GTT ’26, With a Small Side of NM

Posted on March 4, 2026 by admin

Never cared much for the term snowbird, with its connotations of getting up every morning to play golf during winter in some arid place, or spending the evenings with members of your cohort in some gated community, maybe drinking but definitely grousing about the state of the world. Still, considering that in the winter of 25/26, I’ve spent two out of the last three months – the hard winter months, up Illinois way – in warmer places, it would be churlish to cast shade on fellow old people who happen to enjoy golf or grousing.

On the other hand, I’m not about to claim snowbird as descriptive for myself. I just happen to be able to take long trips during the cold months (along with my laptop, for work). In December, Florida. In February, Texas.

Back on February 3, I got on a plane and flew to Austin. I flew home from Dallas on March 3. In between, I spent time – and Yuriko joined me for a while – traversing the state of Texas, going so far west at one point that we ended up in New Mexico. By traversing, I mean long drives, in a rental car part of the time, and in my brother Jay’s car as well, a blue Subaru known as the Blubaru.

I drove from Austin east to Houston, mostly on US 290; from Houston to Nacogdoches, mostly on US 59; then to Dallas on various state highways, such as Texas 21 and 19; and from Dallas to San Angelo to Marathon, Texas, on US 67 and on the grandly remote US 385, which will also take you to the desert reaches of the Big Bend.

From Marathon, Texas, across to Carlsbad, NM, our route took us along US 90, then Texas 56, then US 62/180. Later, US 62/180 took us from Carlsbad part way back to Dallas — to Sweetwater, Texas — but mostly we went on the faster but less interesting I-20. Dallas to San Antonio was partly I-35, but also US 281, which takes you around the perma-gridlock that is Austin.

Of all those, the road between Nacogdoches and San Augustine on a day trip, Texas 21 heading east, winding through greenish (for February) rolling hills, was a favorite.

The towns listed above were just the places I spent the night, alone or with Yuriko or with my brothers. In between were such places as Bastrop, these days a day-trip from Austin, with the requisite boutiques and restaurants; Huntsville, home of Sam Houston and memorials to the first president of Texas; San Augustine, rival with Nacogdoches in claiming to be the oldest town in Texas; Stephenville and Ballinger, geographically about as deep in the heart of Texas as you can be; the West Texas art town of Marfa and the way station of Van Horn; a string of oil patch towns such as Hobbs, NM, and Seminole, Lamesa, Snyder, and Sweetwater, back in Texas. Later, traversing north to south and back again, I stopped in Hillsboro and Belton, along the I-35 axis; and Lockhart, which has claimed for itself barbecue capital of the state.

Along the way, oddities were encountered. Otherwise, why drive on smaller roads?

Such as an ice cream shop in Waller, Texas.

Or a highly visible ad for Rockets RV Park in Gaines County, Texas, not far east of the border with New Mexico.

A former Texaco station on an obscure Texas highway (Farm-to-Market 1690).

Had various encounters with the historic El Camino Real, whose various tendrils crossed a large slice of the future state of Texas, once upon a time.

Yuriko and I visited Big Bend National Park, Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns National Park. I saw the National Museum of Funeral History in the city of Houston and the museum devoted to Houston (the man) in Huntsville. Also, Roadside America in Hillsboro, an eccentric collection of American commercial art, complete with a personal tour by the proprietor, and the outdoor art at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, that is, brutalist concrete structures in the brutal desert environment. I became acquainted with the splendid Glenwood Cemetery in Houston and the smaller and more ragged, but no less interesting city cemeteries in Huntsville and Nacogdoches. I stopped and looked at about a dozen county courthouses, of which Texas has many.

We ate a lot of meat along the way. As one does in Texas.

Also, Mexican food.

Eat like that and you’d better do some walking, and I did: various places in Austin and Houston and Dallas, in all three national parks, around downtowns and courthouse squares in a number of small towns, and a handful of local parks.

All that was good, but of course best of all, I had time to visit friends and relatives, of whom there are many in Texas: Tom and Nancy in Austin, Kirk and Lisa in Nacogdoches, another Tom and Steve and Ron and Greg and Judith in San Antonio, to list the friends; both brothers, two out of three nephews and their wives and all four of their children, to list relatives, along with the mother of one nephew’s wife (niece-in-law sounds peculiar, but that fits too). Also, I met for the first time two good friends of Tom’s, and one of Kirk and Lisa’s granddaughters.

I’d set out to do four long drives when I was 64, but this makes five. Guess I’m an overachiever about driving, anyway.

World of Coca-Cola

Posted on January 29, 2026 by admin

Years ago, when we visited the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota, I noted with satisfaction that Monty Python’s Spam Sketch was playing on demand in one of the exhibit rooms. I understand the museum has moved to a different location in Austin since then, but I hope they still play the sketch.

