My Wife is a Goofball

So our trip is two and a half days away. That's soon. That's REALLY soon.

Yikes.

I mean, we're excited, super-excited even, but at the same time it's really daunting especially given all the things we need to get done both at work and at home in the next two days.

Okay, stop thinking about it.

Anyway, a couple times when we've brought up our road trip, people have said something to the effect of "7 weeks in a car together! You're going to going to want to kill each other by the end of the trip!" I think that was actually my mom's first reaction. Hm.

I guess there probably will be times over the 7 weeks when we'll get on each other's nerves, but I have to say I'm not too worried. I actually really love travelling with Kathy, and I'm not just saying this to build up brownie points at the beginning of our trip. We're actually very travel-compatible. We're interested in seeing the same things (except for baseball parks and the Corn Palace) and we like to do the same things (like walking around city neighborhoods to get a feel for the city instead of trying to see all the "attractions"). We like the same music in the car. We both need to pee at approximately the same frequency.

Mostly that last one.

One of my favorite things about travelling with Kathy is that she's excellent at hamming it up for the camera when we see something cheesy or kitschy like a wooden cowboy statue:


Or a big stuffed bear:

Or a Canadian mountie mannequin:


Kathy sometimes tries to get me to ham it up for the camera, but I have shown over time that I just don't have the knack for it. Although I'm fond of this picture:

I'm thinking this trip should be a mother lode of goofy picture opportunities. We'll see if Kathy's up to the challenge.

We'll Always Have South of the Border

So, Kathy's only real road trip experiences prior to this were her childhood annual family trips from New York to Florida to go to the annual New Year's Day Orange Bowl parade. Apparently, they didn't make too many stops and she mostly remembers just fighting with her brother James the whole way down, but the one thing she does remember is stopping at "South of the Border", located just south of the North Carolina/South Carolina Border:


I've never been to the place or even heard about it until I knew Kathy, but as far as I can tell, it's like a really, really extravagant rest stop that's kind of Mexican-themed. Kind of a Mexican Casa de Fruta. (Or, I guess, just kind of a Casa de Fruta.) Anyway, it's landmark attraction is the 200-foot tall "Sombrero Tower", otherwise known as the Eiffel Tower of the South:

Just like the real Eiffel Tower, you can take an elevator to the top of the tower to the observation deck (which, I guess, is the brim of the sombrero). Except instead of looking down and seeing beautiful downtown Paris and the Seine River, you look down and see, uh, nothing much. Interstate 95, I guess. The parking lot. Some cars.

The thing I'm looking most forward to is seeing the billboards, which apparently start hundreds of miles before the actual attraction, and then repeat at regular intervals, designed to work bored kids in the backseats of all those station wagons into a frenzy:


I know that right now Kathy isn't really keen on going to South of the Border (maybe it brings back bad road trip memories), but I'm betting that after passing twenty kitschy billboards with slogans like "You Never Sausage a Place -- You're Always a Weiner at Pedro's", the nostalgia's going to kick in and she won't be able to resist. Wish me luck.

...But I Would Be Proud to Partake of Your Pecan Pie

So, I'm originally from Los Angeles, and Kathy's originally from New York City. She grew up a few blocks from Central Park, so I've always been really jealous that she got to experience the true fall foliage experience growing up. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, where there are no freaking trees. Except for palm trees, I guess. And those generic looking trees they use for landscaping in mini-mall parking lots. Anyway, then I moved to San Francisco, where it's so windy that the leaves are ripped off the trees before they have a chance to change colors (or something like that). So my whole life I've been totally deprived of the fall experience.

I mean it's not that I've never seen a tree change colors. But I've never experienced the full-on, all-encompassing, in-your-face type foliage, where you're just surrounded by explosions of color. You know, the Billy Crystal-Meg Ryan foliage:

We've gone on a few fall trips to Upstate New York to visit Kathy's parents and I always carry that hope that this will be the trip where I will finally get my "When Harry Met Sally" fall experience. Of course, what I never knew until my first fall trip to New York is that, although on the calendar, fall lasts three months, "FALL" really only lasts, like, 10 days, so it's awfully easy to miss. So as a result, on my first and most disappointing trip, we had to go driving up and down the Hudson River Valley trying to find "FALL" and only succeeded in finding one solitary orange tree, which we of course had to photograph like goofy Californian tourists:


(We were really excited to see that tree.)

The other problem is that for some reason, we always end up going to New York in mid-to-late September, which is technically Fall but is actually a good three to four weeks before the typical New York FALL. And by unfortunate coincidence, on our road trip, we shall be arriving in the New England area in, you guessed it, mid-to-late September. So barring some sort of sudden global cooling, no FALL for us. Just a bunch more goofy pictures of us in front of a single orange tree.

