Kansas City

One of my first road trips as a naive twenty-something was a cross-state drive to Kansas City for the World Science Fiction Convention in 1976. I had the experience of hearing one of my favorite SF authors, Robert Heinlein, speak in person. Since I had discovered his novels in junior high, I was especially excited by the prospect.

With my partner and several friends, we also had delusions of grandeur in thinking we could launch our new SF magazine at the convention. That didn't work so well and had a lot to do with me categorizing myself as naive. We didn't know about fanzines until we got there and the business portion of the venture was a complete and utter failure. But I had a good time otherwise and it wasn't the last time I would go to a SF convention.

I met Spider Robinson there before he was well known - and he also became one of my favorite authors. But more about the experience was simply the challenges of the trip - long, late night driving across Indiana and Illinois, my first glimpse of the Mississippi River as we crossed into Missouri, and a short visit to the Kansas side of KC for dinner one night. We slept six in one room and it was chaotic, but we were all pretty much broke. It was sort of like summer camp without the evening campfire.

The only other memory I have of the trip was the unusual sight of traffic lights on poles at the streetcorners instead of being suspended from overhead lines in the middle of the intersections. Downtown KC was the first time I had seen this variation and it made for some tentative driving.

Boston

The first and only time I have been in Massachusetts was a conference trip to Boston in 1990. I had just joined a software project team and we went to Boston for a software users group conference. But I did have the opportunity to see the city, and it was the first major business trip I had made so it was all a big new adventure for me.

I hadn't been in a very old east coast city before and was amazed and pleased to see what the old part of town looked like - cobblestone streets too narrow for two people walking side by side, the scent of the sea in the harbor - the tall, masted ships. I love the old houses, the brownstones on Beacon Hill. I hadn't seen a real city part until Boston Common. And I hadn't ridden a subway until the T in Boston.

This was also where my practice of visiting museums began. I found I liked them very much and made a habit of seeing one whenever I could from then on.

I had written a novel in which a character attended Harvard and Harvard Medical School, so I took the subway to Cambridge to look over the Harvard campus, and was surprised that Harvard Medical School was not near Harvard but in a different part of the city all together. So I wandered around, gathering background for my novel and taking plenty of photos.

Boston is famous for its seafood and its pubs. I tried both, repeatedly, and enjoyed it. I love fresh seafood and found several great restaurants there. It was also my first experience with Au Bon Pain, a croissant and coffee shop where I had several breakfasts.

I enjoyed Boston but in retrospect, having visited several large cities since, it wasn't remarkable and it wouldn't matter to me if I never returned.

Driving to Florida

In 1986 my partner and I took a Florida vacation. We transported a car and flew back, staying at a Gulf-side beachfront condo while there.


We left after work on a Friday, driving as far as mid-Ohio the first evening before finding a hotel to stop for the night. The next day we drove from Lima, Ohio, into Kentucky before stopping for lunch in Covington. It was interesting to get into Kentucky, this first time in visiting the state for me, and immediately running into a different geography - steeply pitched hills - and cultrual and language differences - car license plates are "tags", and pop is "soda". And the accent becomes obvious. (Of course, we midwesterners think we are the only people without accents - I am sure that is a universal belief.)

It was amusing to see signs on bridges saying "Bridge may ice in cold weather". To northern midwesterners, this was stating the obvious, but apparently Kentuckians have to be warned. We found the "Falling Rock Zone" signs more interesting - not something one worries about in Michigan, but a good thing to think about in the mountains.


We made it through both Kentucky and Tennessee that day, stopping for the night in Chattanooga, TN, a stone's throw from the Tennessee-Georgia state line. I would say that this was the prettiest day of the trip and probably the most memorable for me just for the scenery.


We left Chattanooga on day three and stopped for breakfast once we got into Georgia, at a place called Waffle House. These are common off the freeways in Georgia and northern Florida and are good old southern cooking in a diner setting. When we walked in, everyone yelled "Good Morning!" - the waitresses, the fry cooks - which was off-putting for us. And we had new things - grits, which I found I liked very much, and raisin toast with cinnamon apple butter. Good stuff.

The soil as we drove through Georgia was reddish-brown, and so, oddly, was the asphalt. And this was the first time I witnessed a person driving with a paperback book propped on his steering wheel. Hmm. These days people talk or text on cell phones while driving, but I had never seen anyone reading a book while driving. Fortunately I haven't seen it often again.

We drove straight through Georgia and stopped in Valdosta for an early dinner. We didn't pick a good restaurant and it was obviously too early for dinner as far as the staff were concerned, so we didn't get very good service. We were the only customers in the place.

We finished the drive to the condo in the Tampa/St. Pete area and arrived about 9:30 pm. Late dinner that night was from 7-11.

The condo was in the Gulf Beaches, a stip of land which wraps around the coastline, about wide enough for a street with buildings on either side of it. Quite unusual.

The condo itself was beautiful, though rather obviously done by a decorator, Everything was in a motif of sea shells and wicker and palm trees. There were sea shell soaps in a shell-shaped soap dish in the bath, sea shell covers over the night lights, a conch shell on the refridgerator, a sand dollar on the coffeemaker. Shell prints on the sheets and on the wallpaper - well, okay, it was a beachfront condo overlooking the gulf. But it was nice - two bedrooms, two baths, a balcony off the living room and master bedroom that faced the gulf. We went to bed that night with the balcony doors open so we could hear the sounds of the ocean waves on the shore - low 60s with a breeze. Nice way to spend a December vacation.

What we did over the next few days was relaxing and fairly typical. We shopped, cooked and ate a lot of seafood, and spent time on the beach (my first experience with salt water swimming). Beach sand in Florida is like talcum, not like sand on the Great Lakes which results from rocks ground down by glaciers. In Florida, it feels like the sand has come from shell and coral. It has a completely different texture.

