Travels with Matty 2018

     Nearly fifty years ago I was driving home for Christmas with my brother and an acquaintance in a red mustang hired through Driveaway. We hit a whiteout in western Nebraska that forced us off the road then got stopped fifty miles west of Lincoln due to snowdrifts. The radio informed us that I-80 was closed in both directions and that plows were heading our way. It was dark and cold, we were running low on gas, and we were bored. So we did the obvious thing. We sluiced the car across the median and drove the wrong way on the interstate until we passed the plows going west. Then it was just a matter of sluicing our way back across to the newly plowed highway. It was clean and green the rest of the way. One of us wanted to see how fast the Mustang would go and hit 110 in western Illinois before the car started shaking violently. How the Driveaway company let us have a car remains a mystery.      I was reminded of this story while stopped by road construct...

      I drove west on the Calumet Expressway from Indiana into Illinois this morning. As the distinctive skyline of downtown Chicago hove into view I was ready to experience a wave of nostalgia remembering the times the family saw the same view years ago while returning from the Indiana State Dunes. Nostalgia was not forthcoming, even when signs pointed the way to Hyde Park. I realized that I’m not one for nostalgia. Chicago served its purpose of raising me and, poof, no more need for it. I feel the same about my cars, my bikes, and even my house. Thirty-two years of occupancy and then it gets torn down. I think I’m expected to feel something about that, but I don’t. It was just another tool that had served its purpose.       I left New York City with my first cold in two years. I realized that all the time I had tended to Kathy I had been in peak health, the top of my game. Mind over matter? Fortunately, this cold was mild and disappeared as soon as I st...

I am cruising up the bike lane on 8th Avenue on a bikeshare bike. In order to avoid a surcharge I need to change bikes every thirty minutes. I stop at a station at 55th Street. As I lock the bike I notice my shoulder bag is gone. It has fallen out of the side of the front cargo compartment. I have to wait two minutes to check out another bike. Adrenalin won’t let me wait and I start jogging back the way I came. In four and a half blocks I see my bag on the curb with a woman standing by it dialing her phone, presumably my home number which is visible on the bright orange address tag. She says that she was waiting in case someone came back for it. She says this in an accent that the current administration seems to want to hear less of. Needless to say, I am reminded of last year’s visit to New York when I left my phone in a coffee shop restroom. As I stood in line a man came out asking if someone had mislaid their phone. Obviously, I am looking for a dishonest person in New York City. So...

I went to the Guggenheim Tuesday. What a good way to view an exhibition. You go round and round, up and up achieving a pleasing continuity, after which you can review what you’ve seen on the way down. A great idea from Frank Lloyd Wright that never caught on. The other idea he had that never caught fire was his design of a movie theater with its rows of seats that were angled instead of facing flush to the screen. His thinking was that the viewer rarely sits upright facing straight ahead, but is more comfortable in a relaxed, cross-legged position facing off to the side of the screen. Brilliant.  I went to see the Giacometti exhibition prepared for a raft of pinchy figures like you always see, but was pleasantly surprised to see a variety of styles and an explanation of his art. He says he could work a piece of clay for a thousand years and it might show a bit of progress. This explains why some of his wood works are teeny tiny. I liked his dog, but was most taken by his sculpture ...

Some day there will exist a continuous bicycle path around the island of Manhattan along the Harlem, East, and Hudson Rivers and through Battery Park. It will be for cyclists what the Highline has become for pedestrians. As it exists today, however, there are a score of gaps in the route forcing riders into neighborhoods using roads that are not bike-friendly before allowing re-access to the waterside as well as adding miles to the itinerary. It is not for the faint of heart. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the enthusiasm and intrepidness of my riding partner I could not today say that I have circumnavigated Manhattan by bicycle. I will be in New York through the weekend with only a few items on the schedule. Tonight I’ll visit with family. Tomorrow night I’ll attend a play at a theater with some number of offs in its description. The weekend will find me at Forest Hills, home of the US Open, where my host will be playing in a tennis tournament in both singles and doubles. He says he w...

