We have been heading West, with some Very Long Drives soaking up our precious blogging time. Here is a taster of the view from our hotel room in Monument Valley to bide us all over while we catch up a little.
No, I haven't photoshopped the colour of this!
Well, the food was out of this world, and we didn’t hold back. No problem, thinks James. All I need to do is put on my running shoes, leave the air conditioned frigidity of our hotel and do a standard six-miler. In the evening sun. In 90 degree heat. And 90 degree humidity. Ouch.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not proud, but this run almost finished me off. Anyone tech-savvy enough to download the .kml file behind this google map and interrogate the time signatures (geeeek!) will be able to work out that I ended up dragging my sorry ass round this embarrassingly short course in the world’s slowest time. I had visions of staggering into the hotel bar at run’s end like something out of Ice Cold in Alex and asking for a whisky sour and a litre of house saline (“warm water, one teaspoon salt, five of sugar and three straws please barman!”). I won’t say I burned off all the Jambalaya, but hell, I gave it my best shot.
I must admit that the heat wasn’t my biggest concern when I set out. New Orleans has had a relatively troubled past and as a result has some similarly troubled parts of town. The logical solution to a starting point in the French Quarter and a nice six mile loop takes an out-of-towner along the river, through the up-and-coming Marigny and into the Lower Ninth Ward.
For those of you who don’t know the city, Old New Orleans – the French Quarter, Bourbon Street etc. – was built on a natural levee on the curve of the Mississippi. More modern parts of town, for example the Lower Ninth, were built behind artificial levees about 10 feet below sea level, and as a result were … about 10 feet below sea level after Hurricane Katrina paid her visit in 2005.
Lucy and I both spent the majority of our waking hours over the past decade on the fringes of the (re)insurance industry, for which Hurricane Katrina was a Major Loss Event. Having seen the effects at a narrow industry-wide level, we thought it would be worth paying a visit to the Hurricane Katrina Museum, situated one floor below the Mardi Gras Museum – turn left at the artfully stranded boat by the cathedral.
Having always considered Katrina a natural disaster (hurricane – go figure) it was a surprise to me to hear it classified as man-made: to see exhibits detailing the mammoth but all too often counterproductive efforts undertaken by the federal flood protection programs over the years; to see clearly-explained design flaws in the levees themselves; and to see minute by minute dioramas of how and why they failed. After a room of hurricane tracks and a room of soil science, the rest of the museum focuses on the human cost and suffering of those in New Orleans at the time – those trapped in their homes and the tens of thousands suffering in the temporary shelter in the (Mercedes Benz sponsored) Superdome while the federal government struggled to help. It is pretty harrowing stuff.
A point that was made so carefully by the museum as to seem almost accidental was that 100,000 people remained in New Orleans … while 1.1 million reacted to the truly apocalyptic hurricane warnings and left town in a carefully orchestrated, pre-planned evacuation. That’s your eleven closest neighbors fleeing town, and you deciding to stay behind. And expecting the Federal Government (and there is a huge essay brewing somewhere in me about an Englishman’s take on the touchy relationship between the federal and state governments) to step in and helicopter you out.
I am not able to put myself in the minds of the people who stayed behind. Many may have lived through worse-sounding hurricanes. Many may not have been fortunate enough to have had places to go, or cars to take them there, or even money for petrol. Or may have been afraid of leaving their homes unprotected. In any event, those who stayed had their already tough lives made much, much tougher. All while the richer, older parts of the Big Easy remained relatively untouched above water level.
Returning to the possible route of my run, some said that the Lower Ninth Ward should never be rebuilt – that constructing a neighborhood well below sea level in a notorious hurricane zone may have been unfortunate once, but that doing it twice would count as carelessness. The people of New Orleans are made of tougher and brighter stuff, however, and the buildings have been reconstructed. That said, razing one of the city’s poorest areas to the ground and rebuilding it in a hurry has done nothing for the crime rate – I decided it wasn’t a place for an out of breath Englishman to be caught after dark, and kept my run shamefully short.
