Road Trip Day 13: Flatulence in Paradise

We hit our first bump in the road trip yesterday: my son Alex came down with a head-ache, a stomach-ache, some body-aches and a fever . . . but Alta, Wyoming is an especially scenic place to convalesce (I can't stress this enough, The Grand Targhee Lodge is literally paradise in the summer: great hiking, cheap rates, laid back vibe, incredible weather, etc. etc. . . . but I'm sure this is true for just about any ski resort in the Rockies in the off-season, long ago, my wife and I had similar experiences at Breckenridge and Beaver Creek in Colorado); anyway, my wife was nice enough to drive Alex down to Driggs, Idaho so Alex could get some meds (it probably wasn't just kindness, my wife knows that I'm not assertive enough with doctors and she wanted to be certain that Alex got some meds); this bump in the road trip actually afforded us a break in the routine, which was kind of nice (despite Alex's pestilent flatulence, which had the remarkable ability to completely overpower the paradisiacally crisp and dry mountain air) because Ian and Catherine got to take the chairlift to the top of Fred's Mountain and take a hike with a naturalist (great photos on Captions of Cat) while Alex slept and I read about Yellowstone Park, and then Alex, Ian, and I watched the Argentina/Netherlands game while Cat took the lift up the mountain again and hiked the Bannock Trail, a long meandering trail down the spine of Fred's Mountain, which she called "the most beautiful hike of her life" and this convinced me that I should go up there and hike down as well -- and I had plenty of pent up energy from watching the game (which went to anxiety inducing PK's . . . go Argentina! . . . I chose them to win it all in our family soccer pool) but I decided that instead of taking the chairlift up, I would hike to the top of the mountain-- and this was partly because I had a lot of energy and partly because I was too cheap to buy a lift ticket and partly because I was too scared to use my wife's lift ticket even though my wife said there was no way the "granola guy" working the lift was going to deny me . . . but I was too tired to think on my feet if there was a confrontation-- even though my wife provided me an answer as to what to say if the granola guy with the scanner said anything-- plus, I wanted to conquer the mountain without the aid of a funicular, and so up I went, and within moments, I was lost, but a friendly employee using a backhoe to build a banked downhill mountain bike turn showed me the fastest way to the top, which was an insanely steep service road-- but despite the lack of oxygen, I made it up-- and at the top, which is nearly 10,000 feet, the air was fresh and clean, without a trace of my son's noxious viral gas, and you could see all the Tetons (from the backside! if you know what tetons means in French, then you'll find that especially dirty) and there were snow banks on the mountains and majestic pine trees and birds and butterflies and marmots and prairie dogs, and a 360 panorama of the Targhee National Forest in the valley below, but by the time I got back down to the bottom, every part of my body hurt, and I could barely walk up a flight of stairs . . . but Alex was feeling much better, and this wasn't the kid of hike you could take the kids on, way too long and dangerous, so perhaps his sickness was somethign of a blessing for both Cat and I, who have done a lot of family time in the last week and a half . . . and I'm sorry, but I don't have a resolution to this sentence . . . I don't know if Alex is completely over his illness, and I don't know if I'm going to wake up tomorrow and be completely incapacitated from hiking nearly seven miles at altitude in a little over two hours (that's right, I'm the master of the humblebrag) but like it or not, I will keep you posted.

Road Trip Day 12: We Drive Far Too Far

We took off from Hot Springs, South Dakota at 5 AM yesterday in order to cross Wyoming, swing around the Grand Tetons, cut through a sliver of Idaho, and then zip back into Wyoming on the far side of the Teton range . . . all this to reach our final destination-- The Grand Targhee Lodge-- before kickoff of the Brazil/Germany game . . . but it took us a little longer than expected and so we arrived thirty minutes into the first half, and thought the 5-0 score was a typographical error; the drive took a little over nine hours and now I understand the meaning of Camper Van Beethoven's lyric "no one ever conquered Wyoming from the left or from the right" . . . because we entered Wyoming on the right and finished on the left and we certainly didn't conquer the place, in fact, it nearly conquered us . . . it is such a vast sea of nothingness, of high plains and sharp buttes, exposed rock and sagebrush, pronghorn antelope and cattle, dark hills forever in the distance-- Wyoming is the tenth largest state and only has half a million people (and so-- besides Alaska-- it is the least densely populated state, averaging five people per square mile . . . for comparison, New Jersey is the most densely populated state, with 1189 people per square mile) and while most of the day was a blur of brown land and winding roads, there are a few moments that lodged themselves into my weary brain:

