Mileage: 9,693 miles
Number of states: 20
Number of national parks: 8
A little light on the national parks this go round, though still heavy on the states, thanks to the little ones along the east coast. The final loop should be the reverse, as parks tend to be pretty clustered in the southwest. We're at 21,034 miles total, including the pre-loop truck drive from NYC to Knoxville and the first two loops, then we've got the mini loop coming up next to mississippi and louisiana, then finally the southwest after that - should be about 30k miles, 48 states and 40+ parks when all is said and done.
-B
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
King Cotton
Florida to Georgia, Alabama, and Knoxville (11/9 - 11/10):
We finished up our second loop with a tour of rural Georgia and Alabama. Based on the book Confederates in the Attic, the Civil War travelogue I bought a few days ago in North Carolina, we headed for Andersonville, GA. Andersonville was the site of the most notorious and deadly Confederate prison. Between 20 and 30% of the Union prisoners who entered the camp died from starvation or crazy disease. After the war, the prison's director Henry Wirz became the only person to have ever been convicted of war crimes in the US, and he was hanged. But...he has been turned into a martyr by pro-Confederate groups, who have celebrations for him every year. The establishment of Andersonville as a national historic site was so contentious that it had to be established as a general museum honoring American POWs to distract from the Civil War aspect. (Pro-Confederates say that Wirz was a scapegoat and Northern prisons were just as bad.)
The POW museum was pretty well-done if kind of disorganized. There were a lot of personal stories, plus exhibits about how POWs are actually defined. I would have liked the museum better though if it was somewhere else, as honoring POWs should kind of stand alone, and it distracted from all the terrible things that happened at Andersonville itself. (Also, if you really want to honor POWs, it seems like you could put the museum somewhere more accessible that rural southwest Georgia).
Post-Andersonville, we headed over windy, out-of-the-way highways to Enterprise, Alabama, which our atlas told us was home to a Boll Weevil Monument. We were pretty disappointed to get there and find out it was really just a small kind of generic fountain (you go to the trouble to put up a monument to the Boll Weevil and then make it normal-looking??). The story behind it is at least somewhat interesting, but the Wikipedia article itself would have sufficed.
The destinations of the last day of the road trip made up for the disappointment of the Boll Weevil. We saw a crazy amount of memorabilia at the Hank Williams Sr boyhood home in Georgiana, AL. In Montgomery we stopped off at the Rosa Parks museum (with the Outkast song as our driving soundtrack), which has this cool bus with videoscreens in the windows where you can watch a reenactment of the arrest and then look at exhibits about the following boycott of the bus system. Our final stop was the space center in Huntsville, where we paid our respects to Miss Baker, the first space monkey to return from orbit alive, by laying a banana on her grave.
-M
We finished up our second loop with a tour of rural Georgia and Alabama. Based on the book Confederates in the Attic, the Civil War travelogue I bought a few days ago in North Carolina, we headed for Andersonville, GA. Andersonville was the site of the most notorious and deadly Confederate prison. Between 20 and 30% of the Union prisoners who entered the camp died from starvation or crazy disease. After the war, the prison's director Henry Wirz became the only person to have ever been convicted of war crimes in the US, and he was hanged. But...he has been turned into a martyr by pro-Confederate groups, who have celebrations for him every year. The establishment of Andersonville as a national historic site was so contentious that it had to be established as a general museum honoring American POWs to distract from the Civil War aspect. (Pro-Confederates say that Wirz was a scapegoat and Northern prisons were just as bad.)
The POW museum was pretty well-done if kind of disorganized. There were a lot of personal stories, plus exhibits about how POWs are actually defined. I would have liked the museum better though if it was somewhere else, as honoring POWs should kind of stand alone, and it distracted from all the terrible things that happened at Andersonville itself. (Also, if you really want to honor POWs, it seems like you could put the museum somewhere more accessible that rural southwest Georgia).
