Northeast to Ohio

Do you know what’s really wrong with Texas? No, not the 100 degree temperatures, the disturbing lack of rain or the fact that the Legislature only meets for 140 days every two years? Nope, it’s the lack of basements. Basements are the greatest rooms known to mankind. They’re always cozy, unique and a little bit secretive (the door to a basement always looks like it leads to a closet). You feel like you’re in your own comfortable cave.

Why do I bring this up? Because I’m typing this e-mail in a basement of course! I’m sitting at Bill Moore’s desk the basement of he and his wife Charlotte’s house in Indian Hills, Ohio, just outside of Cincinnati. Jennifer is their niece and thus we were able to blackmail them into making us stay at their fantastic house and show us around Cincinnati. Seriously, they love having guests but at the same time I’m trying to figure out if I should allow them to approve the content of this e-mail regarding Cincinnati or whether I should maintain editorial independence.

For those who hadn’t been alerted, Jennifer and I are using up some of my accumulated vacation from work to go visit the Amish Country and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania and see some neat stuff along the way. It’s not our normal big honking international trip that you all know and love but we weren’t planning on going anywhere this year and when I found out I was going to be required to take four weeks of vacation (in order to get down to 40 hours of accumulated vacation on the books) I promptly informed Jennifer I wasn’t going to spend four weeks at home. Hence, a driving trip. Plus it will provide a small amount of economic stimulus here in the US.

The trip had to be up north so we could escape the heat. Have I mentioned that it’s in the mid-70s during the day up here? Yeah, we’d forgotten what weather under 90 degrees felt like. We’d probably move here except we’d go crazy during the long cold miserable winters. Bill and Charlotte actually wanted it to be hotter during our visit, ha, though in fairness it was so we could use their swimming pool.

Anyway, Jennifer and I started our trip at about 5:15pm on June 30, End of Quarter Day at National Instruments (NI). Our trips must always wait until a) Jennifer is finished with shutting down the Grandview Hills Elementary School library for the summer and b) End of Quarter has passed, meaning the time when NI attempts to ship as much product as possible in order to boost our billings numbers (and thus profit level) to show off to Wall Street and keep our stock price from nosediving, among other reasons. Since my group’s schedule is often heavily impacted by End of Quarter, that is not a good time for me to be on vacation.

So anyway, we left Austin at 5:15pm on Tuesday, June 30 and hit I-35 headed for Big D so we could drop off our little 14 lb kooshball with teeth (our dog BB) with Jennifer’s parents in Dallas. After a brief overnight stay, we hit the road at 8am the next morning, sans BB. The poor dog has been through this routine four times now but the good part is that she loves staying with Bill and Laura most likely because they spoil her like crazy. The goal of the first day was to make it 590 miles to Paris, Tennessee, a decent halfway stop between Dallas and Cincinnati. 590 miles sounds like a lot but when you’re cruising at 70mph on the interstate most of the way it’s not that bad. It took three hours to get to Texarkana, about five to get across Arkansas and then three more to get to Paris. It was all interstate from Dallas to Memphis, punctuated by a half-decent barbecue lunch at Big Jake’s in Hope, Arkansas and a gas fill-up in Lonoke, Arkansas after I, like an idiot got our Toyota Camry Hybrid down to almost empty (the mileage gauge said we had 20 miles to go before we’d be running on fumes).

There were tons of people on I-30 and I-40. Tons. We saw license plates from 23 states and there were almost as many eighteen-wheelers as four-wheelers (passenger cars for those of you who wouldn’t know what to do with a ‘bear on your six’ – answer: pull over). Wayyyy too many vehicles for Jennifer to drive unstressed so I drove the whole way. To help pass the time, we busted out the audio version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (thanks Austin Public Library!). This is my favorite of the Harry Potter books but the problem is that the guy reading the story can really put you to sleep if you’re not careful. To keep me from totally drifting off, we would turn on talk radio every hour or so for a bit. Nothing perks you up quite like listening to talk radio, whether it’s Rush Limbaugh, Jim Rome or a talk show host in Memphis who referred to an unnamed local politician as ‘Buffalo Butt’.