1) at 5:30 AM, Ian ate some of my kippered buffalo jerky-- and liked it-- and so Alex remarked that Ian and the ice cream tasting cowboy from Hot Springs should have switched foodstuff;

2) one of the things John Steinbeck observes about the United States in his book Travels with Charley is that the diction and content of road signs change from state to state; I saw this firsthand in Wyoming . . . there were actually two signs announcing one particular "Roadside Table" and we saw our first "80 mph" speed limit . . . of course, you need to be careful when you're driving that fast, as some areas are "Open Range/ Loose Stock" and others you should be "Bear Aware";

3) the town of Kinnear outdid (undid) Interior, with a population of 44 folks;

4) seeing the Tetons rise out of this vast sea of sagebrush is awesome . . . I think we debated for three hours if the white patches in the distance were snow (they were);

5) when you drink three beers at eight thousand feet, it feels like six (I already learned this with Whitney in Aspen, but I forgot).

Road Trip Day 10 into Day 11: We Learn Too Much

We were barraged with salvos of information from Sunday evening through Monday, probably too much to absorb, so don't quiz me on any of this-- and if you need any visuals, head to Captions of Cat:

1) on our way to dinner at the Firehouse Brewing Company in Rapid City-- highly recommended for both for the food and the beer-- we took an impromptu presidential quiz, as Rapid City has a presidential statue on every street corner; Ian would run ahead and stand on the plaque, blocking the name, and then we would guess which president the statue depicted . . . a number of them were easy: JFK, Taft . . . who was a fatty, John Adams (thanks Paul Giamatti!), Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush . . . and I nailed a number of more difficult ones: Herbert Hoover, Andrew Jackson, and Harry Truman . . . but some were impossible for us: Martin Van Buren,  Chester A. Arthur, and James K. Polk;

2) after a fantastic meal at the Firehouse, we walked through Main Street Square and stumbled upon a theater group setting up an outdoor production of Hamlet-- which was to begin at dusk-- and though we were full of food and beer and tired from a day of hiking, this piqued my curiosity-- were they going to do all four hours of the most famous Shakespearean tragedy on a tiny stage in a South Dakota park? or was this going to be a parody?-- so we stayed to see and it was fantastic: a boiled down, eighty minute version of the play, but all Shakespeare-- just the best bits-- and my kids loved it (I was also giving them a running commentary, using my brother Marc as King Claudius, which was probably very disturbing . . . you come home from school and I'm dead and Uncle Marc is in our house and he says I'm your new dad and then I show up as a ghost and tell you that Uncle Marc murdered me . . . so what would you do? . . . and my son Alex didn't bat an eye, he said "kill him" and then I remembered that The Lion King was a less disturbing parallel to the plot, and used that for reference) and my kids also loved watching the South Dakota delinquent teenagers hanging out in the parking deck just behind the stage, setting off car alarms and smoking cigarettes and acting cool (and Ian also loved sneaking behind the stage to see what character was going to enter next);

3) Monday morning we drove to Wind Cave National Park and I learned, for the seventeenth time, that I don't like cave tours and that if you've seen one cave, you've seen them all-- but my kids loved it and they want to do the four hour "Wild Cave" spelunking expedition once they are old enough (I also learned that some people are really really stupid . . . who brings an 18 month old screaming child on a cave tour? . . . though this wasn't as bad as when Cat and I went through Mammoth Caves in Kentucky and got stuck behind a family with horrible body odor);

 4) we learned that bison really do roam free on the plains of South Dakota;

