Roundtrip USA | By Land, Sea or Air

Nov 13

3

Filed by Morten Rand-Hendriksen under Roundtrip USA:

Easy Living in New Orleans

Driving down the elevated I-10 into New Orleans is a surreal experience. The view of the Superdome awakens memories of CNNs pictures of a flooded city and thousands upon thousands of stranded people. The fact that 80% of this city was under water only 4 years ago is hard to fathom – the city is so vibrant and positive it’s hard to connect it to those horrifying images we all remember.

Anyways, those were the thoughs running through my head as we entered The Big Easy. Those and keeping my eyes peeled as I tried to navigate the insanely tight and mostly one way streets of the French Quarter. We were staying at the Prince Conti (pronounced “cont-eye” in the local dialect) Hotel right on Bourbon Street and arriving it quickly became obvious why most of the hotels down there have mandatory valet parking: There are about 2 parking spots for every 100 cars in the French Quarter (ok, that may be a slight exaggeration but seriously, there are practically no spots anywyere, and we were there in the off season!). Relunctantly we handed off the keys and brought all our stuff up to the stylish and quaint (i.e. tiny) room with cute (i.e. too short) beds. No, I can’t be mean: The hotel was absolutely great (in spite of the beds’ shortcomings) and the front desk staff was both courteous (as in “Mr.” and “Miss”) and very helpful. I would recommend it to anyone visiting New Orleans.

Take a cooking class and learn where to go

Miss Anne spooning out jambalaya

Throughout this trip we really haven’t done much in terms of planning before arriving in a city. For the most part that works just fine and we end up discovering stuff we wouldn’t have otherwise. But had we done some planning ahead of time we would have gotten more out of New Orleans. And here’s why: The last day of our 3 day stay we went to the New Orleans School of Cooking. Leaving we realized we should have gone there first, but that would have required booking well in advance – the place is damn popular, for a reason. New Orleans is famous for the food. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean that the food is necessarily good in all the restaurants – quite the contrary actually. But if you go to the cooking school, run by people who love food almost too much they’ll tell you exactly what restaurants to go to and what to order. After they cook up a great meal that is.

We went to a 10am 2 hour class with chef Anne Leonhard who whipped up a delicious meal consisting of gumbo, jambalaya, bread pudding and pecan pralines, all of which we got to eat at the end of the lesson. Not only was it a great lunch but we left with recipes, satisfied taste buds and lots of history and information on the city and its culutre. You see it turns out Anne used to be a tour guide before she started cooking at the school and being a N’awlins native she is the proverbial bottomless well where information is concerned. And she has a great attitude to boot. At the end of the class she fielded questions on everything from Katrina devestation to ghost stories. Very cool.

Here’s my tip: If you’re going to New Orleans for the first time, book a 10am class at the New Orleans School of Cooking for the first day of your visit. That way you’ll get great local food and historical background right off the bat and you can ask questions about where to go, what to eat and what to see from the knowledgeable staff. It’ll cost you $27 a head but it’s well worth it.

An off-season haven

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear New Orleans? I think it’s fair to assume Mardi Gras, beads and drunken street revelers figures pretty high on the list. Which is too bad, because Bourbon Street is such a miniscule part of what the city has to offer. Speaking for myself I can honestly say out of everything I saw in New Orleans Bourbon Street was not only the least interesting but a place I would stay far far away from if there was a party happening. Even in off-season the night scene is a travesty of human debauchery and over-indulgence with ear splitting music from every bar, barely dressed hookers in most doorways and vendors peddling hard liquor like it was fresh water in a desert town. I can imagine what it must be like during the party season – with the temperature rising to stifling levels and the alcohol consumption nearing lethal dosage. The horror, the horror. But I digress.

My point is this: If you skip Bourbon Street and walk down one of the other streets in the city you’ll find a truly unique and strangely beautiful town stuck in a sort of timeless wonderland between the past and the future. Coming from Europe I’ve seen my share of modernised old cities, but New Orleans is something truly unique. Whereas the old European cities usually upgrade by keeping old facades and changing the interiors, the French Quarter seems to have opted for more of a patchwork approach: Rather than fixing what’s broken or restoring it back to its original state they do the bare minimum of repair leaving the city to slowly take on a fairytale like atmosphere. The paint and mortar is peeling off, the brick is exposed, the walls are sagging and the whole place becomes so full of soul and history it is hard to put into words. You just have to experience it for yourself.

We’d heard horror stories before we came; of people being mugged in broad daylight; of scammers on every street corner; of robbed hotel rooms. We saw none of it. For the most part the city was sparsely populated, bordering on empty, and we walked through the streets late at night with few interactions at all. Some of the lack of people was due to the time of year for sure, and some of it must be blamed on Katrina – after all much of the pre-2005 population is still displaced – but honestly, if you’re not on your knees drunk with your shirt off and 50 beads around your neck I don’t think you’re much of a target, even in a city known for its crime.

