The S.S. Fiasco Hits the Road

So here's the plan:

Helena > Yellowstone > Deadwood > Black Hills > Badlands > Sioux Falls > Omaha > Chicago > Cleveland > Niagara Falls > Toronto > Montreal > Montpelier > Freeport.

We land in Freeport on September 13th. We return to NYC before October 1st, specific date unknown.

The next morning we ran north on flatter streets, and managed our best running distance yet! At this point we were about 7 weeks into the couch-to-5K program, slowly building up to long, sustained runs. We still don’t know why this run in particular was so good. Something in the Dallas air, maybe.

Maria and Laurie put us on the road with hugs and mint brownies, after showing us how to check our tire pressure using the gauge we hadn’t figured out yet. We drove slowly through the highways, disentangling ourselves from the Dallas metroplex and heading south to Austin.

Our digs in Austin were a bed & breakfast near the college, which I picked based largely on availability and some decent reviews. Upon arriving, though, Steven googled around for music and events that weekend, and discovered that Fastball was playing at Hole in the Wall, a bar literally around the corner from where we were staying. I don’t know who Fastball is, but Steven was very excited, bouncing around me as we walked down the street. Perhaps for him, like seeing Youngfellaz on the street in New Orleans for me, having Fastball play at a local bar just around the corner was a quintessential conceptual Austin experience.

We settled in at the bar, got some food, and preceded to read books on our phones for an hour until the music started. I know we looked weird in the crowded bar, because at least three people asked what we were reading. Finally the band started up; Steven went to the stage while I stayed back where it was a little quieter. Steven knew about a quarter of the songs they played, including the big hit, of course, and he commented later that they really do look like a band that had one hit sixteen years ago.

The next morning we ate fritattas in the b&b’s empty dining room, while I did some research on shopping in Austin. This landed us on South Congress Street after breakfast, where we proceeded to walk up and down the street for a couple of miles, turning in and out of trendy shop after trendy shop. It was not the best; as I am completely and utterly spoiled on uber-hip shopping by virtue of living on the border of Williamsburg, I found very little in Austin that felt genuinely new and exciting to me. The culture of hipness in those stores shares many traits with hipster Brooklyn, and Brooklyn brands were everywhere. 

I thought at the time that Austin appears to take being weird very seriously, and I have to admit I have a hard time with any culture that worships weirdness for its own sake. I’m sure there’s a lot to Austin I missed or didn’t understand, but in the end I was happy to end our shopping tour in a recommended taco place, where we ate splendidly. 

The next day we skipped running because of the extremely long drive from New Orleans to Dallas. Instead we neatly packed, checked out of the b&b, did some quick car maintenance—changing a blown headlight, confirming our fears of an oil leak, adding more oil—and hit the road. We set a timer for each leg so we’d remember to switch drivers, and buckled down for eight hours on the road. 

We don’t remember much about this day. We crossed the Mississippi at last. We were surprised to discover how far north into Louisiana we had to go before finally crossing into Texas. We rolled into Dallas and our friend Maria’s appointment around 8pm that night, finding a great parking spot across from her high-rise building downtown. We met her awesome girlfriend, Laurie, and rolled around with her dog, Tenor, before all going out for dinner at Velvet Taco. Maria and Laurie talked us into staying an extra night by stories of an evening museum event that weekend. We fell into a deep sleep under Maria’s astronaut blankets.

In the morning Maria kindly moved our car at 7 a.m. We rolled out of bed an hour later and went off running down the wide sidewalks of Dallas, beginning with a stop at Dealey Plaza. We were content to simply touch our toes to the grassy knoll before running on, instead of stopping for the museum and the tourist photos taken in the middle of the street. (On the off chance you don’t know: Dealey Plaza is where JFK was assassinated.)

Other sights on our run included an incredibly weird art installation of a gigantic eyeball, maybe three stories high, sitting in the middle of a park downtown. 

We let ourselves back into Maria’s (now empty) apartment, and went our separate ways for a day of work and relaxation. After grabbing food at a local Mexican place, Steven wrote while I went back to the apartment to paint. We spent a very chill afternoon getting little things done before Maria came home. That night we went for dinner and drinks at the Woolworth bar, where we were seated on leather armchairs in a small library, books covering two walls and windows floor-to-ceiling on the other. We lounged and caught up with our friend, which was perfect.