Once we crossed the Mississippi River (or, as Jennifer and her brother Andrew would call it, the Mizzizzippi River), we were in Tennessee. I hadn’t been there since getting a tour of Rhodes College back sometime during my senior year of high school (1996-97) and Jennifer hadn’t been since she was a little girl. It was at that point we left the Interstate and hit an old friend of ours, U.S. Highway 79. For those of you familiar with Round Rock, TX and all towns due northeast of it all the way up to Longview, this was the same U.S. Highway 79 that you know and love. I was kind of excited actually to be on a ‘familiar’ highway but then again, I’m a dork for that sort of stuff. The plan was to follow 79 all the way up into Kentucky almost to the Ohio border. Leaving the four-lane bustle of the Interstate and replacing it with a two-lane highway with people’s driveways opening onto it was kind of nice. West Tennessee is very green with lots of tall trees, farmland and rolling hills (more pronounced than the ones we experience driving on 290 from Houston to Austin, that’s for sure).

We arrived in Paris after 11 hours in the car, found a place to eat (an Italian eatery called the Olive Pit) and settled into our room at the Super 8 hotel. We had tried driving around downtown Paris but couldn’t find a single open restaurant but we were determined not eat anywhere that we could eat in Texas (i.e. no McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, etc.). The Olive Pit was just fine though it looked like it was built out of an old Taco Bell. Anyway, the day had worked out well as we hadn’t gotten a super-early start (like when I was a kid and we’d leave the house at like 5 in the morning), had been on the road all day and arrived late enough that we didn’t have time to really sit around and watch TV or anything. Very nice. The one highlight of the day was the spotting of three businesses run, apparently, by fat people. Fat Jake’s barbecue, Fat Larry’s restaurant, Fat Belly’s something-or-other..

The next day had us continuing on Highway 79 through small Tennessee towns and across the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, which American Revolutionary war hero George Rogers Clark swum across while disguised as an Indian in order to sneak back to a fort for reinforcements in the book Long Knife which I read on our trip to Chile last year. Can something I’m reading this trip be a portent for where we’ll be next year? It’s a novel set in 1920s Germany...hmmm. Anyway, we soon started seeing what we thought were fields of tobacco and very soon after crossed into Kentucky, another beautiful state. In fact, I’m going to say right now that Kentucky is much prettier than East Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee. You’ll have to see the photos but that won’t do it justice. No huge mountains or anything but just hills, picturesque fields and old houses and barns everywhere you look. Even a ‘holler’ or two, eh. It’s beautiful.

Our friend Beth Cage had told me to have some barbecue in Kentucky which would mean mutton. Unfortunately, we didn’t stop to have barbecue while gracing the state with our presence but we did have lunch at Perna’s Country Cafe in Brandenburg, Kentucky, where one of the featured items on the dry erase board (Southwestern University Friday Night Dinner people may remember that a dry erase board was a requirement for a good FND restaurant) was fried cheese balls. I doubt they’re unique to Kentucky but they were good!!!!! Why the Texas State Fair insists on frying crazy things like oreo cookies and Coca-Cola when they could just fry cheese balls is beyond me.

Oh yeah, and remember how I was thrilled about following US Highway 79 so far? Well, about twenty miles into Kentucky, U.S. Highway 79 ends and a little later becomes Kentucky Highway 79. I felt cheated. I even had to do a u-turn so I could take a photo of the saying pronouncing ‘End – U.S. Hwy 79’. We referred to Kentucky Highway 79 as ‘Fake 79’ for the remainder of the day.