History in the making

We went to New Orleans in part to eat real Cajun food. Little did we know that Cajun food is actually a fairly recent invention only introduced in the 1970s. And as such it is a cooking style still very much in development. For example, crab cakes – a famous New Orleans dish – were actually introduced by Emril Lagasse! Weird eh? New Orleans is a city steeped in history, much of which is still being written today. We went on a Haunted History Tour the first night with a great guide who told us plenty of spooky tales about young men being ripped apart on “Romeo Catchers”, mad doctors performing experimental surgeries on their slaves and suicides in hotel rooms. But what really fascinated me were the true history bits interspersed among the blood and gore. Our guide actually told us he’d rather be a historical tour guide, but all the money is in haunted tours so that’s where he ended up. In hindsight I think I would have gotten more out of a daytime historical walk of the French Quarter. You are literally walking through history in these small streets and it often felt as if we were missing out on something.

We also went on a swamp tour – one I think we should have replaced with a devestation tour. As I said before close to 80% of New Orleans was under water after Katrina and though the French Quarter was largely untouched, the rest of the city did not fare well. My dad sent me a quick email while we were there saying “The oldest part of town – French Quarter – is above sea level, of course!” and it’s true: The oldest inhabitants of the city knew better than to build a city literally under water. But as people swarmed in more land was needed and the levies were built. We all know how that went. Be that as it may just like the worn down walls and cobblestones of the French Quarter tell the story of life in the old New Orleans, so does the devestated areas left by Katrina tell the story of the current one. And it is an important story of technological achievements and failures, human loss and endurance and lessons ignored and learned. In short I have to go back and do one of the tours before they upturn the Ninth Ward and build something new there.

The photo walk of my dreams

More than anything New Orleans is a photographer’s dream. There is so much beauty and weirdness in the city that pretty much wherever you point your lens there is something worth taking a picture of. As always I took way too many pictures and spent hours sorting through them to figure out what to post here and what to save for my own stash. In the end I realized I have to go back because even though my folder says I have 300 images they are nowhere close to documenting this strange city in all its worn down beauty. If you can, you should go.

Nov 08

1

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Lessons from a Swamp Tour

One of the “absolute must do” items we were told we had to check off on our list when visiting New Orleans was a swamp tour. Turns out that’s advice that is highly dependent on season and weather.

There are multiple companies that offer swamp tours around New Orleans, most of them operating in and around the Honey Island Swamp to the south east of the city itself. It takes about 30-40 minutes to drive there depending on trafic and they all have poor signs and even worse driving instructions so they’re a bit tricky to find.

All the swamp tour companies offer the same basic service: They take you out on a shallow bottom boat and sail around in the swamp looking for animals. The big draw of course is the aligators and if you’re lucky you can see up to 20 or even 30 gators on one trip. Pretty impressive, right? And even if you don’t see many gators “you see a lot of other animals”. Well, that’s a truth with some major modifications. Turns out (not surprisingly) the number of animals and other “cool stuff” you end up seeing on a wamp tour is negatively related to the volume of water currently in the river and in the air. In other words, the higher the river is and the more it rains, the less critters you will see.

In our case the river was the highest it’s been since the mid -80s (excluding Katrina of course) and thus all the non-aquatic critters we were promised, such as deer and racoons, were long gone or drowned and the aquatic ones were mostly washed away. Furthermore the normally shallow and dry areas were all submerged and the water was the colour of chocolate milk rather than the regular “tea colour”. Great stuff. As we sailed up the river our guide (who was great by the way) told tall tales of gator encounters while he frantically searched high and low for anything to show us. There was a lot of talk of plants and birds and we spent a lot of time trying to get close to a couple of snakes but for the majority of the ride it was all foileage and nothing else.

Anny got to hold a tiny aligator

You know you’re in trouble when the guide drags out a tiny gator he has in a box for emergencies. Sure, the little critter is cool and all, but that’s not what you pay to see. Fortunately, at the very end of the trip we did find a small gator, barely awake and not really interested in playing with us, who made some lethargic attempts to eat hot dogs on a stick before leaving. It was so slow and uninterested it was almost as if it had been hired in last minute and the captain wasn’t paying it enough.

Gator visit over we hightailed it back to the dock passing a bunch of hunting cabins, many of which were destroyed by Katrina and never rebuilt. Interesting, but again not what we paid for.

I have to cut them some slack though: The gators go into hibernation toward the end of October and the water was rediculously high because of the insane rainfall they’ve had down in Louisiana. But they should have told us that they hadn’t seen gators in weeks before we bought the tickets. Had we known the trip would probably be a bust where gators were concerned we would have paid more attention to the other stuff, what little there was.

That said, if you’re in New Orleans during the summer I would highly recommend going on a swamp tour. I would go back and do the tour again during a better season.