As far as I noticed, there was no clip of One, Two, Three playing at the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta last month. The scene I’d pick is the back-and-forth about Soviet scientists’ efforts to replicate Coca-Cola without its famously secret formula: “Even the Albanians wouldn’t drink it.”

I’d have this clip playing, too.

Or even the jingle scene from The Coca-Cola Kid. Nice jingle.

The World of Coca-Cola shares a plaza with the Georgia Aquarium. Pemberton Plaza, named for the doctor who invented a particularly successful “brain tonic,” back in the days when enterprising doctors and druggists did that sort of thing. Interestingly, the museum doesn’t play up Lt. Col. John Pemberton’s military service for the CSA, or his morphine addiction, which drove him to experiment with a new wonder drug, cocaine, to kick his habit. That didn’t work out, but he did leave a lasting soft drink legacy.

At 300,000 square feet, the museum is expansive, a 1990s design by architectural firm Jerde.

In December, decorations outside and in.

As a museum, the place includes a number of interactive exhibits and activities, starting at the Coca-Cola Theater with a six-minute commercial. I mean, a short history of Coke. You can also see the vault where the secret formula supposedly resides —

— check out various smells associated with the cola-making process, “explore Coca-Cola’s iconic influence on art, music, fashion, sports, and entertainment,” and “engage with interactive displays and AI magic that bring Coca-Cola’s legacy to life in new, unforgettable ways,” the museum explains. You can even, if you register – maybe with some app? – stand in line to have your picture taken with a person in a polar bear suit.

“The Coca-Cola Polar Bear… became truly iconic in 1993 with the launch of the ‘Always Coca-Cola’ campaign. In the famous ‘Northern Lights’ commercial, created by Ken Stewart, animated bears gather to watch the aurora borealis while enjoying Coca-Cola — a scene that brought the Polar Bear to life and captured the hearts of viewers worldwide,” the museum notes.

Does it rise to the level of icon? Somehow the Coca-Cola Polar Bear had made only a faint impression on either of us, so we took a pass on it. Also, there was a line. And it cost extra? Always with the revenue streams. But I did enjoy the more standard sort of museum exhibits on offer at World of Coca-Cola.

A seasonal observation.

Artifacts from long ago.

Ads from long ago.

And from distant places.

I seem to remember a similar political cartoon of featuring the Earth being nursed back to health after the ravages of WWII, but I can’t quite place it.

There were video clips, including of course the “Hilltop” commercial. That, I remember. Many people old enough do too, which naturally gave the final moment of Mad Men its punch.

The museum also featured Coke product cans and bottles of various kinds (but not a collection of caps that I saw), many more than you see in everyday grocery stores. For instance, Sting and Bon Jovi had their own cans at one point, as part of a musician series.

Cans from around the world.

A very crowded room includes soda and water dispensers that allow visitors to sample Coca-Cola products from around the world. We went to town trying the various concoctions, as did a lot of people, and eventually I found my favorite: Bonbon Anglais, a wonderful fruit drink from Madagascar.

The web site Madagasikara tells us: La boisson gazeuse Bonbon Anglais est fabriquée à Madagascar, un pays reconnu pour ses produits naturels et son savoir-faire artisanal. I would expect no less.

The gift shop was crowded, too. I took pics but bought no Coke merch. (I might have bought a postcard, but found none.)

To my way of thinking, the Coca-Cola Co. should pay me – even a little – to advertise its products on my person. Also, while I’m on that particular hobby horse, the World of Coca-Cola shouldn’t charge admission, especially not as much as a standard museum.

I ran the numbers, and World of Coca-Cola admission costs more than twice as much as admission to the Taj Mahal. Sure, Georgia isn’t Uttar Pradesh, but it’s galling that you’re paying at all, just to be marketed to. Obviously Middle America disagrees with me – and Yuriko didn’t mind paying for both of us – so that idea will just have to be a quixotic hobby horse of mine.

The Georgia Aquarium

Posted on January 27, 2026 by admin

Moon jellies are mesmerizing.

I’m always glad to spend some time peering into a tank where the moon jellies drift, but also somehow contract their entire selves to glide along in deep quiet.

We’d come to the Georgia Aquarium, which keeps company in downtown Atlanta with the World of Coca-Cola, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, and a large parking deck on about 20 acres of a plaza known on maps as Pemberton Place. To its south is Baker St. and Centennial Olympic Park; to the north, Ivan Allen Jr. Blvd. and a massive substation behind walls. For just an instant I thought that was Irwin Allen Jr. Blvd., and was disappointed to realize otherwise.

At 11 million gallons – which is apparently how major public aquariums are measured – the Georgia Aquarium is listed on Wiki as the sixth largest in the world and the largest in the United States, and I believe it. The structure is hub-and-spoke, with an enormous, vaulting hall with sizable exhibit spaces radiating from that hall: Tropical Diver, Ocean Voyager, Explorers Cove, Cold Water Quest, Southern Company River Scout, Dolphin Coast, Truist Pier 225 and Aquanaut Adventure.

