Today’s main event was a few miles’ worth of walking through the heart of downtown Boston. Part of our journey was structured according to the thoughtfully organized recommendations of The City of Boston. Part of it was freeform whim-based wandering. Once we were done having it both ways and had checked off the highest ranking items on our to-do list, we made a point of concluding the day’s tourism with a few minutes of natural tranquility.
On the outside, our Boston accommodations sport a unique architectural design. This 185-year-old brick roundhouse was originally a fuel depository, left an empty husk for decades until it was snatched up and overhauled by one of the major chains over a decade ago. The front doors are easy to miss, recessed into one wall with minimal ornamentation. If you ignore the signage, from a distance it resembles an odd factory or a super-villain’s designer warehouse.
On the inside, it’s as modern, elegant, and packed with extra flourishes as one would hope to find in a big-city hotel, though some big cities have disappointed us in that department. (Orlando, I’m looking in the direction of your refrigerator boxes cleverly disguised as “suites”.) Our room has more furniture and appliances than we expected, plus its own anteroom and plenty of space if we were the kind of weird family who exercised as a group. In terms of amenities and interior decoration, it’s easily in the top ten all-time overnight experiences.
Our surroundings tell a very different story, one that I’m not sure would entice the average vacationing suburbanite.
Before we left home, my wife and I were lamenting how we arrive at our locations each year with a knack for missing all the local celebrations and festivities. This year we’ll be arriving in Boston the week after Independence Day (which I’m sure Boston commemorates with revolutionary pizzazz) and three weeks before the Boston Comic Con. We’ve lost count of how many special events in years past that we missed in other cities by arriving one week late or leaving a day too early.
Imagine our surprise when we found a full-blown town carnival awaiting us when we arrived in the tiny, famous town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, home of the latest bearer of the title Punxsutawney Phil, the world’s most renowned and wildly inaccurate weather prognosticator.
All the essential supplies: maps, guidebooks, drinks, containers, summer reading, tunes, pens ‘n’ notebook.
(Ha! Little joke. I wish I could see my wife’s face right now as she reads this. Hopefully I’m still in bed and well out of striking distance.)
This week’s edition of the WordPress.com Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge spotlighted the theme of Illumination. Not just a recurring motif in various works of quality literature; not just the name of a thundering Rollins Band track; illumination is also an occasional guest star on our family’s past vacations. It peeks around or from within seemingly innocent objects, dares us to snap usable photos of it, and offers extra credit if we can write it a spiritually themed caption.
Behold my sextet of entrants from my own collection, submitted in the categorical competition of light and light accessories, narrowed down of my own volition to sightseeing experiences:
Before climbing the heights of the Statue of Liberty, visitors can enter the pedestal and see her retired parts, including a former torch that once lit the way for hopeful immigrants, but is now residing in a windowless room where it can reminisce about its glory years in peace.
Among the many commonalities my wife and I share, one of them is an Indianapolis childhood that saw precious few opportunities for traveling beyond Indiana state limits. My wife was part of a large family that would go broke quickly if they had to feed and accommodate every member on the road. My family could only afford vacations to other relatives’ houses. Like many adults, we vowed to do the opposite of what our parents did. We found reasons and means to get out of town. It’s rarely easy, but we’ve made it happen without carrying years’ worth of debt.
A few of our basic secrets to success:
1. Save up as much as possible in advance. For too many people, “save” is a four-letter word. In our household, “debt” is a much harsher four-letter word.
2. If the vacation savings weren’t enough, spend the autumn paying down the rest. Pay it down hard.
3. No expensive air travel. We don’t fly. Ever. I’ve never set foot in any plane that wasn’t docked in a museum. It’s not fear of flying; it’s fear of expenditure. I’m aware that ticket prices have dropped in recent years. They can keep right on dropping as far as I’m concerned. It would also help if there existed a single tale of post-9/11 air travel that was blessed with unhindered grade-A customer service at every single footstep through the process.
Hence our annual road trips. On a dare from the WordPress.com Weekly Writing Challenge, I present three maps outlining our life in road trips to date.
