Road Trip Days 4 & 5

Nashville to Rochester


Monday morning, Annie and I left our hotel at around 7:30 am, it was the last leg of our cross country excursion and we had 11 hours to drive. Because we were only going to be in Nashville over night we didn't have very much time to explore the city like we wanted. Instead, we decided to drive past the Grand Ole Opry on the way out of town and save the rest of the city for another time.

After weaving in and out of small, maze like roads that tangle around the Opryland hotel,we finally saw a sign that said "Grand Ole Opry". The historic theater was nestled beneath several large trees, right next to a "Dave and Buster's" restaurant.

It was a little disheartening to see such a landmark being exploited, but by now I have come to expect it. If there are going to be tourists there, you should also expect a wax museum, a Hard Rock Cafe and a Ripley's believe it or Not. So we took our snapshots from the car and moved on.

Only a few hours down the road was the city of Louisville, KY (pronounced Loo-UH-vuhl). Not trying to postpone our arrival time in Buffalo, we decided to visit only one spot and then move on. The Kentucky Derby had only been 2 days earlier so we decided to stop by Churchill Downs and see what all of the fuss was about. The stadium is huge, much larger than any of our photographs could do justice. We pulled up to the front, next to the newly unveiled statue of Barbaro and grabbed our cameras. This time we actually got out of the car.

After taking our pictures we hopped back in the car, me in the drivers seat and began a nine hour drive to Buffalo, only stopping for gas and to grab some fast food in Cincinnati.

The drive was really beautiful, especially in northern Kentucky. Rolling hills trimmed with tall green trees and a handful of barns scattered randomly throughout. It was probably the best scenery we had seen all week and my 8 hour shift behind the steering wheel went much quicker than I had anticipated. In fact, I would have driven the entire 9 hours, but Annie insisted that she drove the last hour into Buffalo.

We arrived at Annie's sister's house around 8:30 that night. She made us a delicious dinner with Chiavetta's chicken and corn on the cob. After catching up for a couple hours, we went to bed.

I still had an hour to drive to Rochester so we planned on going out to breakfast the next morning and then parting ways. Me to Rochester and Annie back to California that night. For breakfast, Annie's sister Kari took us to a restaurant called "The Pancake House". I ordered something off of the menu called a Dutch baby, which I was told was like a German pancake. When it finally came out I didn't recognized what I ordered and it definitely didn't look like the German pancakes that I had at IHOP.

It was a large concave crater of egg and bread filled with butter, confectioner's sugar, lemon juice and fresh strawberries and covered in a thick strawberry syrup. There is no way that you could go wrong with a combination like that, it was awesome.

After breakfast, Annie emptied a few of her things from my car and I set out to Rochester. The drive was a little less than an hour to my apartment and it felt like half that. I unpacked all of the stuff from my car and only had a few minutes to rest before I had to get ready for work.

Annie and I had a lot of fun driving across the country together. We knew that another opportunity like this may never present itself, so we should jump on it and see as much of the country as we can. I'm really glad that we did. There is so much to see in this country that is constantly overlooked and it is waste of our time on this earth if we don't take every opportunity to see it.

Brett

Road Trip Day 3

Little Rock to Nashville


Today was the third day of our road trip and we planned to a shorter drive so that we could spend more time visiting the spots we wanted to see. Memphis was only two hours from Little Rock, so we took our time leaving the hotel and arrived in Memphis around 2 o' clock in the after noon.

The first stop on our agenda was a visit to Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley. Neither Annie or myself were even a little bit tempted to spend the $30 per person to actually go inside, so we just stood at the gate with the other cheapskates and took pictures of Elvis' lawn.


And what visit to Graceland would be complete without the mandatory picture by the gate?

I know that there are some Elvis fans out there that are probably saving every penny so that they can make their pilgrimage to the final resting place of the King, so in that respect I feel like we did a slight injustice to the memory of Elvis Presley by not going inside. But $60 is a lot of money for a couple of people that simply don't care.

However, our next stop was something that Annie and I were more than willing to spend time and money on. We visited the Lorraine Motel where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.

In 1991, a few years after the Lorraine was foreclosed in, the motel was converted into the National Civil Rights Museum. The museum was very impressive and extremely thorough, giving a full account of the struggle to equality of the African American people over the past 150 years. There were recreations of the bus that Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of, the prison cell that MLK Jr was kept in and story after story that expressed their hardships. Annie and I were glad to have gone and we highly recommend it to anyone traveling through Memphis. Outside of the museum they have maintained the original appearance of the motel from the day the shooting took place, adorned with a wreath on the balcony that has been there for over 40 years.