Worrying looking clouds at half time
Lonely Planet says it best: “Sorry; scrape the brains back into your ear, because we just blew your mind. That’s right: looks like a cheeseburger, but that ain’t melted cheddar on top. Honestly, it’s great: somehow the stickiness of the peanut butter complements the char grilled edge of the meat. There’s lots of other awesome burgers on the menu, but it’s incumbent on you, dear traveler, to eat the native cuisine of a city. In Hanoi, there’s Pho, in Marrakech, Tagine; and in New Orleans: peanut butter and bacon burger.”
Lucy and I have eaten in some pretty fancy restaurants over our years of living in London and New York, and we have always tried to keep the concept of value separate from the hard fact of price. We will happily spend a little more on a really excellent meal for a special occasion than on a merely average one. But how much more? And given exponential prices at the top end, how far does the relationship stretch? Is an oversized steak in NYC at $33 really ten times as tasty as a Big Mac at $3.29? (let’s just say we don’t eat much steak). We once ate a meal at the Fat Duck in the UK which marred fine dining for us ever since, by establishing a reference price point at which everything you are served has to make you laugh. Décor is a different matter again. Let’s just say that we once had a good but (predictably) expensive and (predictably) not great meal in a restaurant in Las Vegas with $100m of Picassos on the walls.
So this brings us to New Orleans. Ah, New Orleans – home of Crawfish, Gumbo, Jambalaya and the Deep Fried Oyster Sandwich. We had been happily scoffing smoked ribs for a few days in Nashville and Memphis and thought that our diet was perhaps missing a little … class (that well known food group). There are a number of fine restaurants in the Big Easy that reinterpret Cajun cooking for the squeamish, and we had two wonderful nights out at Bayonna and K Paul’s: frog leg buffalo wings, jerk duck, rabbit jambalaya and snickers tarts were washed down with a (half) bottle of Chateau Musar and the occasional mint julep refugee from Kentucky. It was very, very good.
But it wasn’t great. For that, you have to accompany us to a couple of deep, dark dives which shall remain nameless for fear of too many tourists like us. Huge expanses of deep fried chicken livers in grape jelly, a deep fried oyster sandwich as big as my arm, and crawfish jambalaya which may or may not have contained relatives of the large dark rat we saw in the small dark corner. Perhaps it was the shock of eating an only-one-a-day-sized meal for less than $15 a head. Perhaps it was the old adage that the very best food is eaten when you are truly hungry. Whatever. In New Orleans, cheap and dirty is definitely the way to go.
We are both standing at a crossroads. Life decisions. Future directions. Deeply profound. Heavy meaning. Yadda yadda.
No.
We are standing at THE crossroads. The legendary crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi where Robert Johnson famously sold his soul to the devil in exchange for mastery of the blues guitar. THAT crossroads.
Down to the Crossroads by the Patrick Dodd Trio (a great, yet struggling Memphis bluesman, who we saw in a dive bar on Beale Street, and whose CD we now obligatorily own)
I guess it’s only fitting. We started this morning at Al Green’s All Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis, where Bishop Green himself saved our souls with a two hour, all-singing, all-dancing, tongues-speaking, Lord-praising, barn-storming hallelujah of a Sunday service. So I suppose it’s appropriate that we should be drinking beer and making Faustian pacts at sundown.
The Reverend Green will be glad to see you, if you haven't got a prayer...
We don’t have any photographs of the inside of Al’s church – we didn’t feel it appropriate. That said, how are you supposed to behave when VERY large VERY elderly ladies are moshing in the pews to the power of a funk Gospel breakdown? Bowed heads? Applause? CPR? It was like nothing either of us had ever seen. Bishop Green was deeply, deeply charismatic, if … erm … slightly hard to follow in the logical thread of his preaching. Just go with it – Church of England this ain’t.