Nine days. Five states. 2,887 miles. 828 photos. One mountaintop. Fourteen stops for gas. Innumerable sights and memories. Nine consecutive entries for journals written on location. Forty entries for photos, additional commentary, and hindsight. My wife and I have taken a road trip in some fashion each year since 1999 — before we were married or even dating, back when we were best friends. Our week-plus excursion to Colorado via Kansas was one of our most ambitious, successful, and draining road trips to date. Thanks sincerely to those lovable readers who followed along with us and offered encouragement throughout the process, whether in ways great or small, conscious or unwitting.
As my way of concluding the “2012 Road Trip Photos” series and holding the blogging equivalent of a post-production wrap party, please enjoy this assortment of previously unshared photos from the journey. Some are alternate viewpoints of sights you’ve seen; some are little moments bypassed till now. For the complete itinerary, check out the 2012 Road Trip checklist for the ultimate reading guide, with links to all the notes and photos, day by day. They’re a fun way to kill an afternoon or help decide how your own future trips to these locales will be even better.
Let the montage begin!
DAY TWO: my wife peeks out from underneath the F-14 Tomcat in WaKeeney, Kansas.
On Day Nine, we prepared to exit Webb City and begin the last section of our 2012 road trip. We had very few stops planned on this eight-hour leg and hoped Missouri would grant us the courtesy of safe, expedient passage.
After bidding my in-laws farewell, we detoured for one last sight in town — giant praying hands that stand tall down the street from Ozark Christian College. We took comfort in their presence and prayed they were a good sign that our journey would be under watchful, merciful eyes.
No one likes to see their hopes answered hours later with an ill omen.
Our family had an ulterior motive for cruising Route 66 on Day Eight besides meeting Mater. It was the most straightforward path from the Little House Museum to our relatives who live across the Kansas/Missouri border in a town called Webb City. After so many days on the road with just our trio keeping each other company, it was a relief to unwind and chat with other familiar folks. My wife’s sister, her husband, and our irrepressible li’l nephew have called it home for several years, at a distance hard from us to traverse under normal circumstances. Luckily for us, this year’s itinerary provided a convenient excuse to veer in their direction for a visit.
Times in the area hadn’t been easy over the previous fourteen months. Webb City neighbors a nationally recognized city called Joplin, which occupied headlines in May 2011 when an F5 tornado wrought over twenty-two miles’ worth of obliteration and sorrow.
After our first home-cooked meal in a week, my gracious sister-in-law offered us a status update of Joplin via personal guided tour. Even though fourteen months had elapsed, I hoped we wouldn’t be ghoulishly gawking at a DMZ of too many sobering sights.
Lingering destruction comprised a minute portion of what we encountered. Continue reading
The scenery east of the Little House Museum remained steady and unremarkable until we navigated our way to famous Historic Route 66. Originally connecting Chicago and Los Angeles, the formerly cross-country thoroughfare that inspired a TV show, a Pixar film, and innumerable road trips was ignobly decommissioned decades ago when it found itself superseded by the newfangled interstate system. Many sections were downgraded, renamed, or scuppered altogether. A few segments across America retain the original name, shape, and celebrity, including a few miles’ worth in southwest Kansas, leading east into Missouri.
Some locals still cherish the heritage of Route 66 and cheerfully commemorate its legacy and impact on pop culture. Galena, for example, is a rare small town that can justify boasting about a life-sized stand-in for the one and only Tow Mater.
After two major attractions and lunch at Freddy’s Frozen Custard and Steakburgers, we finally exited Hutchinson and pursued other Kansas fancies on Day Eight. We headed southeast, skirted the perimeter of Wichita, wound our way down I-35, and negotiated the offroad highways leading near the town of Independence to one of several Midwest locations that once housed the original Ingalls family, stars of the biographical Little House on the Prairie series that was mandatory reading for all women of my wife’s generation.
As you can imagine, this short stop in the middle of drought-stricken agrarian territory was for her benefit. We were a long, long way from the manly gadgetry of the Kansas Cosmosphere.
As we saw in our previous installment, the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Museum in Hutchinson, Kansas, provides a good, safe home to many retired spacecraft and spacecraft understudies. Their collections are a comprehensive tribute to those pioneers and daredevils who yearn to see mankind reach beyond our spatial boundaries and discover what else lies in store for us in God’s universe.
Once we returned from the Underground Salt Museum to the surface world, Day Eight of our nine-day journey continued on the other end of Hutchinson at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. Our family has seen space-race paraphernalia in other museums such as the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (2003), Kennedy Space Center (2007), and Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry (2009), but the Cosmosphere competes in its own way, particularly with souvenirs from foreign contributors to the space race. Kansas seems like the last place on Earth you’d find a dedicated repository for cosmonaut relics, but there it was.