Five days before Christmas, much of the human population of Atlanta was there, gawking at the sea and land creatures. We did our own gawking.

The invertebrate collection included much more than moon jellies. There were other kinds of jellyfish, too, looking like the sort of thing that if you see on the beach in Australia (or anywhere), you’d better not to touch.

They puff along.

Other invertebrates. Such as the inspiration for Patrick Star.

And of course, fish. Many, many fish.

Including the inspiration for Nemo.

Small creatures can be intriguing or even enchanting, but what really packs ’em in are the likes of whale sharks, the largest fish species know to science, and one of the aquarium’s signature attractions. There’s no shortage of other kinds of sharks as well, it always being Shark Week at the facility: tiger sharks, silvertip sharks, blacktip reef sharks, and great hammerhead sharks.

More from the sea: Manta rays, goliath groupers, green sea turtles, Japanese spider crabs and weedy sea dragons. Freshwater creatures include, but are hardly limited to, Asian small-clawed otters; black spot piranhas — just how many kinds of piranhas are there, anyway? — snapping turtles; banded archerfish; discus fish; and shovelnose sturgeon.

A few birds are on hand, such as spoonbills and ibises. Ones that subsist on fish, in other words.

In case we hadn’t had enough gators in Florida, the aquarium had a few Georgia gators, including a rare albino. I take it Georgia gators were the inspiration for Albert in Pogo.

We saw the dolphin show. My still camera wasn’t the best for capturing the action, and there was a lot of jumping and splashing, but squint and the second shot looks like an impressionist work featuring a line of mid-air dolphins.

A separate show features seals and sea lions, doing seal and sea lion things for fish rewards.

About half as many people crowded into the aquarium would have made for a better experience, but I can’t begrudge the Georgia Aquarium its massive popularity, since it delivers the aquatic goods. Better a crowd than too few people. They’re out seeing real things. Often better, I believe, to see some part of the physical world than an electronic simulacrum.

Hemingway Visits the Key West Aquarium

Posted on January 21, 2026 by admin

Land meets sea in Key West. For encounters with sea creatures, one can hire a boat and some deep-sea fishing gear and make like Hemingway. We went to the Key West Aquarium instead. A sedate sort of place, a legacy of early 20th-century Key West, when tourists started coming in numbers.

I managed to make one of the employees, or volunteers, laugh a bit. A youngish woman, she took our tickets and said that if we wanted to touch any of the sea creatures – there were a few large tanks with rays and the like, touching allowed – use only two fingers.

“So you’ll still have three, right?” I said.

Most of the aquatic life was in smaller tanks. A nice selection, “home to over 250 specimens of fish, sharks and four of the five species of sea turtles that inhabit the waters of the Florida Keys,” the Aquarium web site says. Also, the place is a more manageable size. Not a big-deal world-class mega-aquarium that takes all day to visit. Not that those can’t be impressive. But we had a good hour as childfree adults at Key West Aquarium, and that was about the right length for a visit.

Besides fish, there are fishermen. Depression-era murals of fishermen, that is.

What a pleasant surprise. By the Civil Works Administration, a short-lived predecessor to the WPA. Not the originals, however, which were by an artist named Alfred Crimi (d. 1994). The Living New Deal says they’re more recent replicas.

Come to think of it, Hemingway would have known about the aquarium. Key West isn’t that big a place, and the attraction would have been fairly new when he and Pauline lived mere blocks away. Wonder whether he ever went there.

Of course, we’re used to thinking of the youngish Earnest as a hard drinking, hard fishing sort of guy. Notions that, I believe, Hemingway carefully cultivated. Not only did he create memorable characters for his books, he did for himself as well.

On a whim, I turned to an AI writer available on line, and fed it the following prompt:

Write an account of visiting the Key West Aquarium, in the style of Earnest Hemingway. Three paragraphs is sufficient.

All of 15 seconds later, the machine gave me this.

The aquarium sat low and white against the glare, and the heat lay on the street like a weight. Inside, the air was cooler and smelled of salt and old wood. The tanks were clean and plain, and the fish moved with the calm certainty of things that belong where they are. A tarpon held itself still in the water, strong and watchful, and its eye followed me as if it knew I was only passing through.

I stood by the open pool where they fed the fish, and the water broke suddenly with life. The fish came hard and fast, flashing silver and green, their bodies cutting the surface and falling back again. It was violent in a small way and honest. The men who worked there spoke little, and when they did it was direct, as if there were no reason to waste words on what could be seen.

When I stepped back outside, the sun struck again and the sea wind came down the street. The aquarium stayed behind me, quiet and contained, holding its ordered slice of the ocean. I thought of how the fish swam without doubt, and how good it must be to live so close to what sustains you. Then I walked on, feeling the heat, and the day continued.