Clarksdale Mississippi, on the other hand, is home to the Shack Up Inn (thanks for the intro LouAnne!) – a motley collection of renovated shotgun shacks down by the railroad tracks (der DER da da DUM!) surrounding a bar / impromptu performance space. Our shack for the night used to belong to Robert Clay, another long suffering blues man whose spirit suffuses the place. If Lucy leaves me, and if my dog up and dies in the night, I will know who to blame.
The Shack Up Inn - how exactly does one "dust a broom" anyway?
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On today’s journey from the deeply holy to the merely spiritual, we paused for a few hours at the National Civil Rights Museum. Built in and around the motel in Memphis where Martin Luther King was assassinated, this was yet more deeply powerful stuff. Seeing the iconic images of race hatred and determined struggle set in their proper historical context (it was unbelievably recent) was a two-wide-eye-opener for a couple of measured Brits, and a reminder that modern day New York and 20th Century America are two very different places.
Another background picture, this time from the most picturesque campsite in the world (at least so far – we currently seem to be finding the most picturesque campsite in the world about twice a week!).
Camping in Kentucky: marshmallows, strawberries and fireflies
We had two bites at Nashville. We arrived lateish on a thundery Thursday evening, went out for fried chicken at Monell’s (meeting a lovely couple – Richard and Karen – whose college-age son is considering a career in investment banking, even after speaking with us). We then hit the town, which was staging an extended Amateur Drinking Hour. After a couple of hours listening to interminable sound checks and getting pushed around by all-beef-fed meatheads (male and female) we went to bed somewhat frustrated. Nashville hadn’t really been what we had hoped for, and we were due in Memphis.
The next morning we decided to indulge in The Ultimate Luxury, which is – of course – time. We didn’t have to be anywhere we didn’t want to be. We would take a mulligan day and do Nashville all over again, Jan Johnson style.
For those of you who don’t know Jan, she rocks. Before we worked together in New York, Jan had spent a little time in Nashville, no doubt being talented, and awesome, and awesomely talented. She had given us a long list of recommendations, which we had initially not paid enough attention to, and we decided that this was our problem – we would spend our extra day in Nashville purely following Jan’s advice.
First stop: pancakes out by Vanderbilt university. Piles of fluffy deliciousness, with maple syrup, and sausages (just go with it, OK?).
Next stop: daytime drinking and live music. We eventually worked out that the key to excellent country music is fiddles. And old dudes – old dudes are to good country music what fat chefs are to good cooking.
Next up: Country Music Hall of Fame. Rhinestones, twangy guitars and hillbillies. Actually deeply engaging, even for an Underworld fan such as myself.
The main event: Bluebird Café. In suburban Nashville in the least pre-possessing strip mall you have ever seen. Cue two hours of finely nuanced, carefully crafted, funny singalong singer songwriting.
Then we strayed. We were weak. We slipped from the path of Jan. The next recommendation was a fried catfish and hushpuppy joint (Caney Fork) a $65 round trip taxi ride from where we were. Jan, we are truly sorry, but we balked, went to a crab shack you didn’t recommend … and were rewarded with the worst meal we have had in the USA. Truly terrible, and not in a bad New York Zagat review kind of way (“it was my birthday and they only gave me one glass of free champagne” etc.) but actually really hard to eat. We retired hurt to Doritos in our hotel room (actually they weren’t Doritos, but we have a friend who works for Pepsi, Doritos are a Pepsi product and we are under pain of death not to eat anything else, so they were Doritos, OK?).
Despite the weak ending, we had a lovely time, and came away with the obligatory CD – nothing says “I was in Nashville” like owning a CD of a struggling singer songwriter. Yee haw!
Jan we miss you.
We have a method for making difficult decisions. We’re both pretty rational people, and if we can’t between us weigh up the pros and cons between two different courses of action and come to a sensible conclusion then … we toss a coin. The key is this: if we don’t both like the outcome the coin chooses we immediately do the other one. Believe it or not, this actually works surprisingly well.
