Final Post (#4)

Alright, we’re in Dallas so it’s time to get this last trip report cranked out. Do you realize how long it takes to write these things? The really crazy ones take at least an hour and a half. Good thing my in-laws’ sofa is quite comfortable because I’m going to be here a while.

OK, so flashback to Saturday morning. We woke up in the Best Western Center City having thankfully not been woken up by the quite loud members of the Robinson Family Reunion. At least, I wasn’t bothered but I learned a long time ago (thanks Robert!) to wear earplugs to bed in any place that might be loud in any way. People yelling in the hall and running up and down definitely qualifies as ear-plug requiring.

Anyway, the point of staying at this Best Western was to be within walking distance of the major Philly attractions. We had a late breakfast, laced up our walking shoes and hit the pavement. First stop was City Hall. If you think your City Hall is neat, believe us it has nothing on Philly’s City Hall. Philly’s City Hall is more impressive-looking than many state capitol buildings. It is enormous. Too bad we could only walk around the outside and inner courtyard as, for some strange reason, there are no tours or elevator rides to the top on Saturdays, the day that tourists would most likely show up to see it. Oh well.

Second stop was the Reading Central Market, a mostly-food market a couple of blocks over. We love these central markets. They have the greatest stuff such as fresh fruit and veggies, random spices, food stalls with local specialties and other random stuff. We can see, however, that they might have more appeal for tourists due to the central location and the potential difficulty of getting down there. At the same time, it can be kind of an excursion for locals due to the presence of all the prepared food vendors and dessert stalls. We made a mental note to come back for lunch.

Third stop was the Masonic Lodge for Pennsylvania, a cathedral-looking building just across the street from City Hall. I know next-to-nothing about Masons and I guess that’s how they prefer it because they are a ‘secret society.’ Seems kind of strange that a ‘secret society’ would take $16 and allow Jennifer and I to visit their facility. The inside was pretty opulent to be sure with about seven meeting rooms that resemble British Parliament though each one had a different ‘theme’ such as ancient Egypt, ancient Greek and Moorish. It was a little like walking through a fake museum. There was some humor in the tour as the tour guide, a Mason in his mid-fifties, was peppered with questions about Masonic rituals and other sensitive subjects by a group of talkative Red Hats. Red Hats are a gang of ladies over 50 who wear, of course, red hats and apparently purple clothing to match. I would call them a menace to society but my mom is a member, eh! The other thing to note about the Masonic Lodge is that it chose its location so that it would be the tallest building around and dominate the skyline. Three years after construction started in 1868, the city of Philadelphia announced that it would build its monster city hall just across the street, thus dashing the Masons’ hopes. We think the city did it that way on purpose.

So after the Masonic Lodge visit we strolled back to the Reading Market to snag some lunch. Jennifer found the salad bar from heaven and I got in a long line for a philly cheesesteak sandwich. Supposedly the way you’re supposed to have a philly cheesesteak is ‘wit whiz’, meaning cheese whiz. This stand didn’t give me that option so I had American instead. It was quite simply one of the top 10 sandwiches I’d ever eaten in my life (even though I couldn’t tell you most of the other nine, eh). And it was enormous! You’ll see the photo when I get ‘em uploaded. As a bonus, some television personality was interviewing people at the next stall over. Neither Jennifer nor I knew who he was though. Maybe one of you can identify him.

After lunch we wandered over to Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. The Liberty Bell had a line but was easy to get into and see. Not so Independence Hall. That requires a ticket and apparently there are a limited number because by the time we got there they were out of tickets for the day. Oh well...now what?

The next step was to wander over to the waterfront on the Delaware River estuary to see the USS Becuna and the USS Olympia. The former is a submarine from the World War II era and the latter was the ship that Commodore Dewey commanded during the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War in 1898. We had never been inside of an actual submarine before and, let me tell you, it was fascinating, especially when compared to the Olympia parked next door. If you’ve seen submarine movies, you know that those subs were tiny. They felt tiny even with only a few tourists inside them but we just couldn’t imagine being inside with 79 other people. 79! And they were limited to one minute of showering a week. It’s just so hard to imagine what submariners went through.

The Olympia was a lot different as it felt like an old-time cruise ship, just with big guns everywhere. It was worlds-roomier than the sub but was also quite interesting. It reminded me a lot of the Steve McQueen movie The Sand Pebbles about US gunboat diplomacy in other countries, in this case China, during the early 20th century. Anyway, despite the increased amount of room, I bumped my head three times on the ship while managing to remain unscathed on the sub.

The next step was to head over to the maritime museum to use the restroom but also to take a quick peek at the tattoo exhibit. Apparently tattoos were done by various cultures around the world but sailors really took a fancy to them and spread the art around the world. Many American sailors during the early 1800s would tattoo their hometowns on their bodies so as to prevent British ships from conscripting them (since they were Americans).

