En route to Glacier National Park

We drove from Custer State Park up and over to Devil’s Tower National Monument, the same tower featured heavily in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a movie that for whatever the reason terrified me thoroughly when I was younger.  I was probably in the fifth or sixth grade, and for nights after I saw the movie I lay awake, fearful, that aliens would come down and do some terrible alien things like I saw in the movie.  Exhibit A:  the kid’s toys are working all by themselves–I seem to remember a monkey cymbal player operating without any apparent activiation, and the electric toy trucks drove up and down the hall.  Remember that?  Scary stuff.  Similarly scary was the Richard Dreyfuss character’s obsession with building a huge model of Devil’s Tower out of instant potatoes in his living room without much care about, say, the other, more rational things in his life.  Oh, what a mess.  Remember how they’d fly over and make the railroad crossing go all wacky and the cars and trucks shut down?  Yike.  As I look back now, I recall being unsettled by the film, and in retrospect that apprehension is unfounded.  After all, the aliens were on a mission of peace, and they were tiny beings (probably fifty percent papier mache glue or raisins or something like that) who looked vulnerable to pretty much any manner of attack.  Had I the coordinates and a spaceship to get me there, I could with startling ease exterminate all the little aliens on their home planet with a badminton racket or maybe a weedeater.  Maybe they could placate me with some anthemic music from their stentorian organ synthesizers, but I don’t know.  I carry a mean grudge.  

Devil’s Tower is a quick visit.  They have a trail that goes around the base of the tower so you can see it on all sides, and as far as I can tell, that’s about all you need to do.  The exhibits in the Visitor’s Center are pedestrian for the most part, the crowds when we were there were too great, and you can see the tower nicely framed against various backdrops as you approach from the interstate.  

We took backroads up into Montana (and paid a whole bunch of money for gas just north of the park).  For months we’d been telling Baby Girl that we were going to meet her uncle and aunt in Montana this summer, and, as we passed over the line into Montana, we whooped some and told her we were in Montana.  And, she asked, heartbeats into the state, “Where’s Eric?” like he was going to be skulking around the border in the sticks of southeastern Montana, a region that is lonely and isolated.  We couldn’t really tell her that he was still 500 miles away in Glacier National Park, so we told her she’d see him soon enough.  

En route to our night’s lodging in Billings, we stopped at the Little Bighorn National Monument, a scenic and somber place.  In short, it is a grave on a hill with white markers that indicate where Custer and his men fell after they foolishly attacked a much larger Sioux force.  I was moved, though, as such places often inspire in me reflections on mortality, justice, and the broad and ever-ranging nature of humanity.  The kids chased about after grasshoppers, we took a little walk, saw the video that recounts the battle, and clambered back into the van.  Some guidebooks we read indicated that the exhibit featured a map that showed troop movements and battle maneuvers with lights.  However, today that exhibit has apparently been incorporated into computer animations as a part of the video we watched.  I had a hard time keeping up with what was going on, and while some folks might argue most strenuously, I ain’t that much of a dullard.  The whole battle movements deal gave me the impression of the 1980’s arcade game Battlezone, the one where you drove your tank through “3-D” environs and tried to blow up the enemy.  If I were doing the exhibit, I’d scrap the whole Battlezone ineffective blocks running around fuzzy hills and integrate claymation, maybe, or the old school rectangles moving around on a two dimensional map.  

We ate at a combination diner and casino called the Purple Cow on this side of Billings as we were running late after seeing all of the stuff we saw.  It was so-so food, but the prices were decent, Baby Girl got Breakfast for Supper, and my food was good.  

In Billings we stayed in a koi-filled, hot tub-studded miracle of lodging called the C’mon Inn, a hotel that featured a most impressive atrium.  They had a waterfall in there, five hot tubs, a koi pond full of big old fish, and nice rooms.  The little folks were awed by the awesomeness, and before bed we walked around, looked at the fish, and they dipped their feet (eventually–AAAAAAaaaaaaaaaggghhhh!!!  This is too hot!) into a hot tub.  Next time we stay at a C’mon Inn, we are going to budget time to allow for swimming, hot tubbing, and general relaxation.  

It was a pretty long day, but we saw some cool stuff and our travels put us within a day’s drive of Waterton Lakes, our next destination.

