Author: Philip Weiss

15 January 2012

Disembarkation from the cruise was pretty damn easy. Wait with Mary Rose for our section (#10) to be called on the boat, then head off. Insert Sail & Sign card one last time to let the computers know I wasn’t on the boat any more. Wait by the carousel to pick up my bags. Wait in line at customs. Wait on the curb for the shuttle back to the parking lot. Only the last was much of a pain, as there was mess of people milling around the shuttle pick up area, and at least three shuttles run by the lot drove by without stopping. Finally a coordinator of some sort put us on a shuttle that was run by a different company, but they work together or something. That meant the van went by a different lot first, which wasn’t an inconvenience.

Mary Rose wanted coffee, but there aren’t a lot of Seattle style coffee shops in Miami, so I’d looked one up in Fort Lauderdale. It was a 30 minute drive, but Mary Rose’s flight was out of Fort Lauderdale anyway. Unfortunately, Brew Urban didn’t have any food except a couple of pastries, and they were out of soy milk to boot. We got brunch at the nearby Old Fort Lauderdale/O-B after a 40 minute wait instead. Food was pretty good after the crap Carnival served.

Then we headed to Hollywood Beach to walk the boardwalk, where I figured we’d find a cafe or coffee shop we could hang out at and people watch or surf the web. But the boardwalk was really windy, and there weren’t any coffee kinds of places. So after an hour or so, I drove us to downtown Hollywood Beach where there was a Starbucks. Incidentally, filled with people camping at tables not drinking coffee.

After a bit, we checked in at the Holiday Inn Express and waited for my friend Lenei, a resident of Fort Lauderdale, to show up and take us to dinner. Lenei picked a place she’d heard good things about called Aruba, but when we arrived it had switch to night club mode, so we ate next door at the Village Grille. Mary Rose ate a giant chicken sandwich on her own.

Then, rest…

16 January 2012

First thing on waking up was to deliver Mary Rose to the airport for her flight home. That was easy. 10 minutes there. 10 minutes back.

Later in the morning, I headed to Lenei’s place. The plan was to toodle around Miami and that’s what we did.

First stop, breakfast at the Floridian in Fort Lauderdale. Tasty huevos rancheros style breakfast. Then down to Miami to drop off a tire at Lenei’s mechanic. This is the cool part. King Automotive is right in the heart of a mural art district. Dozens of murals decorated the buildings around there. So we walked around and I got snapshots with my camera. Click through for bigger versions and more pictures.

Next stop, a little video store to pick up bootleg DVDs for Lenei to watch later.

Next stop, Little Havana after driving by the Miami-Dade Library so I’d know where it was the next day. At Little Havana we stopped by a small park where old men (mostly Cuban) played chess and dominoes. A few more blocks brought us to a market with a restaurant called Nuevo Siglo. Lenei ordered for me, as I know zero Spanish. A big hunk of cooked meat and a garlic dipping sauce. Delicious. Also stopped by the nearby Casa De Los Trucos House Of Costumes where I found a couple of masks that would be perfect for next year’s sparkle party.

Last sight of the day was on Virginia Key, where Lenei took me to see Jimbo’s Place. I don’t really quite know how to describe Jimbo’s. Lenei said it wasn’t what it was 6 months before, the last time she’d been there. There were a couple of bulldozers there and a big empty place where a bunch of shacks apparently had been. No sign of Jimbo.

After that, Lenei treated me to a home cooked meal, and I crashed on her couch.

17 January 2012

Lenei had to go back to work. My plan was to spend some time at the Miami-Dade library looking up obituaries. A few people in my family tree retired to Florida, so I wanted to dig up some information. The library only had obituaries from Dade county newspapers, and none of the three people in my tree who’d died in that county had obituaries published there. Struck out.

Instead, I drove to Fort Lauderdale and hung out in a Starbucks for a bit and then headed to the Broward County Library. There I started writing these travelogue posts and did a bit more research online into Florida relatives to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

For dinner, Lenei and I partook of the fine food served at El Guanaco Taqueria Y Antojitos, a Honduran place in Oakland Park. I may have had the best enchilada I’ve ever had. Juicy and spicy without being drenched in enchilada sauce. If you are ever in the area, go to this restaurant. It’s super cheap to boot.