Nov 04

0

Filed by Morten Rand-Hendriksen under Roundtrip USA:

10,000 Kilometers and Counting

Our trip so far (click for a larger version)

Some time during the day as we made our way from Asheville, North Carolina to Williamsburg, Virginia, our odometer reached the 10,000 km mark (well, actually the odometer got accidentally reset in Albuquerque, New Mexico when it was at around 5,300 km and today it once again reached 5,000 km so combined they make 10,000) and our map is starting to fill in nicely. Our route now has a lot more twists and turns than we originally planned so we could cram in more fun stuff. If you’ve been following along, you know where we’ve been and what we’ve done. If not, I’ve created a list of all the locations and articles we’ve written so far. Keep in mind we’re about 5 days behind right now so even though we’re in Williamsburgh, the New Orleans post is still just a draft. But it’s all coming in due time.

Roundtrip USA – In Chronolocial Order

More to come

Nov 02

1

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Oak Alley Plantation

Driving down from Alexandria toward New Orleans we started talking about what we wanted to do once we got there. On the top of our list was visit a plantation and go on a swamp tour. Yeah, we’re real party animals, I know. As with just about everything else in the USA, there are either way too many of something or none at all. In the case of the outskirts of New Orleans and Baton Rouge there are plantations aplenty and no real direction as to which one is worth visitng and which one is better viewed from the pages of a book. Fortunately the AAA book on Louisiana and Mississippi had a list of “gems” that included two plantations that were along our route, sort of. They were the Laura and Oak Alley plantations. Based on the descriptions in the book we picked Oak Alley. It turned out as we drove there that Laura and Oak Alley are literally right next to one another (as in neighbours) so if we had come earlier we could have done them both. But we only had time for one so Oak Alley it was.

The Magic of Oak Trees

Sometimes I get lost in nature and end up just staring. Such was the case when we entered the plantation grounds just as it was when Jacques Telesphore started building the estate back in the 1830s: Coming up to the main house is an alley walled by two rows of 300 year old majestic oak trees. If you’ve ever seen old oak trees you know what I’m talking about. From the ground up they are right out of gothic fairy tales (probably why they shot parts of the movie Interview With The Vampire at the plantation). The huge trunks are clad in intricate folds of bark and thick moss where the sun paints faces and patterns. The branches reach out like massive fingers, sometimes to the sky, sometimes to the ground, carrying canopies of leaves that lend shade and calm to the ground below. The effect is spellbinding no matter what weather. In our case it was overcast and the diffused light made the entire scene unreal. And as always I took way too many photos. Ah, the curse of digital cameras.

A Scene of Dreams Crushed

Our guide Cathy in an authentic costume

Visiting Oak Alley Plantation will cost you $15 and gets you a tour of the plantation house itself. If you’re cheap or don’t want the tour you can access the grounds on your own from the back. The tour takes about 40 minutes and consists of a guide dressed in period clothing telling you the story of the plantation and its owners; a sad and surprisingly timely story of lost love, financial ruin and historical filanthropy. I’m not going to retell it because if you decide to go it’s the only thing you’ll learn. This is a bit of a spoiler but I think it’s worth knowing: Due to the tragic history of Oak Alley the main house is not what it was when the original owners lived there. It has been restored to authentic period status but there is only one piece of furniture in the entire house that is actually from the original owners. There have also been major structural changes and all of this takes away from the experience. The tour only covers the main house and only mentions the actual plantation operation, slavery and other history in passing. You are also not allowed to take any photos inside the house. Quite disappointing actually.

Later on in our visit to New Orleans we were told that although Oak Alley is the most pictoresque of the plantations, Laura next door has a much more comprehensive tour that also covers the slavery in detail. In hindsight I wish we had gone there instead even though it wouldn’t have produced the great pictures I got.

Oct 31

14

Filed by Morten Rand-Hendriksen under Roundtrip USA:

Cowboy Up!

A real cowboy on the streets of Fort Worth Stockyards

Seriously, you can't get more seteotypical than this.

Anny already wrote a great article on our visit to the Fort Worth Stockyards so rather than repeating everything she said I’m going to share some photos and observations with you.

We didn’t actually plan to go to the Stockyards at all. In fact our plan was pretty much to just pass through Dallas on our way to New Orleans. But the detour that ended up being a full 12 hour stay at the stockyards was well worth it, mostly because we happened to be there on the same day Red Steagall had his annual Cowboy Gathering. We went to experience some true Texas cowboy culture and boy did we get what we came for. And then some!

I’m not going to pretend for one second I know anything about modern cowboy culture. All I know is the people who adhere to this culture insist on wearing wide brimmed hats, jeans and cowboy boots all the time – even if they don’t actually work out in the fields or even with cows. What I didn’t know is that once you find real cowboys – the ones that actually ride around on horses and deal with herds of cows on a daily basis – they are not all that different from the ones you see in movies and TV shows depicting life on the range back in the 1800s (minus the gun slinging and lawlessness perhaps). And at the stockyards we saw plenty of these true men and women of the field. Which was very cool.