 

Subsequent Custer Dayz

If you have not been to South Dakota’s Custer State Park, you should go.  The facilities, drives, and wildlife combine to make it a memorable place, and its location near several national parks and monuments makes it a good base for Black Hills explorations.  While there we visited Wind Cave National Park, Mount Rushmore National Monument, Jewel Cave National Monument, and took two memorable drives–the park’s Wildlife Loop and 16 from Custer up to Mount Rushmore, a drive that features pigtail bridges where the road curves around and goes under itself and single width tunnels that frame Mount Rushmore off in the distance.  In my mind, and after all these miles, if a fellow can have fun simply driving around, then the locale must be a pretty good place.  

Wind Cave and Jewel Cave were both good sites.  I preferred Jewel Cave a bit more, I think, mainly because the geological features there were more interesting.  Wind Cave features formations called boxwork, pretty cool stuff, true, but the cave to me seemed to be a one trick pony–yeah, it features 95% of the known boxwork in the world, but after ten or so viewings, the old boxwork starts to look, well, old.  Jewel Cave had a few isolated examples of boxwork, but it also features flowstone, straws, stalagmites and stalactites (Sonny Boy’s favorites, these two types of features apparently corresponded with what SB expected to see in a cave), drapery, popcorn, frostwork, sparkly calcite pretty much everywhere, and aluminum catwalks and steps that seemed a cut above the concrete walkways in Wind Cave.  Of course, the concrete deals were built by hand after guys hauled wet concrete into the cave in inner tubes hanging around their necks, so some props there, but the Jewel Cave deals lent a much more convincing air of supercriminal hideout.  Jewel Cave also seemed to have a greater sense of verticality about it.  If you surfed on over to the sites linked above for the respective caves, you’ll see that Wind Cave apparently features all sorts of geological features, but I suspect that some of them are in the far reaches of the cave and cannot be reached by the normal public.  Spelunkers, get me if I am wrong.

Mount Rushmore, a favorite of mine from a previous trip to South Dakota, did not impress me as much this time around.  The cafeteria there offers a really good deal for breakfast–Ms. AlphaLima seems to think it’s called the Monumental, I am not so sure about the name but I don’t think it was the Monumental, but nevertheless, they’ll serve you a good breakfast (2 eggs, meat, hashbrowns, and biscuit) for $5.50.  Now, most of you folks out there in Normal Land can probably cite numerous examples of local eateries that beat that price, but if you are in Tourist Land, that’s probably the best breakfast deal going.  The cafeteria manager said that it was, and I believe him.  Go early, eat the breakfast, see the monument.  In an earlier post I noted that breakfast prices in Wall, SD seemed usurious, and let me tell you, many eating establishments out there will gouge you on prices.  It’s almost as if we were eating in 1849 California where flour was $75 a pound and the only other option was eating beans (again) prepared by Smitty the Chuckwagon Cook.  The Rushmore breakfast was a welcome change, even if they did charge us $1.75 for the extra biscuit for Baby Girl.  

The day we visited, the temperatures soared, so our tour with the park ranger turned more into something along the lines of Sonny Boy’s field trip to the North Carolina Arboretum, a trip that he noted “made us feel like dried cactuses.”  Apparently the whole deal was some Death March of Bataan kind of joint wherein the kids couldn’t drink, talk, have fun, look kooky at anybody, or enjoy themselves on any level.  Our tour with the ranger was hot to the point that I tried to park myself in the shade at every stop and, in those cases where I failed, tried to make my entire body fit in the shade cast by my hat, but I enjoyed it since the park ranger was a Sioux who narrated about the four guys on the mountain and then talked some about notable Native Americans and their contributions to Native American culture.  The ranger was an art teacher during the school year, and I wanted to talk with him about his regular job, but he jetted out of there mighty quick, probably to wring out his straw park ranger hat and stand with his legs spread over the air conditioning vent.

We drove the Wildlife Loop one evening as that’s when the stupid animals were supposed to be cavorting, and the predictions proved true.  Randy buffalo males were trying to have their way with buffalo cows, beckoning to them with gutteral and low-pitched grunts that made me think of the musical stylings of the Drepung Monks; deer and their fawns were browsing streamside right up next to the road; prairie dogs and ground squirrels were out and about; the pronghorns (not really antelope, mind you) were at play in fields virtually next door to the deer, and the buffalo were roaming…there’s a song in there somewhere, but I cannot quite figure out what that song might be…so, we saw all manner of wild animals doing wild things, and then, right as the sun was going down, we rounded a bend down towards the Custer State Park Buffalo Corrals, and we espied them, there in the gloaming, fifteen or twenty of them:  feral burros young and old, making their way back up the road towards the corrals, schmoozing handouts from passersby in their cars.  