For our last task of the evening, I helped Lenei transport a kayak she’d stored at a friend’s house. Getting it strapped to the top of her Jeep can probably be done with only one person, but my presence makes it easy. Her friend travels for a living promoting Geico insurance, and also sells belts. For helping her fix her printer, she gave me a very sparkly belt buckle which I will gift to Keenan on my return to Seattle.

Before crashing for the night, Lenei popped in one of the DVDs she purchased the day before, Attack The Block. This was a pretty damn good movie. Fairly short, but that made it better. One story with very little to distract. Just after mugging a woman, a gang of London teens finds themselves in the center of an alien invasion and under attack. The Block being their project-like apartment building with something like 19 stories.

4 January 2012

The morning of the fourth I woke up in Amarillo, Texas. You know that part of Texas that sticks up and lies between New Mexico and Oklahoma? It’s flat and boring. It’s part of Texas because New Mexico and Oklahoma didn’t want it. Also, Texas does not believe in rest areas. Instead, they have picnic areas. The difference is that there aren’t any bathrooms. If it weren’t for McDonald’s I’d have had to drive all the way across the state without urinating.

Oklahoma is also flat. But not quite as flat as north Texas and it has trees to decorate it in places. The only other thing of note this day was that I stopped at Logan’s Roadhouse in Oklahoma City for dinner. The schtick at this restaurant is that they give customers peanuts to snack on, and you can throw the shells on the floor! Which people seemed to be doing with abandon. But the gimmick seemed very look ma I’m throwing peanuts on the floor! rather than a big amount of pent up desire to throw food on the floor.

I stopped for the night in Maumelle, Arkansas, just outside of Little Rock. A long day of driving, but relatively easy given that the interstate was very straight and traffic was pretty light.

5 January 2012

The 5th was to be a lax travel day by intention.

First thing on the agenda was to head just south of Little Rock and visit the Pinecrest cemetery and look for a relative who might be buried there. I’d found a reference online that said the wife of my grandmother’s cousin was buried there. The office was able to quickly look her up and found where she was buried. When I got out to the location, my grandmother’s cousin Leo Reichle was buried there as well. I was hopeful I’d find him there, but wasn’t sure. He was born in Illinois and lived in Ohio after the war. So far as I know, his only connection to Arkansas was that his wife Geneva was from there.

Anyhow, that trip was quicker than I expected, so I had some time to kill. While I was driving through Little Rock I saw a sign for the Clinton Presidential Library, so I turned off the interstate to visit. The building looks quite impressive. However, the exhibits were a little more canned than I prefer. The one interesting things was that they have all of the President’s daily schedules in binders for public perusal. Redacted in a fair number of places, but still cool to see.

After that, I headed to Jonesboro. It’s a little off the direct path to Miami, but my friend Renay lives there and I wanted to meet her in person. She’s a former book blogger who still keeps her toe in the pool writing at Lady Business, which is a great feminist blog that focuses mostly on books and media. I had a great visit with her.

Then I was on the road to Memphis where I planned to stay for the night. Memphis freeways are confusing and seemingly under a lot of construction. The lanes are narrowed for that work, light was dimming right about then, and there was lots of traffic on the road. All that combined to make me really uncomfortable driving there. In on incident, a car pull up at a red light in the right hand turn lane. He sorta veered right but kept going straight at a high rate of speed, right through the red light. Also bypassing the long line of vehicles waiting at the light. Dangerous and assholish.

But as I got to Memphis it was about 6 and I realized I could drive some more. So on to Tupelo a few more hours down the road. Tupelo is a hilarious name, so I was chuffed to stay there.

6 January 2012

This was the longest driving day of the trip. My plan was to drive to Orlando and crash the night there. However, the night before I was looking at the web site for the Florida Turnpike to figure out what kind of change I needed to have for tolls, and what lanes to avoid and which ones to take. I didn’t want to get stuck in a Sunpass only lane because I didn’t know what they looked like. Unfortunately, their web site is crapola and I couldn’t figure it out. I posted that on Facebook, and a high school friend responded that I should head to St. Petersburg where she lives. As that meant a night not having to check into a hotel, that became my new plan. Also, it avoided the turnpike.

