Category Archives: Been there, done that

We are trying to avoid our blog becoming just a list of things we have done on our travels. Zen and the art of blogging, and all that. That said, we are doing a lot of things!

And On the 7th Day, God Made the Creation Museum

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America is a diverse country. Full of the bright, the beautiful and the downright bonkers. Having covered off bright (Washington) and beautiful (Skyline / Blue Ridge), we felt it high time for something a little less serious. We already knew where might fit the bill and in fact had spent some time in NYC working out how to fit this particular gem into our trip: the Creation Museum just outside Cincinnati, Ohio. Yep, that Cincinnati, Ohio. The one about 300 miles north of our ending point coming off the Blue Ridge Parkway. And also about 300 miles north of Nashville, Tennessee, our next scheduled hunting ground. Small detour then … but worth it we thought not only for the museum, but for the opportunity to pass through the famous Kentucky bluegrass country afterwards.

For those of you who haven’t yet heard of this esteemed establishment, it is, simply speaking, a museum which portrays the views of the Creationist movement – an increasingly prevalent movement in the United States which believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible. Amongst the key truths espoused by Creationists are that the world was created by God in six days (well earned rest on the seventh), and that this Creation took place about 6,000 years ago. Those of you who know James and I may by now be suspecting that our attitude towards this may not have been without a certain amount of tongue in cheek-ness. Indeed, several days later, my tongue has only just about begun to straighten back out again.

Yep, we went in prepared to mock.

And yes, we did LOVE the diorama of Adam, Eve and the dinosaurs. AND the depiction of the mammals that COULD have been the starting point for all future mammal species (tiger stripes plus giraffe spots plus a lion mane, anyone?). The learned discussion on how Noah might have designed his ark to avoid too much hard work in the way of pesky animal poo cleaning (well, that’s a pretty important consideration when you have dinosaurs on board) was inspired on oh so many levels.

And no, fundamentally, my mindset hasn’t been changed. I still hold onto that good ole’fashioned view of evolution spurned by the museum in favour of a theory primarily reliant on apparent fossil aging caused by the catastrophic effects of the subsidence of Noah’s flood. Blame it on my scientific mother, engineer father and a maths degree, if you will. Or perhaps on the fact that STILL no-one has been able to explain to me what the carnivores ate on the Ark when two of each animal came in and two came out (I’ve given quite some thought to this one, believe me. Yes, pregnant animals will get you some of the way – though isn’t that kind of cheating? A life is a life and all? – and some frisky bunnies would certainly help too. But enough to be able to satiate the appetite of at least two large and hungry DINOSAURS? I just don’t buy it).

Still, at the end of the day, what the Museum basically sets out to do is to provide a venue for the representation of an alternative viewpoint of how we all got here to the big bang / evolution based model shown in pretty much every mainstream natural history museum you can think of. And you know, I can’t bring myself to laugh at that.

After a heavy day we landed up at our campsite for the night – you’ll already recognize this from one of our backgound pics. A gorgeous setting in the midst of rolling Kentucky hills, surrounded by race horse stables. Eating ribs then settling down for a night by the fire with marshmallows and fine malt whisky, life felt pretty good … And waking up the next morning to send out final leaving emails to our (ex) work colleagues from this beautiful spot in the middle of rural nowhere is a memory that will stay with me for a very long time.

Jan Johnson Day

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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?).

Pancakes!

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.

Day drinking in Nashville

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.

So Wrong For You, by Treva Norquist (a great, yet struggling Nashville singer songwriter)

 

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.

The Open Road

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DC was great.  But you’re not really on a road trip until you’re out on the open road, in some beautiful rural area.  Preferably overtaking a tractor or two for extra authenticity.

Fortunately, DC happens to be very close to two of the USA’s longest and most scenic parkways – the Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway.  Together, these make up about 575 miles of gently (well…for the most part anyway) winding roads passing through some absolutely spectacular countryside – views for miles at every turning point.  To put it into perspective, that’s the same distance as driving from London to Inverness – but all on National Park designated roadways.

In total we spent 3 and a bit days cruising down from DC through West Virginia and down into North Carolina.  We loved it.

The Nature!