Post-Andersonville, we headed over windy, out-of-the-way highways to Enterprise, Alabama, which our atlas told us was home to a Boll Weevil Monument. We were pretty disappointed to get there and find out it was really just a small kind of generic fountain (you go to the trouble to put up a monument to the Boll Weevil and then make it normal-looking??). The story behind it is at least somewhat interesting, but the Wikipedia article itself would have sufficed.
The destinations of the last day of the road trip made up for the disappointment of the Boll Weevil. We saw a crazy amount of memorabilia at the Hank Williams Sr boyhood home in Georgiana, AL. In Montgomery we stopped off at the Rosa Parks museum (with the Outkast song as our driving soundtrack), which has this cool bus with videoscreens in the windows where you can watch a reenactment of the arrest and then look at exhibits about the following boycott of the bus system. Our final stop was the space center in Huntsville, where we paid our respects to Miss Baker, the first space monkey to return from orbit alive, by laying a banana on her grave.
-M
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
A Farewell to Taste
Edisto to Florida, all points (11/3 - 11/8):
Brad and I have spent some lovely times in Florida in the past, relaxing and enjoying the sun and warmth while New York is being battered by blizzards and winter-ness. The Florida of the road trip, however, was mostly garishness. We spent a couple of nights camping in the Everglades (free because it was the off-season!), where the mosquitoes had their way with me in the evening. I've never had worse mosquito bites in my life (easily 30-50 of them), and I spent most of our time in Florida in an itchy hell.
We visited Key West with the intention of taking a 4-hour road trip boat trip to Dry Tortugas, the most inaccessible national park in the continental US. You can tell that Key West was charming back in its time. Now it’s more Gatlinburg-esque and is crammed with cheesy bars and lewd t-shirt stores. It was a 3 hour drive just to get to this unpleasant town, and when we got there we found our that our Dry Tortugas trip had been canceled because of high winds (and after I'd already bought the Dramamine!). Rather than spend more time surrounded by ass shorts with Key West splayed across the butt, we turned around and headed back to to Florida City on the mainland where we were instead surrounded by strip malls.
It wasn't all terrible, though. Namely:
1) We saw some alligators/crocodiles, cranes, and silly birds in the Everglades
2) It was quite the novelty to use the air conditioner instead of the heater, and we welcomed the warmness after all the snow from the first part of this loop.
3) Ernest Hemingway's house in Key West is pretty awesome AND it's filled with six-toed cats! Ernest Hemingway collected six-toed cats because they are supposed to be good luck, and now there are a number of their descendants among the 40-50 cats who currently live at the house. The extra digit is an opposable thumb, which they can use to pick things up off the ground (creepy!). In other animal news, the old town also has a number of roosters running around as a result of a ban on cock fighting several decades ago that required owners to set the birds loose.
4) We went canoe-ing in the Everglades, where we got lost off the trail, but had fun paddling around for a couple hours.
5) On our way out of Florida, we got to have lunch with Brad's mom and stepdad and visit for at least a little bit before heading north.
-M
Key West is terrible.
-B
Brad and I have spent some lovely times in Florida in the past, relaxing and enjoying the sun and warmth while New York is being battered by blizzards and winter-ness. The Florida of the road trip, however, was mostly garishness. We spent a couple of nights camping in the Everglades (free because it was the off-season!), where the mosquitoes had their way with me in the evening. I've never had worse mosquito bites in my life (easily 30-50 of them), and I spent most of our time in Florida in an itchy hell.
We visited Key West with the intention of taking a 4-hour road trip boat trip to Dry Tortugas, the most inaccessible national park in the continental US. You can tell that Key West was charming back in its time. Now it’s more Gatlinburg-esque and is crammed with cheesy bars and lewd t-shirt stores. It was a 3 hour drive just to get to this unpleasant town, and when we got there we found our that our Dry Tortugas trip had been canceled because of high winds (and after I'd already bought the Dramamine!). Rather than spend more time surrounded by ass shorts with Key West splayed across the butt, we turned around and headed back to to Florida City on the mainland where we were instead surrounded by strip malls.