The drive to Montgomery was easy. But after that Google’s directions took me a way I probably wouldn’t go again. See, there’s no interstate from Montgomery toward eastern Florida. I should have headed directly south, but Google thought heading east through Georgia would be the fastest route. Normally I’m finding that Google’s estimations are about 15% to 20% high. But in this case the estimate for driving time was spot on. The roads through southeast Alabama and southwest Georgia were windy and slow. While not exactly picturesque, it was a nice drive. But as I didn’t want to pull into St. Petersburg at midnight, it was the wrong choice.

So when I finally got to I-75 and headed directly south toward Florida, I pushed the driving hard. Normally I’ve kept my speed under the speed limit and stopped regularly for breaks. On this section I was going over, and I only stopped once. I pulled into St. Petersburg about 9:45 local time, and found Stephanie’s place around 10.

Her family has a really nice house on Treasure Island, which is an upscale area on the water. Her three boys and husband were already asleep, so we chatted a bit before both of us crashed.

7 January 2012

Since the drive to Miami from St. Petersburg was only about 4 or 5 hours, I could sleep in a bit. When I woke up, Stephanie was already back from her job. She was still handling the phones via her cell phone though. She is an office manager type for her husband’s medical practice. Her boys really wanted to show off their Nintendo 3DSes, but I have to say that was pretty boring. More fun was the giant map of the world her oldest has on his bedroom wall. They played a game with me where they named a place on the map and I had to find it. They managed to stump me about half the time.

I got driving just before noon. I took the Sunshine Skyway toll bridge south instead of a toll free route. It had spectacular views and the other route didn’t.

The only item of note from the drive is crossing Alligator Alley, I-75 pretty much straight east to Miami through the Everglades. No real exits. Only a couple points of interest. The watery swampy part seemed to start about halfway across. I suppose there are places one could get off and go exploring the Everglades, but I wasn’t going to be doing that this trip.

Once in Miami, I decided to stay at the Quality Inn near the airport. This was based on having stayed at a couple of other Quality Inns already and finding they had reasonable prices and good Wifi. This one had neither. I used the guest laundry to wash everything I’d worn on the trip so far, and re-packed my bags so that I wouldn’t be taking some items on the cruise with me. No need for the heavy jacket that was necessary crossing Idaho and Utah.

I’d hoped to be able to Skype with a group of people from Community for Youth that were doing a reunion back in Seattle, but that didn’t happen. Not sure the Wifi could have kept up anyway. It was awful.

Dinner was at a fast foodish joint called Taco Beach just up the street. Not quite fast food, but not really an actual restaurant either. I can’t think of a comparable type of place in Seattle. The enchilada was delicious though, and they had a match on the televisions from the Mexican top flight. The match turned out to be not particularly well played.

And then sleep.

I haven’t had a lot of time to write the blog entries I promised myself I would. Although I had a fair amount of free time on the cruise, I haven’t had free time otherwise. Until now. Upcoming (including this one) are a few catch up posts.

One administrative item to note first. I am maintaining a Grand Road Trip travel map on Google Maps. It has all the stops and points of interest of the trip. Not a whole lot in the way of notes though. It’s mostly for me to remember things along the way, and for other folks to get an idea of where I have been. I am not adding much in the way of details of what I did at each place.

Also, it’s a very useful companion to these blog posts, as I don’t plan on writing up the exact routes in them.

1 January 2012

The trip started off quite well, though really a bit too late. Deirdre hosts a New Year’s Day party most years where she serves Hoppin’ John. I needed to be on the road well before that, but she wanted me to stop by anyway. I got loaded up and headed to Deirdre’s about noon. There she served pancakes (I think, I’ve forgotten already) and bacon, and packed me some cookies and a ginger brew for the road. Actual departure time from Seattle turned out to be about 1:15 p.m.

Of course, I freaked out and thought I might have left my door unlocked. Luckily, I could stop, email my building manager from my phone, and ask her to twist my doorknob and make sure. I got a reply a few hours later. I had locked it up tight.

