My friends at Country Roads Magazine asked me to write about some of my favorite places discovered as we wander about. Here’s that story.
As chance would have it, our RV park for an overnight stop was just down the road from Mesilla, New Mexico. Once the Confederate capital of the Arizona Territory, today it’s an arts community filled with very cool adobe homes.
I asked my friend and former boss, Country Roads Magazine publisher James Fox-Smith, for a bit of help making a whacky idea for The Fabulous Fifth Wheel come true. His valiant efforts on our behalf seem to have raised an eyebrow or two. http://www.countryroadsmag.com/featured/blogs/editorial-reflections/kudzu-appreciation-society
I’ve never considered myself a beach person. Lying on hot sand, no matter how crystalline white it may be, acquiring the golden glow of future melanoma, hasn’t been appealing since high school. (I still recall the summer in high school when I was briefly unemployed and acquired an actual tan. That was also the year I put “Summer Blond” in my hair to lighten it. And it began falling out. Quite coincidentally I’m sure.)
But now I’ve fallen in love with Cannon Beach on Oregon’s pacific shore. Hard packed sand you can walk for miles in search of starfish. The sand is brown, not the brilliant white we know from the Florida panhandle, but has a surprising range of nuanced color as it interacts with the sun and the sea.
Huge rocks shrouded in mist. Cliff top views. Surfers. Children. Dogs.
Something to awaken every sense.
But the pictures tell the story better than I can.
Just down the road from our current campground is the tiny Iowa farm town of Oxford—population 821. It hasn’t changed much since I was a kid growing up nearby and we’d come to the rodeo held outside town every year.
With one exception— a few years ago a new restaurant popped up in one of the pretty historic brick buildings along the couple of streets that comprise downtown. A restaurant run by a couple flooded out of New Orleans by Katrina.
And so last night we had a big family gathering at Augusta, ten of us in all, gathered around mismatched tables with pretty table clothes, surrounded by walls covered in a mixture of New Orleans mementos and the work of local artists. I had shrimp and a grit cake on the side as good as any I’ve ever had in New Orleans. Rosemary may not be one of the “holy trinity” of Creole spices, but after these shrimp I’m convinced a “holy quad” is in order. Great gumbo too, and red beans that also departed a bit from the way they’re traditionally spiced, but nonetheless delicious.
In a bit of cross-cultural irony, displayed on the wall was a newspaper article reporting that Augusta’s “tenderloin,” as the iconic Midwestern fried pork sandwich is known, had been voted the best in Iowa by the pork producer’s association.
There too, right next to beer taps where it belongs, was one of our old New Orleans neighbor Dr. Bob’s signature “Be Nice or Leave” signs.
My story about the part of this last year’s journey we spent in the Ozarks is in month’s Country Roads Magazine HERE. And here are some additional fave pix that aren’t in the online version:
Every Saturday night in Eureka Springs, the town traffic cop leads the community drum circle.
Rosie was my most favorite of many fave pieces at the Crystal Bridges Museum.
The Walmart museum housed in what was Sam Walton’s first store, has this interesting display of merchandise returned for unusual reasons.
One of the best meals we’ve had on our journey was at a student run restaurant on a mountaintop college campus outside Branson. Everything on this plate was raised on campus.
A personal fave shot of Dave taken at one of Branson’s many cheesy but delightful attractions.
Our bead throwing buddies Johnny and Robert were sporting some spectacular float finery.
This past weekend was all about parades here on our return visit to New Orleans.
I’m not sure why, but it was worth standing in the pouring rain Sunday waiting for the float to pass on which our friends were riding, so that we could be singled out to be thrown those REALLY NICE beads. (I’m special! I’m special!) We so need to feel special.
Yes, I will always treasure my hand-embroidered Princess Leila ornament, caught during a Close Encounter with the Krewe of Chewbacchus Saturday night, one of several new parades to emerge in recent years from our old Marigny-Bywater neighborhood. What could be more fun than a rolling Star Wars convention? (It also brought back memories of an equally fun Star Trek parade earlier in our adventures.)
And then there was the ‘tit Rex parade. Well that’s not really the name anymore. Because now the “e” has been replaced with a schwa.
Thanks to the schwa, this tiny parade continues to roll.
Just in case you haven’t yet made the acquaintance of this symbol used to denote the vague multipurpose vowel sound found in words like “fudge,” “the,” and the last syllable of “sofa” —it looks like an upside-down “e.” I Googled how to create the schwa symbol using my laptop and here’s what I found:
Never mind. I’ll just spell it out.
So why you might ask, did they go to the extraordinary typesetting effort to make the substitution? Well who knew that a bunch of artsy hipsters walking through the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood pulling miniature floats behind them would be perceived as a threat by the landed gentry that comprise most of the old-school Krewe of Rex.
To be fair, it was all very genteel. The old Rexters were afraid that if they let one entity use the name unchallenged, there’d be a flood of copycats and they’d lose control of their branding. Sort of like Kleenex I guess. And after a conversation about various options, a solution was chosen.
Schwa to the rescue.
One of my favorites. When I passed by the creator of this float had engaged a young admirer in a fascinating discussion about homonyms.
This parade may rival Krewe du Vieux when it comes to bawdy political satire.
A favorite new addition to my vocabulary.
We’re working on our taxes for last year, and while it’s not deductible, I went ahead and totaled up my health insurance costs from 2013. For about the last decade I’ve been one of the millions of Americans without company sponsored health insurance, so I’ve had an individual Blue Cross policy.
