Category: Travel

I made it to San Francisco last night, no thanks to our travel agency. Not only did the hotel not have my reservation, but somehow they had decided that it was perfectly OK to offer my an itinerary that flew into La Guardia and took off again from JFK. It turns out that the two airports are traversable via cab, provided of course that you leave enough time for the inevitable traffic jams.

I’ll be heading into the conference in a few minutes, but right now I’m just enjoying the brief sunshine from my hotel window, and my view of the San Francisco Chronicle offices. Pictures later, maybe.

I had a great visit with Esta. Don’t let anyone tell you seminarians don’t have fun. I have a bunch of photos of the first invitational Ultimate Frisbee Revival, featuring competition between Union PSCE, Louisville, Princeton, and Columbia (as well as Pittsburgh—thanks, Esta for the reminder).

Now I’m on the road again, back home—and, as Lisa is working in New York next week, the dogs are staying here with her parents.

I’m on the road a lot right now. I have a couple of classes a week that I teach for an SAT prep company, and they’re cutting a bit of a hole in my vacation. So now I’m heading back for a couple of days to take care of this week’s classes. After that, I’m not sure—but I might take advantage of the free doggie day care to do some other visiting. We’ll see…

…call me, and I’ll drive there. And it will rain.

Seriously, except for Tuesday, it’s rained every single driving day I’ve had. As the kids say, what up with that?

Today I’m heading to Richmond to hang with Esta and those wild seminary kids. I haven’t seen my sister in her new home digs, so this should be fun. Looking forward to crazy partying tonight.

In the meantime, enjoy these other photos from the road.

As a Virginian by accident of birth, rather than lineage (as my parents’ families were from the surrounding states of North Carolina and Pennsylvania), and as one raised in the “cradle of the Revolution” in the vicinity of Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown, I have conflicting impulses about historical sites in Virginia. The former impulse says that I should seek out those sites to understand the state in which I was born. The latter impulse says that I should shun the sites and their accompanying flood of hucksterism, sweaty tourists, and admission fees that have inexplicably kept pace with movie ticket prices.

So it is perhaps understandable that—until yesterday—I had never visited the Natural Bridge. Never mind that it was surveyed by George Washington and once owned by Thomas Jefferson, my initial-sake and revered father of The University. Just the fact that I saw billboards for it was enough to put me off. But, yesterday, as I drove down Interstate 81 through the Shenandoah Valley, halfway to my parents’ house, and talking to myself to keep alert, I realized three things:

1. The site of the Natural Bridge was less than five miles off I-81, and the road it was on ran alongside the interstate—so I would lose no distance and little time getting to and from the site.
2. I was driving by myself down that road and had a little flexibility in my schedule, and who knows when that might happen again.
3. I had to use the restroom.

So I pulled off and drove up the road. I was amused to see that the first sign of the Bridge (apart from billboards) was a paddock of deer, grazing in the Natural Bridge Zoo—next to a sign for the Natural Bridge Wax Museum, and just prior to the Natural Bridge Antique Shop and Tool Museum. After a short drive, I pulled up to the imposing neo-plantation Natural Bridge Admissions and Gift Shop building, and stepped outside—and realized that it had been a while since I had experienced 80° weather.

I went inside, past the gift shop, and paid my $10 and went through the door and down the stairs—all 136 of them—to the gatehouse at the bottom of the hill, where the man took my ticket and pointed me around to the right. I stepped through and there, as they say, it was. It’s a massive stone vault or arch that has been carved through by the rather innocuous stream running through the base, and—even with rows of benches permanently installed for the special “Drama of Creation” nightly shows and the sound system mounted on the far side at the top—it’s pretty darned spectacular. My pictures, I’m afraid, do it no justice at all.

Approaching the bridge and looking up, you feel something of the awe inspired by gazing up inside a large cathedral, only this arch was massive and carved over the millennia by water, not craftsmen. The echo under it is pretty spectacular, though I didn’t really test it out too thoroughly.

At any rate, I spent a few minutes walking around and taking pictures—and noting the 19th century names carved in the rock beside the walkway. (Apparently even graffiti was done with an eye to quality then—note the serifs!) Then I began the long climb back up and to the car, avoiding the blandishments of the giftshop (though I was tempted by the custom-label wines from Barboursville, my favorite Virginia winery—and another Thomas Jefferson connection). As I drove back out to the interstate, I realized that I was driving across the top of the bridge—and that the maintainers of the site had built high wooden barriers across the top to keep pedestrians and drivers from getting a free peek.

I highly recommend the bridge as a leg stretcher, provided you can keep a sense of humor about the hucksterism. One does get some of the sense of awe that Jefferson must have felt on discovering the scale of nature’s operations in Virginia, and even gift shops can’t detract from that.

1. It is possible to drive five hours, teach a class, answer email, pack, sleep, grade papers, have a job interview, drive a long distance, teach another class, drive to New Jersey, sleep, and drive to North Carolina in the span of two and a half days.
2. …. That’s it, really.
3. Except to note that there’s not a lot between Providence, RI and New Haven, CT when you’re driving along I-95 between the two points at 10 PM. (Or, one suspects, at other times.)
4. And that you aren’t allowed to take pictures from the top deck of the George Washington Bridge.
5. And that even slow music can keep you awake if you play it really loud.
6. And that the Natural Bridge is worth a look if you’ve never been.
7. And that April in Virginia and North Carolina sometimes means 80° days. (I knew that, but had forgotten it.)
8. And that a memory-card-enabled printer and a USB flash memory keychain drive make an acceptable, if dog-slow, workaround to get your photos if you left your camera’s cable at home.
9. And that lists are fun.
10. And that I have no idea what has been happening for the last two days and I should really go to bed.