The next day we sleepily drove Jean into Volvo of Dallas to deal with the leak situation and get a check-up. Our mechanic, Donny, came out an hour later and told us our car’s drain plug hadn’t been put back properly the last time we’d had the oil changed. “It’ll cost us 8 bucks to fix it, but it’s good your brought it in because if that thing had fallen out you would have lost your whole engine and maybe caught fire.” I was wide awake extremely quickly after that. But as we were wrapping up, Donny added, “247,000 miles on that car and I can’t find a single thing to sell you. That’s amazing.” So yeah, that was good.

We went for lunch, trying to visit Spiral Diner on our friend Max’s recommendation. Alas, they were closed. We ate next door. I caught up with NYC folks on the phone before diving into my salad.

That afternoon we walked to the Perot Science museum, which was absolutely amazing. Where I sometimes find the stand-read-walk-stand-read-walk pattern of science museums to be monotonous, this experience was entirely different. The Perot museum is heavily tilted toward interactivity. Want to learn about the colors of light? Turn these knobs. Want to learn about cells? Swab and stain your own cheek cells. Want to learn about ground speed? Race a simulation of a T-Rex on a running course. Want to learn about robotics? Build and program a robot car to go through a maze. Want to learn about nutrition? Play a hungry hippos-style video game. Want to learn about body heat? Dance in front of a body heat monitor. The list goes on and on. We had a great time. If you’re ever in Dallas, you must do this museum.

This is going to be the longest update, oh my.

Out of our hotel we went and off to the Vicksburg battle field, where we poked at the visitor center and picked up the paper guide to the park’s driving tour of the battleground. We stopped to watch a play-by-play of the battle’s progression, mapped out in LEDs on a huge map of the area. Then, equipped with some very basic (in my case) knowledge of what we were about to see, we hit the scenic road, though not before catching the very last minute (and subsequent explosion) of a canon firing demonstration.

The Vicksburg battlefield scenic drive roughly follows the lines of the Confederate and Union forces, and is consequently extremely wiggly, hilly, and somewhat narrow. Definitely a driving adventure. The battle is mapped out with signs for each major event of the battle, but of course there’s nothing to actually SEE there. “On this hill this force charged on this date.” Yes, it’s a very nice hill. Detailed signs of the death toll were sobering. The primary point of interest in the landscape is that many states from both sides have put up monuments to the forces who fought there, in a variety of styles, so the entire place is like a tour of Monuments R Us.

On our way out of the city we drove through historic Vicksburg, which is liberally festooned with the bricks, narrow windows, and art galleries that one expects of a historic district. We snuck out of the city along the river, and made our way south to Natchez. 

Having completely forgotten about Father’s Day, we arrived in Natchez hoping to get lunch, only to find almost the entire place closed. Natchez apparently once boasted the highest concentration of millionaires in the USA, and it’s appropriately home to many fancy shops and well-reviewed restaurants. We walked by their windows extremely hungry until stumbling upon a Father’s Day buffet at a local hotel, which we promptly crashed. We were very underdressed, but the food was great and plentiful. On our way back to the car we found a single art gallery open, where we enjoyed some browsing. Highlights of the collection (entirely local artists) included hanging glass sculptures and a wooden mobile that we loved but passed up because of limited car space.

After lunch we had a looooong drive east, back down the toe of Louisiana’s boot to New Orleans. The highway was narrow and over water for many miles, and we passed through yet another torrential rain storm on our way into the city. After a great deal of driving and a few confused turns, we finally found our bed and breakfast, the Lion’s Inn, via the very tiny sign hanging on their porch. The b&b is a few blocks past the Esplanade, putting us adjacent to but not inside the tourist center of the city. We set up in our very nice room and relaxed for a little while before changing and heading out into the evening.

We had SO many recommendations for New Orleans, between friends who grew up there and people who have visited in the past. We decided to walk across the French Quarter to a cluster of recommended restaurants, see where we could get in, and get ourselves adjusted to the city. This worked splendidly; we absorbed the atmosphere of decorative iron, beads dangling from street lamps, enormous puffs of brilliant green fern hanging from the upper balconies of houses and dripping their daily supply of water into the street.

We ended up at Mr. B’s for a delicious dinner. The jambalaya was spectacular and our waiter very funny. Afterwards we walked a few blocks over the French 75, which we expected to be packed but was completely empty. We picked a couch in the back near the bar, and made friends with our bartender, Vince, and eventually the barback, Victoria, as well. 

We stayed and chatted with them for over an hour in the empty bar, and showed Vince our list of recommended cocktail bars. He promptly ticked off the places on his fingers, nodding along. “This list is a few years old, yeah? I’ll give you the updates.” He went through each bar individually, marking where the famous bartenders had changed locations, or gone on vacation, or left the business, and adding in new locations and specific drinks to ask for at each place. Steven ordered a cigar (smoking indoors! So strange!) and Vince kindly cut it and demonstrated a proper pull.