I had wanted to see these burros because burros are inherently awesome, because I’d seen the other large mammals in the park (except for elk, and I suspect that we’ll see many, many elk at Yellowstone NP), and because burros are, to me, funny animals.  One time back in the day when I was just a kid, my folks took my brother and me to some ghost town out in the the Western states, and one of the things we got to do was to ride these burros in a line just like we knew what we were doing.  All we really had to do was to sit there on burroback (which sounds fifty times dorkier than “horseback”) and let the experience flow over us.  Unfortunately for my brother, his burro decided to cast off the bands of servitude and sat down in the middle of the trail, rolled over on my brother’s leg and mashed it all into the stupid ghost town trail rock, and pretty much say in burrovian, “To hell with this.  My labors today have ended.”  I don’t really remember how that whole deal resolved itself, but I remember clearly that my brother was shaken and probably more than a little hurt, and my mom made distinct efforts to ease his sorrows.  At the time I probably savored that opportunity to relive the grand old days of the Old West, but now, I can’t believe I was riding a burro.  

Anyhoo, the Custer burros were released from their lives of servitude after park operators ended the burro service to the top of Harney Peak–they released the burros into the wild (I can’t remember the date), and the population seems to be doing well.  Lots of folks refer to them as the “begging burros” since they readily approach vehicles, but think of them more as animals who have adapted to living with humans who cannot for whatever the reason follow the rules about feeding the animals.  

As we drove through the burro herd, Sonny Boy and Baby Girl had a grand time as burros approached our van, snuffled the kids’ fingers, and moved away.  One of the park employees said that the burros liked to eat celery and carrots, but since we didn’t have those vegetables on hand, I threw half a can of barbecue Pringles out the window at them and shouted, “Don’t worry!  These aren’t the ones with Olestra in them!”  Actually, I do not feed wild animals, even those as seemingly tame (with the exception of one mule in the herd (!) who was trying to have his way with one of the she-burros who in return was kicking him to the point that he desisted and brayed forlornly while Ms. AL and I cackled) burros that apparently have been fed for generations by the weak-minded or weak-willed.  

I’ll tell you what, though:  a baby burro is mighty cute.  Mighty daggone cute.  

 

Burros appeared, visions in the falling day, wily and noble

 

Wall to Rapid City to Custer to Rapid City to Custer…

We ate breakfast at the Cactus Cafe, an eatery right across the street from Wall Drug–average food for above average prices.  The hash browns were good.  I’m not so sure about Wall now–in retrospect its gloss has tarnished some, and the resulting patina is not nearly as shiny.

We headed into Rapid City, drove around some looking for a grocery store, and, upon finding one, stocked up on food for our stay in Custer State Park, some twenty odd miles down 79 from what this South Dakota guy who camped in the site next to ours called “Rapid.”  We arrived at the park, bought our pass, headed to the Legion Lake Campground and started to set up camp.  For future reference, if you are ever staying at Legion Lake, you should try to get campsites 12 or 13–they are at the far end of the campground from the main road, are situated in a little cove, and seem to be the nicest ones there (though the lack of shade might be an issue).  Speaking of nice, Custer State Park has probably the nicest facilities I’ve seen in a public park–I’d suspect that the figurative glamor palace campgrounds like Jellystone or Yogi in the Smokies or whatever might have some pretty nice stuff, but Custer is pretty posh–flush toilets, free hot showers, all really clean–it’s a very nice place and a good deal.  I reckon if we come back we’ll stay at Legion Lake again as it is fairly small and centrally located.

Anyhoo, as Kim bustled about getting all the cooking stuff ready, I started setting up our tent, a Kelty Pagoda 6 or something like that.  It’s a nice tent, big and roomy, good ventilation, near-vertical walls, and I got the tent set up and checked the tent duffel for the fly to cover us in inclement weather.

In the fall we had some work done in our basement, a room finished off, drywall put up, I installed a woodburning stove (that is an awesome addition), and during the construction phase Don the Builder was generating all manner of dust and detritus, so we moved some stuff around, stashed some other stuff in other places, stowed our gear properly to keep it fairly clean.