The curators of the Underground Salt Museum realize that visitors want their money’s worth for the experience. Staring at shelves filled with real film canisters and acid-free storage boxes isn’t the most stimulating visual aid to the average tourist. Either to drive home their mission statement or to dazzle and delight us, the tour ends with a collection of sample movie props that have been forwarded to Underground Vaults & Storage for permanent preservation. If American civilization ends and the next wave of settlers happens to be searching for clues as to the leisure-time predilections of their predecessors, the contents of this fortified entertainment bunker will tell them all they need to know about the movies and characters that meant the most to all of us, that transcended commerce and became High Art worth saving from oblivion.
They’ll also see the Mr. Freeze suit from Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin.
In addition to their service as a simple salt mine, the subterranean chambers of the Underground Salt Museum provide a stable temperature, humidity, and overall salt-heavy atmosphere ideal for slowing the biodegradation process and preventing everyday objects from crumbling into dust. To prove the point, one of their museum exhibits is a stand filled with vintage garbage, looking just as freshly disgusting as it did when Don Draper’s contemporaries first threw it all away decades ago.
The following photo was taken outside an Indianapolis store on Black Friday around 9 a.m. At far left in the background is a strip mall; at far right, a Best Buy.
What’s wrong with this picture?
If your answer was, “There are empty parking spaces,” you win! Congrats on spotting the unoccupied tarmac in the upper-right corner. I owe you one imaginary cookie with your choice of pretend toppings.
We ended Day Seven with a hotel stay northwest of Wichita in Hutchinson, a city large enough to have its own dying shopping mall and not one, but two notable attractions. Thus did Day Eight commence in the heart of the Kansas heartland…at the Underground Salt Museum.
I realize the name carries an excitement level on par with a box factory or the state of Delaware, but the Salt Museum is no ordinary salt mine. Granted, yes, part of it is an ordinary salt mine, but we’d never seen one of those before, either. Could it possibly be fascinating to gander inside the workplace that provides us with one of the greatest-tasting minerals on Earth?
This rusty but imposing chainsaw-mobile says yes.
Previously on MCC: The most notable event of Day Seven of our road trip was a quick tour through the Boot Hill Museum in Dodge City. The main attraction is a preserved portion of the original Boot Hill Cemetery, still populated by the original customers, still marked by low-budget tombstones of the Old West.
However, the Boot Hill Museum is more than those preserved historical plots. Beyond that and the spacious gift shop, visitors can also walk along a simulated Dodge City strip mall of the Old West. Some of these shops are inaccessible, but several invite visitors and contain display cases filled with souvenirs and paraphernalia of the Old West. The saloon even has occasional rounds of singing, and waitresses who invite you in for a glass of sarsaparilla, which I was afraid to sample. There’s also a working ice cream shoppe, but the tourism-level prices inspired us to bide our time and fetch snacks later at a Dairy Queen down the street instead.
Not all the contents are vintage 19th-century items. One room is dedicated to TV shows of the Old West in general and Gunsmoke in particular. Their short-sighted gift shop missed a profit opportunity by not offering copies of these objets d’art for sale. What child wouldn’t want to pop Gunsmoke’s Festus…Sings and Talks About Dodge City and Stuff! into their parent’s CD player and listen to it twelve times a day?
After hundreds of miles of tourist unattraction, our first real Kansas sightseeing oasis on Day Seven was in Dodge City, fabled frontier town of the Old West. The “frontier” aspect is diminished now that the place is swamped with all the usual famous chain restaurants, but at least one section remains somewhat preserved and partly simulated: the Boot Hill Museum, which contains a preserved portion of the most well-known cemetery of the Old West.
We reluctantly exited Colorado on Day Seven late in the morning. Highway 50 led us from Lamar, CO, to the regions of Kansas that everyone always warns you about. It’s not completely deserted. The long stretches between signs of life could be discouraging, but civilization exists in pockets if you know where to look, or if you’re patient enough to wait for it to cross your path, such as this armored farming vehicle that resembles the futuristic, titanic Batmobile from Frank Miller’s Batman: the Dark Knight Returns.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 