And for the last several years, my premiums have gone up $100 a month. Not a year. A month. With a $2800 deductible. Even my doctor was shocked, given my relatively minor health issues. Last year my premiums totaled $10,185.70. Just for me.
So among the things Dave and I were celebrating when we married back in July, was the fact that, thanks to the Supreme Court, I could then be added to his excellent health plan for retired federal workers. Under which BOTH of us would be covered, without a deductible, for $200 a month.
We filled out the forms, faxed in our marriage certificate and waited. For six months. While the feds tried to figure out just what to do with these newly recognized same-gender couples. (Six more premiums for me—do the math.)
But at long last the card has arrived. And I handed it over to the pharmacy tech the other day to update my account.
“What’s your relationship to Mr. Johnson?” he asked, noting Dave’s name on the card. And for the first time with a stranger, I smiled and answered, “I’m his spouse.”
My thought exactly.
Tomorrow we suck in our slides, hitch up our wagon and end our visit to the heart of snowbird country. This part of central Florida has become such a Mecca for those escaping the cold that there are easily 50 other RV parks within a twenty-minute drive. The small community of Zephyrhills just south of us doubles in size from 10,000 to over 20,000 in the winter. Google’s satellite view of the community is a sea of RVs. It would seem that lots and lots of folks came to the realization long before us, that hauling your home behind you to whatever place offers the best weather at the moment—is a swell idea. That and owning an Arabian horse apparently. Now on to New Orleans, just in time for Mardi Gras.
Our snowbird CHristmas tree, populated with origami cranes and a starfish on top.
Dave checks out Grant Wood’s tiny studio.
Grant Wood is perhaps my home state of Iowa’s most renowned artist, but until last summer I really knew little more about him than that he painted American Gothic. That all changed when, on a trip to the small town library near our campground I spotted something quite unexpected: Full frontal nudity.
Okay, that was cheap—but true. The library had an extensive collection of Wood’s lithographs including “Sultry Night” which depicts a naked farmer cooling off at the horse trough.
Wood designed this window for the door of his studio. There is a pointer that can be dialed around to show if he’s home—and taking a bath, or having a party.
I’m just back from a Christmas trip home and had a chance to add to what I learned on that earlier visit (which you can read about HERE) with a tour of the studio in Cedar Rapids where Wood painted many of his most noted works.
The studio was in a converted hayloft above a stable that once housed horses used to pull hearses for the adjoining funeral home. Once mechanization came along the stable wasn’t needed anymore and as it happened, the funeral home’s owner was one of Wood’s patrons, and offered him the space in 1924. He lived there (for a while along with his mother and sister) for over a decade.
Wood created these collages which he gave to friends using found materials from around his studio located on a back alley—and thus named them “Lilies of the Alley.”
Wood designed built-in furniture for the space (he was, I now know, also a noted local interior decorator), and even included a small stage for performances of the local community theater company—which he founded. He was also a sculptor, and designed jewelry—as well a huge stained glass window for a local public building.
He was multi-talented, witty, and reportedly gave great parties. So not so surprising then that a number researchers have come to the conclusion that he was probably gay.
So I said, somewhat self-importantly, to Dave, “My vision for living large in a small footprint means that we won’t have a lot of stuff, but absolutely everything we do have has to be something we really love.”
And I’d pretty much pre-determined that we’d achieve that grand vision (at least in the Fabulous Fifth Wheel’s kitchen) with a quick trip to IKEA when we got to our stop in Houston.
We did make that trip. There is über contemporary new flatware in a drawer and a set of knives in a very cool knife holder that now graces the counter. But the dishes we decided we loved the most came with us—a discontinued pattern from Dansk that we found at our friend Ray’s yard sale. Ray used to be a manager at Commander’s Palace, so his cast-off dinnerware is fabulous by anyone else’s standards. The cobalt blue glass bowls we found to go with those dishes are from Walmart.
And then there are the mugs. Some pretty, some not. Some handmade, some not. What unites them as a collection is that each has a story that made them worthy of the journey.
There’s the left-handed mug I bought from Joe Polotzola, a retired radiology tech turned potter and healthy cooking guru. Drop by his little studio in Amite, Louisiana, and while you’re admiring his beautiful pottery he’s likely to offer you something he’s just steamed up in one of his hand thrown steamers. (Fun fact: Dave is left-handed, while his identical twin is right-handed. Such twins, it turns out, are actually genetic mirror images, a lesson I learned when I presented him with the mug. So it clearly had to come along.)
Then there’s the 30-something year-old Astroworld mug that my kids bought for me on a trip there in its heyday. It’s personalized with my name above a drawing of the Tazmanian Devil cartoon character. I’m not sure if they intended to make a statement there. That was the summer I’d planned another trip for us all to Disneyworld, and was dismayed when I got a lukewarm response to the announcement. Turns out that there just weren’t enough really scary rides at Disneyworld to suit them and so Astroworld it was, where we stayed until the park closed one evening while they rode the same rollercoaster over and over again. I was a little nauseous just watching. And the lesson I carried away is that Disneyworld is really for adults—the kids are just an excuse.
And then there is this mug from which I’m drinking my morning coffee as I write this, a gift from my lifelong friend Terry with whom I grew up in Iowa. We’ve been friends since grade school, but we’ve both spent most of our adult lives far from home—Louisiana for me, Mexico City for him. This mug was his tongue-in-cheek reminder of the roots from whence we both came. Roots from a place that excels at growing them deep and strong. Roots that have served us both well.