I was expecting something from a bad Hemingway writing contest, but no. This is pretty good. Better than that, actually. A little wow moment for me, and the day continued.

The Harry S. Truman Little White House

Posted on January 14, 2026 by admin

Nightmarish human faces weren’t invented by demented AI, but have long been with us. Case in point.

There’s Harry Truman in there somewhere. This particular wax dummy watches patrons in the small gift shop at the Harry S. Truman Little White House, which we toured on our second day in Key West.

The property belongs to the state of Florida these days, but of course was once a federal facility. Specifically, used by the Navy as officers’ quarters for the base at Key West. Truman took a cotton to the island early in his presidency, and visited often, and this is where the Navy put him up. He came to relax and play cards and fish and drink, naturally, but also to be president somewhere besides Washington in winter, since by the 1940s communication tech could facilitate such a thing.

The museum has been restored to its appearance in the late 1940s, and damned if it isn’t like walking into my grandparents’ time, entering an ordinary sort of American house of the period. The president might have stayed there, but Harry and Bess weren’t the sorts who went in for the latest expensive styles, but rather the sort of things available at a department store or via mail order: couches with some color but not too much, wooden coffee and end tables, mid-century lamps, etc.

Except, that is, for the handsome custom-make card table. That wasn’t available from Montgomery Ward.

“The poker table was a gift to Truman in 1949 by three civilian contractors working in the U.S. Naval Station cabinet shop,” says Wood Shop News. “The table is a marvel of craftsmanship and one of the most popular pieces at the Key West facility. Measuring 58” in diameter and 28” high, according to Little White House executive director Bob Wolz, it is based on a poker table that was used on the U.S.S. Williamsburg presidential yacht. The piece is made of mahogany with built-in chip holders and ashtrays crafted from recycled brass shell casings. A solid tabletop can be used to cover the poker table to turn into a dining space.”

The limo parked on the grounds of the Little White House wasn’t standard mid-America either.

A nearby sign says that it is a 1950 Lincoln Cosmopolitan Presidential Limousine. One of nine that the Truman administration used, since in those days presidential vehicles weren’t transported by air, as they are now, so the government had them stationed in various parts of the country, ready to use.

The car is a museum piece, but no mere museum piece, since I understand that the current owner, the Key West Harry S. Truman Foundation, rents it under specific conditions. Namely, you pay some large fee, and are driven around Key West for a while. I learned this when we saw an elderly couple get in the back seat, followed by a uniformed driver, and off they went.

One more thing about the Little White House: the grounds are a small arboretum.

Flora includes well-known varieties, such as avocado, coconut, date palm, mahogany and mango, plus less-than-household names, such as Fiji fan palm, soapberry tree, and my own favorite name, gumbo limbo, whose “wood, though soft, was used in the past to carve carousel horses,” the museum tells us.

Earnest Hemingway House, Key West

Posted on January 13, 2026 by admin

“How many of you came because you’ve read some of his books?” our guide at the Earnest Hemingway House in Key West asked our small group. We’d paid our entrance fee, waited outside the house for a few minutes, then started on the tour. I was in that group. Most of his books, in my case.

“OK, some of you. How about because someone else dragged you here?”

A few more hands went up. I don’t think he was taking a survey, exactly, just kicking off the tour in an interesting way.

“What about to see the cats?” Hands went up. Some laughter.

Yuriko came for the cats, mostly, though she told me Hemingway is a writer than isn’t hard to read in the original English. We’d come to Hemingway House after our Duval Street stroll. It was about as pleasant a day as possible for such a walk. Everything is a short distance in Key West, so we arrived after a short walk.

The house is a block off Duval, on as high a spot as Key West provides, and in the shadow of a lighthouse about a block away. The grounds are lush, the house itself a handsome two-story legacy of one of the 19th-century Key West booms. One Asa Tift, a Key West wrecker, completed the house in 1851.

Tift was one of the more successful wreckers, looks like: a man who led small boats out from Key West to the nearby hazardous reefs when ships foundered there. Wreckers were eager for valuable salvage from these vessels, and if the Hemingway House is any indication, the rough-and-tumble of salvage — and you know the process was dangerous, full of natural hazards, but especially other violence-prone wreckers out for the same prize — nevertheless produced at least few men of means in isolated, pestilential Key West.

Emphasis on pestilential. Just ask Asa Tift, whose sizable family, for whom the house was built, were carried away in that all too common 19th-century way, by communicable disease.

The Hemingways showed up some decades after old man Tift died, acquiring and renovating the property using her family’s money. They did what they did, and these days the house is a museum to their presence.