Lisa and I decided that I should take advantage of some quiet time here in Arlington to go on the road. Naturally, as soon as we made the decision my scheduled filled up with other activities. The end result: I drove Lisa and the dogs down to her parents yesterday; drove back today; drove out to Westborough for some errands tonight; am doing some interviews tomorrow, then driving down to Mattapoisett for other work tomorrow evening; driving from there back to my inlaws in New Jersey, arriving about 1:30 a.m.; then driving from there to my folks. Followed, hopefully, by several days of doing nothing.

The second batch of photos from our trip. These include outdoor shots around my dad’s property (and my uncle’s house on the neighboring hill) across several days, from sunrise to sunset.

Technical note: the last batch, starting with the wood photos, were shot at twilight, although the exposure makes them look as though it were still late afternoon. This is why they aren’t especially crisply focused—I didn’t have my tripod, so I leaned against a tree where I could and shot freehand where I couldn’t.

Continuing to catch up from my posting vacation, here comes the photo flood. This is the art batch. Esta and I went walking in downtown Asheville on the morning of the 22nd. I was looking for textures. I think I found a few.

I also found a mystery. The faded lettering in the picture to the right says “Jarrett’s Press” (the full logo says “Jarrett’s Press Printing”). It’s on the back of a warehouse-like building behind the First Presbyterian Church in Asheville, just off Patton Avenue. Googling tells me a few things, namely that the press was active in the late 1920s, but not much else—and particularly not whether a close family member ran the press. It would be a little too ironic if one of my ancestors was in the printing business.

We just got in from our trip back to New Jersey from Asheville. It took 11 and a half hours, which is I think something of a land speed record.

On the way, at a rest stop on I-81 in Virginia, I stopped to chat with a nice young man with a microphone and a TV camera who was earnestly quizzing people about their experiences driving on this, the second-worst traffic day of the year. As it was at that point about 10:30 am and we hadn’t seen more than a handful of vehicles, I was probably trying too hard not to laugh to say anything intelligent.

More updates will have to wait until I clear my email backlog, which is currently at 36 skillion and counting. It turns out that my current mail load is not maintainable using Webmail over a 28.8 dialup connection.

But I’ll say it anyway. We’ve been busy, of course; who hasn’t? We got two inches of snow and temperatures around 4° Fahrenheit from Sunday to Monday; have already had a turkey dinner, pizza night, and spicy Thai beef soup along with homemade apple and lemon meringue pies, homemade biscotti, and homemade cookies; and will be working on jambalaya tonight, traditional Italian fish tomorrow night, and pork tenderloin with risotto on Christmas day.

Lest you get the wrong impression, we have also occasionally left the house—for last minute Christmas shopping, grocery replenishment, and even a joint photo shoot with me and Esta (pictures to come sometime next week). I borrowed my Mom’s copy of the family genealogy; also next week the genealogy pages will be updated with many of the cousins on her side.

And, it being Christmas with seven people under one roof, we are also swapping new and interesting upper respiratory conditions. If the drive down was a little tense, the drive back should be positively nervewracking with all the blowing of noses, hacking coughs, and “I said, bake a left turd here idto de parkig lot! Why are you laughing ad be?”

Ah, Christmas.

No posting for a day or two, because we’ve been on the road. For a very long time. We left Arlington at 7 am Friday morning and for once made it through Connecticut with a minimum of fuss, pulling into Lakewood, New Jersey at 5 past noon.

That was the easy day. The next morning, after spending an hour with a shoehorn in front o four trunk the night before, we loaded four people, two dogs,and a week’s worth of baggage into the Passat and left—at 6:45 am sharp. It was 7:55 PM, after a blockage on I-81 in Maryland and a very long day of driving, that we pulled into my parents’ place in the Asheville, NC “suburbs.”

It may be a while between posts this week. My dad’s phone line only does about 28.8. But rest assured, we’ll fill you in when we get back.

Oh, and turkeys: this morning when we awoke, there was a flock of wild turkeys moving along the edge of the lawn. Gone now, alas, but we have snow to compensate.

I have officially decided to make my claim to fame by finding a trade route between Boston and the Jersey Shore that does not include Connecticut. For the second trip in a row, we were deluged by rain non-stop for the four hours it took us to get through this ridiculous state. For a good two solid hours, I thought we had taken a wrong turn and were driving through the Atlantic Ocean. Also we’ve tried all three east-west routes, all with unsatisfactory results: I-84 to I-91 to I-95 is a disaster through all the states on the southern coast; taking the Merritt Parkway is somewhat better but adds a good two hours to the trip, most of that due to rush hour delay getting on the parkway through Hartford and New Haven; and staying on I-84 all the way through to 684 to 287 means going through rush hour and nasty construction. Pfui.

Anyway, we’re here, we had no recurrence of womitin’ dog, the sun is shining, and I have a day to work all the kinks out of my body before we head into the city tomorrow.

Lisa and I are headed down to the greater NYC area in a few minutes to drown our post-election sorrows at the Frick and spend some time with her folks. I’ve never Fricked, so I’m really looking forward to the visit. Keep your fingers crossed that we don’t experience Return of the Womitin’ Dog on the way down.

We have a family wedding this weekend in Pennsylvania. Lisa and I just arrived in New Jersey, our base of operations. After a very long drive from Boston through what felt like 40 days and 40 nights of rain, one wommitin’ dog (“aye, she’s wommitin’ bad, sorr”) and various other tribulations, we’re here and I’m going to bed. Blogging might resume on Sunday.

Makes me want to hop a plane to Florence just to celebrate: Michaelangelo’s David sculpture was completed 500 years ago today. The statue is in pretty good shape for its age, though it no longer stands outside, has some broken toes, and might not survive being cleaned with spring water. (Via MetaFilter.)