The cowboy culture is as foreign to an European city dweller like myself as my Norwegian Christmas traditions must be to an Australian aboriginal. Everything is different, from the clothes to the hair to the language to the art and even the cooking utensils. At the craft market we found everything from “Wild Rag Rings” made from old silver dollars (a “wild rag” is the neckerchief cowboys traditionally wear when out in the field. They are called “wild rags” because as the cowboys rode across the open fields for weeks or months at a time without bathing they would use the rag for everything from filtering the dust from their breath to wiping sweat and other stuff off their skin. After a good long ride the rags would be truly wild i.e. smelly) to a special kind of small meat hook used to grab and flip steaks and other meats without having to handle them with more cumbersome utensils (see the gallery below). Other than that the market mostly featured cowboy art – mostly a modern day version of what I’d call national romantic art with heavy emphasis on the lone cowboy, sunsets, open fields and oil rigs – plad shirts, boots, various stuff made from longhorn horns and of course tons and tons of shiny flashy stuff attached to leather. I couldn’t see myself wearing or buying any of this stuff but then again I don’t think they were very impressed with my cool custom t-shirt and silver jewellery either so…

The Quebe Sisters Band – country music worth listening to

The Quebe Sisters Band

The event we had stumbled onto was actually called The Red Steagall Cowboy Gathering and Western Swing Festival with an emphasis on the latter (Red Steagall apparently is a famous western swing musician and he was plaing a concert later in the evening). Music is a vital part of the cowboy and country lifestyle, one that I understand on a theoretical level but can’t stand on a practical one. To be quite frank I absolutely hate most country music so this may not have been the wisest place to be, at last where my taste in music is concerned. I’d prepared myself to endure hours of terrible country twang and happy music with endless lyrics about life on the farm and how everything is so sad and depressing but it turns out (as it often does) that my preconceptions were way off. At least that was the case when we dropped in to take a listen to the Quebe Sisters Band (QSB). Now here was something classified as country music (though I’d probably place them in the Charleston / 20′s jazz category) that I could actually listen to. In fact, after having heard a few songs we ended up buying one of their albums! If you have a chance you should check them out live. They seem to be travelling a lot so chances are you’ll find them at a country festival at some point. The three sisters are originally fiddle players but they now also sing. What’s interesting about their style is that they do everything in complicated harmonies reminiscent of the 20′s and 30′s Charleston style which can be horrible but in this case is quite pleasant to listen to. The songs are the typical country stuff but the way they’ve arranged them lifts the songs above the standard country sound to something more refined and way more entertaining. Very impressive stuff.

My only real exposure to North American country culture before this was the Cloverdale Rodeo in Abbotsford, BC which quite frankly was horrible. Bizarrely I found myself much more at home in Texas and I think what we saw in Fort Worth was way closer to the real thing than the assless jeans, ridiculous prices and hordes of messed up drunks displayed in Abbotsford, pleated jeans and rhine stones included.

Oct 31

1

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Happy Halloween!

We’re celebrating Halloween in the weirdest place on earth: Pigeon Forge in Tennessee. The pumpkin above is the one Morten drew and Angela carved at the Rogers’ house in Tyler, Texas when we visited Stephen – one of Anny’s fellow Best Job in the World top 50 candidates.

Oct 30

2

Filed by Anny under Roundtrip USA:

Rhinestones and Denim

My first time riding a mechanical bull

We had arrived in Dallas just in time to miss the annual Dallas Fair – supposedly (according to a guy at the hotel) the biggest fair in all of the USA. “Well, that sucks” we thought and asked the receptionist if there was anything else we could do in the area. She said that there was nothing worth seeing in Dallas, but if we wanted a cowboy experience we should visit Fort Worth (about an hour away). Off we went!

Everything happens for a reason right? Although we missed the Dallas Fair, we had arrived just in time for The Red Steagall Cowboy Gathering and Western Swing Festival!

The Red Steagall Cowboy Gathering

The Red Steagall Cowboy Gathering happens on a weekend once each year in Fort Worth, and events include a chuck wagon cooking competition, ranch rodeo, cattle drive, dancing, and live music performances.

Walking through Fort Worth during a cowboy gathering is like walking through an ad co-sponsored by Ed Hardy and Wrangler jeans! I was glad I was wearing jeans. But even so, we stood out like sore thumbs (Ang even more so because she was wearing yoga pants). You’d be hard pressed to find a place with more cowboy hats, jeans or rhinestones. I can understand the hats and denim, but rhinestones?? Where’d that come from? I’m curious to know whether people normally dress this way in Fort Worth or if it was just for the event.

