This morning we awoke to the Mississippi sunrise. In the hotel parking lot, a swarm of about 30 dragonflies greeted the day with us. Some might think this an omen. I thought it symbolic of the rural environment that is most of Mississippi, but whatever. After filling the cooler with hotel ice, one of the only good things about this hotel, we were Memphis bound. We took a few pics at the Tennessee welcome center (which is hardly worth talking about) and set a course for Graceland. I expected something special, almost transcendant. A legendary memorial, even. Turns out, Graceland is off the side of the road like anything else, such as a gas station or a homeless person. After seeing it from the car, and the 'Heartbreak Hotel' across the street, I thought we should check out Libertyland, an amusement park my family visited when I was just a kid. The Tom-Tom mapped a route, but when we 'reached our destination' there was just an old parking lot. Apparently, Libertyland had been torn down and nobody told Tom-Tom. He really needs to get on the ball because the part of town we ended up in wasn't the part of town we would have voluntarily visited, what with the high risk of drive-by shootings and all. So we left the parking lot behind us and headed through Memphis, where we quickly realized it wasn't Tom-Tom's fault, really. ALL OF MEMPHIS is the part of town we wouldn't have voluntarily visited, what with all the trash and filthiness. On the other side of Memphis is the Mighty Mississippi and the Arkansas line, and we were soon at yet another welcome center. The attendants there seemed rather apathetic about our visit to their state. Or maybe being welcome center attendants wasn't what they dreamed about as innocent young children, and they just liked taking out their dissatisfaction with how their lives had worked out on those unlucky enough to stop by. On the way through Arkansas we saw the Ozarks...which was the most interesting feature of the state.
We reached the 1000 mile mark on our journey while in Arkansas, which was cool. It made me wonder - Why are we always so keen on celebrating numbers divisible by 10, like the 30th birthday or the 100 yard dash? Numbers that end in zero are really uninteresting. Why not celebrate the 1221 mile of the trip, a number that is a palindrome, or the 35th birthday, a number that can be written as the sum of two cubes?
The Oklahoma welcome center was really awesome. I mean, they had a coffee station! Swarm of dragonflies aside, THIS was an omen. There were a lot of neat portraits of Native American life and actual Native American dress adorning the walls. Apparently, Oklahoma was BIG with these guys. The ladies working the desk there were super nice, and even mapped for us a route to the hotels in Oklahoma City. At the Arkansas line, it was hard to get the attendant to even acknowledge our existence, so you can understand our appreciation for this level of personal attention. The picnic tables outside were covered by large concrete teepee structures, and there were about a dozen of them. Very nice attention to detail, we thought, and we knew then Oklahoma was going to be great. And it was.
Once we made it to the OKC (that's what Snoop Dog called Oklahoma City on 'King of the Hill'), we stopped at the bombing memorial first. Without the aid of our trusty Tom-Tom, navigating this city would have been impossible. The city designers were probably those guys who graduated 'thank-the-lordi' from community college. The roads seemingly had no real pattern and didn't really seem to work as team. When we parked outside the memorial, a parking officer rolled over on a segway to check on us. Classy.
The memorial itself is hidden from street view by a black wall three stories high, with a single doorway in the bottom center. Once inside, we saw a field filled with bronze chairs sitting on clear cube bases. Each one has the name of one of the 168 victims of the attack. On the far side of the black entryway is another identical black wall entrance. Between the walls is a rectangular reflecting pool. Each entryway has a time carved into the top. The one we entered has the time 9:01, and the one on the far side has the time 9:03. These walls symbolically frame the time 9:02, capturing the moment of the bomb's detonation, the moment that changed the country, frozen in time. It was like nothing we had ever seen before.
Since we are traveling across the country to lands we often thought completely out of reach, it was decided to eat at as many restaurants featured on The Food Network as possible. Today we chose the Cattleman's Restaurant, where everybody wore cowboy boots and had big, shiny belt buckles. We even saw a guy with spurs, actual spurs, on the heels of his boots. I had a dish called lamb fries. Think fried clams, with cocktail sauce and everything, but instead of clams, it was lamb. On the way back to the hotel, we noticed that Oklahoma City is a very clean city, and it was a real pleasure navigating through it. We will miss it.
No comments:
Post a Comment