On our last round before leaving I asked him to make me something of his own, and he turned out a delicious bourbon drink with a crisp bite on the end, which he explained was created by adding acid phosphate. This was news to us, but acid phosphate showed up on cocktail menus over and over again for the rest of our stay in New Orleans.

After leaving French 75 we bopped around on Bourbon street for a little while. Bourbon Street, to our NYC-adjusted eyes, looks like Times Square but with more alcohol and nudity. We strolled for a few blocks before turning into a club for another drink, where we spent an hour watching pole dancing of simply spectacular athleticism. Finally we walked out of the French Quarter and crashed into our beds in the small hours of the morning.

Steven’s notes for the next morning are “so much goddamn shopping” in all caps. And yeah, that’s a pretty good summary. We went out for our morning run, trying to get to the edge of the river, but ended up stuck on the wrong side of the train tracks for a mile out and back. After showering and a quick breakfast in the b&b’s kitchen, I proceeded to drag him all over the French Quarter yet again. We started in the French Market, and then ran our way through an impending rainstorm to Cafe Du Monde, where we played proper tourists squished into a corner table with beignets and coffee while the rain poured down. Once it lightened up we went back out, hitting shops including Trashy Diva, Quarter Stitch (brilliantly named yarn store), La Parfumerie, and many more. Trinkets were purchased, including a notebook bound in marbled paper, a Mardi Gras mask, very sparkly yarn, and a vial of perfume. We rested at a bar in Pirate’s Alley, where I sipped absinthe and Steven nursed a well-deserved beer.

We stayed out all day and into the evening, eventually having dinner at Deenie’s Seafood, where the portions overflowed the plates. Afterwards we did a round of three of the bars Vince had recommended to us the night before, including Broussard’s and Bar Tonique, picking a drink a piece at each place. Some were great, others extremely odd. An herbal cognac blend stands out in our memories.

After a late night the night before and a very long day, I was happy to bail on our adventures at a more reasonable hour. As we walked back, however, we crossed over a street full of more locally frequented bars, where we discovered an open-air, impromptu party. Youngfellaz, a New Orleans big brass jazz band, was set up on one corner, playing to a crowd that filled the sidewalks and spilled over into every lane of the street. We stayed and danced for a little while, watching incredibly patient drivers navigate through the crowds of people. The interlude felt perfectly suited to the idea of the city, as though we’d stepped through a hidden archway into a more saturated and magical New Orleans.

The next morning we slept in, then went out for a day of more relaxed and spread out tourist adventures. We started with a tour of the Old Mint, before taking a trolley down to the aquarium (of course). The aquarium was pretty good, although the best part by far was feeding parakeets in a huge open-air enclosure stuck onto the side of the building. We then slogged through the heat to Cochon for lunch, which was fantastic. Well worth the heat and the walk, especially when their vegetarian dishes turned out to be just as good as their pork.

After lunch we moseyed down Magazine Street to a less tourist-oriented shopping district, where I poked at antiques and fancy lingerie. We caught a cab home for an afternoon nap.

For dinner, we donned swimsuits and headed out to The Country Club, a “clothing-optional gay pool bar.” (Sincere thank you to our friends, especially Elsha, for this and many other amazing recommendations.) The pool was in the back of a huge, columned house flying the rainbow flag from its balcony, the inside carved up into little bar spaces with couches and televisions. The inside was calm, but the pool turned out to be busy with people, paddling and drinking and sprawled all over the deck beneath palm trees and speakers. Steven settled our things into a couple of lounge chairs while I went to the bar for drinks. Steven asked for a hurricane; when I ordered it, our bartender scoffed and grinned at me. “Tourists, huh?” I made my complete dissociation from the drink in question clear by blaming my husband and ordering myself a margarita. Later when Steven went to the bar for the next round on our tab, the bartender greeted him with, “Hey, you’re the hurricane!”

We ordered food, which came out in styrofoam containers with little packets of tartar sauce, and relaxed. Eventually we swam in the pool, chatting with our neighbors about NYC and other cities. People shrieked and splashed water and made out and ran around. I interrupted an extremely awkward conversation in the sauna about how to best invite someone to an orgy. It was warm outside, and I felt sharply how much I missed our home and our friends. (New York has a distinct lack of pool bars. We should fix this.)

Hello intrepid fiasco followers! 