There’s so much to tell you about that I figured it’d be best to section this post off into smaller more digestible chunks:

Chuck Wagon Cookoff

Making bean stew the traditional way

Where else could you find a chuck wagon cookoff? So cool! There were dozens of teams set up with their own chuck wagons (Where else could you find people who own working chuck wagons!?!) cooking meals which all included biscuits, meat, bean stew and peach cobbler. The rules are simple: make your meals the traditional way using a chuck wagon and fire pits, using the same ingredients as everyone else. I don’t think there was a rule about how you clean the pots afterwards, but I saw people cleaning them the old fashioned way (in tubs) too.

And the best part? Everyone gets to sample the food! Even though the food made Ang and me feel a little ill (I suspect the culprit was the gravy), it was well worth it. We tried samples from three different chuck wagons which included: beef, biscuits, mashed potatoes, gravy, bean stew (some were plain bean stews and others were bean and vegetable stews), and peach cobbler (some were more cobbler-like and others were more pie-like). It was traditional home-cooking and for the most part, it was good! I loved the peach cobbler we had at the last wagon. Yum yum yum.

There are so many cookoff participants that the competition is sectioned off into different parts of the day. So long as you’re in the area in the afternoon, you’ll come across a sampling.

Ranch Rodeo

All the cowboys lined up for the beginning of the ranch rodeo

I was really hesitant about attending the rodeo because I used to associate “rodeo” with brutality, animal cruelty and other uncomfortable images. But hey, we were in Texas and it didn’t feel right not to go to a rodeo. Besides, you should try and embrace other cultures while travelling. Right?

We got tickets and I’m so glad we did. The rodeo was my favourite part of the day! They didn’t do any of that bull spearing or thrashing that you usually see on rodeo ads or videos on tv. The rodeo was a competition featuring real challenges cowboys face on the farms:

Team Sorting: Working as a team to single out and move calves from the herd one at a time and in order (the calves are numbered) from one end of the field to the other. Some of the teams were able to do it really quickly and were very impressive.

Bronc Riding: Riding an angry horse for a minimum of eight seconds. Ok, I don’t think the cowboys do this on a regular basis (it’s really bad on the back), but it was definitely entertaining! Nobody was hurt (animals included).

Calf Branding: Working as a team to rope a cow and brand it. I flinched and went wide-eyed when it was announced that the next competition would be calf branding. I don’t appreciate the idea of branding cows because I don’t think they appreciate it either. Most of the cows and horses at the rodeo were branded. Thankfully, the competition used fake branding irons and flour to mark the cows.

This was taken earlier in the day when they were having horse cutting competitions. Horse cutting is when you separate one calf from the herd.

Maverick Branding: A combination of calf branding and team sorting where you have to cut the calf from the herd before you brand it. I wasn’t as keen on the sports that involved lassoing the animals because it looked painful and some of the cows would ‘moo’ in distress. They all walked away without any limps or signs of abuse though.

Mutton Bustin’: This was the CUTEST part of the competition! Little kids between 5 and 7 years of age would take turns mounting sheep and ride them for as long as they could. Some of those sheep could run really fast and most kids would fall off less than two meters out of the gate. There was one little boy though that seemed to have no concept of fear and latched onto that sheep all the way to the end through the herd! The crowd went wild as the kid strutted his way back to the starting line to receive his ribbon.

Team Doctoring: This is the only time when I’m ok with lassoing and tying down a cow. For this event, the team must cut their assigned cow from the herd and tie her down on both ends. This is done on a farm to allow a doctor to safely take a look at a distressed cow.

Wild Cow Milking: It’s exactly how it sounds! LOL And no, cowboys don’t normally do this on a farm.

Cattle Drive and Music Performances

Twice a day, cowboys would march a herd of cattle down the street. It’s a short spectacle, but worth a look if you’re already there.

Throughout the day, there are live music performances on several stages throughout the stockyards. Some performances don’t require a ticket, and others (the better ones) like the Quebe Sisters are held on stage in Mule Alley (ticket required). Mule Alley is also where they have the Swing Festival (dance) at the end of the night to live country music.

Around Fort Worth

Cowboy Boots

It was recommended to us that if we wanted to shop for cowboy hats, boots or jeans, we should shop outside of the main stockyards area because it’s very touristy and the prices are higher. I agree that the main stockyards area is very touristy, but it’s hard to imagine the prices being any higher than those of the surrounding stores. Boots were being sold anywhere between $200 and $2,000 per pair. Yes, they’re handcrafted and detailed, but gee whiz $2,o00 is a lot to spend on one pair of shoes. In another store we went to, each shirt was priced over $150 – the cheapest thing I found was a really ugly blue shirt on the sale rack for $70.