     Sunday was a free day in Lafayette so I drove around the countryside revisiting some of the sights Kathy and I saw ten years ago and seeing some new ones. In Loreauville I stopped at the little cemetery to view Clifton Chenier’s grave. Instead of listing the dates of his and his wife’s birth and death his gravestone had engraved in it their alpha and omega. I failed to look at other gravestones to determine if the alpha/omega designation is common in the cemetery or if it is unique to the Cheniers. I guess I’ll have to make another pilgrimage.      The Evangeline Oak in St. Martinsville marks the omega of the Evangeline legend. I visited the alpha of the story last year when I drove through Acadia country in Nova Scotia. The story, as immortalized by the Wordsworth poem, is about two Acadians, Evangeline and Gabriel, who fell in love, but were separated when the English drove the them from their land in Canada. They were not reunited until years later...

     Kathy and I liked to make up terms to describe various phenomena we encountered. When you are passing cars on the interstate and a car cuts in front of you, you have been mattied. If you are cut off by a truck that is barely going faster than the vehicle in front and you have to wait forever behind it then you have been kathied. I was not mattied yesterday, but I was kathied three times. You now have names for these inconveniences. You’re welcome.      The drive from Santa Fe to Abilene, Texas is boring. The highlight was Clovis, Mew Mexico near the Texas border. It seems to be the freight train capital of the world. Trains are constantly going by. At the train crossing I had to wait for three separate trains to pass. My mom would have loved it. Whenever she saw a freight train she thought of all the trucks that were not on the road because of it.      Abilene is a cute town. It has amusing sculptures all over town, it has a Waldo-like...

I was greeted in Santa Fe by an unprecedented heat wave. The national park and most good hiking areas are closed due to fire danger. There is a fire raging near Durango as evidence of what can happen. Tuesday morning we got right to it with a hike somewhere. My hosts dutifully explain where we are going each day and kindly ask things like, "Do you want to hike 10 miles at 14 miles today?" I remain neutral in all decisions and just let them dictate my life for a couple of days. The Tuesday hike is a hot one. I would jokingly compare it to the Bataan Death March, but at what point is that appropriate or acceptable. I don’t imagine it would have been joked about 70 years ago. But now it’s okay. We can tell jokes about the Spanish Inquisition, about the Salem Witch Trials, even Joan of Arc at the stake. How long until we hear 9/11 jokes? Holocaust jokes? I am slowly becoming a hiking afficionado. They used to all be similar walks in nature. Now, I rate them. Tuesday’s good hike w...

We hit the road at 5:07 am and turned on the radio to the news of the apparent suicide of Anthony Bourdain. The news hit me hard. I remember some years ago after "Kitchen Confidential" and before the tv showsthat  Bourdain published a mystery book and was in Portland flogging it at a mystery book store owned by a friend of Kathy’s and mine. He was totally gracious and entertaining, a rare combination. Kathy loved the book and was enamoured of the guy. There is a photo somewhere of a smiling Bourdain side by side with a beaming Kathy. He was late for the event because, I think, he got lost on the way. Rather than throw his assistant under the bus he took full responsibility himself. A small detail that made a large impression. When I began last year’s road trip I was thinking a lot about life, death and happiness. I didn’t think that this year’s road trip would begin the same way. If you were to design templates for the ideal life, Bourdain’s might well have been one of them. ...

Leaving Portland this morning my goal is to arrive in Salt Lake by dinner. I thought the time change gave me an extra hour so I could dawdle before departure. I mentioned this to a friend and she said: "Oh, are you driving west?" I don’t think she was being a wiseacre, but I’m not sure. In any case, it will be an early start.  I can think of three ways this trip will differ from last year’s. One is weather. Last years‘ fall, northern route made for pleasant, sometimes cool temperatures the whole time which led to a fair amount of camping. This year Precious and I will be in the south and are looking at temperatures in the 80’s and 90’s. Possibly the 100’s. Precious is hoping to spending less time in tents and more time in air-conditioned motels. I expect her to get her wish.  Another difference: Emma Peel, our trusty steed, powered by the cheating diesel engine designed and sold by the criminals at VW has been modified. The modification was much more extensive than I had real...

