Monday, August 31, 2009
You Know You're in Montana If... (Adam)
Headed into Yellowstone now, but saw this on the wall of our hotel restaurant at breakfast--check the fourth-to-last. My favorite is the sixth-to-last.
I Wanna be a Cowgirl, Pt. 2 (Bethany)
Given how immune I am to the majority of tourist traps, I was surprised how much I loved Mount Rushmore.
If Frank Lloyd Wright was a sculptor, he would have made Rushmore (in fact it is the work of one Gutzon Borglum, fyi, and a big team of helpers) 
—the work is clean and simple and inspired, not the gaudy bit of Americana that it always seemed to me. We climbed an excellent National Park Service trail right to the foot of the mountain, looked up everyone’s nose and laughed, and left having had a thoroughly worthwhile experience. Note to myself and any of the rest of you who may come after—skip Rapid City and stay in Keystone, a hokey, cheap-as-dickens wild west town with nice hotels for $50 (White House Inn, Presidential View). Lunch was a hot dog, Dilly bar and Sprite for the kids. We’re great parents.
We hit the road in earnest after that, flying through the last bit of South Dakota and the northeast corner of Wyoming and into Montana, an unending, waving prairie dotted with cattle and spotted horses and antelopes everywhere. There are far more trailers than houses out here, except when there is a proper town. We went through Sturgis, home of the nation’s largest biker bar, and past Deadwood, which advertised everything from bars to car dealerships to interesting caves by sticking a picture of a woman in a bikini on a billboard. The honesty was refreshing: Dudes will look at anything in a bikini, and may then suddenly decide they need a soda or a new car.
Once in Montana, the landscape began to change slowly; trees appeared in creek-beds, there were hills and sharp folds in the earth. We passed through the Cheyenne reservation and the Crow reservation, all trailers and spotted ponies and cars that you can’t believe are on the road.
It is now about 9:30 p.m. and I have been writing in fits and starts. We’re about an hour away from our destination, a hotel outside Yellowstone, and my eyes are starting to smart from writing in the dark, so I’m calling it quits for now. It’s hard to stop—we wound up at Little Bighorn in the early evening and I want to write about it while it’s fresh, but it will have to wait.
Sleep tight, friends, and think of us, trundling through Montana in the dark.
—the work is clean and simple and inspired, not the gaudy bit of Americana that it always seemed to me. We climbed an excellent National Park Service trail right to the foot of the mountain, looked up everyone’s nose and laughed, and left having had a thoroughly worthwhile experience. Note to myself and any of the rest of you who may come after—skip Rapid City and stay in Keystone, a hokey, cheap-as-dickens wild west town with nice hotels for $50 (White House Inn, Presidential View). Lunch was a hot dog, Dilly bar and Sprite for the kids. We’re great parents.
We hit the road in earnest after that, flying through the last bit of South Dakota and the northeast corner of Wyoming and into Montana, an unending, waving prairie dotted with cattle and spotted horses and antelopes everywhere. There are far more trailers than houses out here, except when there is a proper town. We went through Sturgis, home of the nation’s largest biker bar, and past Deadwood, which advertised everything from bars to car dealerships to interesting caves by sticking a picture of a woman in a bikini on a billboard. The honesty was refreshing: Dudes will look at anything in a bikini, and may then suddenly decide they need a soda or a new car.
Once in Montana, the landscape began to change slowly; trees appeared in creek-beds, there were hills and sharp folds in the earth. We passed through the Cheyenne reservation and the Crow reservation, all trailers and spotted ponies and cars that you can’t believe are on the road.
We passed an early 80’s white Ford with five Indians in it, limping along with smoke pouring out the tailpipe, no plates, no rear bumper, no windows, and the windshield shot through with spiderweb cracks; the brake light covers were smashed out too, so when the brakes went on the lights glowed white. Hard to imagine where they were going. We passed a church with a huge hand-painted sign saying “Jesus is Lord on the Crow Reservation,” right next to a group of trailers that looked like they had been bombed—cardboard-covered windows and upturned cars, the only sign of life the skinny mustangs foraging among the laundry hung out to dry. Think about that for a little bit. I sure did.
Sleep tight, friends, and think of us, trundling through Montana in the dark.
I Wanna be a Cowgirl, Pt. 1 (Bethany)
It’s late afternoon and we’re somewhere in Montana driving on one of those terrifying, two-lane not-quite highways through hundreds of miles of nothing but cows and pronghorn antelope and widely separated one-saloon towns. Huge double-trailer trucks come barreling down on us, looking for all the world like they are in our lane and we’re all going to die, and you can see your death coming from miles away because everything is totally flat. They rush by and the van bends to the right just a bit. It’s the kind of road where you develop relationships with the other cars that are there with you for a while and the truckers wave just to have some sort of human contact. We had an old guy and his wife behind us for a bit—he had a giant cowboy hat on and they were driving a dented old Lincoln that passed us at about 120 mph. We loved them.
We just drove through Broadus, a tiny, sleepy, rusted little town with the Sunday afternoon rodeo in full swing downtown—big bleached 80’s hair and cowboy hats. You get the most meager of glimpses of these things, of course, whipping through town at forty miles an hour, but I feel like I know it better than I care to admit—brought back memories of the Fort Saint John Rodeo in British Columbia when I was a kid. We brought horses there to sell, and I have a distant memory of riding in a chuck-wagon, a souped up thing meant for racing around a ring with teams of horses. It’s all pretty far back. Here in these wide-open places Adam points to groups of cows and horses and asks questions about branding chutes and irrigation ponds and Angus cattle and I know the answer more often than not.
Recently I became friends on Facebook with one of my best friends from my bizarre girlhood in B.C., but we have not yet had a real conversation. This trip and all its little triggers are making me want to talk to her, almost desperately, to check these things with her and see what she remembers. I have a picture of her, blonde and smiling, arm draped around the neck of a palomino horse whose name I can’t even remember—Summer, maybe, Autumn? It gets further and further away as I get older, which is both a blessing and a tragedy. I wish I could disappear for a few days when I get to Seattle and drive up there, but I’m afraid it will have to wait for another time.