Tips for Travellers to Fort Worth & The Red Steagall Cowboy Gathering

Prices: To attend some of the events at The Red Steagall Cowboy Gathering, you must purchase a ticket (it cost $30 per person this year with an additional $10 to attend the rodeo). You only need one ticket for all the events (except the rodeo), and events that require the purchase of this ticket include: music performances, horsemanship clinics, daytime cowboy competitions (ex. horse cutting), and admission to the markets, Cowboy Hall of Fame, and small museums. You do not need a ticket to shop in the malls around Fort Worth or sample food at the Chuck Wagon Cookoff. Even if you don’t purchase a ticket for the daytime events, I would highly recommend going to the Ranch Rodeo ($10)!
There are surprisingly few places to get quick eats at the main Fort Worth stockyards area. If you’re there for the Cowboy Gathering, stop by the chuck wagon cookoff areas in the afternoon for free samples. There are enough samples to keep you full throughout the day if you’re short on change.
You can bring snacks and drinks into the rodeo (they’re very casual), but you can also purchase snacks there (hot dogs are $3.50 and they also have cotton candy, burgers etc). Do NOT purchase a chilli hot dog. It tastes as nasty as it looks, and it looks pretty darn nasty.
Watch where you step because the cows and horses walk on the same roads as the people.
This may be different next year, but when we entered the main area of Fort Worth Stockyards, there was a sign for $10 all day parking. We went a little further in and ended up finding parking for $5.
I don’t think Fort Worth would’ve been as much fun if we hadn’t stumbled across the Cowboy Gathering. But, if you’re there for it, plan to spend an entire day there. Go early (before noon) for good parking. If not, a couple hours to circle the area will suffice.

Oct 28

6

Filed by Morten Rand-Hendriksen under Roundtrip USA:

Cadillac Ranch on Route 66

Everyone’s heard the song with the catchy chorus “get your kicks… on Route 66”, but few know where this mythical road is and what cities it connects. I was counted among the majority for whom the name is a mere cultural reference to a time past until we left Flagstaff, Arizona and I started noticing signs that said “Historical Route 66”. This required some further research. While staying over in Albuquerque I looked for info on the old route and found way more than I really needed. Turns out the original Route 66 went from Detroit to Los Angeles passing through Albuquerque and Las Vegas as well as a bunch of hole-in-the-wall cities like Amarillo, Texas. And although the original route is no longer the main thoroughfare from point Motor City to point the City of Angels the modern highway system runs parallel with it for long stretches, merges with it at times and there are signs pointing you to the historical route when the two diverge too much.

But what’s so special about this road anyway? Like I said it used to be the shortest route from the North East to the South West and it runs through what can only be described as a whole lot of nothing. So why all the legends and nostalgia? The answer lies hidden in the hundreds of weird cultural remnants left by the beatniks, hippies and other societal fringe dwellers that made this road their common home. One such relic is the bizarre installation called Cadillac Ranch found along the freeway on the west side of Amarillo.

Old cars, new paint

The Cadillacs are covered in grafitti

On paper there isn’t that much to it: Cadillac Ranch consists of ten old Cadillacs buried front down at “the same angle as the Kheops pyramid” in a row in the middle of a field. The cars are gutted and completely covered in graffiti – something that is encouraged by the owner, Helium millionaire and artist Stanley Marsh 3 who created the art piece back in 1974. Sounds pretty stupid, right? Well, it does until you get there.

Standing in front of the cars you can’t deny that this is art in one form or another. It is a feat in itself to bury one car like this up to its windshield at such a weird angle. But to put down ten in a row at precisely the same angle is impressive and shows that the artist put a lot of time and effort into it. The piece is also something of a satirical comment on modern day consumer and automotive society. These cars are not cheap and burying ten of them like this sends a pretty strong message about how our society is built around disposable items and how the automobile for all its usefulness is reduced to a massive hunk of steel and rubber once it’s rendered useless.

That’s my perception anyway (I can totally see my mom rolling her eyes at this and mumbling something about how art is really just a big hoax). But to me this is meaningful and it is art. Not to mention it makes for damn cool pictures.

Considering that Amarillo really is a tiny pile of nothing with only one other attraction – The Big Texan Steakhouse – I’d say Cadillac Ranch is a must-visit if you’ve accidentally or intentionally made your way into the middle of nowhere, USA.

Cadillac Ranch on Route 66

Everyone’s heard the song with the catchy chorus “get your kicks… on Route 66”, but few know where this mythical road is and what cities it connects. I was counted among the majority for whom the name is a mere cultural reference to a time past until we left Flagstaff, Arizona and I started noticing signs that said “Historical Route 66”. This required some further research. While staying over in Albuquerque I looked for info on the old route and found way more than I really needed. Turns out the original Route 66 went from Detroit to Los Angeles passing through Albuquerque and Las Vegas as well as a bunch of hole-in-the-wall cities like Amarillo, Texas. And although the original route is no longer the main thoroughfare from point Motor City to point the City of Angels the modern highway system runs parallel with it for long stretches, merges with it at times and there are signs pointing you to the historical route when the two diverge too much.

But what’s so special about this road anyway? Like I said it used to be the shortest route from the North East to the South West and it runs through what can only be described as a whole lot of nothing. So why all the legends and nostalgia? The answer lies hidden in the hundreds of weird cultural remnants left by the beatniks, hippies and other societal fringe dwellers that made this road their common home. One such relic is the bizarre installation called Cadillac Ranch found along the freeway on the west side of Amarillo.