After that we walked over to Elfreth’s Alley, the oldest residential street in America. That means there are people living on it still though I can’t imagine how they could cope with all the tourists like us. It was a cute street though and the Harry Potter-sounding name didn’t hurt either. By that time it was too late to visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which closes at 5, so we headed back to the Reading Market for dinner. Many of the stalls were closed but there was still a stall making philly cheesesteaks so I had one ‘wit whiz’. The ‘whiz’ was, quite frankly, a detriment to the sandwich. When you’re in Philly, stick with either provolone or American and leave the cheese whiz for making queso. The rest of the evening was spent in the hotel room watching the Phillies score five runs in the ninth to beat the Pirates.
The next morning we began the denouement of the trip: the return to Texas. The original thought was that we’d take five days; four to drive and one to fart around in the Smokies. We had made no hotel reservations and figured we’d be better off playing it by ear. However, 14 days is our limit for vacations and it was already day 12 so we weren’t necessarily going to have an off-day in the Smokies. Anyway, we set out on Sunday morning and drove down I-95 through Baltimore and Washington, D.C. It was tons of freeway and a fair amount of traffic, especially at the first tollbooth (though the toll was a merciful $2), but we got through it without going insane. For lunch we stopped and visited Jennifer’s best friend from Kindergarten, Ashley, as she and her husband have an apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, just across the river from Washington, D.C. Ashley took us to eat at Gadsby’s Tavern, a place so old that George Washington ate there. After a nice lunch, we hit the road again to the Blue Ridge Parkway.

The Blue Ridge Parkway is a two-lane road that skirts the mountaintops of the Blue Ridge Mountains in western Virginia and North Carolina. We hit the Parkway at Shenandoah National Park and paid a $15 fee for the pleasure. The views were very nice and there was an overlook with a small parking lot at least every mile if not more often so you really didn’t miss any good views. The problem was that the road just got tough to drive after a while, what with the all the hairpin turns, steep grades and cars stopping in the middle of the road because they thought they saw a deer or something (leading to a line of 10-15 cars slowly driving forward as everybody looks for whatever it was the first person thought they saw). It was reminiscent of Yellowstone really except at Yellowstone there was usually a shoulder to pull off onto. We drove on the Parkway for about an hour and a half before deciding that by that point we had had a representative sample of its benefits. We cut west a little bit and hit Interstate 81 which heads southwest to our intended destination, Roanoke, Virginia. We found a Best Western and crashed for the night.

The plan for the next day was to, rather than take the Interstate all the way home, drive backroads in Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee before reuniting with the Interstate somewhere between Memphis and Nashville. That seemed like a good idea except for a) more mountain driving (though in valleys mostly) was making Jennifer feel a little nauseous and b) it was going to take us another three days to get home going that way than the expected two (we were set on making Dallas by Tuesday night, i.e. the next evening). We followed some nice roads through Appalachia but it also felt extremely, for lack of a better term, backwoodsy, mainly the type of place you didn’t want the car to break down in for fear you were never going to be able to get someone to adequately repair it. We couldn’t even find a good local restaurant to eat at, having instead to get burgers at a Hardee’s and supplement it with Cheestick & Marinara-flavored Pringles, ginger snaps and cheesebread bought at a local Kroger. Still, we saw some neat stuff but after realizing it was almost 1 and we were still in West Virginia, we made an alternate plan to follow some better developed highways.

It was interesting to see the difference between backroads and the main US highways and parkways. On the backroads, the road was built wherever it could with a minimum of blasting mountainsides and such. You’d cross a river multiple times, skirt hillsides and be subject to steep grades and downgrades. On the main highways, however, no expense was spared to make the road as straight and level as possible. Rather than going over steep hillsides, the road construction crews had blasted through them. The highways were still not straight and flat but they were definitely much easier to drive on.

Our goal was to get to Bowling Green, Kentucky, which is located on Interstate 65 going southwest to Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks to gaining an hour while crossing from Eastern Time to Central, we reached Bowling Green at 6:30 after almost 11 hours of driving. Figuring that was too early to stop, we pushed on through Nashville and stopped at the first Best Western afterward, thus ensuring we’d miss Nashville rush hour the next morning. We like Best Western because it’s moderately cheap but still has two essentials: wireless internet and continental breakfast.

We hit the road on our last day at 7:15am, knowing we were going to have a long haul to Dallas. It was all interstate driving, changing from I-40 to I-30 in Little Rock, Arkansas. We also stopped in Little Rock to see my old college buddy Elena and her cute-as-all-getout eleven-month-old daughter Dabney, whom we hadn’t met yet. The visit worked rather well as it gave me a chance to rest after so much driving plus the food at the Flying Burrito Company was really good. ‘Suitably rested and refreshed’, we pushed on for another five hours through southwestern Arkansas and northeastern Texas (stopping for some mandatory bbq not long after crossing the state line) we reached my in-laws’ house in Big D around 7:15pm. Not bad at all.

This was a strange trip for us due to the large amount of driving. When you look at it, we spent only five of the fourteen days not driving (two in Cincy, two in Ohiopyle and one in Philly). That’s how it goes of course on a long driving trip, especially one unlike the trips of my childhood where we got started at probably 5 in the morning. We could’ve taken other roads to get us to certain places more quickly but for us part of the enjoyment of the trip came from seeing America on its backroads. After about 4100 miles of driving, we’ll be home this afternoon and ready to recharge ourselves until our next vacation. Thanks to everyone for reading these journals of ours and especially for being a part of our rather fortunate lives. We’ll be seeing you all sometime in the future.

Matt and Jennifer