5) we learned that Hot Springs is the most scenic town in the Black Hills-- all the buildings are made of light red sandstone and some are stately, a warm stream runs through the center of town-- fed by the springs-- and there is a even a waterfall . . . the place has none of the tourist vibe of the towns up near Mount Rushmore (it actually has a sense of decay, which is paradoxical, considering the solid nature of the buildings);

6) my children learned that Evans Plunge is their favorite place on earth-- it is billed as "the world's largest natural warm water indoor swimming pool" and it is quite huge, a giant gravel bottomed pool filled with 87 degree mineral water from the eponymous hot springs of the town . . . and it has some old school water slides-- extremely fast and scary-- and rope swings and rings, and an outdoor pool and water slide as well . . . worth visiting;

7) and though we had learned too much, we had to visit the Mammoth Site, as that's the reason we were in Hot Springs-- so we took another tour, and it was well worth it-- this site rivals Ashfall-- but this time the fossil trap was a slate-ringed waterhole . . . animals would come to snack on the plants that grew year round at the site (because of the hot springs) and then would slide down the slippery slate into the pool of water and drown or die of starvation; the site is sixty seven feet deep, a treasure trove of Pleistocene bones preserved in sandstone like fruit in jello-- mainly mammoths (there are several different species represented, including the gigantic Columbian mammoth, see the photo below) but they also found the remains of the giant short-faced bear, the biggest bear and possible one of the biggest mammalian terrestrial carnivores to ever live on our planet;

8) we learned about Crazy Horse on the way to Wind Cave National Park-- the twenty minute film at the monument nearly made me cry-- carving this mountain is like a great underdog sports movie . . . a far more moving place than Mount Rushmore (in fact, you could fit all four busts at Mount Rushmore in Crazy Horse's head);

9) I learned that nothing looks  sillier than a skinny dude in full cowboy attire-- black Stetson, black pinstriped button down long sleeve shirt, blue jeans, boots-- discerningly tasting an ice cream sample on one of those cute little spoons.

Road Trip Day Ten: We Visit Places With Excellent Names

Yesterday, we drove from Rapid City through Sturgis, and into Spearfish, and then descended into the Spearfish Canyon and hiked the 76 Trail and to Roughlock Falls, and then hooked around and had a burger at Lewie's in the town of Lead and then proceeded to Deadwood (the highlight of which was eating chocolate truffles at The Chubby Chipmunk, a dilapidated whitewashed concrete shack at the edge of town with a full parking lot and a tiny interior, where you can order from a vast array of expensive and very dense chocolate truffles -- they even have a truffle vending machine outside . . . it's $11.75 for four truffles and well worth it) and then we went back to Rapid City, which has a park full of concrete dinosaurs at the top of a mountain in the middle of town, and my kids said this place is more fun that Mount Rushmore because you can't climb on Mount Rushmore but you can climb on the concrete dinosaurs.

Road Trip Day Nine: We Drive (Not So Rapidly) to Rapid City

Yesterday morning, we bid farewell to Interior (population 67) and drove Route 44 to Rapid City (population 67,000) and-- after the prerequisite visit to Mount Rushmore-- we meandered through the Black Hills on the Needles Highway, which is an outrageously scenic and outrageously stomach-churning road-- lots of hairpin curves, tight switchbacks, and one-car-width-stone tunnels-- and just before we entered one of these skinny tunnels, we saw a mountain goat perched on a cliff, so now we know how to tell the difference between a big-horn sheep and a mountain goat (we saw big horn sheep in the Badlands) and it was very very hot again, which was fine, except that all the real men in the region wear cowboy hats, blue jeans and button down shirts with long sleeves-- long sleeves which they never roll up-- so I felt like a tool in my EMS light weight hiking shorts, black baseball hat and Adidas t-shirt; finally, for your amusement, I offer the names of two convenience/fuel establishments we have encountered multiple times in the West:


1) Kum & Go;

2) Loaf 'N Jug.