We ventured to a part of Memphis known as Beale Street,which evidently refers the name of the street that it is located on. It's basically a really big bar with a lot of drunk people walking around drinking beer out of giant buckets (not kidding). But after about 10 minutes of walking around in the rain, Annie and I noticed something really odd: everyone was wearing rain ponchos and galoshes. I am not exaggerating either, literally everyone was dressed this way. To prove that I am not exaggerating I took a picture. How many pairs of galoshes can you count?

Its like everyone planned it, but then purposefully forgot to tell us so that we would look stupid.

For dinner we decided to try this place in downtown Memphis called Rendezvous that came highly recommended by a television program. It boasted original, Memphis style barbecue served out of the same alley since 1948. Something else it boasted? Not being open on Sundays! Oh well, the sign made it look delicious though....


Instead of Rendezvous, we decided to go with our back up eatery called the Cozy Corner which was only a few miles away, which ended up being closed as well. So this time we decided to call #3 on our list instead of driving there. Turns out they are closed on Sundays too! But lucky for us, our 4th option was a delicious Memphis style rib joint run by a bunch of heathens that keep their restaurant open on Sunday. It was called Leonard's and has been open since the 1920's. The sign depicted a lovable cartoon pig named Mr. Brown who is dressed up in a top hat and coat and spinning a neon flashing cane (I guess that's what you are supposed to do when you go "to town").


We ate some very delicious pulled pork shoulder and smoked ribs. Just the kind of meal that we needed to tide us over for our 3 hour drive to Nashville in the pouring rain.

We arrived in Nashville a little after 9pm and after we settled into our hotel, we went back out. Annie was craving a hot fudge sundae so we found a little ice cream shop in downtown Nashville and ate our dessert while it rained out on the streets. Shortly after, we returned to our hotel and called it a night.

I really had fun today and I'm glad that we were able to slow it down a little bit and enjoy some of the great parts of the country.

Brett

Road Trip Day 2

Albuquerque to Little Rock

Well, today was our big driving day. We had the greatest distance to travel and more stops to make than any other day that we have planned. Driving to Little Rock, AR from Albuquerque, NM takes a little less than 13 hours, which would be tolerable if you left early, stopped as little as possible and arrived at reasonably early hour. None of those things applied, we left after breakfast made many stops and didn't get into our room until around 2am. But after I spent the good half of the day pushing us along our schedule, I decided to relax and enjoy our road trip.

We began our day stopping at a couple of old Route 66 towns (the kind of towns that didn't get mentioned in the song). A few hours past Albuquerque was the little town of Santa Rosa, which used to boast over 4,000 hotel rooms, all brilliantly advertised in neon lights. These days Santa Rosa is the type of town where people leave their cars running while they run into the pharmacy or say a cheerful good morning to a couple of tourists taking pictures of their decaying city.

After Santa Rosa we visited Glenrio, NM (or maybe it was in Texas) that was located right on the border of the state. This town was less of a town and more an aged relic of American history. We saw buildings that used to be a gas station, post office and general store, that are now possible hideouts for crazy drifters waiting to stab unsuspecting tourists (obviously I wasn't very comfortable here and I wouldn't let Annie get very close to the buildings). But we stopped took some photos and quickly went along our way.

Stop number three was the famous Cadillac Ranch. You may not know it by name, but you have most certainly seen images or heard references to it in movies or in TV. It is an art installation piece created by a collaboration of artists in 1974. Essentially, its a bunch of cars buried in the middle of a cow pasture. Over time it has had so many layers of graffiti that the spray paint has become a part of the art itself.




Today's lunch stop came courtesy not of Guy Fieri, but from the Travel channel show "Man v. Food" where the host travels to restaurants taking food challenges. The first episode we saw featured a stop at the "Big Texan Steakhouse" in Amarillo, where they boast a "free 72 oz steak". The steak, however is only free if you can eat it, along with a baked potato and salad in under an hour, otherwise you pay $72 for the meal.This place is as big of a tourist trap as any place in the world, but we enjoyed our humble 8oz steaks and the old west atmosphere.



About 30 miles outside of Amarillo is the largest cross in the western hemisphere in Groom, Texas. I don't know what to say about it except that it was really big.