And so, in Custer State Park when I realized that our tent’s rain fly was sitting in the gear cabinet back home in dear old NC, it seemed like it was a perfectly reasonable place for it to be.  Unfortunately, it was not the optimal place for it to be, so after some thought I clambered back into the van for a return trip to Rapid to procure another tent.  I ended up at Cabela’s, a large hunting and fishing outfitter that I’ve bought stuff from online but never visited in person, and I bought another tent–the Alaskan Guide something or other with a fiberglass frame.  It alleged sleeps six, but unless you are lilliputian or a veteran of being packed on some Third World bus, four folks and a lot of their gear seems more reasonable.  Initially I had some reservations about the tent as I don’t really like fiberglass frames, but once I set it up, it’s a pretty nice tent.  It weighs 31 pounds (!), but the pitch was easy, the tent is very sturdy and nicely constructed, and it has enough stakes and tie outs to anchor it through anything I’ll be sleeping through.  Two nice touches:  the duffel is actually big enough to pack tent, fly, poles, and stakes in with relative ease, and the Cabela’s folks provided two repair sections for the poles.  In short, the tent deal worked out okay.  However, when we return, I’ll have to figure out which big old tent to sell, so that’s kind of a bummer.

During my second trip in from Rapid, the gatehouse/guard shack into Custer was surrounded by buffalo, an entire herd, walking and munching and snarling up traffic.  I smiled, and, as fortune would have it, the whole tent fiasco worked out all right.  I got to see me some buffalo.

We ate over at Legion Lake, lakeside at some restaurant they have there.  Ms. AL was supposed to cook, but I got back from Rapid at a little after 5 and had had my fill of all things camping.  I had something to eat, but I don’t remember what.  Actually, I had a patty melt, and it was (you guessed it) decent but overpriced.

Earlier, when I had driven in from Rapid, there were a couple of guys playing frisbee at a campsite near ours–those two guys and their girlfriends (wives?  hired dates?) shall be referred to from here on as the Florida Four, a chatty and annoying quartet from the Sunshine State.  Not only were they loud, but they carried on late into the night, and during the entire time they had some flourescent or LED gulag caliber light shining right on our campsite while they sat around a fire and yucked it up.  I can understand fully the need to have light in a campsite if you are, say, playing a spirited card game like the Florida Four did for about three hours early in the evening, but why turn the entire campground (and yes, the light shone up into the woods on either side of the campground, cast shadows that rivaled those seen during daytime) into the Las Vegas strip if you don’t need the light?  As a whole, the campground seemed noisier than most I’ve been in back East, and I cannot figure out if it is a different sort of garrulous and loud people out here or if we just got lucky.

More on Custer later.  If you haven’t visited, you should.

 

South Dakota: Corn and Cornier

Today we traversed much of South Dakota, driving from Sioux Falls to Wall.  While en route, we stopped by Mitchell to see the World’s Only Corn Palace and to purchase a replacement headlight bulb for the van (and, if you are ever in Mitchell, be sure to patronize OReilly’s Auto Parts right there on the road on the way to the Corn Palace if you are coming from the East–the guy working there was imminently helpful, accurate with his directions, and kind enough to let Baby Girl and me use his nice clean probably-not-for-the-public restrooms).  The Corn Palace features pictures that are made of cobs of corn and sundry other grains that are pneumatically nailed to the different sections of the building–this year’s design is called “Destinations” and had corn versions of the Gateway Arch, the Golden Gate Bridge, sites in Washington, D. C., and the like.  There was a dearth of destinations from the South, and that’s fine by me since the only folks who were looking at the World’s Only Corn Palace were yahoos and rustics (Clan AlphaLima included) the likes of which I do not want coming down to the Sunny Southland.  Actually, the visitors all pretty much seemed like just folks, so come on down if you were there today and want to visit the South.

We stopped at a rest area right at the Missouri River (just past Exit 260) that contained a cool replica of Lewis & Clark’s keelboat that you could walk up into–I liked it because it gave some sense of the size of the real vessel (55 feet), a danged big boat to be hauling all over the West.  We ate lunch there at a picnic shelter and saw some hilarious dogs, one of whom decided that walking in the sunny grass was just too damned much like work, so he plopped down all Gandhilike and refused to go another inch even though the other dog in the party was content to scramble all over looking for grasshoppers to eat.

At Exit 131 we headed south into the Badlands and bought one of those all access passes for $80 since we’ll be going to quite a few parks over the next couple of weeks.  I am not sure what all we can get into, but I am hoping we can get into Mt. Rushmore in addition to Glacier, Yellowstone, and Grand Tetons with it because if we can, it will have paid for itself this trip.

The Badlands were a wonder today.  The last time I was here in the mid 90s, it largely seemed like a sunblasted hell, but today the weather was more temperate, the skies were broken clouds, and a steady breeze blew.  And, the flatlands were a beautiful mix of greens and yellows, and the sun shining through the patchy clouds gave parts of them an ethereal glow.  We took many pictures, and the kids had a nice time hiking around a little to see the sights at the overlooks. We concluded today’s time in the park with a trip around the Badlands Loop Road that put us on the road to Wall, SD.