Road Trip Day Eight: The Badlands Start Treating Us Good

An epic day in the Badlands yesterday, but I will try to keep it terse:

1) I got up early to catch the sunrise over the Badlands, but so did the mosquitoes;

2) we tackled the Notch Trail at 7 AM, when it was cool and cloudy-- and after we ascended the rope and log ladder, edged our way along a cliff, and peered through the windy notch and into the White River Valley, we remarked at how much easier the hike was than the guidebook described it, and how lucky we were that it wasn't so hot . . . and then it started pouring rain, big drop rain-- the kind that hurts-- turning the ash and broken sandstone trail into a treacherous mudslick-- we tried to climb into a cave, but the climb turned out to be more dangerous than the actual trail, and then -- as fast as it came-- the downpour stopped and we made it down without injury (and later in the day we saw several ambulances at the head of this same trail and heard from a fireman at the rodeo that a guy fell from the rope ladder and broke his leg);

3) we found the best food in Interior (and maybe on the planet) at the Cedar Pass Lodge . . . and this could be hyperbole because we had been hiking all morning (and ate dinner at The Wagon Wheel the night before) but the Sunrise Fry Bread-- a piece of Indian fry bread covered with buffalo meat chili, refried beans, two fried eggs, and cheese-- is the best breakfast I have ever eaten in my entire life, and everyone else was very happy with their food as well;

4) we rode the Loop Road through the park, stopping several times to climb surrealistic rock formations-- the Badlands are a paradise for kids, a giant game of king of the hill, but not as fun for parents, who notice the cliffs and rockslides-- and we saw big horn sheep, prairie dogs, and bison;

5) Wall Drug was just as tacky as ever, and we learned that folks in South Dakota call seltzer "soda water" . . . we thought our waitress was mentally challenged and she thought the same of us, until we sorted the whole thing out;

6) my son Ian has been keeping a journal and when he read his description of the Ashfall Fossil Beds, I realized that he described what happened there better than me: "there was a giant volcano and it erupted and the lava didn't touch the animals but they suffocated from ash and the bad air from the volcanic eruption" and he also described the dynamic between my wife and me when we arrived at the Badlands Budget Host: "at the hotel there were fishing hooks in the bed and mommy got mad at dad because he chose this motel."

7) though it was ninety degrees, we went to the rodeo (and when I expressed my worry about the heat and the rodeo to the grizzled waitress at The Wagon Wheel, she agreed that it would be brutal but gave me some advice: "drink a lot of beer" but that didn't help-- and though we were very impressed with the bronco riding and the steer wrestling, we left after an hour and went back to The Badlands Budget Host to enjoy the above ground pool . . . even my wife took a swim).

Road Trip Day Seven: Go West, Young Man (and Keep Going and Going and Going)

Yesterday, we crossed the Missouri River and our trip into the West truly began:

1) Nebraska is a browner, drier, bigger version of Iowa-- bigger farms, bigger spaces, and smaller towns . . . and the gas stations serve "fried gizzards";

2) the Ashfall Fossil Beds is something to see before you die . . . beardogs, barrel bodied rhinos, three toes horses, giant turtles, a barrel bodied rhino embryo in utero, horned rodents, moon rats, saber-toothed deer, etc. etc. . . all frozen in place by the ash of a giant volcano that erupted 12 million years ago: this is the Pompeii of Mammalian Megafauna (I liked it so much there I did the unthinkable . . . I bought a t-shirt);

3) we then drove to Interior, South Dakota-- population 67-- which is literally inside the Badlands and we checked in to The Badlands Budget Host, which my wife described as "the scariest motel I've ever stayed in" and while I admit that it is a bit rustic (Ian found a fishing hook in one of the beds) but the views are spectacular and the A/C worked-- and thank God for it, as we went from a breezy cool day in Nebraska to a broiling lunar moonscape;