After Groom, we stopped at a random exit to fill up our gas tank and stumbled upon a lesser known attraction that we remember seeing on a website a few months ago. We never looked up where to find it or even knew which state it was in, but there it was right off the exit that we had taken to top off our tank before we drove to Oklahoma City. The attraction I am referring to is called "Bug Ranch", a poorly executed copy of Cadillac Ranch featuring VW bugs. Needless to say, we were very happy to see it.



We pushed through the endless waste land of northern Texas to get to Oklahoma City before dark. We really wanted to see the Oklahoma City Bombing memorial and we knew that as soon as the sun went down we wouldn't get very many good pictures.

The monument was amazing and very well created. Where the building once stood they put a plot of grass with a series of chairs symbolizing all of the victims of the attack.


Across from the chairs was a large Elm tree known as the "Survivor Tree". It was planted in the original parking lot and survived two buildings collapsing. We know this tree from its appearance in the movie "Elizabethtown".

The OKC bombing memorial was a really beautiful monument and although we were really behind schedule, we were very glad that we stopped.

The day seemed to drag on forever and the final 4 hour stretch from Oklahoma City to Little Rock seemed extra long. The roads were wet, dark and crowded with aggressive truck drivers that wove in and out of gaps seemingly too small for their large trailers. We arrived at our hotel a little after 1:30am and I have never been so anxious to jump into bed.

Day 3 is our relaxed day. We only have 5 hours of driving between Little Rock and Nashville, with a stop to Memphis and Graceland.

Brett

Road Trip Day 1

Rancho Cucamonga to Albuquerque

Today was our first leg of our four day road trip. We decided to let Stanley have a vacation as well, so we took him to a Pet Bed & Breakfast where he will stay until Wednesday afternoon. I know it sounds crazy to some people to spend that type of money on a pet, but we want him to be taken care of while we are gone and this just felt right.

After we dropped off Stanley we began our 10 hour drive to Albuquerque, New Mexico. We drove on I-40, which parallels the original Route 66 all the way until Oklahoma. A lot of the old road side attractions have been closed since the road's hay day, but the old abandoned buildings dot the desert giving us a break from the monotony of the desert. I snapped a quick picture of this odd looking souvenir shop as we drove past at 85 miles per hour.
It's essentially a geodesic dome with a mohawk, but I'm assuming that it has some meaning to the culture of the local Indian tribe, because we saw several more like it near by. Most of the buildings were not kept up like this one. There were countless ghost colonies of decaying Route 66 attractions, hotels and gift shops, each one stirring up feelings of nostalgia for memories I never had. It is easy to witness the devastation that was caused when I-40 replaced the meandering Route 66 with a straight and efficient Highway, bypassing all of the family owned shops, restaurants and hotels that made the road so popular.

Before we left we made a list of restaurants featured on the Food Network show "Diners, Drive Ins & Dives" that we could visit along the way. So we made a stop in Flagstaff, AZ to eat an early dinner at "Salsa Brava", a Mexican restaurant that prides itself in making all of their food from scratch.




The food was awesome, even though I was a little bit unsure about how smart it was to eat a huge plate of Mexican food before a long stint in the car. But everything proved to be okay. The food was delicious and I gave a proverbial high five to Guy Fieri for recommending such a delicious Mexican diner, drive in and/or dive.

Flagstaff was a little more than half way, so after we topped off our gas tank we set off to finish our day long drive to Albuquerque. We made the time pass by watching movies in the car, starting with season one of "Flight of the Conchords", then the "Best of Will Ferrell: Vol. 1". It really did make the four hour drive seem bearable, and I couldn't help but think what the pioneers did with out portable DVD players (but where would they charge them if they don't have a car cigarette lighter to plug it into?).

Finally, the glow of Albuquerque began to create a silhouette of the desert mountains around us. We arrived at the Hyatt Place Hotel a little after 10:30pm and I don't think I could have lasted another minute in the car. Our hotel room was surprisingly nice, and exactly what a couple of weary travelers need to rest their atrophied minds and bodies.



So now, at the end of our first day on the road my mind is beginning to feel hazy with sleep after looking at the picture I posted above. Tomorrow we are driving to Little Rock, AR and stopping in Amarillo, TX and Oklahoma City. It's a long drive and I'm going to need a good night sleep on a comfortable bed in order to make the entire distance without falling asleep.

Good Night and Thanks for Reading,
Brett