Life was good in the Badlands

If you are looking for lodging in Wall, look no further than the Sunshine Inn, an older hotel that fits in perfectly with the whole Wall vibe.  John the owner is a nice guy, the rooms are clean and comfortable, and the bath towels are hilariously small.  I suspect that all bath towels back in the day used to be smaller, but I fear that Martha Stewart went and wrecked that for everybody so that now everyone wants gigantic sail-sized Egyptian combed cotton blah blah blah to towel off with.  The little Ricky Ricardo sized ones do just fine, thanks, and I’ll bet they take less resources to launder.  Did you ever think about that as you were wiling away the time in a prison cell, Martha?

We are staying tonight right on what passes for a strip in Wall, just up the street from the oft-mentioned and rarely overappreciated Wall Drug, a place that typifies better than any other I’ve visited the notion of kitsch.  Couple the quality of the merchandise with the not-so-reasonable prices, and Wall Drug is a place to behold.  Of course, you are pretty much obligated to stop in if you’re in the vicinity (more on that later) because the place is entertaining.  On the street front outside they have stuffed animal head atop appropriately scaled human bodies, so the first sign of greatness you see is a jackrabbit dressed like a bartender and wearing an appropriately scaled pistol.  We ate supper there–I had the “World Famous Beef Sandwich” (though try as I might I found little documention of its fame abroad), an open face sandwich that was pretty good but not $9.19 good.  In the “Backyard” there’s all manner of cool photo props you can perch on to have your picture taken–the most popular, I think, is probably the gigantic jackalope.  I was a little sad to see that they have replaced the really cool lifelike bucking bronoc prop with a sort of water feature that resembles the fountain down there by the Atlanta Aquarium–irregularly timed jets shoot streams of water up out of the ground.  I’m not sure who in his right mind would allow his kids to become soaked in a store only to climb back in the van for five more hours of riding, but who am I to judge?  Another downer for me was the fact that the penny smashing machine took my quarters, went through the motions of smashing my coin into a commemorative memento of my visit, but ultimately failed to send my smashed penny down the chute.  I hadn’t the spirit to contest my loss nor the proper change to try again on a different machine.

I figured out today as I was barreling across South Dakota that the nature of the place begets places like Wall Drug and the World’s Only Corn Palace because truth be told, there’s not much else to do in the state on I-90 for the first 300 miles in from the east.  On the western end there’s the Black Hills, but they are a long time coming.  The sell seems an easy one given the fact that there’s very little competition for consumer dollars.  And, the payoff for stopping is easy–you can sit there, watch the animatronic Tyrannasaurus Rex head scare the pants off of the kids, take some corny pictures, and hit the road again.

Which is what we’ll do tomorrow.  We are headed into the Black Hills to Custer State Park where we’ll camp for three nights and stay in a cabin for the fourth night, try to trick some foolish buffalo into jumping to their deaths in a sinkhole so we can feast on their tongues (one item I’ll need to attend to is to acquire a coyote pelt so Sonny Boy will be satisfactorily predatory looking to the buffalo), see Mount Rushmore, and stagger through some caves where everything is always SPF 50.

I am not sure what the wifi access will be like in the Black Hills, so dispatches may be sporadic.  Trust that we are having a good time.

It is a beautiful night in Wall.

 

Turning North

We drove north through more beautiful farmland today, up through the balance of Missouri, into Iowa, and on into South Dakota.  The trip was a good one, pretty straightforward except for one weird detour in South Dakota wherein we were mandated by the Iowa DOT to backtrack some because they had closed the onramp opposite the offramp we took to buy gas.  There were no signs to indicate that the onramp was closed–it seemed like one of those episodes off of the Dukes of Hazzard where Boss Hogg and Roscoe set up some contrived detour to nab innocent wayfarers.  No local gendarmes, however, and we were back on I-29 in about ten minutes.  Incidentally, the station where we pumped our gas actually had the 89 octane priced cheaper than the 87, so I paid a dime or so more a gallon for inferior gas.  Iowa:  Land of Mysteries.