Old cars, new paint

On paper there isn’t that much to it: Cadillac Ranch consists of ten old Cadillacs buried front down at “the same angle as the Kheops pyramid” in a row in the middle of a field. The cars are gutted and completely covered in graffiti – something that is encouraged by the owner, Helium millionaire and bon vivant Stanley Marsh 3 who created the art piece back in 1974. Sounds pretty stupid, right? Well, it does until you get there.

Standing in front of the cars you can’t deny that this is art in one form or another. It is a feat in itself to bury one car like this up to its windshield at such a weird angle. But to put down ten in a row at precisely the same angle is impressive and shows that the artist put a lot of time and effort into it. The piece is also something of a satirical comment on modern day consumer and automotive society. These cars are not cheap and burying ten of them like this sends a pretty strong message about how our society is built around disposable items and how the automobile for all its usefulness is reduced to a massive hunk of steel and rubber once it’s rendered useless.

That’s my perception anyway (I can totally see my mom rolling her eyes at this and mumbling something about how art is really just a big hoax). But to me this is meaningful and it is art. Not to mention it makes for damn cool pictures.

Considering that Amarillo really is a tiny pile of nothing with only one other attraction – The Big Texan Steakhouse – I’d say Cadillac Ranch is a must-visit if you’ve accidentally or intentionally made your way into the middle of nowhere, USA.

Oct 26

1

Filed by Morten Rand-Hendriksen under Roundtrip USA:

Car Service, Nukes and Steak

Drive-through service at Toyota in Albuquerque

Thursday turned out to be a day of huge contrasts and a long drive across state lines. It started off in Albuquerque, New Mexico where we had to get our car serviced. In Vancouver this is a big multi-hour ordeal and we were worried we’d have to stay in the city an extra day to get it done. By fluke we booked in to a motel that happened to be right next to a Toyota service centre so bright and early Thursday morning we drove over to see if we could get ourselves slotted in early on.

Needless to say we were quite surprised when we discovered the Toyota place had drive-through service! You literally pull in without an appointment, tell the people what you want done (in our case an oil change, fluid top-off and overall inspection) and they take your car in right then and there. By contrast our regular maintenance place – Open Road Toyota in Richmond – requires you to book in advance and keep your car for up to 8 hours.

The service was quick (under an hour) and the people there even let me walk into the service area to take pictures and have a look under our car. Very impressive. And the coolest part? It cost a mere $35!

Things to do in Albuquerque…

Comical appearance, disturbing potential (talking about the bomb)

For most of the places we’ve visited we’ve found stuff to do in books or on the web. But for Albuquerque the only thing we knew of was the Hot Air Balloon Fiesta which is supposed to be spectacular. Unfortunately we showed up one week late for that and when we asked the receptionist at the motel and the AAA guy at the local office what to do and what to see in the city they both said “there really isn’t anything worth seeing here”! Crazy. I’m sure they were being modest but seriously, it didn’t exactly make us want to stay. So we hit the one attraction listed in all the research: The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. Unfortunately it was a bit of a bore and the only things I found even remotely interesting were the scale replicas of Little Boy and Fat Man (the nuclear bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively) and the huge periodic table set in stone at the entrance. The girls looked like they were about to keel over from boredom and the only thing that was of any interest to them seemed to be the x-ray machine used to check that your shoes were the right size back in the 50s and 60s.

So we moved on all the way to Amarillo, Texas.

Big Steak – Big Bore

Before and after eating way too much food at The Big Texan

According to legend there is this great place along the route through Amarillo that you just have to stop by where they serve a 72oz steak. It’s called The Big Texan and we pulled up at 10pm local time. It’s true what they say: Everything really is bigger in Texas, but that doesn’t mean it’s any better. The food we got was mediocre (read Anny’s post for amore detailed description) and the atmosphere was flat and dim (literally). I’m sure if there was someone there taking on the 72oz challenge it would have been more interesting but when we were there it seemed like the crazy trio from Canada was a bigger attraction than the food or surroundings.

Overall, apart from the driving and the service, a bit of a waste of a day I have to say (no rhyme intended).

Oct 25

19

Filed by Morten Rand-Hendriksen under Roundtrip USA:

Petrified Forest and Painted Desert

One of the many petrified logs you can find in Petrified Forest National Park

Meteor Crater was actually just the first of two natural wonders we planned to see on Wednesday. The second one, located about 1 hour further down I-40, was Petrified Forest National Park. We arrived at Meteor Crater around 1:30pm and our 1 hour walking tour of the crater rim was at 2:15pm so we didn’t get back to the car and on our way to Petrified Forest until close to 4pm. That meant we wouldn’t get to the park until 5pm, and according to our AAA book that’s when it closed. But it was on our way and we figured there was always a chance they’d let us in anyway. And it’s a good thing we did because it turned out they didn’t close till 6pm and even then they’d let you drive through. “We just ask that you don’t stop and get out of the car after 6pm” the park ranger said as we paid our $10 per car entrance fee and got a map of the area.