Sara here. Steven has had a REVELATION about his novel. (I love when Steven has revelations about his novel. He makes this I’m-clever-but-oh-shit-that’s-going-to-be-a-lot-of-work noise. It’s a very specific noise.) Anyway, he’s spending his current writing bandwidth on said revelation, and I’m going to be picking up the daily log for a while.

The morning we planned to leave Memphis, we rolled out of our tent and drove about 20 minutes to the running track at Shelby Farms, at our friend Maria’s recommendation. Shelby Farms abuts a golf course and has signs for bison…somewhere. We did not see actual bison. We did see many runners, bike riders, and rollerbladers; Shelby Farms is apparently the place to go for long, smooth paths in Memphis. The running track’s short loop borders a lovely pond, complete with a cupola and ducks, while the long loop splits off and disappears into the distance. We took the short loop.

After running, and spending a sweaty few minutes trying to find a water fountain, we headed back to the Graceland campground for showers and a breakfast of PB&Js. We were camped on a little rise of grass next to a field that looks deceptively isolated, the heavy foliage on either side disguising the highway and local houses only a few steps away. (We’d seen fireflies in that field the night before.) Our neighbors were engaged in the continuing struggle of trying to fit an RV into a tent space.

Last thing before leaving Graceland, we hauled out Stitch and posed with him in front of the Graceland sign. We did not get the precise shot you can see at the end of the Lilo and Stitch movie, because the proper gates to Graceland are blocked off for most of the day; you’re only allowed to walk up to them between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m. We were content with the hotel sign instead.

Then we hit the road toward Vicksburg, our stop-over before making our way to New Orleans. Our highway rolled in massive waves for a little while before flattening out to run straight as an arrow through miles of marshland, fields, and greenery, with the water illusion erasing the highway edge. It was beautiful. Stands of trees hung over the road and vines and shrubs roped over and around them, covering every inch of vertical space in leaves. Maybe you know the trees that Maxfield Parrish paints? The ones that are not so much trees as clouds of foliage clumped together, flu of gaps like missing puzzle pieces and not a trunk in sight? Those trees are in Mississppi. Now you know.

On our way through Steven directed us to Robert Johnson’s crossroads on Route 61. As we were driving he told me a little about the legend of Robert Johnson, who supposedly sold his soul to the devil in order to play the guitar. Except, you know, that the legend was created years after his death when his music was “discovered” by white people. And that the legend conveniently ignores his work before the supposed deal, or the time he spent practicing with other musicians that resulted in him improving his performances. And there are several crossroads that claim to be “the one.” 

This one was a pretty typical four corners. Deli on one corner, BoJangles on another. A sign with a stylized guitar has been erected, but there’s no museum or landmark other than that. We stopped in the BoJangles for a biscuit and got on our way.

A little later in the drive, we passed the place where Teddy Roosevelt apparently refused to shoot a bear, and so kicked off the chain of events that would lead to the invention of the teddy bear. 

Arriving in Vicksburg in the late afternoon, we collapsed into our hotel room. Steven did a load of laundry while I went out for Subway sandwiches, which we ate while ensconced in air conditioning and pervasive wifi.

After a couple of hours we decided to go see Edge of Tomorrow, playing at the Vicksburg Mall a half mile down the street. We walked to the theater, which turned out to be rather complicated by a complete lack of sidewalks. We ended up hopping from parking lot to parking lot, scrambling over decorative grass dividers. 

♫There’s a girl in New York City/Calls herself the human trampoline♫

The morning started with a run around the campground, where I got I to try out my new runnin’ clothes, which are strangely only comfortable while running, but they do show off the guns. We managed to untie to tent from its secure position, packed up the car, noticed another oil leak, uh oh, and drove onto Memphis. We stopped for lunch at the highly reviewed Log Cabin along the way, where the portions were generous indeed, and were slightly detoured by a sign advertising a Freshwater Pearl Museum, which turned out to be a room in the back of an RV park’s general supply store. It was… disappointing.

From there, we drove directly to the Memphis Botanical Garden, which along with the usual Rose/Japanese/Desert gardens also featured a playful children’s garden, with giant worms and musical lawns. The Botanical Garden was under construction, which meant parts of the garden were just fields of dirt, and hard to navigate, and our visit was cut short by the arrival of storm clouds. Drops fell as we got in the car, and I don’t want to know what happened to the wine reception that was being set up while we were there.

And when it started to rain, it poured. Heavily. Sara drove to the Graceland complex, where we were camping behind the Heartbreak Hotel, through literal flood conditions. It rained so heavily we sometimes couldn’t see out the windshield, and there were certainly puddles so deep we worried whether Jean could make it through. But driver and car prevailed, and when we got to Graceland we opted to sleep in a cabin, at least that night, so we could have a roof over our heads.