No one lives there anymore. No hefty, dark-mustachioed man staggers home from Sloppy Joe’s bar good and drunk and flops to bed there, or goes to the upstairs office-studio and bangs out famed literature during sober periods, or argues with his wealthy wife under the sub-tropical shade trees – quarrels whose root seemed to be Hemingway’s roving eye, with a dash of alcoholic irresponsibility added to the mix.

The pool was an addition by his wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, which caused consternation for Earnest. Something about taking the place of his informal boxing ring on the same site, done while the author was out gallivanting somewhere. Terrific writer he might have been, and I certainly admire his talent for gallivanting, but he also seems to have been a touchy bastard.

Tourists and staff come and go, but in our time, only cats live at 1301 Whitehead St., a property enclosed by sturdy brick walls. Said the be the descendants of Hemingway’s son’s six-toe cat, the herd is large. Our guide told us how many, though I can’t remember the exact number now. In the range of dozens, beyond the dreams of even the most thoroughgoing cat ladies.

They are everywhere.

I mean everywhere, except maybe the pool.

My favorite story about the house doesn’t involve cats. The guide didn’t tell it this time, but I heard it before. By the mid-1930s, Hemingway was already a Famous Author, and without even telling him, the local chamber-of-commerce or the like put the house on a pamphlet given to tourists, as one of the local sights. Inevitably, people started showing up at odd and inconvenient hours, or entered expecting a tour. The brick wall all the way around the house is a legacy of that situation.

Ed Leedskalnin, Noted Latvian Eccentric

Posted on January 7, 2026 by admin

Where does eccentricity come to flourish? America, you could argue. Even more specifically, Florida. That might be too much of a generalization, and these might not be the best of times (or the worst) for American eccentricity, but the example I have in mind actually reaches back a century or so: Ed Leedskalnin, immigrant from Latvia who single-handedly built the Coral Castle in Homestead, Florida.

The story goes that his fiancée left him at the altar back in Latvia and that Leedskalnin, born into a family of stonemasons, built the place to remind himself of his lost love once he’d settled in Florida. Since he lived and worked alone, an undergrowth of lore grew around his creation, some stories more ridiculous than others.

Actually, he called it the Rock Gate, and started building it in the 1920s in Florida City, not far away. Considering that some of the oolite limestone structures weigh some tons, one of the amazing parts of the story – just one among many – is that Leedskalnin decided to move them in the late 1930s to their current location on US 1. After that, he added more structures, and the whole thing stands today as a somewhat overpriced tourist attraction, but also a monument to eccentric, determined monomania, the kind that leaves behind a place to gawk at.

I was willing to pay. We took the tour, which is the only way to legally visit inside Coral Castle’s stone walls, just before we left Homestead for the Keys.

“The castle contains many wonders including a sundial, a stone rocking chair, a 500-pound heart-shaped stone table (a ‘Valentine’ for his lost love), and a 9-ton gate made to spin with just a light touch,” Atlas Obsura notes. “Ed was secretive, working on the castle mostly at night, and keeping to a policy of letting no one see his working methods. This led to much speculation that Ledeskalnin used some magical or ancient power to move the giant stones.”

Magical power, eh?

As a more detailed article published by the Skeptics Society points out, Ledeskalnin clearly knew the “principles of levers and fulcra.” I’ll go along with that. If anything, that’s more of an achievement than using magical powers. For all I know about levers and fulcra, it might as well be magic.

And what of Latvia? Our tour group was about 10 people, including a young couple who said they were from Latvia when the guide asked where everyone was from. This answer didn’t surprise him. Apparently they weren’t the first.

Toward the end of the tour, I asked the Latvian man if Ledeskalnin was known in his home country after all these years, and for something so odd (not quite how I phrased it). Oh yes, he said. Maybe not famous, exactly, but people had heard of him (not quite how he phrased it), enough that a steady trickle of Letts come to see his creation while in distant Florida.

Florida ’25

Posted on December 28, 2025 by admin

Decorating for Christmas this year meant a rapid set-up. We spent a fair number of hours on the 23rd making the living room ready for a tree – moving clutter, mostly. On Christmas Eve, I brought the tree in from the garage, and Ann mostly decorated it. Finishing touches, by me, were in progress even on the morning of Christmas Day, but since that moment in the life of our family doesn’t involve an early-morning rush downstairs by children anticipating Santa’s bounty any more, that was doable.

Ann did a fine job of decorating, in the style of our family: fill up the tree with a wide variety of glowing and glinting objects accumulated across the decades.

We got a late start on decorating for Christmas, though when I think about, decorating after the Solstice discourages the sort of front-loading of Christmas that a lot of people complain about, but which they do anyway.

We had a good reason for the late start: a drive to Florida and back, beginning on December 4 and ending on the 22nd. Not just to Florida, but as far as you can go in that state, at least by car, namely to Key West and back. Early to mid-December seemed like a good time to do such a thing, after any traveling people do for Thanksgiving but before the worst of the Christmas-New Year’s rush. A short shoulder season in other words, but a good one, with room rates not quite subject to surge pricing, and crowds thick in some high-volume tourist destinations, but not impossible.