The first of the day’s highlights came with our lunch stop at the Western Historic Trails Center in Council Bluff, Iowa.  We were toying with the idea of stopping at a rest area to eat, but Ms. AlphaLima saw this in the AAA guidebook and we wheeled on in.  The entrace drive was cool–the flora was all native prairie plants and looked kind of like what I’d imagine the prairie would have looked like many years ago except for all of the stadium lighting for the rec park that abutted the museum grounds.  I was admiring the beauty of the place–echinacea abloom, queen anne’s lace, too–and Sonny Boy was in the back hollering about the soccer game taking place just across the boundary.  The exhibits in the museum were well-executed and covered a broad range of trails and expansion throughout the western US.  While the museum focused at length on the California Trail, Mormon Trail, Oregon Trail, and Lewis and Clark’s collective ramblings, it also covered the logistics of migration, the evolution of rail and road networks, the influx of immigrants, and the like. The content and presentation were better than average.  We also walked the half mile down to the Missouri River and watched the river flow for a bit.  We also saw the largest specimen of poison ivy anyone in Clan AlphaLima has ever seen, basically a tree growing out of a tree.

The second highlight came with our visit to the Falls Park in Sioux Falls, SD.  The place is a marvel; we headed over after eating at a diner in what I think is a really cool downtown area, and the kids and we big folks rambled around, clambered on rocks, shot lots of photos, and the like.  The park was going to host some light show at 9:30, but the littlest AlphaLima was about worn to a frazzle by that point so we came back to the hotel.

Geese at Falls Park.

From what we’ve encountered here in Sioux Falls, the folks are mighty nice.  Of course, they are aiming to take our money, but they sure are nice doing it.

Another interesting thing about Sioux Falls:  there are little c onvenience store sized casinos on many street corners here in town.

Interesting thing #2: we were dining outside in downtown Sioux Falls, and while the big black four wheel drive trucks were awesome in their own rights, the coolest thing was a guy driving his girl around town on his four wheeler.  It had a license plate on there, so I’d assume that y0u can do that kind of thing in South Dakota.  I’m going to get on my four wheeler and ride on down to the tiny casino.

 

From Paducah to Kansas City and then Kansas City again (and again)

Today we cr0ssed significant rivers–the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri–as we traveled from Paducah to Kansas City.  While initially I thought that I’d not much like the drive, traveling through Missouri today was nice.  Broken clouds, the countryside an explosion of all things green, the rolling hills out to the horizon studded with the silhouettes of silos and barns.  I gravitate towards mountains, but the lay of the land today impressed me.

Sonny Boy said that crossing the rivers was one of his favorite things, and I agree–there’s something exciting and full of promise about coming into contact with a near-living entity that connects the span of one bridge, the environs of a single city, to many, many points across our land.  And when the river has a watershed the size of the Missippi’s, I am awed.  I think Sonny Boy just liked riding across the big bridges, seeing the tugs and barges, crap like that.

The schedule also afforded us a stop at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.  Our stop was almost an afterthought, but the access was surprisingly easy, and for the price of six bucks worth of parking, a picnic lunch, and a peremptory search of our belongs (our peanut butter and jelly have both been irradiated now; I am not sure if I feel safer or not) for us to gain admission into the Gateway to the West Museum, we had a great midday break.  We romped around some, Ms. AlphaLima rustled up some grub while I occupied our intrepid explorers with a stroll down the tree-lined promenade, and we watched river traffic go by as we ate our PBJs.

The arch itself is impressive–true, it’s a static form,  but its shape, color, and size all change as we moved about the park.  The clouds overhead transformed it from bright silver to cloud-dappled to cool sky blue, and the arch’s span narrowed or broadened as we neared or moved away.  Built to commemorate the beginnings of travels west, I thought our stop was fitting.  We’ll be stopping at other notable Lewis & Clark sites through the balance of our trip, and following in their footsteps appeals to me more now.

You'll never see the same arch twice.

After we covered the span of Missouri in the afternoon, we got all mixed up in Kansas City and took what I will euphemistically call the scenic route to arrive at our hotel.  I don’t want to waste valuable internets space with excessive details, so I’ll simply say that Kansas City folk need to invest in more arrows for their highway signs, if we’d stayed on I-35 we would’ve eventually reached Waco, TX, and could have eaten at Kitok’s, and finally and probably most importantly, well, the kids have now been to Kansas.  The kids have been getting special goodies with every state line we cross, but for Kansas?  No special goodie as Kansas was not in the plans.

We spent this evening after eating an average (yet somehow overpriced) meal at a nearby themey barbecue place, the Smoke House chasing each other and wily Missouri grasshoppers and crickets in the grassy expanses surrounding our hotel.  The place is a Residence Inn, we ended up in a suite, and the kids were suitably impressed to the point that they had to inventory everything in the kitchen for us.

