Champagne Velvet

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.

It’s the end of day 3 of the trip and everything has been fantastic so far. Some thoughts from the first few days:

• Savannah is beautiful.  It’s amazing how much of the city remains from the 19th century and how close the historic district is to the “New Urbanist” ideal of a walkable city with a variety of housing and commerce so close together.  They should rename the movement Old Urbanism.
• Barbecue Center in Lexington, NC, which I went to based on this website of North Carolina BBQ reviews was pretty disappointing but Ian’s recommendation of Lexington Barbecue was fantastic.
• The Blue Ridge Parkway from Blowing Rock to Asheville was perfect.  Some jaw dropping views from the crest of the Blue Ridge and a fun, slow drive.  Both AT&T and Nextel cell service was spotty to non-existent though which is why there are no updates on the map. 
• Asheville has been great and Alex and his parents have been incredible hosts.  12 Bones, a new BBQ place in town, was even better than Lexington Barbecue and the ribs were the best I’ve had.  The Grove Park Inn had some gorgeous views and some interesting architecture and a roof that reminded me of the Smurfs.
• New trip rule: only locally brewed beers.  Sweetwater 420 Pale Ale out of Atlanta is the best yet.  French Broad Pilsner was the best I’ve had in Asheville so far but the Highland Gaelic Ale and Oatmeal Porter were pretty good as well - both breweries are in Asheville.

More pictures and videos coming soon.

So I’m off on my roadtrip tomorrow morning. For details on the plan, see http://roadtrip.mattlehrer.com/wiki and see this map for my current location. I have a Boost mobile phone transmitting my location to a database stored on this server using Mologogo software. In order to get it to work, I owe a lot of credit to the script provided by Steve Crow at his website. I made some changes to allow for the huge amount of datapoints I plan to generate and I hope it works…

I should be posting plenty of pictures to flickr and I hope to have time to get some good videos posted to vimeo. I’ll also try to post here as much as I can.

So I was really proud of myself for coming up with ‘prebound’ last night and then this morning decided to do a quick googling and found it on urbandictionary. What a disappointment. I guess original words are hard to come by.