Day 1 was about 10 hours of driving. I stopped for a quick break at the Selah Rest Stop on I-84 near Yakima. That’s where the bridge photo below was taken. It’s kinda pretty for a bridge. I stopped for a couple of quick rests and one gas station before finally deciding to call it a night in Mountain Home, Idaho. The drive between Seattle and Boise is one I’ve done many times, as I loved in Boise for about a year (1998).

2 January 2012

I didn’t get an early start, but it was much earlier than day 1. A quick (and free) breakfast at the restaurant adjacent to the Best Western and I was on the road. The route to Salt Lake City is one I’ve driven 3 times before as well. I do like the views from the interstate in southeast Idaho as a driver turns southward toward S.L.C.

S.L.C. has traffic and lots of it. To me it’s a good illustration of what happens when a metro area invests heavily in roads. People fill roads to their available capacity in cities. If more are built, people move to places and use them. There really isn’t unused highway capacity in a city. Also, S.L.C. did not pay for those roads by themselves either. Those are new and pretty and got a lot of funding from the federal government.

Around Provo I got off the Interstate and took US 6. The road is mostly a 2 lane highway, and it also has some incredible views. I stopped in Price and got myself a grilled sandwich at a little drive in called Sherald’s with a very overworked waitress. It was a damn fine sandwich. While waiting, I chatted with a couple of adolescents who were waiting for their burger. They were not particularly bright, but enthusiastic and charming.

Unfortunately, the evening was already upon me by the time I reach I-70 near Green River. That meant I didn’t get to see what must have been great scenery as I drove by Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park near Moab, Utah. Moab looked like a nice town, though a bit touristy. I drove through and made it to Cortez, Colorado for the night, where I got a room at a really cheap motel. The temperature was in the high 20s, which seems downright cold to me as I write this from balmy Fort Lauderdale with a temperature in the 80s. I actually brought my road beverages into the room at night because I didn’t want them to freeze in the car and burst.

3 January 2012

I woke up pretty early and drove into the main part of Cortez from the outskirts for a breakfast at the El Grande Cafe. It is the kind of place where the old farts for their breakfast every day and the breakfast waitresses all call you honey. The people were friendly, but the huevos rancheros were awful.

Day 3 was the first day I did any actual sightseeing at all. I figured my chances of being in the area again anytime in the next few decades were pretty slim, so I was gonna take the opportunity to stop at 4 Corners, and stand in the one spot where I can be in four states at once. The road to 4 Corners goes through the Navajo reservations in New Mexico. There’s really nothing there. Just a small plaza with a survey marker in the center at the exact spot where the states touch. The local tribes have set up booths around the plaza to sell trinkets to tourists. I bought a bunch.

Afterward, the road took me into Arizona briefly before I hung a left toward Shiprock in northern New Mexico. My original plan had been to drive a more northerly route from Shiprock to Albuquerque and then take a left. Just cause. However, Deirdre presented another option when she was serving me bacon. Her hometown was Tohatchi, which is about an hour south of Shiprock. It’s on the way from nowhere to nowhere. So I routed through that town to see what makes a Deirdre.

The highway south of Shiprock is a four lane divided highway. I don’t know why. About 5 miles north of Tohatchi it abruptly narrows to two lanes undivided. Five miles south of Tohatchi, it becomes a four lane divided highway again, and continues that through Gallup. Very odd.

I did stop and pull into the Tohatchi High School parking lot to get a quick phone snapshot before continuing on my way. At the edge of Tohatchi I saw a fellow hitch-hiking on the side of the road. Since I was going that way I pulled over and let him hop in. I saw 4 other hitch-hikers shortly afterward. Deidre tells me that’s a way of life on the reservation. I just thought it would be nice to help a guy out (I’ve even given rides to gutter punks in Seattle before. The guy’s name was Rick, and he needed to get to the hospital in Gallup, though I’m not sure why. He didn’t appear to be injured himself. His accent was really thick, so I couldn’t understand much of what he said, and neither of us are the talkative sort anyway.

After dropping Rick off and swinging by the post office in Gallup to deposit a batch of post cards, I headed east on I-40. New Mexico had a lot more elevation changes than I expected, particularly dipping into Albuquerque and then climbing the ridge east of that metro area. The earth in the state is very reddish as well. Once I crossed into Texas though, everything flattened out. Final stop was at a Quality Inn in Amarillo.

More later…