4) the Horseshoe Bar looked a bit seedy (everything looked a bit seedy in Interior, but that's because we got such great hotel deals with Hotwire.com in the Midwest-- every place we stayed had an indoor pool in a glassed in atrium overlooking a body of water-- and so the Budget Host's above ground pool didn't have a chance in hell to impress, though my kids didn't care) and so instead we ate an early dinner (screw you, Mountain Time) at the Wagon Wheel Bar and Grill, which was located in "the business district" of Interior-- there was actually a sign-- and The Wagon Wheel was made of colorful corrugated metal; the interior of the place contained a grizzled biker, a grizzled bartender, a grizzled waitress/cook, and a bunch of video poker machines-- and surrounding one of the machines were several generations of a Native American family-- all female-- grandma transfixed by the screen, sipping her third Tecate, grandma's daughter playing on the adjacent machine, while her pre-teen daughter watched the youngest-- a cute little toddler in pink-- as she ate chicken fingers off a napkin on the floor of the bar . . . she was sitting on the floor of the bar, and her napkin was on the floor of the bar . . . the food was edible, but not much more, and that's perfectly fitting for a place called the Badlands.

Road Trip Day Six: Des Moines is the Capital of Iowa

Bill Bryson begins his book The Lost Continent with an opening worthy of Herman Melville: "I come from Des Moines . . . somebody has to" and then he pokes good-natured fun at the place, calling it "hypnotic" and boring and all the other things that people usually say about their hometown, but after driving for 13, 978 miles, visiting thirty eight of our fifty states, and cracking innumerable jokes along the way, Bryson finds new appreciation for Iowa's capital city; coincidentally The Lost Continent is the first book I finished on our road trip, and I finished it the day before we headed into Des Moines-- so I was looking forward to seeing the birth place of America's funniest expatriate travel writer, and the city did not disappoint, it is a charming place, amidst fertile, green, rolling hills (Iowa is NOT flat, though my father told my kids this repeatedly before we left) with a nice little zoo and a cool sculpture garden, beautiful botanical gardens and hip restaurants (we ate lunch at great little bar called El Bait Shop) and most importantly (after Chicago and New Brunswick) the driving is easy and the parking is plentiful . . . I really can't stress this enough, the city is on a grid and every road is three lanes wide (most of them one way) and wherever you want to go, there's a parking spot right in front of your destination-- there's even parking on the bridges!-- and there is no traffic to deter you from pulling in to your spot: a most excellent place, in some parallel life I'd like to settle there.

Road Trip Day Five: Megan Inadvertently Uses Zeugma

As we drove through the endless farmland between Chicago and Altoona, I worried that the USMNT would be blown out by Belgium and I also worried that we wouldn't be able to find a fun place to watch the blow-out-- but we were lucky enough on both counts; Jethro's BBQ was walking distance from our hotel, and-- after I explained just how far we had driven-- our extremely friendly waitress (Megan) not only recommended the beef brisket but also that I "get trashed" and I took her up on both accounts (she also drew us a lovely map to the local WalMart on a napkin) and though the USMNT lost the game, and though they could have gotten blown out-- they didn't-- and this was mainly because of NBTHS alumnus Tim Howard, who did my hometown proud, so no complaints about our first day in Iowa (aside from the surfeit of corn and the wind . . . but I think that comes with the territory).

Road Trip Day Four . . . I Begrudgingly Adjust to Central Time

Diligent readers are familiar with my rants about Daylight Savings Time, but this time I have nothing to complain about, as I've inflicted Central Time upon myself . . . so this sentence is going to be a little logy (can a sentence be logy? or just the author of it?) as I woke up at 4:30 AM Monday morning, and after reading some Bill Bryson (The Lost Continent) for inspiration, I did my favorite early morning thing to do at a hotel-- go to the  hotel fitness center and give whatever odd workout devices they have a perfunctory try and then swim some laps in an empty pool-- and though I got an early start, I still had a great time in Chicago; the Shedd Aquarium is awe-inspiring-- even better than the one in Camden-- and the Art Institute is equal to the Met (I saw more Magritte paintings in Chicago than I did in Belgium) and the sculptures and fountains and architecture and skyline in Millennium Park are as beautiful (or more so) than they are in Central Park and the "L" train system is equally as complicated, confusing and expensive as the subway in The Big Apple . . . the CTA employee saved us a few bucks on tickets by sending us around the block to Walgreens to purchase some kind of re-loadable card and then she had to use her personal card to scan the kids at a discount . . . absurdity . . . and the gist of it all is this: I don't know why this surprises me so much-- perhaps because we drove across a sea of farmland-- and I should have known better . . . but Chicago is a real city!