Anywho, back to the trip. It’s funny the things that come up when you’re in the car for days and days.
I know Adam covered the trip out of Michigan in great detail, so I will just add a few of my impressions. Most of the day on Friday was spent driving in an arch around the top of Lake Michigan, with Adam declaring that he wanted to stop for pasties every five feet and then blowing past whatever establishment was advertising them and being bitterly disappointed, until we passed the next place that he wanted to stop at, blew by, was crushed, etc. When we finally stopped at a gas station and he got himself a pastie of his very own, it was a great relief to us all. It is remarkable how huge the lake is, and therefore how much lakefront property there is, and yet most of it was just pretty sad and desolate, though charming in its retro poverty. There was a great deal of artfully arranged yard trash. I couldn’t help but think of the lake-house I could have for ten bucks and some beaver skins.
I drove in the rain through most of Wisconsin, which was rolling and beautiful and filled with huge dairy farms, as you might imagine. We stopped at a charming family restaurant in a small town off the highway, and people came in, rocking their workboots and green jeans and greeting each other by their first names, all plump and round-faced women and broad-shouldered men in trucker caps. Minnesota went by at night, and I slept for a few hours in preparation for another shift behind the wheel. There was a good hour of late-night navigating when we were detoured off the highway through endless cornfields and grain silos, train tracks criss-crossing roads that turned to dirt periodically. The poor truckers who had been detoured along with us downshifted and roared in frustration and kicked up huge clouds of dust on either side of us.
We passed into South Dakota sometime in the wee hours of the morning, made more wee by losing two hours to first central and then mountain time. Adam turned over the wheel somewhere in Minnesota and went to sleep, so I was alone when the hills disappeared and the stars seemed to reach right down to the horizon. Adam and I had a long, serious talk before he went to sleep, and I had popped a No-Doz, a leftover from my college days, and so I was deep in thought and then it was two, then three, then four in the morning, and at some point I had to pee so bad I just pulled over and cowgirled it in the bushes and had a semi-religious experience, not from the peeing (which to its credit was spectacular), but from what happened when I righted myself and looked around. It was the darkest black night I have ever experienced, and the sky was swimming with stars—seemingly millions of them, dizzying and completely unlike anything I have ever seen. There was no light anywhere on the horizon, nobody else on the road, no sound at all. It made Mackinac Island seem like a cacophony. After a minute, of course, you start hearing things—chirps and squeaks and rustles. The smell of the prairie sage was overwhelming—like cinnamon and mint, and varied depending where you were standing. All of your senses seem to revert to their natural state when there aren’t so many things to filter out, and just standing there by the side of the road in South Dakota was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had. We got on the road again, stopped at a truck stop to get gas, and I had a quick lovely chat with the Indian dude behind the counter (I’m an INDIAN, he said, when I asked him something about Native Americans in the area). There was a buffalo skin on the wall and they sold knives made from their horns, and bison jerky. We were very close to the Pine Ridge Reservation.
We pulled into the Badlands National Park about 5:30, just as the sky was getting dusky around the edges, and slept for about an hour. We woke to Jed going mad with joy at the sight of so many rocks that he could climb, and before my eyes were even fully open, he was off like a shot across the otherworldly hills, pink in the early morning light, sleepy Meg and her sleepy mama trying in vain to keep up, sleepy dad doing a better job. We spent a remarkable morning there, meandering up paths to sheer drop-offs, running off down dry creek beds littered with tumbled rocks and fossils. On our way out of the park we stopped to hang out with prairie dogs and bison and then picked our way over to Rapid City, S.D., to the crap-tastic Foothills Inn, where we were greeted by one surly clerk after another. Breakfast this morning was a frozen Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwich and a shrug in the direction of the microwave. Still, it was clean enough and I was so tired after 28 hours on the road that I would have slept standing up on a spike. Rapid City is a frankly terribly depressing place, filled with pawn shops, multiple outlets of every fast food joint you have ever heard of, and little storefront casinos with tired Indians smoking cigarettes in the parking lot. Our most nutritious option for dinner was an Outback Steakhouse, nestled in the warren of hotels off the highway, a more upscale option than we could find in town, which is saying something. It’s pretty hard to eat well when you’re on the road, and I’m sure I will return ten pounds heavier and completely cured of any secret attraction to fast food. If I ever see another Hardees, it will be a billion years too soon. On our way out of town, at yet another drive-through, this one a Starbucks, a very cheerful and clean-cut young Indian guy leaned out the window and struck up a conversation with Adam, who asked him a million questions about his background and his experience, which he answered cheerfully. He said he was Oglala Sioux and was pretty excited that we knew a bit about the reservation he was from (the appallingly impoverished Pine Ridge). In my long experience with Adam, people’s responses to his barrage of questions are a pretty good indicator of how interesting and smart they are, and our friend was very happy to share his rez experience (bleak), and offer advice to well-meaning guilt-ridden white folks like ourselves (“You can send all the books you want, but you can’t make kids read them,” he said). He had found his way out through the National Guard, and given the number of armed forces recruiting centers all through town, he is one of many. We wished him the best and sped off in the direction of Mount Rushmore.
Recently I became friends on Facebook with one of my best friends from my bizarre girlhood in B.C., but we have not yet had a real conversation. This trip and all its little triggers are making me want to talk to her, almost desperately, to check these things with her and see what she remembers. I have a picture of her, blonde and smiling, arm draped around the neck of a palomino horse whose name I can’t even remember—Summer, maybe, Autumn? It gets further and further away as I get older, which is both a blessing and a tragedy. I wish I could disappear for a few days when I get to Seattle and drive up there, but I’m afraid it will have to wait for another time.
Anywho, back to the trip. It’s funny the things that come up when you’re in the car for days and days.