     Apparently this trip was scheduled to last exactly eight weeks. Why else would Matty drive twelve  hours (the first hour and a half in snow) in order to get home eight weeks to the day after we left? Not much new in the 'hood. The nearest homeless camp moved a couple of hundred yards up the road. The buildings under construction are four stories taller. And that's about it. The concierge could not come up with a single nugget of interest that we missed.     We're no worse for wear after eight weeks on the road.  Emma Peel performed flawlessly. Matty stayed healthy the entire trip and, except for some minor tummy trouble in Virginia, so did I.     We saw many interesting sites and some not so interesting ones. But, as I have written previously, it was the people who gave us shelter and the people we broke bread with who made the trip. Even the households with the overly friendly big dogs were fantastic. To all of them (you) we say thank...

     An hour west of Denver sits Dillon Lake where my Denver hosts have a condo they put on Airbnb. It was vacant this week so Matty and I spent two nights there. Breckinridge and Vail are close by, but it is not ski season so Matty rode his bike around the lake. At 9200 feet he suffered on the uphills. I even got winded going up the 35 steps to the condo. The place is absolutely gorgeous.     I thought Portland would be our next destination, but, apparently, Matty hadn't had his fill of lake beauty so we find ourselves in Fish Haven, Idaho, near where Idaho, Utah and Wyoming meet. More stunning beauty and the first sunrise of the trip. One last bike ride this afternoon, one last night here, and then Portland. We'll see if Matty wants to do the eleven and a half drive in one day or two.      Tomorrow will mark eight weeks on the road. It will take time to digest. Monday we will hit the ground running: Mail pickup, arrange for haircuts, get Emma...

     On August 14, 1960, John Kennedy paid a visit to Eleanor Roosevelt at Val-Kill, her private home in Hyde Park. They met one-on-one on that Sunday afternoon so he could ask for her endorsement for president. She was concerned about his commitment to civil rights and about the influence his father might have on a Kennedy administration. Apparently he said all the right things convincingly, because he got her endorsement and the rest, as they say... Here are some of the lyrics to the Simon and Garfunkle song that was originally titled Mrs. Roosevelt, but changed to Mrs. Robinson when used in The Graduate:                     Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon                     Going to the candidate's debate                     Laugh about it, shout about it               ...

    I wasn't really feeling the blog last night so I kind of gave Ike short shrift. Here's three things I learned about him.      He enjoyed driving an electric car that had a top speed of 19 miles an hour and a range of 13 (or maybe it was the other way around).     He made his bones as commander of Camp Colt which housed 10,000 soldiers near Gettysburg. His deft handling of the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 helped forge his reputation.      In 1919 he was part of a military convoy that traveled from Washington, DC, to San Francisco and took an agonizing 62 days. As president, his support of the transcontinental highway system shortened that time considerably.     I always feel better when I have shared useless information. Emma is packed and we are off to Denver. Up, up, and away. Precious

     Trivia question: I've been listening to a lot of radio this trip and there is one song I've heard at least once every travel day and twice a day in Canada. Hint: it's by a British group and its about how you don't have to be godlike to be a superhero. Answer later.      Spent a day tooling around Kansas City. The attractions are lined up north to south from the limited access to the Missouri River through a market area. Then you have to skip two interstates to get to downtown and then on to the museum district. There are a lot of museums.     A couple of weeks ago we went to FDR's presidential library in Hyde Park. Since then we've driven by Woodrow Wilson's Library in Staunton, VA, and  Harry Tuman's in Independence, MO. We stopped at neither. Today we stopped at Eisenhower's library in Abilene, Kansas. Small town boy from the wrong side of the tracks makes good. We then drove through Wamego, which bills itself as Wizard of Oz central...