Weird rocks, coloured sand and ancient cultures

Three logs from the same tree in Petrified Forest

The National Park actually showcases two natural wonders, The Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert, and is also an archaeological site. Petrified Forest is a huge area that used to be a flood plain banked by tall conifers. When the trees fell they were quickly covered in silt, mud and volcanic ash and sunk into the soft soil where the lack of oxygen prevented them from rotting. (If you’ve ever seen one of the bog men of ancient Europe you’ve already seen the result of this process – natural mummification.) But at the Arizona mud plains things went a little different: Over centuries silica-laden ground water saturated the buried logs and slowly replaced the wood itself with silica deposits. The silica then slowly crystalized binding iron, carbon, manganese, cobalt and chromium with it to create stunning colourful patterns in the shape of the original wood. The result of this process can be seen today: Giant felled tree trunks made of solid crystal.

In their natural state the petrified logs look so much like regular logs it’s hard to understand that they’re not. Driving past them it just looks like a woodsman came out onto the plains and took down the few remaining trees cutting them into meter long pieces. Its only when you get up close that you notice the trunks are actually coloured rock. What’s cool about it is that the petrification process preserved all the aspects of the tree perfectly so looking at a cross section you can clearly make out the bark, cracks, knots and even year rings. This is even easier to see if you go to the visitors’ centre or one of the many places that sell cut and polished petrified wood.

One of the many mounds in the Painted Desert

Painted Desert is the name of the sandy hills surrounding the Petrified Forest. It’s actually the same place and you see both at the same time. The desert is unusual because the sandy dunes are comprised of layers of multi-coloured sands in strata – much like a layered cake. Looking at the huge hills it appears that someone came through with a set of paint brushes and created long horizontal lines throughout the area. The colours change from hill to hill and are quite spectacular. We were there at sundown and the low light played beautifully with the sands though I’m sure if we’d come earlier we would have gotten even more out of it.

As for archaeology, the area is home to everything from dinosaur remains to ancient petroglyphs (rock carvings) to ruins of pueblo Indian dwellings. In short there’s a lot to see and if you go you should estimate at least 2-3 hours during daylight. We had about 50 minutes in fading light and that was not enough. I would have liked to stay for a day though the girls would probably have enjoyed about 2 hours of it before gagging me and putting me in the trunk.

A True American Attraction

Petrified Forest National Park is what I would call a True American Attraction. By that I mean it’s a place you drive through and observe from your vehicle. The only places you can get out are the Visitor’s Centre and Museum at by the south entrance and the designated areas with parking and paved walkways. The drive is several kilometers long and can be done in about 45 minutes if you don’t stop at all. Which honestly would be stupid because you don’t really get to experience the wonder of the place without getting out. We only had an hour and didn’t get to take it all in which is regrettable – even with the restrictions there is a lot to see.

Personally I find this type of park layout to be quite annoying and it really takes away from the experience; by being confined to designated areas that were obviously created to keep people and curious fingers away from all the cool stuff you don’t get up close and personal with the things you are there to see and you don’t really get the full experience. For the Painted Desert part of the park this is just fine – the stratified sands and rocks are best viewed from afar anyway. But when it comes to the petrified wood it really detracts from the experience in the same way that observing the building techniques of ants would be if you had to stand 5 meters away from their hill.

It’s pretty obvious why the restrictions are in place: If people were allowed to roam freely and pick at whatever they thought interesting, the delicate stratified sand hills would quickly be ruined what little remains of the petrified wood would be broken or taken away. I say little because judging from how few trunks you find along the road and the number of stores outside the park that are selling petrified wood in all shapes and sizes (one advertised dinner table tops of the stuff) I’d say the majority of the best trunks are long gone and what remains are just discards. Even so there are plenty of beautiful trunks to see including the Agate Bridge (pictured) so this in itself is not a reason to ditch the park.

If you want some wood made of stone, buy it!

Even up close the petrified wood looks freakishly real

Not surprisingly it’s illegal to step on or play with the petrified wood in the park and removal of the precious rock is absolutely not allowed. At the two ends of the trail there are checkpoints and the park rangers reserve the right to do complete vehicle and cavity searches looking for any stones you may have lifted (ok, I may have exaggerated a bit on the whole “cavity search” part but seriously, they are strict about this stuff). It doesn’t really matter though: If you want a piece of petrified wood for yourself you are better off buying it at one of the many stores that sell it on the roads to and from the park: Not only do they have better samples but they are properly handled and processed to bring out the true beauty of this natural wonder. We of course did not have time to go to any of them or buy any petrified wood which is a big bummer. I’d love to have taken a big chunk home with me.

Seriously, geology is just too fascinating.