Also, Florida has few mosquitoes this time of year. Not no mosquitoes, as we found out one day in the southern reaches of the peninsula, just a “bearable” number.

Sometime earlier this year, I got the idea that I wanted to take four long drives after turning 64. Four for 64, you could say. Doing so by the end of 2025 wasn’t part of the idea, but that’s how things worked out. The drive to Florida and back, by way of such places as Indianapolis, Louisville, Chattanooga and Atlanta, totaled 3,682 miles. For all four trips since June, the total is about 14,300 miles.

That could be made to sound impressive, but in fact American men my age average more than that every year, about 15,000 miles, at least according to this source, which cites US DOT data. Younger men drive even more annually. Most of that is commuting, however. My commuting mileage by car has been exactly zero this year, and while I drive locally to stores and such, it couldn’t be more than a few thousand miles. So it seems clear that, as an American man, it was my duty to get out and drive.

When we headed south in early December, snow covered the ground all the way past Indianapolis, where we stopped for a few hours at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which is part of a larger campus called Newfields – and better examined in summer, I think. But the museum is a good one, with a solid collection, especially 19th-century American and European works. Such as “Justitia,” a Morris & Co. work from the 1890s.

After overnighting south of Louisville, we diverted from I-65 and took smaller roads through southern Kentucky and into Tennessee to a holler in Jackson County, where we were the guests of dear friends. Tennessee musicians from those parts — some professional, others skilled amateurs — gathered on the the evening of Saturday the 6th, for one of the periodic jams in our friends’ barn, which houses no animals these days, but a small stage and some sound equipment and a fair number of folding chairs. A joyful jam it was. Food was potluck. I like to think we went to a hootenanny.

The road through the holler. By this point, no snow. We were trading cold for warmth. That was one of the goals of the trip. Maybe the main one.

From there it was mostly a straight shot down through Georgia on I-75 to Florida, and eventually US 27 to Orlando by way of non-coastal Florida places like Gainesville, Ocala and Lady Lake, a string of settlement less agricultural and less pastoral now than ever, more like an endless outer suburb. Heavy traffic is an invasive species in this part of Florida, surely as pythons are in damper parts of the state. Not just masses of cars and trucks, either, but also golf carts. We passed close enough to The Villages to see billboards advertising legal representation in the event of golf cart accidents. Carts, I’ve heard, provide transport in great numbers in that sprawl of a settlement.

The drive to and in Florida involved the usual North American mix of large and small roads, smooth and ragged, grid-like and irregular, though Florida cities tended toward the irregular (except for Key West), and as crowded as can be and as empty as can be. Snow lined the way up north, thinning out the further south we went, giving way to brown landscapes and bare trees. Then we came into greenery – evergreens and palms and even deciduous species turning color. We crossed mighty bridges over mighty rivers, small culverts over alligator haunts, and the string of bridges that make up the civil engineering marvel known as the Overseas Highway (US 1). We crossed barely acknowledged borders and signs at the Florida visitor center on I-75 proclaiming The Free State of Florida.

Florida Man was out and about, weaving in and out of high-speed traffic, pushing 100 and pretty sure that physics doesn’t apply to him, though I have to admit that Florida isn’t different from any other state in that way. Traffic stopped cold more than once: for a banged up, upside-down SUV; for a raging RV fire, attended by a half-dozen firemen; for a serious two- or maybe three-car wreck on the other side of a divided highway; for construction, usually without any workers in sight; and once for no reason that we could tell at all.

In Orlando, we spent all December 9 at Universal Epic Universe, a theme park that only opened in May. Ann flew in the day before we went to the park and flew home the day afterward, taking advantage of the low prices that discount airlines offer to high-volume places in a shoulder season, if you take no bags and buy nothing to eat or drink at sky-high prices, literally and figuratively. A small bag of hers had been stowed in our car for the visit.

A theme park is one thing, but I wanted a look at Orlando, at least a sliver of it, the next day. Ann’s flight was fairly late that day, so we were able to spend part of it in posh Winter Park, including a tour boat ride through the town’s small lakes, lush with greenery and expensive houses on their banks, and connected by canals.

A drive that included the stretch of US 41 that passes through the Everglades took us to Homestead, Florida, and the mid-century charms of The Floridian motel. A day in Everglades NP followed, including an airboat tour and a drive to the coast at Florida Bay. The next day, before leaving Homestead for a drive in the rain across the Overseas Highway to Key West and while the sun still shined, we toured the Coral Castle, a one-man construction project using 1,000 tons of oolite to make walls, carvings, stone furniture, and a castle tower.