Road Trip Day Three . . . We Travel at the Air-Speed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow

Pittsburgh to Chicago is a long and boring haul through Ohio and Indiana, but luckily my son Alex lost his mind at the latter end of the ride, providing some much needed entertainment:

Alex: a coconut is almost a mammal!

Dad: what?

Alex: it has hair, and it gives milk . . . all it needs is to have live young;

Mom: what about a heart and a brain?

Alex: Ian doesn't have a brain, and he's a mammal!

but despite the long haul, the high temperatures, and my epic quest to find parking, we were able to rally and cover a lot of ground in the city-- for all the shortcomings of my children, I will give them this: as long as we keep feeding them, they can walk forever . . . even with the addition of "punishment push-ups," which they are consistently doing for various bad choices; anyway, here are a few highlights and lowlights of Day Three:

1) major surprise . . . when it's hot in Chicago, it's a beach town . . . at the shore of Lake Michigan, the skyscrapers abruptly end and the beaches begin . . . and another surprise . . . there were lots of attractive, scantily clad women roaming about (I had imagined the women of Chicago to be stout and solid . . . female versions of the guys in the SNL "dah Bears" skit) and there were loads of people sailing little boats and partying on yachts;

2) the view from the top of the John Hancock Observatory is astounding, but it must eventually get rather mundane, as the girl who ran the elevator made herself an excellent rubber band ball and was having a good time bouncing it;

3) the view from our hotel is awful, as all the rooms at the Holiday Inn Chicago Mart are on the interior of the building, but this is karma-- as we were upgraded in Pittsburgh and got the best view in the city-- so things needed to even out (and you can see down into the hotel pool, which is mildly entertaining . . . and if you leave the room, you can look down into the lobby, which is very nice . . . the hotel is a donut within a donut, I think);

5) deep dish pizza at Gino's East is good but very filling (and also really expensive and takes quite a while to make) so though the kids loved it, I much prefer Pete and Elda's at the Jersey shore;

5) nutritionally, I had an especially ugly day: Jimmy Dean sausage and egg sandwich for breakfast, two McDonald cheeseburgers for brunch, a chili dog with onions at Portillo's for lunch, and deep dish pizza with sausage, peppers, and onions for dinner . . . but at least I avoided the deep-fried cheeseburger;

6) there was also some serious nutritional disappoint when we found out that Rick Bayless's two Mexican places that we were dying to visit are closed on both Sundays and Mondays . . . our only hope is a quick breakfast on Tuesday before we head to Iowa.

Road Trip Day Two . . . Can I Keep It Short and Sweet?

In order to keep my fans from migrating to my competitor's blog, I am going to summarize our second day in Pittsburgh in as few words as possible . . . I'm going to try my best to be terse and laconic:

1) we visited the Carnegie Science Center, which is quite a bit better than the Liberty Science Center (although I found being inside the submarine extremely claustrophobic);

2) while my wife and kids were watching a show in the Buhl Planetarium, I slipped off to the Jerome Bettis Grille in order to watch the noon Brazil/Chile World Cup game and found myself sitting alone, making strange noises at a giant TV, and drinking copious amounts of beer to mask my embarrassment, because every other person in the bar was in town for the 4 PM Pirates/Mets game, and they were doing their best to look at anything besides the soccer match-- though it was on the majority of the TV sets in the place-- so these people were watching baseball pre-game, or hockey reruns, or even looking at the autographs and memorabilia on the walls . . . they all seemed to be of the same mind, that if their glance happened upon soccer, they would turn communist or something worse . . . but my wife and kids joined me at half-time and an ethnic guy (Asian? Filipino? Colombian? all three?) from Long Island, who was also a soccer coach, stood next to us and we all yelled and rooted like crazy people, as the match was fantastic and went to penalty kicks, but even though they made a special announcement on the PA about the game and actually shut off the classic rock for a bit and played the volume, the baseball fans in the bar still refused to look at the game, they focused on their deep-fried cheeseburgers and got ready to enjoy an afternoon watching America's pastime, not some artistic sport that you play with your feet and head (and you heard me right, the Jerome Bettis Grille specialty is the deep-fried cheeseburger . . . I was tempted to order one until I actually saw the sort of person who eats one . . . 