I know Adam covered the trip out of Michigan in great detail, so I will just add a few of my impressions. Most of the day on Friday was spent driving in an arch around the top of Lake Michigan, with Adam declaring that he wanted to stop for pasties every five feet and then blowing past whatever establishment was advertising them and being bitterly disappointed, until we passed the next place that he wanted to stop at, blew by, was crushed, etc. When we finally stopped at a gas station and he got himself a pastie of his very own, it was a great relief to us all. It is remarkable how huge the lake is, and therefore how much lakefront property there is, and yet most of it was just pretty sad and desolate, though charming in its retro poverty. There was a great deal of artfully arranged yard trash. I couldn’t help but think of the lake-house I could have for ten bucks and some beaver skins.
I drove in the rain through most of Wisconsin, which was rolling and beautiful and filled with huge dairy farms, as you might imagine. We stopped at a charming family restaurant in a small town off the highway, and people came in, rocking their workboots and green jeans and greeting each other by their first names, all plump and round-faced women and broad-shouldered men in trucker caps. Minnesota went by at night, and I slept for a few hours in preparation for another shift behind the wheel. There was a good hour of late-night navigating when we were detoured off the highway through endless cornfields and grain silos, train tracks criss-crossing roads that turned to dirt periodically. The poor truckers who had been detoured along with us downshifted and roared in frustration and kicked up huge clouds of dust on either side of us.
We passed into South Dakota sometime in the wee hours of the morning, made more wee by losing two hours to first central and then mountain time. Adam turned over the wheel somewhere in Minnesota and went to sleep, so I was alone when the hills disappeared and the stars seemed to reach right down to the horizon. Adam and I had a long, serious talk before he went to sleep, and I had popped a No-Doz, a leftover from my college days, and so I was deep in thought and then it was two, then three, then four in the morning, and at some point I had to pee so bad I just pulled over and cowgirled it in the bushes and had a semi-religious experience, not from the peeing (which to its credit was spectacular), but from what happened when I righted myself and looked around. It was the darkest black night I have ever experienced, and the sky was swimming with stars—seemingly millions of them, dizzying and completely unlike anything I have ever seen. There was no light anywhere on the horizon, nobody else on the road, no sound at all. It made Mackinac Island seem like a cacophony. After a minute, of course, you start hearing things—chirps and squeaks and rustles. The smell of the prairie sage was overwhelming—like cinnamon and mint, and varied depending where you were standing. All of your senses seem to revert to their natural state when there aren’t so many things to filter out, and just standing there by the side of the road in South Dakota was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had. We got on the road again, stopped at a truck stop to get gas, and I had a quick lovely chat with the Indian dude behind the counter (I’m an INDIAN, he said, when I asked him something about Native Americans in the area). There was a buffalo skin on the wall and they sold knives made from their horns, and bison jerky. We were very close to the Pine Ridge Reservation.
We pulled into the Badlands National Park about 5:30, just as the sky was getting dusky around the edges, and slept for about an hour. We woke to Jed going mad with joy at the sight of so many rocks that he could climb, and before my eyes were even fully open, he was off like a shot across the otherworldly hills, pink in the early morning light, sleepy Meg and her sleepy mama trying in vain to keep up, sleepy dad doing a better job. We spent a remarkable morning there, meandering up paths to sheer drop-offs, running off down dry creek beds littered with tumbled rocks and fossils. On our way out of the park we stopped to hang out with prairie dogs and bison and then picked our way over to Rapid City, S.D., to the crap-tastic Foothills Inn, where we were greeted by one surly clerk after another. Breakfast this morning was a frozen Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwich and a shrug in the direction of the microwave. Still, it was clean enough and I was so tired after 28 hours on the road that I would have slept standing up on a spike. Rapid City is a frankly terribly depressing place, filled with pawn shops, multiple outlets of every fast food joint you have ever heard of, and little storefront casinos with tired Indians smoking cigarettes in the parking lot. Our most nutritious option for dinner was an Outback Steakhouse, nestled in the warren of hotels off the highway, a more upscale option than we could find in town, which is saying something. It’s pretty hard to eat well when you’re on the road, and I’m sure I will return ten pounds heavier and completely cured of any secret attraction to fast food. If I ever see another Hardees, it will be a billion years too soon. On our way out of town, at yet another drive-through, this one a Starbucks, a very cheerful and clean-cut young Indian guy leaned out the window and struck up a conversation with Adam, who asked him a million questions about his background and his experience, which he answered cheerfully. He said he was Oglala Sioux and was pretty excited that we knew a bit about the reservation he was from (the appallingly impoverished Pine Ridge). In my long experience with Adam, people’s responses to his barrage of questions are a pretty good indicator of how interesting and smart they are, and our friend was very happy to share his rez experience (bleak), and offer advice to well-meaning guilt-ridden white folks like ourselves (“You can send all the books you want, but you can’t make kids read them,” he said). He had found his way out through the National Guard, and given the number of armed forces recruiting centers all through town, he is one of many. We wished him the best and sped off in the direction of Mount Rushmore.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Saturday, August 29, 2009
*Badlands!* (Adam)
Whew! Okay, aside from disgustingly gorgeous vistas, the Badlands also have lots of animals. Such as:
Bunnies
Chipmunks (specifically, "Least chipmunks")
Prairie dogs
And of course these guys:
This guy wanted a piece of me, but I flexed, and then he sodded off.
Okay, my kids hate me for still being on here. Bye! Yellowstone tomorrow!
WHEW! (Adam)
Wow, look at that, we missed a whole day due to travel! This technology thing adds a whole new entertaining dimension to roadtripping--looking for wifi hotspots whenever you stop to gas up or eat. Actually it's pretty ridiculous. Anyway, we didn't find any yesterday.
Right now I'm totally preoccupied with the awesome time we had today in the Badlands, SD, which I passed through on one of my trips cross-country to or from Seattle in the 1990s, and have always wanted to revisit--they are fantastic, enchanting, captivating, all of that, and I totally, completely recommend a visit. But first I'll try to recap from where we left off in Michigan.