Jennifer had never been to Indiana so we crossed the Ohio River going due north, then cruised through the Indiana foothills for a bit (also very pretty) before heading east to cross the Ohio River at Louisville. We could’ve stayed on the two-lane backroads up to Cincy but we wanted to get to Bill and Charlotte’s in time for dinner so we, ugh, hit the interstate. First Interstate 64 east into Louisville and then Interstates 75 and 71 up to Cincinnati. Tons of traffic again. Tons. Heck, 71 was four lanes way before we got to Cincinnati. On the bright side listening to Harry Potter determine who were going to be the Quidditch players for Gryffindor House had a calming effect on my driving and we made it into Cincinnati (across the Ohio River again) and to Bill and Charlotte’s house in Indian Hills on the eastern edge of the city without incident.

Bill and Charlotte didn’t make me write this but Cincinnati is a fabulous city. What do you know about Cincinnati? All Jennifer and I knew was that a) it was named after some Roman General named Cincinnatus, b) it was on the Ohio River, c) it’s the home of the Reds and Bengals and d) for some strange reason they eat their chili on top of spaghetti. Bill and Charlotte have spent a considerable amount of time (1.5 days as of now) educating us on what a cool city it is. Tons of big hills, lots of greenery, cool old funky neighborhoods and great views, especially of the Ohio River, made this feel a bit like Seattle actually. It has a vibrant downtown, tons of artsy stuff like a great art museum (more on that in a minute) and a symphony and great restaurants and culinary traditions. The only downside is the winter. In Texas it may be around 100 degrees right now but at least we can go outside in January.

Yesterday Bill and Charlotte took us to explore the city. We visited a couple of parks with great views of the Ohio River and Kentucky, took a spin through the Cincinnati Art Museum, ate some of the afore-mentioned chili spaghetti (which includes about a pound of cheddar cheese to top it off) and visited the Kentucky Riverfront. I had my chili spaghetti ‘five-way’, meaning it had chili, spaghetti, cheddar cheese, onions and beans and had a coney dog (buried under cheddar cheese) to finish it off. Good stuff. We also saw tons of old buildings including a water tower that was designed back in the 1800s to resemble Elsinore Castle in Denmark (wasn’t that in Hamlet?). Cincinnati’s Art Museum, where Charlotte lives as a docent, has a fantastic collection of paintings from the 1800s due to Cincinnati being an artistic center even back then. You’ll see photos of some of the paintings; they’re as fantastic as any paintings we saw in the Met in New York except for the fact that none of them had ever made it into any of our history textbooks in high school, eh. The other sections of the museum that we saw weren’t half bad either.

We also stopped by the Findlay Street Market in downtown Cincy. Food markets like it are apparently common in big Upper Midwest cities like Cleveland and Pittsburgh and we could see why. Not only could you buy all sorts of fresh fruits, vegetables, meats and spices but you had the following two options: 1. You could buy fig newtons and other usually boxed snacks by the pound ($3.99 per lb for the fig newtons) and 2. You stop by Kroeger’s sausage stand and feel like you died and went to sausage heaven. There were seriously about forty types of sausage including Cincinnati metts (their version of hot dogs), bratwurst, Hungarian sausage and, and this is something I’ll try one of these days, Moroccan camel sausage ($7.99 per lb). Very cool. Oh yeah, and we had Graeter’s Ice Cream for dessert, an item that could give Blue Bell a run for it’s money except that we all need to support the Texas economy since Blue Bell’s based in Brenham.

In the evening we went out to eat at this very nice Italian restaurant to celebrate Charlotte’s birthday. Located just off the main square in Cincinnati, anchored by a fountain with a lady having water pour out of her outstretched hands, the food was good and it was a great place to people-watch. Afterward we wandered around downtown before heading back to Indian Hills for the evening and just in time to listen to the Reds blow a game to the St. Louis Cardinals.

This morning we headed over to the Indian Hills town center to catch the neighborhood Fourth of July parade which was really neat. Community events like that are so cool. Jennifer and I are determined that, if our neighborhood doesn’t yet have a Fourth of July parade, we’re going to make one. Assuming we’re not always traveling on July 4^th, eh. After a nice lunch of metts and bratwurst, I’m busy typing this e-mail. We were going to chill outside by the pool but it’s drizzly outside.

We hope you all are doing well.