Now That's Just Sad

I'm thinking that this blog is starting to give the impression that Kathy and I are just going to be jumping from cheesy tourist trap to cheesy tourist trap. Which is not the case, really. We're mostly visiting national parks and some cities we've never been to and some friends we don't see very often. But I don't think our Great American Road Trip would be complete without visiting tourist traps like Carhenge, Graceland, and Wall Drug. What can I say, I've become kind of fascinated by tasteless, over-the-top American cheesiness. What that says about me, I'm not sure.

But there are limits.

One place that I've read about but that we will NOT be visiting is Riverside, Iowa. Riverside is an otherwise normal small Iowa town whose claim to fame is that it is the "Future Birthplace of James T. Kirk". Captain Kirk from the Star Trek TV show and movie, that is (just to clarify for the pop culture impaired).


Yes, in 1985, the City Council of Riverside decided to declare itself the Future Birthplace of Kirk. We basically have to take them at their word, because Kirk's hometown was never mentioned in any of the books, movies, or TV episodes. But no matter. Riverside took credit.

I think since then, Riverside has been trying, mostly in vain, to turn their Kirk hometown status into big tourist dollars. There's a plaque outside a community center stating that this is the future site of the Kirk family home. The community center sells (unlicensed) Trek memorabilia including authentic "Kirk hometown soil", at the bargain price of 3 bucks per vial. There's a bar and grill that has a plaque by the pool table stating that it is, I kid you not, the future "conception site" of James T. Kirk.

They've also have a "USS Riverside", which due to copyright laws, is only allowed to look marginally like the USS Enterprise:


To me, this picture is simultaneously hilarious and sad. Mostly sad, though.

Point of No Return

So, trip's getting pretty darn close now. We've now made our first actual hotel reservation for our trip, for our first night in Ashland, Oregon. The rest of the trip we're going to avoid reservations, or for some national parks maybe call ahead a day or two in advance. But we know we're going to be in Ashland on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, which is during the Shakespeare Festival, so it just seemed like the smart thing to do.

So, one official hotel reservation (and two tickets to "Merry Wives of Windsor"), so the trip is actually real now. No backing out now, or else we, uh, are out about eighty bucks. Er, unless we sell our tickets on Ebay or something.

Anyway.

Five places Kathy and I are both really excited about seeing on our trip:

1. Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming
2. Quebec City
3. Savannah, Georgia
4. Acadia National Park in Maine
5. Graceland

Three places I'm excited to see, but Kathy -- uh, not so much:

1. Fenway Park
2. Carhenge
3. Field of Dreams tourist trap in Iowa (Think I'm gonna get vetoed on that one.)

Three places that Kathy's a heckuva lot more excited to see than I am:

1. Dollywood in Tennessee
2. Some nebulous unidentified area in New Hampshire that she used to go to summer camp in
3. Amish country, Pennsylvania

Regarding Dollywood, I think Kathy's in for some major disappointment on that one. I think it's pretty much a normal amusement park. Kinda country themed, and I'm sure they play a lot of Dolly Parton music over the loudspeakers, but it's not like there are Dolly Parton themed rides like the "Steel Magnolia Adventure Ride" or roller coasters shaped like gigantic breasts or something. Although THAT would be worth visiting.

The Search for Stuckeyville

So, for many years, Kathy and I had been sort of thinking of taking some extended time off work to go on a long vacation, but it wasn't until recently that we definitively decided on the long cross-country road trip idea. We had toyed a little with the idea of doing a big tour of Europe or Australia/New Zealand. But in the past two years, a couple things inspired us a little more and got us more excited about the idea of roaming around the USA.

First, about a couple years ago, I happened to pick up the Bill Bryson book, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America. I picked up the book just because, as Kathy will attest, I'm a sucker for any TV show, movie, or book that takes place in an impossibly quirky small town like Stuckeyville or Stars Hollow. Anyway, this book basically chronicles Bill's travels cross-country as he searches for the perfect small town. Ironically, even though he never finds the perfect small town and actually finds that most small towns are either oddly tacky or boring, it really made me want to see all the places he was talking about and experience the tackiness and/or boredom for myself.

The other thing that recently inspired Kathy and me was the cheesy road trip scene in the movie Elizabethtown. This is also a little ironic because neither of us really liked the movie that much. But, toward the end of the movie, there's a long rambling scene where the main character goes on a solo road trip, guided by an ultra-detailed map given to him by his love interest, Kirsten Dunst.

The scene actually doesn't fit that well into the overall movie, but if you've seen it you know that it really does make Middle America look like this wonderful, quirky place to go out and explore. He visits a bunch of places that I don't remember now, but the one place I do remember that he visited was the Second Largest Farmers Market in America. Again, you probably won't understand unless you've seen the movie, but after seeing that movie, I pretty much wanted to go on a road trip just to see that farmers market. It was that awesome.