We left Mackinaw City yesterday morning (really??) and drove across the Upper Peninsula to Wisconsin. In this part of the country they fancy a grab-and-go type of food called "pasties," which I saw so many signs for that I finally had to stop and get one--I was wrong, they weren't "pastries" with the R omitted, and Bethany was right, they are the British thing--a turnover with meat and potatoes and such inside. Good solid middle-American fare. (Pronounced with a short A--not like the less-than-bra things--but I forget which kind of short A.)
Anyway, Wisconsin went by with its farms and such, and Minnesota we experienced in the black of night, which is to say not at all. (To the guys at work--I gave a wistful wave in the direction of Iowa as we passed.) Same with the whole eastern and middle part of South Dakota--which has a 75 mph speed limit to recommend it. Finally we pulled off I-90 onto the Badlands Scenic Route sometime after 5 a.m., after about 1,000 miles and only a couple hours sleep for each of us--the grownups I mean--the kids sacked out in the back all night.
And speaking of the kids, let me just take a moment to state that they have held up far better on this trip so far than I ever imagined they would--really, really great. I don't know if that speaks to what natural couch potatoes my kids are, that they can sit around in the back of a minivan all day and not complain too much, or what--I'm sure it helps that my resourceful wife and mother-in-law bought and wrapped little gifts for them to open each day (talk about something that NEVER would have occurred to me). Meg is in a growth spurt or something, and asks for food about every 15 minutes, and Jed of course is naturally argumentative and wants to have a lengthy discussion about each individual decision that comes up, whether his opinion is solicited or not--and he also has an unnatural fear of stopping to eat at non-chain restaurants, or at chain restaurants he has never eaten at before--but on the whole the level of conflict has been lower than it sometimes is at home, which is amazing. So you should do this too--if your kids are as awesome as ours, and if you are as talented at parenting as we are. HA! Just kidding, believe me.
To close, before my next, all-Badlands-all-the-time post, we pulled off the Badlands Scenic Route as vague shapes were starting to loom in the distance, and both put our seats back to close our eyes for about 10 minutes before the kids woke up. Then we all got out and tromped into this otherworldly wonderland starting about 6 a.m. And right now, Bethany is sacked out in our Rapid City, SD hotel room as I sit by the pool while the kids splash around endlessly. We've crossed two time zones, so it's 6 p.m. or 8 p.m., depending how you look at it.
We love all the comments! Still waiting for one from Greg Feingold though.
Right now I'm totally preoccupied with the awesome time we had today in the Badlands, SD, which I passed through on one of my trips cross-country to or from Seattle in the 1990s, and have always wanted to revisit--they are fantastic, enchanting, captivating, all of that, and I totally, completely recommend a visit. But first I'll try to recap from where we left off in Michigan.
We left Mackinaw City yesterday morning (really??) and drove across the Upper Peninsula to Wisconsin. In this part of the country they fancy a grab-and-go type of food called "pasties," which I saw so many signs for that I finally had to stop and get one--I was wrong, they weren't "pastries" with the R omitted, and Bethany was right, they are the British thing--a turnover with meat and potatoes and such inside. Good solid middle-American fare. (Pronounced with a short A--not like the less-than-bra things--but I forget which kind of short A.)
Anyway, Wisconsin went by with its farms and such, and Minnesota we experienced in the black of night, which is to say not at all. (To the guys at work--I gave a wistful wave in the direction of Iowa as we passed.) Same with the whole eastern and middle part of South Dakota--which has a 75 mph speed limit to recommend it. Finally we pulled off I-90 onto the Badlands Scenic Route sometime after 5 a.m., after about 1,000 miles and only a couple hours sleep for each of us--the grownups I mean--the kids sacked out in the back all night.
And speaking of the kids, let me just take a moment to state that they have held up far better on this trip so far than I ever imagined they would--really, really great. I don't know if that speaks to what natural couch potatoes my kids are, that they can sit around in the back of a minivan all day and not complain too much, or what--I'm sure it helps that my resourceful wife and mother-in-law bought and wrapped little gifts for them to open each day (talk about something that NEVER would have occurred to me). Meg is in a growth spurt or something, and asks for food about every 15 minutes, and Jed of course is naturally argumentative and wants to have a lengthy discussion about each individual decision that comes up, whether his opinion is solicited or not--and he also has an unnatural fear of stopping to eat at non-chain restaurants, or at chain restaurants he has never eaten at before--but on the whole the level of conflict has been lower than it sometimes is at home, which is amazing. So you should do this too--if your kids are as awesome as ours, and if you are as talented at parenting as we are. HA! Just kidding, believe me.
To close, before my next, all-Badlands-all-the-time post, we pulled off the Badlands Scenic Route as vague shapes were starting to loom in the distance, and both put our seats back to close our eyes for about 10 minutes before the kids woke up. Then we all got out and tromped into this otherworldly wonderland starting about 6 a.m. And right now, Bethany is sacked out in our Rapid City, SD hotel room as I sit by the pool while the kids splash around endlessly. We've crossed two time zones, so it's 6 p.m. or 8 p.m., depending how you look at it.
We love all the comments! Still waiting for one from Greg Feingold though.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Mackinac / Mackinaw / Whack-a-mole...(Bethany)
Well, friends, I am sitting here still in Michigan, exhausted and exhilarated, and thanking my lucky stars that we're not embarking for the marathon haul to South Dakota right now, as was originally the plan - we'll save that particular pain for the morning. After endless hours driving through the Michigan countryside (a particular highlight was the "Prison Area - Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers" signs that sprang up periodically) last night,
we had an excellent sleep, woke to waffles and amiable Nordic-looking folk circling the buffet, and after an all-American dip in the chlorine, we packed up and caught the ferry to Mackinac Island, possibly the sweetest little tourist trap in the world - just hokey enough (Fudge was Invented Here!), historical enough (the rather stunning Fort Mackinac), and surprisingly inexpensive - the fort, which could certainly occupy most families for a whole day, was only about $10 a head - free for me, of course, since I am a poverty-stricken fellow museum professional. Most exciting for me was the total lack of motorized transport on the island. Everyone is either on a bike or in a carriage or on horseback. First of all, I watch horses like teenage boys watch girls in bikinis. I think they are fascinating and want to hang out with all of them. They also want to hang out with me, and turn their massive heads and give me the once-over when they walk past. 