Key West was a two-day, three-night mid-December ramble on the busy and less busy streets of Old Town, including humans but also chickens, taking in the likes of the Hemingway House, the Little White House, Mallory Square, the San Carlos Institute, the Key West Aquarium, and the Key West Cemetery. Also, tourist shops, boutiques and the building where Pan-Am was founded. We ate and drank, though as our wont, nothing alcoholic. Key West was decked out for the holidays but not over the top. We walked and walked some more. It felt like a couple of pleasant summer days.

From my 2014 visit, I knew that on the back streets near the little-visited cemetery, parking was possible on an otherwise cramped island. So it was. On Margaret Street, within sight of the cemetery.

The return drive took us up the eastern coast of Florida, but avoiding the worst traffic in Miami-Dade by taking Florida’s Turnpike. By December 17, we’d arrived in Orange Park, a large suburb of Jacksonville, for a stay with two other dear friends, former Austinites now in northern Florida. Part of the next day was in and near downtown Jacksonville, one of the larger U.S. cities I’d never visited before (I believe San Jose is now the largest on that list). During our downtown stroll, we encountered the coolest building in Jacksonville and certainly one of the coolest in Florida.

We quit Florida on the 19th, but weren’t quite done with the trip. Yuriko had never been to Atlanta and wanted to go. Though I’d been however many times since 1982, I was happy to oblige, so we spent two nights and a day there, using the day to see the astonishing Georgia Aquarium and the impressive but somewhat overpriced World of Coca-Cola.

The last legs of the trip were long drives: Atlanta to Elizabethtown, Kentucky; and from there to home the next day. I wasn’t about to let them be completely dull drives, so we stopped on the second-to-last day in Chattanooga, to see the conveniently located, blocks-from-the-highway Chattanooga Choo-Choo redevelopment. On the last day of the trip, we stopped in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and walked across the Big Four Bridge, a former RR bridge across the wide Ohio, now serving pedestrians and bicyclists.

Home and then — Christmas, when things slow down for a week or so. Good timing.

Three Missouri Museums Along the Way

Posted on December 4, 2025 by admin

At least a foot of snow covers the ground outside, so it’s good to be inside. Winter has fully returned, but at least the early part, when the holidays are yet to come, and not the post-New Year grind of January or the interminable days of February, the alleged shortest month.

Thanksgiving was low key. I expect that’s actually true for most people, however many anecdotes there are about fractious Thanksgivings. Low key doesn’t get into sitcoms or in real or made-up tales on a Thanksgivingishell subreddit.

Back to posting after Christmas, maybe the first Sunday after. Got a lot to do before then.

One more note about Kansas City in September. Besides the World War I Museum and Memorial, there was one more place I wanted to be during my visit: Arthur Byrant’s, for the barbecue I remembered so fondly from the late 1990s. Good ‘cue has sustained AB long after the pitmaster of that name died in 1982.

I’d go again.

After I left KC, I headed not too far northeast to the Jesse James Birthplace Museum.

The birthplace museum, like the house, isn’t a large place, but it does convey some of the life and times of the famed outlaw, with some good artifacts and reading. Posters, too. I hadn’t realized that Jesse James was a character in the very last Three Stooges theatrical release, The Outlaws is Coming (1965), but there was the poster, along with ones advertising better-known biopics or Jesse James-adjacent movies. Somehow I missed that Stooges picture on TV as an impressionable kid, though I saw the likes of The Three Stooges Meet Hercules.

Jesse used to be buried at the homestead.

But at some point he was moved to Mount Olivet Cemetery in nearby Kearney, Missouri. Jesse receives rocks and flowers and coins from visitors 140+ years after his assassination by the Coward Robert Ford (“coward” capitalized, because the word is welded to his name in popular memory). As for Jesse, not a bad posthumous haul for a train robber.

Just as an example, do the Newton Boys get that kind of attention? No, they do not.

“The Newton boys were a criminal gang composed of brothers Willis, Joe, Jess and Wylie (Doc), who operated mostly in Texas during the 1920s,” says Texas State Historical Association. “Willis ‘Skinny’ Newton robbed over eighty banks and six trains from Texas to Canada with his brothers and other outlaws, including the single biggest train robbery in United States history. By the time they were captured, they may have stolen more money than all other outlaws at that time combined.”

I liked Mount Olivet. Got some stones of yore.

Aunt Duck had to have been a character.

Further east, along U.S. 36 in Hamilton, Missouri, is the two-roomed JC Penney Library and Museum. The town library is in one room, the museum in the other. Most of the Penney artifacts are under glass. A wax JC Penney stands in front of a portrait of the department store mogul.

In Laclede, Missouri, is the Gen. John J. Pershing Boyhood Home State Historic Site. A fine museum about the General of the Armies, including an exhibit on something unknown to me, the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Bicycle Corps — the Iron Riders. The Army tested long-distance bicycling in 1897 as a strategy for troop movement, with the corps riding from Missoula, Montana to St. Louis. Pershing wasn’t involved in that effort, but it did happen during his time in the military. Quite a story. Deserves to be better known.