Oh yes, lots of nature.  Mainly to be fair in the form of nasty little beasties trying to eat my lunch time sarnies but also some proper stuff.  We saw some men on horses, some ground hogs (is that why it took 3 days?), lots of birds, plenty of insects, a snake (fortunately dead) and 2 dung beetles with requisite ball of dung (JUST managed to avoid the temptation to boot their dung off into the far distance).

We didn’t QUITE see a bear but apparently were about 10 minutes away from having done so. Quite a relief that we didn’t actually as at that point in time we had yet to put in place a formal “peeing your pants doesn’t count if it’s because there’s a bear” amnesty.  Now that’s in place I’m much more relaxed about a potential encounter with possibly the only wild animal who could kill you without blinking yet whose reputation (at least in the UK) is based primarily on the honey loving grizzly from that popular kids TV series, Gentle Ben….

We did however spend the next few days both practicing our bear scaring tactics as well as initiating an advanced awareness testing game of skill: “Spot the Predator”……

The Trees!

Do you like trees? Do you really, really like trees? Are you utterly fanatical about trees? Do you have borderline pathological personality traits regarding trees? Is your name Daniel Simon? Good.  Because on the Blue Ridge Parkway you are going to see a LOT of trees. Our record was probably a four hour section of a six hour hike with a view of … wait for it … trees.

The Great Outdoors!

The drive took us through some amazing countryside, including the famous Shenandoah national park, and for quite some way ran parallel with the Appalachian Trail (this is an INCREDIBLE trail running 2,178 miles up the Eastern Coast of the USA.  Some lunatics have apparently been known to hike the entire trail over the course of a few spare months.  (sans deodorant).  The perfect place to get our hiking on.

Walk 1 was short (well, 2.5 hours), deeply scenic and entirely wonderful.

For walk 2 we wanted a bit more of a challenge, so plumped for a 10.8 mile “moderate” trail, which proved to be a slightly unexpected six hour marathon comprising a steep 2,000 foot vertical descent followed by a (slightly less) steep 2,000 foot vertical ascent.  Through trees.  Did we mention the trees?

Boy we ate well that night.

Such a beautiful area and such a great intro to our road trip – really it’s hard to express in words.  So check out the gallery – the pics really do this part of the trip justice.

The Capit(o/a)l

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First stop on the road: Washington DC, a pleasant 4 hour drive or so south of New York. This was the only part of our journey where we had pre-booked a hotel (SEE how intrepid we are), which ended up something of a blessing given that James & Lucy’s timing (we’ll leave NYC by noon) proved a little on the [traditionally] optimistic side (left the island about 4….).

Things we loved about Washington?
Air and Space Museum. Totally insipring uber geeky fabulousness!!! With rockets!!!!Rockets!

The Capitol. Totally awesome building. So awesome it got an epic point from James.Capitol

The gadzillions of american flags and eagles we saw. DC is in the midst of a massive upheaval (job creation programmes anyone?), all of which clearly need some highly visual patriotic support.

Flags 1Flags 2

The White House (but also see below…..)

FDR and Martin Luther King memorials; neither of which we took photos of but we do have a lovely picture of James holding up the Washington Monument taken from just by the FDR memorial. Heaven only knows what’s happened to Washington Monument now he’s gone….

Atlas!

Bikes!! Absolutely the best way to get round DC. James’ notion of running everywhere is clearly daft. Not to mention making me sweat and go red in the face 🙁

Bikes

Art….despite a somewhat tragic looking James (or is that the bull??).

Bull

Last but definitively not least, the totally uber awesome robes in our hotel. RRROOOAAARRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!

Roaar!

Things we were less fond of?
Everywhere being under construction. This, believe ot or not, is the view down the famous reflecting pond. No reflections, no pond, no happy Lucy. Made up for slightly by HUNDREDS of large diggers 🙂

Reflecting pond

Food in the Air and Space Museum. McDonalds anyone? NYC I miss you already

Space museum food

Crowds at the White House. And the fact that this (we’re on a fairly hefty zoom here) is the closest you can get to it without months of forward planning and a large group tour. Humph.

White House

All in, we loved Washington and, remarkably, after 2 days there, we felt like we’d been on holiday for weeks. Still, you know, at the end of the day it’s a (albeit beautiful and inspiring) city like any other…My heart yearns for the open road…