It was the silence that got me. Take cars off an island, walk into the woods, and despite throngs of cheerful Midwestern tourists, it is quiet - really and truly quiet. I realized as I listened to a porcupine climb down a tree somewhere in the woods that I haven't been in a truly silent place since one night in the mountains of Hungary, and before that, those many years in British Columbia. It is like nothing else - relaxing and energizing and amazing. I may need to find it again soon, but it's hard to come by - highways cut across so much of this country and my ears are so sharp that I hear them buzzing practically everywhere. Kind readers, your tips for total quiet would be most welcome.
Of course nowhere where Jed is will be silent for long, and we formed a happy snaking line down a long forest trail, Jed running up ahead and then crouching in the middle of the trail while Meg tried her best to keep up, her pink dress flying out behind her, elbows pumping. Adam and I brought up the rear, confident for once that our little monkeys would be alright if they got out of sight. We wound up at Arch Rock, a limestone hoop with a breathtaking view of the lake, and Skull Cave, which turned out to be a rather dumpy pile of limestone, despite its terror-inducing name. Jed was non-plussed.
So back we came on the freezing ferry, back for another couple hours of chlorinated fun before bed. They are all tucked in now, even Adam, and I should join them. In a moment of weakness, Adam agreed to take Meg into a haunted house display on the island and so it falls to me to dodge her kicking feet all night so I can comfort her in case of bad dreams. It will be my pleasure.Quote of the day, from Jed on the ferry: "My goose-bumps are so big they look like small-pox"!
And by an automaton soldier in the fort: "De Indians, deyr gonna attayk!"
Sweet dreams, friends...
By the way (Adam)
The only way to tell if anybody is reading this is if you leave comments--you shouldn't have to register or anything, if you just select "Name/URL" under "Comment as." I'm just saying.
Btw, people in this part of the country are REALLY NICE. If they even think you need help with something, they offer. I'm kind of inclined that way myself, but around here I realize I hold back a good bit of the time, because oftentimes in the Northeast it's perceived as intrusive or something.
What day is it?
Btw, people in this part of the country are REALLY NICE. If they even think you need help with something, they offer. I'm kind of inclined that way myself, but around here I realize I hold back a good bit of the time, because oftentimes in the Northeast it's perceived as intrusive or something.
What day is it?
Staying Put... (Bethany)
Well, Michigan, despite my best efforts to resist your charm, you have won me over with your bright blue sky and your endless lakes and your ridiculous bargains ($50 for a clean hotel room, breakfast for 4, two pools and passes to a water park).
After a really rather long day yesterday, we have decided to delay the inevitable plow through Minnesota, Wisconsin and South Dakota until tomorrow and are staying here by the shores of Lake Huron for another night. It's really a charming place, despite its crowded rows of name brand hotels and themed restaurants. Adam has gamely marched the kids down to the pool and I will be joining them soon, just as soon as I lay down for just...one...minute...
Right time for nap time. Be back soon.
*snore*
After a really rather long day yesterday, we have decided to delay the inevitable plow through Minnesota, Wisconsin and South Dakota until tomorrow and are staying here by the shores of Lake Huron for another night. It's really a charming place, despite its crowded rows of name brand hotels and themed restaurants. Adam has gamely marched the kids down to the pool and I will be joining them soon, just as soon as I lay down for just...one...minute...
Right time for nap time. Be back soon.
*snore*
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Back to the Lower 48... (Bethany)
Good evening, friends...
Today I loved Canada again, if only for her complex metric system, which came back to me quickly, and her quirky locals (you're gonna wont some sauce with dose carrots, eh?). We left our basement room in Michael's By-the-Falls Hotel, a seedy joint redeemed for me by the well-worn bottle-blonde barmaid who kept me in very strong G&Ts last night as I blogged and my family slept. Her name was Donna and she was straight out of a Tom Waits song. I loved her and she called me sweetie-pie.
After a swell swim in the surprisingly nice pool, we ran out of Niagara Falls like we were on fire, swearing never to set foot in such a tourist trap again. The minute we were out of town the grey skies literally parted and the sun was out for the rest of the day. We spent the day driving through Ontario along a fine selection of Great Lakes (Erie, Ontario, Huron), over massive bridges (hurl-inducing for me, whose greatest fear, second only to centipedes, is falling off bridges), on a cool, bright-blue day that reminded me of my favorite days in Scotland.
We crossed back into Michigan in the middle of the afternoon, drove through Flint (rusty Buicks) and Saginaw (muscle cars and fishing outfitters), and straight up to Mackinaw City through miles and miles of brush and scrubby cow pastures, roadside wind-rows and irrigation ponds, through the most beautiful sunset I've seen since a doozy on Plum Island a few weeks ago, and on into the night.
A quick re-cap of things I learned while driving through Michigan:
Today I loved Canada again, if only for her complex metric system, which came back to me quickly, and her quirky locals (you're gonna wont some sauce with dose carrots, eh?). We left our basement room in Michael's By-the-Falls Hotel, a seedy joint redeemed for me by the well-worn bottle-blonde barmaid who kept me in very strong G&Ts last night as I blogged and my family slept. Her name was Donna and she was straight out of a Tom Waits song. I loved her and she called me sweetie-pie.
After a swell swim in the surprisingly nice pool, we ran out of Niagara Falls like we were on fire, swearing never to set foot in such a tourist trap again. The minute we were out of town the grey skies literally parted and the sun was out for the rest of the day. We spent the day driving through Ontario along a fine selection of Great Lakes (Erie, Ontario, Huron), over massive bridges (hurl-inducing for me, whose greatest fear, second only to centipedes, is falling off bridges), on a cool, bright-blue day that reminded me of my favorite days in Scotland.