It wasn't all terrible, though. Namely:
1) We saw some alligators/crocodiles, cranes, and silly birds in the Everglades
2) It was quite the novelty to use the air conditioner instead of the heater, and we welcomed the warmness after all the snow from the first part of this loop.
3) Ernest Hemingway's house in Key West is pretty awesome AND it's filled with six-toed cats! Ernest Hemingway collected six-toed cats because they are supposed to be good luck, and now there are a number of their descendants among the 40-50 cats who currently live at the house. The extra digit is an opposable thumb, which they can use to pick things up off the ground (creepy!). In other animal news, the old town also has a number of roosters running around as a result of a ban on cock fighting several decades ago that required owners to set the birds loose.
4) We went canoe-ing in the Everglades, where we got lost off the trail, but had fun paddling around for a couple hours.
5) On our way out of Florida, we got to have lunch with Brad's mom and stepdad and visit for at least a little bit before heading north.
-M
Key West is terrible.
-B
Magnolias and Moonlight
Winston-Salem to Edisto State Park, SC (11/2):
We bid good-bye to Aaron and Erin and headed for Congaree, South Carolina, a national park established only a few years ago. We did a walking tour of the swamp before heading to Charleston on the coast. We arrived at dusk and unfortunately had only a couple hours anyway, but it’s a peculiar little place. The historic district is genteel and very pretty but seems stuck in a time a couple centuries ago, and you sort of expect to turn the corner and meet women in hoop skirts heading to the harbor to watch the shelling of Fort Sumter. It’s a place we’d like to spend more time in the future, so we’ve added it to the list of future vacation spots. We then camped in a state park down the coast. Like Virginia, we paid $30 for the night, which really is not that much less than a cheap motel, but at least the campsite was nice.
On the advice of Aaron and Erin, on the way out of NC I bought a book called Confederates in the Attic. This Pulitzer Prize winning author travels around the south, visiting Civil War battlefields and interviewing Civil War re-enactors and crazy pro-Confederates. The book is great so far, but I was a bit put off by the fact that it was on the shelf of a major bookstore (though luckily not one of the national chains) beside a book entitled "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War" which espouses such views as the fact that slavery wasn't actually so bad and that the South actually held the moral high ground over the North. So yeah, welcome back to the south.
- M
We bid good-bye to Aaron and Erin and headed for Congaree, South Carolina, a national park established only a few years ago. We did a walking tour of the swamp before heading to Charleston on the coast. We arrived at dusk and unfortunately had only a couple hours anyway, but it’s a peculiar little place. The historic district is genteel and very pretty but seems stuck in a time a couple centuries ago, and you sort of expect to turn the corner and meet women in hoop skirts heading to the harbor to watch the shelling of Fort Sumter. It’s a place we’d like to spend more time in the future, so we’ve added it to the list of future vacation spots. We then camped in a state park down the coast. Like Virginia, we paid $30 for the night, which really is not that much less than a cheap motel, but at least the campsite was nice.
On the advice of Aaron and Erin, on the way out of NC I bought a book called Confederates in the Attic. This Pulitzer Prize winning author travels around the south, visiting Civil War battlefields and interviewing Civil War re-enactors and crazy pro-Confederates. The book is great so far, but I was a bit put off by the fact that it was on the shelf of a major bookstore (though luckily not one of the national chains) beside a book entitled "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War" which espouses such views as the fact that slavery wasn't actually so bad and that the South actually held the moral high ground over the North. So yeah, welcome back to the south.
- M
Go Deacs
Pocahontas to Winston-Salem, NC (11/1):
The last in a string of free lodging tonight courtesy of Aaron Bachmann et al, formerly of Birnam Woods, Brandermill, USA. First we had to stop in Raleigh and ensure a Browns loss, and they did not disappoint. Then on to Wake, where we found the one restaurant open Sunday night and played a touch of wii.