3) we then hauled it up the hill into the Mexican War Streets -- the best name for a neighborhood ever-- and went on an epic quest in the epic Pittsburgh heat to find The Mattress Factory . . . a contemporary art museum with room sized installation pieces . . . and once again we were going against the grain, walking past a tide of Mets and Pirates fans, none of whom knew the way to this museum . . . but we finally found it and it was weird and eerie and dark and fun and mainly air-conditioned, much more exciting than an afternoon baseball game in 90 degree heat game could ever be;

4) and finally, my wife (and competitor) has banned me from using her pictures, so this is all I have to offer in the way of photography (and so much for keeping it short and sweet, but I'm better with words than with a camera . . . and that's not saying much).

An Original Photo by Dave

Road Trip Day One . . . We Become Honorary Pittsburghers

I'm going to stretch the boundaries of the sentence for these posts (mainly because I'm competing against another, ersatz blog being written by my wife -- Sentences of Cat -- and I want to be the definitive and comprehensive provider for information about this cross country trip) and so I'm going to use a chronological listing format to give you all the stuff you need to know:

1) we made it to Fallingwater without much conflict in the car, mainly because of two podcasts -- Song Exploder  . . . artists take apart songs track by track and explain how they put them together -- and Professor Blastoff . . . which is slightly inappropriate for the kids but hysterically funny;

2) Fallingwater makes miraculous use of steel-reinforced concrete, which I just learned all about in the highly entertaining book Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Man-Made World, and while I could appreciate the aesthetic charms of the place, mainly what kept running through my mind was: this would be an awesome place to have a party! but then I kept imagining drunk people leaning over the low balustrades and falling onto the wet slate below, and I questioned Frank Lloyd Wright's brilliance;

3) Hotwire upgraded us without telling us, and we found ourselves staying in the Pittsburgh Wyndham Grand, with a fantastic view from high above the confluence of the three rivers (the Ohio, the Allegheny, and the oft forgotten Monongohelalhgonelagonorrhea) and so after a surprisingly cheap meal at Pittsburgh's oldest restaurant -- the Original Oyster House-- we were able to watch the sun set into the confluence (and you're not going to get a word like "confluence" over at my competitor's blog;

4) the concierge at the Wyndham asked me where we were coming in from, and when I told him New Jersey, he said, "I've been to Elizabeth . . . they'll murder you twice there before you get out of the car," and I agreed that it was a tough town -- but not quite that bad (we travel there and play soccer, and while they play rather rough and tumble, no one ever gets knifed) and then he said, "I've also been to Camden" and I told him that's a rough town too, but "with a great aquarium" and I didn't bother to explain to him that not all of New Jersey is evocative of Mad Max and that I live in an innocuous Jersey town full of liberals, lesbians, Orthodox Jews, grad students, and a sprinkling of every ethnic group on the planet, and he assured me that Pittsburgh "is like Mr. Rogers" and it did seem to be full of nice old white men like the concierge, but we did meet one black guy, who owned the ice cream parlor we went to . . . the place is called DreamCream and each flavor in the shop represents a charity-- it could be an organization like the Red Cross, or an individual who needs an expensive medical test -- and by purchasing a particular flavor, you support that particular charity . . . so very Mr. Rogers;

5) and while I'm not above trashing my competitor's blog, I will steal one of her pictures.