We crossed back into Michigan in the middle of the afternoon, drove through Flint (rusty Buicks) and Saginaw (muscle cars and fishing outfitters), and straight up to Mackinaw City through miles and miles of brush and scrubby cow pastures, roadside wind-rows and irrigation ponds, through the most beautiful sunset I've seen since a doozy on Plum Island a few weeks ago, and on into the night.
A quick re-cap of things I learned while driving through Michigan:
- there are sufficient quantities of venison to fully stock the “Deer Jerky Outlet” (that’s a real place)
- don’t drive a Toyota with California plates through Flint
- all-you-can-eat Ponderosa Steak House buffet + 12-hour drive = nasty belly ache
- you can buy a sweet bow-hunting setup for $239 at Bob’s Bow and Boat Bonanza
- the muscle car is not dead
- the real estate of my dreams is a parking lot between a Wal-Mart and a yellow water tower with a smiley face on it...
At last I saw a shimmering bridge rising up at the end of the dark road, a beautiful sight indeed, and after some very pleasant pleasantries with a meaty desk clerk, we are checked into our clean and over-decorated room at the Econo-Lodge (floral carpet! plaid wallpaper! striped bedspread! aarrrggghhh!). So tomorrow we will enjoy the sights around town and then it's a marathon drive to South Dakota. Truckers got nothing on me.
So goodnight all you moonlight ladies...
Michigan (Adam)
I just found a wifi link outside a Burger King after we just had dinner at a Ponderosa Steakhouse (it was GROSS). There is not a lot of stuff in Michigan. And you know what there is NONE of in Michigan? Non-American cars. Seriously--except for our Toyota rental, which we are lucky nobody keyed while we were eating dinner.
We have to go, but remind me to talk later about our talking GPS--it's a Magellan who talks in a female voice, so we call her Madge. Anyway. Earlier in the day, while we were still in Ontario, I wrote some stuff in Word for later publication. That later is NOW:
_____________________
We're in Canada. Everything is different here.
I keep saying that to the kids to try to be funny. Actually the main difference is that signs are in both English and French, and distances are in kilometers. I mean kilometres. I haven’t even laid eyes on Canadian money yet, because you can use your bank card everywhere, like in the States.
So I’m typing this in the car for posting later—mainly because, like most people nowadays (except my mom), I can’t feel like I’m alive unless I’m engaged with some kind of media. Screw the Canadian countryside.
I gather Bethany posted last night, but I haven’t read it yet. I also understand she’s guilty of drinking and blogging, so I’ll be interested to see how that came out. She may have mentioned that Niagara Falls, Ontario is dreadful. The falls themselves are smashing, of course—they say that, in addition to all the people who have gone over them in a barrel—starting with a 63-year-old woman schoolteacher in the late 19th century—in 1960, a 7-year-old boy was swept over them wearing nothing but a life jacket and a swim suit, and he lived. That’s amazing. (They of course no longer allow the barrel thing.) But anyway, the town itself is tourist hell—
casino, Hard Rock Café, Planet Hollywood, all that mess. Actually there was a Guinness World Records Museum, which might have been cool to visit, but this is a whirlwind tour we’re on.
So we’re driving through the Canadian countryside because it’s much faster to go over Lake Erie to the north than cut back into the States and go around the south. We come into Michigan not far from Detroit. From there we’re heading due north to the tippy-top of the mitten—right between the mitten and the Upper Peninsula, actually—to visit Mackinaw Island. The reason we’re visiting Mackinaw Island is that it’s a historic site of some sort, and the CEO of Historic New England (Bethany’s employer) used to run it, and recommended it, and so we have to go there or Bethany will be fired. Actually we’re just going there.
__________________
Okay--Madge says we have to go now.
We have to go, but remind me to talk later about our talking GPS--it's a Magellan who talks in a female voice, so we call her Madge. Anyway. Earlier in the day, while we were still in Ontario, I wrote some stuff in Word for later publication. That later is NOW:
_____________________
We're in Canada. Everything is different here.
I keep saying that to the kids to try to be funny. Actually the main difference is that signs are in both English and French, and distances are in kilometers. I mean kilometres. I haven’t even laid eyes on Canadian money yet, because you can use your bank card everywhere, like in the States.
So I’m typing this in the car for posting later—mainly because, like most people nowadays (except my mom), I can’t feel like I’m alive unless I’m engaged with some kind of media. Screw the Canadian countryside.
I gather Bethany posted last night, but I haven’t read it yet. I also understand she’s guilty of drinking and blogging, so I’ll be interested to see how that came out. She may have mentioned that Niagara Falls, Ontario is dreadful. The falls themselves are smashing, of course—they say that, in addition to all the people who have gone over them in a barrel—starting with a 63-year-old woman schoolteacher in the late 19th century—in 1960, a 7-year-old boy was swept over them wearing nothing but a life jacket and a swim suit, and he lived. That’s amazing. (They of course no longer allow the barrel thing.) But anyway, the town itself is tourist hell—
So we’re driving through the Canadian countryside because it’s much faster to go over Lake Erie to the north than cut back into the States and go around the south. We come into Michigan not far from Detroit. From there we’re heading due north to the tippy-top of the mitten—right between the mitten and the Upper Peninsula, actually—to visit Mackinaw Island. The reason we’re visiting Mackinaw Island is that it’s a historic site of some sort, and the CEO of Historic New England (Bethany’s employer) used to run it, and recommended it, and so we have to go there or Bethany will be fired. Actually we’re just going there.
__________________
Okay--Madge says we have to go now.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Over the Falls (Bethany)
First, a moment I want to remember - a thin moon in the dark blue sky, inches above booming horseshoe falls, and under it all, dripping and laughing, Meg in a mermaid dress standing on a life vest box, her head above me, blonde hair, arms around my shoulders, bending and and kissing me absent-mindedly on the cheek. It's amazing how much love you can stuff into one minute.