Over the last few days, however, Mr Coin has had it in for Lucy. We have been choosing driving shifts on the coin toss method. I (James) have had beautiful straight interstates through long rolling grasslands with occasional stops for petrol and ice cream. Also, as driver I get to subject Lucy to my truly vast Led Zeppelin collection. Road trips are great!
Lucy, on the other hand has been journeying through an extremely scenic circle of hell reserved for newly passed drivers:
Low bandwidth travel eh? Well, right now we aren’t. Bandwidth in the good old US of A is like free refills of your gallon sized buckets of coca cola. Every man, child and service animal has free wifi nowadays, and we are happily chugging across the States swilling data like so much watery light lager. I downloaded half a gigabyte of yoga videos the other day – before I realized that I used to play rugby, and that therefore I shouldn’t do such things. Ahem.
But this cannot last. Oh no. Dark times will come. Papua New Guinea and Turkmenistan will be like deserts of bandwidth, and blog posts will be few and far between. There BE NO internet cafes in North Korea! (or so I’m told). We have a stack of special worldwide SIM cards, two laptops (one with 3G), one iphone, one soon-to-be-unlocked blackberry, a spare GSM phone and a partridge (plus pear tree accessory) so we should be reasonably accessible most of the time. But more importantly, perhaps, we have X!-TREME! low bandwidth experience…
A couple of Septembers ago Lucy and I were on an RV trip in California / Nevada. We knew there was likely to be no cellphone coverage, and we were deeply embroiled in a couple of important transactions, so we took the fateful decision of bringing a satellite phone / broadband unit with us. Now, Satphones are great. They work just about everywhere you could possibly want them to; the deeply laborious process of navigating by the stars to point a piece of high-tech kit at a satellite thousands of miles above you is like finding the entrance to geek heaven; and they look pretty 007 to boot. That said, data was a cool $16 a megabyte (see above re yoga videos). Ouch.
After much expensive trial and error I can definitively say that the lowest bandwidth way of communicating is … wait for it … Blackberry. But no ordinary Blackberry – whilst your common or garden Blackberry is extremely good at bandwidth-efficient email, they don’t tend to work in the middle of nowhere. The full setup, therefore, is:
It worked. It WORKED! I was in the desert. I was deeply desperate. I made the above all by myself, from scratch. I was so, very, VERY proud. I sat back, mopped the literal and metaphorical sweat from my brow, gave myself a pat on the back (see above re yoga videos) and went to make myself a well deserved cup of tea.
At which point, my shiny Sony laptop looked at me, saw it was connected to the internet, sighed, shrugged, and downloaded $1,000 of itunes updates.
Our new background picture – us happily motoring down the Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park.
Bendy roads, Lucy driving, fixed smiles!
It must be something to do with my accent. Whenever I telephone to book accommodation I seem to throw whoever it is at the other end into a fit of utter panic.
I like to think I sound reasonably normal. But now we are in North Carolina, and we have been in Virginia, and we are going to Kentucky. Whereas most accents involve the occasional mispronunciation of a vowel or two, in this part of the world entire new syllables and grammatical forms are invented round the campfire on long winter nights. As a result, perhaps, Lucy and I are most definitely not from round these here parts (y’all).
We have been staying in a series of beautiful countryside cabins and campsites, yet whenever I call to make a reservation I get a long speech as if the Queen was coming to stay:
It’s rustic (nervous) no, it’s really rustic … it was built in the 1930s (panicked) you have to walk ten yards to the bathroom … wifi only works near the main lodge (really panicked) you may have to run the hot tap a little before it heats up … the fridge is only small … (desperate sounding) the cooker runs on gas … your cellphone might (pause) not WORK!
Despite the physical hardship, we are sleeping ten hours a night. Life is tough.