One the last day of my driving, I didn’t want to stop for much, but I did spend a while in Nauvoo, Illinois.

There’s a LDS temple there now. It wasn’t the last time I came this way, in 1997. I couldn’t go in, of course. For that you’d have to join the club.

The National World War I Memorial and Museum

Posted on December 3, 2025 by admin

As a kid, that is as a kid in the late ’60s and early ’70s, I took an unusual interest in WWI. My grandfather, my mother’s father, had been with U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in France, but it was more than that, since he was gone by the time I could remember, and I only heard bits and pieces about his service from family members who knew him. Some of his gear was still around, such as a bent-up canteen and some binoculars, and a panoramic photo of his regiment, but that was about it.

My interest was more likely sparked by The American Heritage History of World War I, a book we had around the house, along with the Civil War and WWII titles by the same publisher. The WWI volume, a weighty tome lavishly illustrated, had such chapter headings as When the Lights Went Out, Appointment at the Marne, Deadlock, Ordeal of Nations, Crisis in the Allied Camp, Enter the Yanks and Eleventh Hour. I spent quality time with that book.

Just as important, there was a companion record to go with the book: World War I, Historic Music and Voices. I listened to it many times, fascinated by the music and voices from an age that seemed to have nothing to do with the time and place I found myself. That was an illusion of youth. Growing up in the 20th century meant you were in the shadow of that war, know it or not. I’d argue that’s still true. Anyway, I ended up knowing such songs as “Over There,” “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” and even “K-K-K-Katy.” all of which were mostly unknown to my contemporaries.

I’m glad to report that the record is available on line. The narrator, Charles Collingwood, had just the right earnest, commanding voice for the record. It was years before I knew anything else about him – his time covering WWII for radio, especially, but also as a TV journalist for CBS.

Like many boyhood interests, WWI carried over into adulthood, faded but never quite gone. I knew, for instance, of the shameful neglect when it came to memorializing the war in the U.S., especially in Washington, DC. The first time I ever visited the National Mall, in 1982, I noticed a (relatively) small memorial, the District of Columbia War Memorial, off to the side at some distance, forlorn and badly aged, though I understand it was finally renovated in the 2010s. The memorial honors the “residents and citizens” of DC who performed military service in the Great War.

There was nothing else in the nation’s capital to honor anyone else in that war, not until National World War I Memorial was completed last year, and even it isn’t on the National Mall.

I haven’t seen the new DC memorial, though I’m sure it’s a worthwhile effort. Still, for a memorial really worthy of the event, go to Kansas City, Missouri.

The National World War I Museum and Memorial started as a local memorial soon after the war ended. Long enough ago that Vice President Coolidge was at the groundbreaking, as was Gen. Pershing and a number of other Allied military luminaries. Local, perhaps, but with the heft of a national memorial, designed by Harold Van Buren Magonigle, who was known for his memorial work.

Magonigle’s limestone tower soars.

Sphinxes crouch near the shaft, supposedly covering their eyes from the horrors of war.

Naturally the memorial went through a period of neglect, and the museum came later, as the site evolved from a local to a national memorial, finally acknowledged as such by Congress in 2004. I’m glad to report that now the memorial stands renewed, and the museum, built under the memorial, is first rate. Beginning at the entrance: One enters the museum over a glass bridge that crosses a field of 9,000 red poppies, each representing 1,000 combatant deaths during the war.

As usual with any good museum, there is more than you can absorb in one go, organized in two wings: the war before U.S. entry, and after. All together, it holds more than 350,000 items, a collection comparable with the likes of the Imperial War Museum or the Musée de la Grande Guerre du pays de Meaux.

The museum’s scope is wide ranging as well, including not just the U.S. part, but perspectives and memories from people from all of the major participating nations, and some smaller ones. There was even a small display, including a map that explained things well, about the Japanese participation in the war. Japan joined the Allied side early in the game, taking the opportunity to kick the Germans out of China and seize Germany’s scattered possessions in the Pacific. A low cost, high-gain exercise for Japan, unlike the next war in the Pacific.

Artifacts were large and small.

There are only a few life-sized dioramas – there are more to be found at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans – but the WWI museum did a good job of it.

I was particularly taken with the posters. I’d never seen most of them.

The 10 Whiz Bangs, even though there are only nine names listed. Then I realized that, at least symbolically and maybe literally, the 10th man hadn’t made it home, like so many.

Remarkably, you can listen to an article about the Whiz Bangs (in the Whiz Bangs Articles).

After visiting the museum, the thing to do is take the elevator to the top of the memorial, for a modest extra fee. Elevator, then iron circular stairs, actually, for an excellent view of downtown Kansas City.

Hey Hey Hey Hey!

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Museums