Soccer Injury

During the USA/Portugal match, all the kids watching the game were sitting on the floor of my living room, and my son Ian didn't jump up quickly enough when the US scored their second goal, and so he got kneed in the side of the face . . . so amidst the jubilation he was curled in a ball, crying, and had to be extricated from the throng of cheering boys . . . and in my usual empathetic fashion I blamed the injury on his slow reaction time to the goal-- not the insane boys that injured him-- and advised him "when you watch soccer you've got to really pay attention because if a goal gets scored people go crazy."

Boats: Could They Cure PTSD?

In Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush, Geoff Dyer summarizes writer Karl Marlantes theory: "in the Second World War people came home slowly, gradually, by boat, as part of a unit" but "in Vietnam, and in Iraq and Afghanistan, the swift return and dispersal of the group was accelerated and increased, something that may well have played a part in the drastic increase of PTSD" . . . and while this reverse acclimatization into the civilian life may be necessary to healthily adjust from wartime to peacetime, it's also possible that WWII guys were just tougher (this was the time of leather football helmets, a time when you could still die of septicemia from a rotten tooth). 

My Grill Communicates With Me In the Only Way It Knows How

I assumed that the very high temperatures on my Ducane grill thermometer were like the zone beyond the 85 mph mark on my mini-van's speedometer-- just for show-- but apparently, if you let enough fat and grease and meat shards pile up on the heat plates and the floor of the grill, and then throw a bunch of burgers on and close the lid, you can start a 700-degree fire inside your grill -- which charcoalizes burgers in mere minutes (and inspired me to finally clean the grill).

Itinerary

I am posting my cross country trip itinerary here so I don't get any statements like this after the trip . . . you should have told me you were going to Nebraska, my uncle owns a circus in Nebraska and you could have performed in it! or You were in Hot Springs, South Dakota last week . . . I was in Hot Springs, South Dakota last week . . . we could have met for margaritas at my favorite place . . . so here it is, and if you have any information about these places, I'd be happy to hear it: Pittsburgh to Chicago to Sioux City (near Adventureland) to Nebraska (Ashfall Fossil Beds) to the Badlands to the Black Hills (Rapid City and Hot Springs) to the Grand Tetons and finally to Yellowstone (we are staying north of the park in Emigrant, Montana).

Why Did All the Good Stuff Happen a Long Time Ago?

A lot of the supernatural -- werewolves and mermaids and vampires-- and the most fantastic religious miracles -- Jesus walking on water and Moses parting the Red Sea-- can probably be attributed to the fact that no one in ancient times had access to eyeglasses.

Parallel Preparation (Not Really)

If you're a diligent reader of this blog, you may have noticed that I haven't been reviewing many books lately, and that's because I have been reading travel guides and hiking guides and (my favorite) eating guides, in preparation for our cross-country trip, but one writer was able to pull me away from this preparatory research -- the humorous British curmudgeon Geoff Dyer; his new book is called Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush and it is a study in the act of perpetual preparation, because-- as the men on board repeatedly tell him-- the lessons they learn about how to effectively and safely run an aircraft carrier are "written in blood"-- the bad things that can happen on the ship and in the air above the ship are multifaceted and multifarious, and Dyer describes them all (though he doesn't witness anything horrific, but he hears about soldiers being sucked into jet engines and blown overboard and killed by catapulting cables and the variety of ways to crash land, etc. etc.) and the book is both absurdist in its detailed observation and inspirational in how these men lead their lives, and it's great preparation for our cross-country trip, because no matter how claustrophobic it gets in the mini-van and no matter how annoying the kids get, this is NOTHING compared to what men and women have to endure when they are contained for months on an aircraft carrier (which, to Dyer's chagrin, has neither a bar nor a ping-pong table).

Sometimes A Short Walk Can Be a Very Good Time

I warn my composition students not to take to much lined paper at the start of the exam, because the only fun thing that you can do during the course of the examination is walk to the front of the room to get more paper (of course, normal people can sit in one place for an hour and a half straight without taking a short walk, but I know that I need little breaks like that to look forward to).