My predictions for this morning were stunningly off the mark. Meg's eyes popped open at the first sound from me and she ripped out of bed, threw on her clothes, and then stood at the bottom of the stairs howling at us to get moving. Jed had relocated to the living room at some point during the night and so he was also raring to go. In the end, it was the big slow grown-ups who dragged the departure out until nearly 8 a.m., an unforgivably late departure in my humble opinion. The kids got themselves into the car and sat there griping at us for about an hour as we ran in and out of the house like loons.
When we finally got in gear and hit the road, it was such a relief that the time flew by, right up until we got into the heart of New York, where time drags something fierce. I kept noticing all of these cool 19th century mill towns - I would notice one side of the town and then the other, straddling the highway. After a while, it began to feel like we were driving down a long, jagged scar through the state - the highway seems to cut everything in half. Near Canada, there were miles and miles of fields and valleys, pretty but monotonous, and I was happy to have some new tunes and Adam was happy to play with the Magellan (Madge, we call her) that came with our rental van. The kids were stuffed full of bad rest-stop food at key points, and so were in a sugar / MSG / trans-fat coma for much of the afternoon, getting rammy and testy only when we were within shouting distance of the border.
I always have a strong reaction to entering Canada. I have been known to mist up unexpectedly at the sight of the maple leaf draped across the stands at a hockey game, or sing O Canada loudly when I have been drinking. This time I can't wait to get out of this town and back to the states, since the upside-down exchange rate has resulted in $13 sodas and $18 beers. No good. I also must say that lovely as the falls are, Niagara is a meat machine - get tourists on a boat, play them a recorded message, take their picture, turn them out into the street soaked and fleeced and hungry and then charge them a fortune to sit and have a drink.
It was well worth it, if only to play the "would you rather" game with Jed, after he heard about a 7-year-old boy who fell over the falls and survived. This game is played something like this...
MAMA MAMA MAMA, would you rather...
go over the falls or get eaten slowly by a shark,
go over the falls in a barrel or get one leg eaten by a shark,
go over the falls or get hit by a car,
go over the falls strapped to a mattress or get hit by a very small car,
go over the falls and land in a marshmallow factory or get hit by a cart pulled by a goat...
This is followed up by a rousing game of "would it hurt more if"...
We're all toast after a long day of driving and sightseeing, so I will bid you all a fond adieu. Off to Michigan tomorrow and a full day at Mackinaw Island.
Good night, sweet friends.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Away We Go... (Bethany)
Well, friends, I have sworn to be in bed by midnight, which means that I have exactly twenty seconds to...oops, missed it. Oh, well, the best laid plans, etc. It's exactly five and a half hours until I will rocket out of bed fresh as a daisy and do my whirling dervish bit for an hour, forcing each member of my little family out of their deepest sleep and into the mini-van (GO GO GO! You can sleep when you're dead! When I was a kid, we left at 3 a.m.!).
Jed will rocket out of bed with me and spin around in circles until he has gathered every piece of electronic wiring and gadgetry that he can find and has stuffed it and handfuls of creepy Lego robot pieces into his backpack. He will feed the dog, kiss the cat, put on his rock-and-roll underpants and his Iron Maiden t-shirt and stand at the door, black socks pulled up to his knobby knees, and ask over and over again if we can go to Dunkin Donuts on the way out of town. It's on the way, Mama, MAMA, MAMA, MAMA, it's really on the way and if we miss that one there's another one, PLEEEEAAAASSSSEEEE!
Meg will turn her back to me and beg for five more minutes and then get up slowly, whimpering, her eyes still closed, and on her way out of the room in this state, she will stub her toe on some bit of the house and have a full-on cry until I agree to go to Dunkin Donuts after all and use up our entire stock of band-aids on her imaginary injury. She will insist on a lengthy hug-n-snuggle, which will be just exactly what I have no time for, and just exactly what I need, turns out.
Adam will still be snoring quietly until I threaten to tell Jed to ask him about the difference between handling and stability when it comes to race cars, and then he will get up, grunt, and shut himself in the bathroom with the New Yorker. Five minutes later he will emerge and begin frantically closing windows and emptying trash and worrying about what he has forgotten.
Meg will forget Little White Bear. Jed will forget his headphones. Adam will forget his pills and the CD he really wanted to listen to. I will forget to email somebody about something silly and we will spend the first hour of the trip fighting over whether we should turn around and go home. We will become convinced that we have left the oven on. Neither of the kids will remember to brush their teeth.
Our cargo so far consists of many metal t-shirts for Jed, which should play well in the Mid-West, flowery dresses for Meg, plastic toys with too many pieces, a small plastic sheep who goes with me everywhere, and a whole lot of good music. Generous friends have handed off their well-loved travel games, and each kid has brought a random assortment of total nonsense to gaze at and fiddle with.
Perhaps most exciting to the Groff guys (and gals) is the three cases of Ipswich Ale and Stone Cat Hefeweizen, packed with tender care and best wishes by our friends at the Mercury Brewing Company. We promise to arrive with some of it, but it may come in handy along the way.
It's been 41 minutes now, and I am interested to see if I can, in fact, leap out of bed fresh as a daisy with so little sleep. The whole shooting match (I mean that metaphorically, Adam, you can't bring the gun) will be interesting to see. I am excited to spend so much time with Jed and Meg, and Adam and I have never minded having hours to chat. I'll let you know how the rest of my predictions pan out.
..and to all a good night...
Jed will rocket out of bed with me and spin around in circles until he has gathered every piece of electronic wiring and gadgetry that he can find and has stuffed it and handfuls of creepy Lego robot pieces into his backpack. He will feed the dog, kiss the cat, put on his rock-and-roll underpants and his Iron Maiden t-shirt and stand at the door, black socks pulled up to his knobby knees, and ask over and over again if we can go to Dunkin Donuts on the way out of town. It's on the way, Mama, MAMA, MAMA, MAMA, it's really on the way and if we miss that one there's another one, PLEEEEAAAASSSSEEEE!
