Champagne Velvet

Through the first 21 days I had driven 6,000 miles.  In week 3, I spent four nights with friends and three nights in hotels.

• The Pro Football Hall of Fame was pretty much what you would expect it to be: some interesting stuff but not all that exciting.  I think it’s good that they collect a lot of “artifacts” but I’ve never understood why someone would get excited to see the cleats somebody wore 25 years ago.
• Cleveland was much better than expected and Stuart gave me an excellent tour and was a fantastic host.  The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was more interesting than I expected.  “The 500 Songs that Changed Rock” is an exhibit that I would love to see again.  Also, check out the beers from Great Lakes Brewery if you get the chance.

• Cedar Point.  Yes!  Everything I wanted it to be.  The new roller coaster they just opened this year, the Maverick, was practically perfect.  I rode it just before leaving the park to drive to Grand Rapids and it left me smiling for hours.  A bunch of other great rides as well.  Check out my video of the Top Thrill Dragster.
• Grand Rapids… it was great to see Jordan.  Also, Grand Haven State Park could be the best beach I’ve ever been to, shockingly.
• The Amish flea market in Shipshewana, Indiana, was huge and I picked up some cheap CDs but the highlight was definitely the soft pretzel.  The Amish sure know how to make a soft pretzel.
• I didn’t spend much time in Chicago because I’ve been there before and I feel like I’ll be back soon but I did check out some great Frank Lloyd Wright houses in both Hyde Park and Oak Park.  The home and studio tour in Oak Park was well worth the trip.  It’s the first house (in the US? anywhere? not sure) with a family room and closets!  Unfortunately they don’t allow photography inside.  This is the Robie House in Hyde Park:

• The next day was a long one driving through Minneapolis, Fargo, and Bismarck.  I obviously didn’t spend much time in any but I got to see some of the highlights of Minneapolis (no Mall of the Americas) and I got the sense that Fargo seems like a more interesting place than Bismarck despite Bismarck’s more interesting landscape.
• Deadwood, Sturgis, Rapid City and the Black Hills.  Very cool.  Didn’t want to gamble here but it looked nicer than I expected.  Rapid City seemed like it had a lot going on and would be much easier to live in than I expected of a South Dakota town (about 100,000 people). 
• The Badlands.  Wow.  By far the highlight of the trip to this point.  It’s almost like you’ve reached the edge of the earth.

• Mount Rushmore is exactly what I expected.  I had to stop there but it certainly wasn’t life changing.

I’m writing this from a campground with WiFi outside of Glacier National Park (incredible) and my laptop batter is about to die.  More to come…

Highlights from week 2 on the road:

• I stayed two nights in hotels and five nights with friends
• Onondaga Cave State Park was interesting.  It’s supposed to be the jewel of all the caves in Missouri (only Tennessee has more caves) and is fairly commercialized with paved walkways and lighting.  It made it much easier and faster but was sort of strange at the same time.
• Columbus, Indiana, was fantastic.  The city seems to have two official tourism slogans of “Different by Design” and “Unexpected. Unforgettable.”  Both are true.  With a population of under 40,000, it still ranks with the biggest cities in the country in terms of its architecture.  I. M. Pei.  Eliel and Eero Saarinen.  Robert A. M. Stern.   Cesar Pelli.   Richard Meier.   The list goes on.   My favorite was North Christian Church which was designed by Eero Saarinen (who also designed the St. Louis Arch).  Even (or especially) the public schools were incredible.

• Louisville, Kentucky, has three city parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted of Central Park and Prospect Park fame.  I spent parts of both of the days I was there in Cherokee Park, driving through or reading.  Beautiful.  Churchill Downs, after its $121 million (is there any money in horse racing? wow.), was much more impressive than I expected.  No racing going on so I only saw the outside.
• On the way from Louisville to Lexington, I stopped for the Labrot & Graham Distillery tour in Versailles (read: ver sales).  In operation since 1812, they claim to be the oldest whiskey distillery in the US and the smallest commercial distillery in the world.  Great tour.  Great gift shop.

• Special thanks to the Kesten family for their great hospitality in Lexington.  It seemed like a great city with the University of Kentucky at the center of everything.  Keeneland was jaw-dropping though.  I thought Churchill Downs was impressive until I saw Lexington’s racetrack.  I can’t wait to go back and see some races.
• Going to the Dayton Dragons minor league baseball game with Chris on the Fourth of July was great.  We got roped into doing an on-field contest called the Hula Hoop Hustle, which was fun and embarrassing.  A guy told us he would email us the pictures but I’m not holding my breath at this point.  The museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was really interesting also.  It includes an exhibit on the entire history of flight from blimps to the modern day.  There’s a few old Air Force Ones and a lot of experimental planes, built either just for research or those that never made it to full-scale production.  The most interesting experimental plane was one plane that both took off AND landed vertically by hooking itself onto a vertical platform with a wire going across.  It seems impossible to land that way but apparently the test pilot did it on the first try.  It seemed to imply that was the last try also.  The production planes were pretty incredible though.  The B-2 (Stealth Bomber) and SR-71 Blackbird were fabulous: smooth and powerful looking.  Since seeing a documentary on the F-22, I’ve always been a sucker for its vectoring exhaust.

• The second “Columbus” of my trip, Columbus, Ohio, was much more interesting than I expected.  It was great to see John and Cindy (also excellent hosts) and the Ohio State football facilities, which were recently massively renovated, were extremely impressive with an indoor practice field and hallways lined with the history of the program.  Very cool to see all those Heismans in the trophy room also.

Week 3 review coming soon…

check it out on vimeo.  it’s a summary of the first two weeks in pictures.

It’s the end of the eighth day of the trip but here are some of the highlights of the first week.

• I’ve stayed two nights in hotel rooms, 5 nights in friends’ houses and no nights camping so far.
• I’ve driven about 2,000 miles (today was a big driving day and I’m now at 2,500).
• I’ve spent $229.27 on gas (more today).
• 12 Bones in Asheville has the best BBQ I’ve ever had, particularly the dry rub ribs.
• Nashville has been the most impressive and livable city so far, a big surprise to me. 
• Belle Meade Plantation was very interesting.  Every entrant in this year’s Kentucky Derby descended from a Belle Meade thoroughbred and every Derby winner from 1972 to 1996 (from memory but something like that) did as well. 

• Beale Street in Memphis was hopping with activity and the Peabody Hotel was great.
• St. Louis has a lot of traffic.
• The Arch in St. Louis is so much more impressive than I imagined.

• The Anheuser-Busch Brewery Tour was great.  It’s the site of the beginning of the modern beer industry, which I didn’t know.  Adolphus Busch came up with the idea for the first national beer brand (all beers had been regional to that point), came up with the name Budweiser to sound German while still easy to pronounce for Americans, and was the first brewer to pasteurize beer, even before milk was pasteurized (this allowed shipments all over the country).  The site is also home to the largest bottling plant in the world (over a million square feet) and a gorgeous stable for the Budweiser Clydesdales.

So far so good.  See more pictures on my flickr page and some videos on vimeo.  I’m checking out the architecture of Columbus, Indiana, in the morning and then on to Louisville, Kentucky.  Current location is always here.