Having made up an insect catching game, Sonny Boy displays one of his 50 pointers

Other than the mixup in Kansas City (and if you ever decide to travel down I-35 south twice in the same day, just take my word that everthing looks exactly the same the second time as it did the first), today was a fine day.  Tomorrow should be just as nice as we’ll have a shorter travel day, and I am looking to seeing Sioux Falls.

 

Atown to Paducah

Only after I packed the van three times and repacked after each did I finally settle on an arrangement of our gear that I thought worked–then, as I was unloading our hotel stuff in Paducah, Kentucky, tonight did I realize the error of my ways as all of the carefully packed stuff came crashing down into a heap in the back of the van.  When I repack tomorrow I am going to cram all the camping stuff farthest in as we won’t need that for several days and then, maybe, my gear life will be easier.

We headed out about 8:30 this morning; crossing into Tennessee was a vision of cornflowers and mimosas–they were all abloom, and in the early morning golden hour they looked just about like magic.

Travel today was uneventful; the kids did pretty well though I figured out that Sonny Boy has a distinct advantage over Baby Girl in that he can read to himself.  While she was back there rolling her eyes and sighing and generally harumphing around, Sonny was blazing through books.  He got up to page 140 in the Lightning Thief, one of the books in the Percy Jackson series.  Before we left my dear wife also bought him a little computerized 20 Questions electronic game–you answer yes/no questions by mashing the little buttons and to my surprise, the game gets surpisingly close to the correct answer.  Sonny Boy, however, chortled through his victories because close is not good enough.  “I win again,” he’d smile, “the game guessed silver and I was really thinking platinum!”  As of today, the 20 Questions game is kind of like Sonny Boy’s own little bag of crack rocks.  An added bonus?  It also changes color depending on your body temperature.

Baby Girl hurtling through TN

Sonny Boy taking a little break from 20 Questions

Paducah is a nice place.  They have a fancied up downtown area right on the Ohio River.  One of the highlights is a fairly lengthy series of murals that depict important events in Paducah’s history.  one of which was a hugeous flood in 1937.  The floodwaters inundated the town and, oddly enough, eventually froze in 1938 to the point that folks could walk about and frolic and the like.  One thing that struck me as interesting was that this nice series of murals is painted on the town side of the flood wall the town eventually built, so while I was checking out the paintings (and trying to find the dog in each one–I am not positive there’s a dog in each one, but dogs are in lots of them) I could sense way off in the recesses of my mind some dim threat of future floods.  Weird.

We ate at a Mexican place called Tribeca.  It was okay, nothing stupendous.  My two favorite things were Sonny Boy’s leftover french fries and the last piece of Baby Girl’s cheese quesadilla.  Muy bien!  We ate at this restaurant largely on the recommendation of a doctor I spoke with a couple of weeks ago when he diagnosed me with the shingles.  I alluded to this earlier, I think.  Anyhoo, he said it might have been the best food he’s ever eaten.  I was not nearly so impressed, maybe becuase I’ve eaten crabmeat panned in butter at the Sanitary Seafood Restaurant in Morehead City (the last report I got, however, indicated that the Sanitary has fallen on untasty times), maybe because I’ve eaten barbecue at Lexington No. 1, maybe because many of my loved ones are exceptional cooks.  When we come back through on the tail end of the trip, we are going to eat at Starnes downtown, a barbecue place.

They got quite a few different little boutiquey shops here in Paducah; one that wasn’t open was a porcelain doll shop.  Or, should I say, Porcelain Doll Shop of Horrors:

What in the hell is going on here?! Of the stuff I'll rememeber from this trip, this is probably the thing that'll be burned most deeply into my poor, flinching conciousness.

Tomorrow we’re off for Kansas City436 miles up the road.  I’m hoping for another good day.

 

The night before…

Here we go. Tomorrow we are headed west, spending the night in Paducah, Kentucky, a river town from what I hear but I couldn’t say for sure as I’ve not been there yet. The American Quilt Museum or something like that is there, but we’ll be blowing through headed for Kansas City for the next night’s rest. I suspect that in Paducah we will find time to eat a little (there’s supposed to be some hot little Mexican place there recommended highly by the Physician’s Assistant I conferred with when I had the shingles—he says it is “probably the best food he['s] ever [ate]). I think it’s called Tribeca. There are also a couple of barbecue places there, and I naturally tend to gravitate towards those. There’s also a riverwalk along the banks of the Tennessee River, and we are planning on strolling around a little bit with the kids. The hotel also has a pool, so there’s that.