I kind of forgot about that farmers market until today as I was writing this, but just now I went on a long web search looking for the location of the Second Largest Farmers Market in America to see if it was anywhere along our route. To my huge disappointment, I discovered the Second Largest Farmers Market is completely and entirely fictional. Just like there's no town of Stuckeyville with a lawyer's office inside a bowling alley, and there's no town of Stars Hollow in Connecticut with a charming inn owned by a really fast-talking mother of a teenage girl.

Alas. I guess we'll go on the trip anyway.

Casa de Blog

I think Kathy would agree that one of great failings as a husband is that I've never, during any of our road trips down to LA (all 3 of them), allowed us to stop at Casa De Fruta, the weird rest stop off the side of Pacheco Pass. I'm not quite sure what the claim to fame of Casa de Fruta is supposed to be. As far as I can tell, it appears to be a fairly run of the mill fruit stand that they happened to build a big rest area around, each component of which is entitled "Casa de" something.



See, I kid you not. You've got your "Casa de Diner", your "Casa de Gas", your "Casa de RV Park". Kathy was greatly intrigued and once wanted to stop there, but it was Thanksgiving and I had just sat in traffic for three hours getting out of the Bay Area and wasn't quite in a "Casa" frame of mind. But in retrospect, I've gotta admit it's impressive that they were able to make a run of the mill rest stop a real destination just by putting the words "Casa de" at the beginning of everything on the signs.

So, anyway, we didn't stop at Casa de Fruta. Little did I know that would later become Kathy's ultimate symbol of how I'm no fun. That and not wanting to go to Tijuana during our last weekend trip to San Diego.

Anyway, I have officially learned my lesson and have pledged not to make the same mistake on this trip. We are stopping at every freaking Casa de Fruta we pass on this whole trip, no matter tourist-trappy. Including, hopefully, the mother of all Casas, Wall Drug, a truly bizarro drug store located in Wall, South Dakota.





























Take that, Casa de Fruta. Do you have an 80-foot dinosaur statue? No, I didn't think so.

Pass the Pork Rinds

So, our number one concern going into this trip? That we'll go into the trip as fairly normal, reasonably healthy individuals and come out of the trip as two shapeless tubs of goo needing dual coronary bypasses. As I've discovered in planning for this trip, the United States interstate highway system is not a very healthy place to be. First, there's the fact that almost all the "restaurants" are actually going to be of the McDonacoBellKingJuniorintheBox variety. Then there's the fact we're going to be a whole heckuva lot of time either (a) sitting in a car, (b) eating, or (c) sleeping. In other words, not much time (d) burning calories.

But making things far worse will be the fact that we're going to be spending a lot of time in the Midwest and in the South, where all food is apparently legally required to clog your arteries.

Exhibit A: Bub Sweatman's in Holly Hill, South Carolina, home of the "Sweatman's Fried Pig Skin" plate:


Actually, my favorite thing about that place is just knowing that there's a guy named "Bub Sweatman".

Exhibit B: Interstate Barbecue in Memphis, Tennessee, home of the barbecued spaghetti...


...As well as a most excellent mural:


I particularly like how they draw the interstate crashing right into that pig's neck fat.

So, anyway, if we end up dying of heart attacks before the end of our trip, you'll know who's to blame. That's right, Bub Sweatman and the pig with the neck fat.

Thought I Married a "Planner"

So, I guess it's time to answer the first question that everybody asks, which is "So where are you going on your road trip?" Our usual answer is "Uh, kind of everywhere in the U.S. and Canada." That answer, I've been sensing, isn't very satisfying to most people, but it's kind of hard to explain where we're going without getting out a map or atlas or something, and you'd be surprised, but usually when people ask that question, there never seems to be a good North America map around.

But thanks to the miracle of modern technology, I now present to you a map that kinda sorta shows where we're thinkin of going on this trip:


Man, that there's a big freaking country.

Anyway, Kathy has mocked me endlessly for mapping this trip in such detail. She wants to keep the trip spontaneous and go wherever the wind blows us on any particular day. So, actually, she has yet to completely see the map shown above. Translation: our actual route may not bear any resemblance to the map shown above.

Anyway, I'm all for spontaneity, freedom of the road, yadda yadda, but my anal sensibilities refuse to let me go on this kind of trip without researching it to death. And at least figuring out ahead of time all the must-go places. After all, if I hadn't bought all these books to research this trip, I might never have known about Carhenge. Or Wisconsin's House on the Rock, which has it's very own "Infinity Room":


I don't know under what logic 218 feet equals "infinity", but how sad would it be to miss seeing infinity in person just due to bad planning?