Meg will turn her back to me and beg for five more minutes and then get up slowly, whimpering, her eyes still closed, and on her way out of the room in this state, she will stub her toe on some bit of the house and have a full-on cry until I agree to go to Dunkin Donuts after all and use up our entire stock of band-aids on her imaginary injury. She will insist on a lengthy hug-n-snuggle, which will be just exactly what I have no time for, and just exactly what I need, turns out.
Adam will still be snoring quietly until I threaten to tell Jed to ask him about the difference between handling and stability when it comes to race cars, and then he will get up, grunt, and shut himself in the bathroom with the New Yorker. Five minutes later he will emerge and begin frantically closing windows and emptying trash and worrying about what he has forgotten.Meg will forget Little White Bear. Jed will forget his headphones. Adam will forget his pills and the CD he really wanted to listen to. I will forget to email somebody about something silly and we will spend the first hour of the trip fighting over whether we should turn around and go home. We will become convinced that we have left the oven on. Neither of the kids will remember to brush their teeth.
Our cargo so far consists of many metal t-shirts for Jed, which should play well in the Mid-West, flowery dresses for Meg, plastic toys with too many pieces, a small plastic sheep who goes with me everywhere, and a whole lot of good music. Generous friends have handed off their well-loved travel games, and each kid has brought a random assortment of total nonsense to gaze at and fiddle with.
Perhaps most exciting to the Groff guys (and gals) is the three cases of Ipswich Ale and Stone Cat Hefeweizen, packed with tender care and best wishes by our friends at the Mercury Brewing Company. We promise to arrive with some of it, but it may come in handy along the way.
It's been 41 minutes now, and I am interested to see if I can, in fact, leap out of bed fresh as a daisy with so little sleep. The whole shooting match (I mean that metaphorically, Adam, you can't bring the gun) will be interesting to see. I am excited to spend so much time with Jed and Meg, and Adam and I have never minded having hours to chat. I'll let you know how the rest of my predictions pan out.
..and to all a good night...
Scrumtrilescent (Adam)
The below is worth a followup: check here, after about 1:10 (and after the ad they make you watch).
Lost Prologue (or not) (Jed)
Crazy. Daring. Scrumtrulacent (snl). Those are the only words able to define our trip to Seattle. It's crazy that we're driving to the other friggin side of the country. It's daring because, according to the disastrous film RV, our car will either run into a pile of shopping carts, be driving away in a panic to get away from a wierd Texas family, or crash into a lake . It's scrumtrulacent because we'll be driving past mount rushmore, hang around on yellowstone, and climb on mountains near the badlands. It's going to be a trip so scrumtrulacent that I can barely move or type anything but dots......................................................... anyway, my summer reading list is sadly going to be forced upon me on the trip >:-( and me and my best friend Jesse are planning a daring rebellion against those who created the summer reading list >:-). But more to the point, my dad and i are climbing up on mountains while my sister meg and my mother do a bunch of their girly stuff. We're gonna camp out and stuff and have picnics. However, riding along the countryside isn't very normal for me: I'm a media-addict, i love The King from Cars, i dig heavy metal and punk rock, etc, so why would I be doing this? Will I survive this trip?
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Prelude... (Adam)
So, here it is Sunday night, maybe 36 hours before we--me, Bethany, and our two kids, Jed (10) and Meg (6)--pile into a rental minivan and trundle across the northern portion of "these United States" (as politicians used to refer to it), bound for Seattle, Washington, where my nephew Karl and his new blushing bride Michelle are having a wedding reception on Friday, September 4.
B: We will also be dipping into Canada, eh, and I will wave my little maple-leaf for you, Michaud, and Justin and Lillian...
Why, you ask? Why are we driving cross-country for about a week with two rammy, media-addicted elementary school kids? Why are we daring fate to recreate scenes from National Lampoon's Vacation and various other vacation-disaster movies? First let me say that it was all Bethany's
idea. Whether it was generous or mean-spirited of me to say that will be determined retrospectively, after we find out how this goes.
Her reasoning was that she spent a good portion of her childhood trundling across the barren wastelands of western Canada in a station wagon with her family, and it was a character-forming experience, and she would like to bestow just a taste of that sort of thing on our children.
B: Actually my reasoning is that suffering builds character, and that my children haven't suffered nearly enough.
I went along with the idea because typically I just do whatever my wife says.
B: If only...
But seriously, despite the potential for so many "someday we'll look back and laugh" type episodes, I'm pretty excited about the whole thing. And anyway, we're only half crazy, because we're dropping the rental off in Seattle and then flying home at the end of Labor Day weekend.
So anyway, check back here later this week for posts on Niagara Falls, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, and all kinds of other cool stuff! YIPPEE!
B: We will also be dipping into Canada, eh, and I will wave my little maple-leaf for you, Michaud, and Justin and Lillian...
Why, you ask? Why are we driving cross-country for about a week with two rammy, media-addicted elementary school kids? Why are we daring fate to recreate scenes from National Lampoon's Vacation and various other vacation-disaster movies? First let me say that it was all Bethany's
Her reasoning was that she spent a good portion of her childhood trundling across the barren wastelands of western Canada in a station wagon with her family, and it was a character-forming experience, and she would like to bestow just a taste of that sort of thing on our children.
B: Actually my reasoning is that suffering builds character, and that my children haven't suffered nearly enough.
I went along with the idea because typically I just do whatever my wife says.
B: If only...
But seriously, despite the potential for so many "someday we'll look back and laugh" type episodes, I'm pretty excited about the whole thing. And anyway, we're only half crazy, because we're dropping the rental off in Seattle and then flying home at the end of Labor Day weekend.
So anyway, check back here later this week for posts on Niagara Falls, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, and all kinds of other cool stuff! YIPPEE!
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