I still have to finish a few last little packing things, and tomorrow bright and early I’ll load the van and we’ll hit the road after breaking the fast with cold cereal and milk. Hoo boy. As we wheel on down the road I will be drinking a Diet Coke with Lime, one of my current addictions.

 

Licorice Shootout: Black Jack Taffy

Trust me when I say that looks can be deceiving–this here is some pretty good candy.  Each piece looks pretty unpalatable, something between discarded fish parts after cleaning a mess of bream and some bit of a growth that the surgeon snipped off one of your internal organs.  See for yourself:

Black Jack Taffy--not so black, huh?

In the middle of each piece you’ll see a bit of licoricey black, but the preponderance of each piece is sort of a sallow yellow color topped with a streak of sanguine goop.  It looks kind of like a debeaked chicken head.  Yum!

The taste redeems this confection–initially sweetness predominates, but as you consume the licorice flavor grows stronger until at the end you pretty much taste licorice albeit a sweet strain.  The flavoring is artificial, but there’s some good chemicals in here.

Sonny Boy said, “They taste kind of weird at first, but their aftertaste tastes really good.  They’re good, aren’t they?”

Baby Girl gave a silent thumbs up of approval, probably thankful that these were not Snaps.

The taffy is smooth and soft, none of that out-of-date crap from down in Morehead City that you had to gnaw on for a bit until it softened up. Of course, back in the day before my palate became so refined, I’d blow through a bag of that taffy like a bob-tailed Manx in an Electrolux showroom.  Whatever that means.  I’m thinking it’s pretty fast.

"Holy Doody! Is that an Electrolux?! Or is that Meryl Streep singing?!1"

Note:  even after eating a piece of Black Jack Taffy (which is a pretty strong flavored goody) I could still get that incensey taste from the Snaps that I had eaten earlier.  I noted that it was “like that subtly unpleasant taste of illness you get when you are falling ill.”

 

Licorice Shootout: Snaps Classic Chewy Candy

Snaps your teeths.

Next up in the Licorice Shootout are Snaps Classic Chewy Candy, a confection that is at this point bringing up the rear in terms of licoricey goodness.  Here at Chez Lima, afficianados of all things licorice (thus far), this entry recieved enthusastic thumbs down. Here are the principal reasons:

Texture:  well, not really chewy.  All of us have had to grind away with serious lifelike grinding molar action to get the Snaps into anything other than their original form, a form that bears uncanny resemblance to the plastic insulation on the outside of wire.

Upon partaking, young Sonny Boy quipped, “I wouldn’t really call them chewy candy.  More like ‘impossible to chew into pieces candy.’”  Baby Girl opined, “I can’t even eat them.”  Mind you, she got some pretty effective teeths as she’s still at the age where many of her teeth are very small and pointy.  It must be that she lacks the massive hyena-like jaw strength required to eat these things.  In my Mr. Fancy sommeliery comments on the back of an envelope, I observed that a Snap “doesn’t chew so much as break into rubber shards.”  I also noted that eating the candy makes my mouth feel like it is full of “foamy dye.”

Have you ever seen those blown-out tire retreads beside the interstate?  If you haven’t, it may be because they’ve already been collected and sent to the Snaps Candy Factory.

Taste:  Some tasters have called the taste of the pink ones “soapy,” but I think they taste like incense smells, and what’s worse, the taste offers up some faint aromatic quality, so subsequent exhalations invoke the badness once again.  The incense I’m alluding to might be sandalwood or some other head-shoppy variation of hippie scent.  I’m not talking licorice incense here.

Final Damning Evidence:  The kids and I got my wife to try some as she was absent at our first tasting.  We all cackled with impish glee at her displeasure.  Later on I duped her into trying one of the soapy/incensey pink ones, and she spat it right into the trash can!

Having eaten one, Baby Girl voluntarily threw her other one into the trash as well.  My kids consider dessert as one of the greatest possible things ever, a vice that ranks right up there with putting underpants on their heads, watching television commercials, or drinking beer through straws.  Well, actually, not the beer one, but dessert is a very important part of their culinary existences.  And Baby Girl chucked it right into the trash.

One observation that might give Snaps some redemption in the big old Licorice hierarchy:  I’ll bet that you could get some serious velocity and knockdown power by shooting Snaps out of a Wrist Rocket.  And maybe, just maybe, because they are hollow in the middle, they might make an unsettling whistling noise as they flew by, fast as a bullet!

Fare thee well, gentle Snaps.  We shan’t see you again.