When we checked in, they gave us a menu for Marlowe’s. Instead of delivering to Graceland, Marlowe’s picks guests up in pink limousines and ferries them to and from the restaurant. Well, we couldn’t pass up an opportunity as campy as that, so we called for a car. Marlowe’s was decent food, and on the screens the San Antonio Spurs won the NBA Championships.

(Also, Graceland Resort, I understand that, when naming your hotel, it’s tempting to go with the Elvis Presley song with hotel in the title. But the Heartbreak Hotel was a shitty place to be.)

The actual Graceland house is across the street from the hotel and campground, and there’s a shuttle that takes you there and back. The next morning we put off getting on the shuttle to grab some breakfast, only for the line to grow by half an hour by the time we got back. Yikes.

Anyway, the house is basically a house. It’s a very nice, big, two stories and a basement, and clearly last decorated in the late 70s, but still it’s a house. You walk around it while the audio tour tells you what the Presley family did in each room. Behind the house, they’ve turned some of the other buildings into a history of Elvis’s life, from his first hit single until his death. They tour is weirdly biased towards Elvis’s successes, in that it has to mention the troubles he had only when they can’t be ignored anymore: his loss of popularity in the 60s that led to the comeback special, the divorce from Pricilla, the drug addiction that would eventually cost him his life. When these things get brought up in passing, we had moments of double take. “Wait? What drug addiction?” And then the tour ends at his grave, as in “Well, that was Elvis’s life. And here’s Elvis. Under that slab there.” It’s kind of a gut punch, but not the biggest one we’d get that day. 

After spending a little more time in the ancillary museums, looking at Elvis’s cars and his Hawaiian jumpsuit and such, and then moving out of the cabin and setting up our tent in the campground, we drove out to the Memphis Metal Museum, on the suggestion of the tourism board of Memphis itself. Yes, when I asked Twitter what we should do in Memphis, Memphis answered me.

ANYWAY, the Metal Museum is a small but growing collection of functional metal objects, jewelry, and sculptures, with a temporary exhibit on armor and jewelry that evokes armor, and a permanent collection of statues, busts, gates, frames, and mantel pieces. It’s really cool, and we spent a long time in the gift shop trying on bracelets and asking the women behind the counter what they recommend in Memphis. 

The Metal Museum ALSO has a stunning view of the Mississippi, and seeing the wide, massive river made a great milestone in our progress west, even if we weren’t going to actually cross those waters for another five days.

On the recommendation of the counter women, we went to South of Beale’s, a tasty brew pub where we had sangria and watched the World Cup. A little wobbly after lunch, we walked down the street to the Memphis Civil Rights Museum, where we had our second, and much bigger gut punch of the day: the Civil Rights Museum is built on the site of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. 

The main portion of the museum is concerned with the struggle of black Americans from the end of reconstruction to the murder of MLK in 1968, and you are literally led from the entrance to the preserved rooms he was staying in before his death. It lends a sense of dread to the whole affair. You know how this story must end.

To say the Civil Rights Museum made a sharp contrast to Graceland is a gross understatement, but it was also a contrast to everything we’ve seen on the trip so far. Everything else is a celebration of something: a celebration of baseball, of Coke and Disney, of science or art or fish. Even the Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah is a celebration of the lives of those departed. The Civil Rights Museum is sad and angry, countering every success of the civil rights movement with a failure, or fight left unfinished. 

Yes, Brown V Board ended legal segregation, but here’s how it’s still going on through zoning and other means. Yes, the Voting Rights Act ended the poll tax, but here’s where new voter ID laws disenfranchise people again. So, the President is black. So what? He’s basically an anomaly in the larger political landscape. And all the while we’re drawn closer and closer to the site of the one of the greatest crimes in our nation’s history.

We’re sad to report that we did not give the Civil Rights Museum its due. It takes 2 or 3 hours to see everything, and everything there is worth looking at. The museum is clear to say that the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t one man or one organization, but hundreds and thousands of people, some famous, some not, many working at cross purposes and with conflicting means, and that it didn’t end on April 4th, 1968. However, we arrived later in the day, and the museum closed before we could see everything. 

As the museum doors were closing, we booked it out and up the street to go to the Peabody Hotel, to watch the ducks march out of the fountain in the lobby, only to arrive minutes after the parade was over. So we wandered down to Beale St, which is for blues what lower Broadway in Nashville is for country music, a place for tourists to barhop and listen one live blues band after another. We picked one with an open air courtyard and relaxed and processed what we’d seen in the Civil Rights Museum.