-B
The last in a string of free lodging tonight courtesy of Aaron Bachmann et al, formerly of Birnam Woods, Brandermill, USA. First we had to stop in Raleigh and ensure a Browns loss, and they did not disappoint. Then on to Wake, where we found the one restaurant open Sunday night and played a touch of wii.
-B
Heading Back Down South
Shenandoah to Pocahontas State Park (10/31):
Living it up down Brandermill way today, though first we swung through Charlottesville for lunch at Bodos (and dessert at the new giant Arch's by Barracks Road!! -M). Midlothian has seen fit to build a number of terrible new subdivisions, reasonably enough. It does have a wonderful Arbys, which may be new, and Chesterfield Towne Center has inexplicably replaced its movie theatre with a bookstore, though otherwise things remain as you would expect. Word is that Clover Hill is being torn down, making me glad we kept that debate trophy instead of giving it to the school. Zombieland in the evening (surprisingly awesome movie! -M) and then a $31 stay at Pocahontas State Park, which I don't think I'd ever been to despite living 10 minutes away from for most of my life.
-B
Living it up down Brandermill way today, though first we swung through Charlottesville for lunch at Bodos (and dessert at the new giant Arch's by Barracks Road!! -M). Midlothian has seen fit to build a number of terrible new subdivisions, reasonably enough. It does have a wonderful Arbys, which may be new, and Chesterfield Towne Center has inexplicably replaced its movie theatre with a bookstore, though otherwise things remain as you would expect. Word is that Clover Hill is being torn down, making me glad we kept that debate trophy instead of giving it to the school. Zombieland in the evening (surprisingly awesome movie! -M) and then a $31 stay at Pocahontas State Park, which I don't think I'd ever been to despite living 10 minutes away from for most of my life.
-B
I can't believe I forgot the lyrics to one song about Shenandoah
Winchester to Shenandoah National Park (10/30):
After a break from our hiking itineraries, we were back at it again in Shenandoah. Skyline Drive is probably lovely, though 90% of it was enveloped in fog when we drove through. The parts we saw, however, were beautiful. We set out on a 6.8 mile hike late in the afternoon. At the beginning of the trail, we were greeted by an angry deer that kept trying to charge us, though that made sense once we saw the baby deer hiding that it was trying to protect. After a bit of diplomatic negotiations, the deer let us go on our way. A couple miles later, we met an angry snake on the path that starting hissing and doing that stand-up-y snake thing, so we climbed through the bushes and trees on the side of the path to detour around it. We hadn’t checked the elevation before heading out and were quite surprised to find ourselves climbing a giant mountain halfway through the hike. Even more ominously, it started to get dark and it was looking like we might end up spending the night on the trail, but we prevailed and made it off the trail before nightfall (meeting the same deer again at the head of the trail, who were considerably less upset to see us this time). We went back to camp and were even able to do laundry that evening. Success!
-M
After a break from our hiking itineraries, we were back at it again in Shenandoah. Skyline Drive is probably lovely, though 90% of it was enveloped in fog when we drove through. The parts we saw, however, were beautiful. We set out on a 6.8 mile hike late in the afternoon. At the beginning of the trail, we were greeted by an angry deer that kept trying to charge us, though that made sense once we saw the baby deer hiding that it was trying to protect. After a bit of diplomatic negotiations, the deer let us go on our way. A couple miles later, we met an angry snake on the path that starting hissing and doing that stand-up-y snake thing, so we climbed through the bushes and trees on the side of the path to detour around it. We hadn’t checked the elevation before heading out and were quite surprised to find ourselves climbing a giant mountain halfway through the hike. Even more ominously, it started to get dark and it was looking like we might end up spending the night on the trail, but we prevailed and made it off the trail before nightfall (meeting the same deer again at the head of the trail, who were considerably less upset to see us this time). We went back to camp and were even able to do laundry that evening. Success!
-M
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