We picked up a lot of shells to clean and take home with us. When we left them on the kitchen counter before washing, a couple of them moved! That was startling. Of course the shells were homes to hermit crabs. We returned the occupied ones to the beach.

Two days we spent at Disney World. At this time, Magic Kingdom and Epcot were the only theme parks they had - at least, those were the ones we visited. The first day we did Magic Kingdom, which resembled any theme park. (The one we knew best was Cedar Point, which we had both visited in Ohio previously.) At that point in my life, I was a big roller coaster fan (I still am but since my spinal surgery, it's not a good idea). Anyway, we did Space Mountain which was the first time I had ridden an indoor coaster. It's a very different experience and not one I really liked - I would rather see what's coming as part of the fun. We also tried the coaster in Frontierland, which was great. Waterfalls, good hills. Still, Magic Kingdom was just another theme park really, not bad but not great.

The second day we spent at Epcot. That was a new experience for us. We hadn't done this before, where you ride through the exhibits and things move and talk to you and make sounds. That was really interesting. My favorite was Journey Into Imagination, about art and creativity. Also good was Horizons, showing imagined future living in an urban home, a desert farm home, and an undersea home. Spaceship Earth traced the history of communication, and The World of Motion did transportation. Another favorite was The Living Seas, a trip to "Sea Base Alpha" where you pass by huge aquarium tanks that have sharks, dolphins, rays, corals, aneomes, and more. Beautiful.

The second part of Epcot had areas of various nations, but we never made it that far. The front part used up our whole day and we were satisfied with that.

We spent three more days at the condo before flying home on Monday. We had arranged for a cab to the Tampa airport. It was an odd airport at the time - very dark and gloomy. Also, I found it interesting, when I went looking for a pack of gum to help with the air pressure in my ears on the flight, that it was an airport policy at the time not to sell chewing gum. I thought that was really wierd.

It was an excellent trip, and has made it onto my list of ideal vacations - sitting on the beach. Again, I have not repeated the vacation, although I did get to Orlando recently for a conference at Disney World. But that didn't involve any beach sitting.

San Francisco

My first real tip on my own was to San Francisco. I went with my partner of the time, and not being experienced travelers, we stumbled our way through the whole experience. We had no idea what we were doing but ended up having a good time anyway.



We drove to Chicago, where we spent the night before our flight and where we could leave our car while we were gone. From Chicago, we flew to Dallas/Fort Worth and connected from there to San Francisco. I could have counted this as my first visit to Texas since I touched ground, but just experiencing an airport doesn't count as a "significant event".



As a part of the travel package, we had a rental car for our first day only. So when we landed, we went to get the car and drove first to our hotel, then around the city to sightsee. We went to Golden Gate park the first day, and through the neighborhoods to see the townhouses. It is interesting to view how houses are built on very steep streets, because to make level floors, one side of the house will have a foundation several feet taller than the other side. It's also extraordinary to a Midwesterner's viewpoint to see how brightly-colored the houses are.



Another small but telling difference is that we never saw a rusty car. In the Midwest, winter road salt takes its toll, but in San Francisco that isn't needed, so the cars last a lot longer and are in more pristine condition.



After visiting Golden Gate Park, we drove to Fisherman's Wharf and did some strolling. We didn't know much about the city so generally we were looking to visit the well-known tourist spots. After the first day, when we had to return the car, we did a lot of moving around via cable car. Or by bus when we wanted to go places that the cable cars didn't go there.




We did walk Lombard Street, a famous street that curves back and forth as it goes downhill. It is lovely but one can't imagine driving down it except at a crawl. It is a series of hairpin turns with flowerbeds on each side of the street and in the photo, you can see the flowerbeds better than the street itself, but the cars are telltale.

One thing that was educational to us was the variety of foods and the demographic mix of peoples. At that time, we had few Asians in our home city, but in San Francisco, there were large populations of Chinese, Japanese, and other Asians - and the markets and restaurants supporting their tastes. My partner and I enjoyed Chinese food, so we spent a great deal of time in Chinatown. It was our first experience with dim sum. And, as keepsakes, we each bought Chinese silk bathrobes. Mine was green with gold embroidery, and I have it still.

The other tourist experience I most enjoyed was the visit to Alcatraz. At that time, with Alcatraz a national park site rather than a prison island, one could buy a ticket on the ferry that brought tourists over several times a day, and a park ranger would conduct a tour. Some parts of the prison are familiar if you have ever seen a movie set in a prison, especially the main cell block, with tiers of cells and guard posts at each end, and the prison yard and mess hall. I was impressed with the solitary cells, with no windows, three-inch thick doors, nothing except a sink and toilet - no beds. The park ranger told us that an inmate in solitary might or might not even be allowed to have his clothes, depending upon the circumstances. The rooms were dank and cold, so it wouldn't be comfortable, to say the least. But we were told that Alcatraz made no attempt to rehabilitate prisoners. The purpose was simply to isolate and control.

We spent four days in San Francisco - not long enough to see everything but a good first visit. I always wish I had more time and I always plan to return to a place I liked. But it is 24 years later and I have not yet been back to California.

"Superior"

Those not living in or near Michigan may not know that some who live in the Upper Penninsula of Michigan occasionally venture that they would like to be their own state, and they would call it "Superior". Michigan is unique in that it has two distinct land masses as a part of the state, with a beautiful, 5-mile long suspension bridge connecting the two parts. The Mackinac Bridge (pronounced "mack-in-naw") was constructed in 1957 after many years of attempting to get the project started. Apparently the ferry services, adequate in summer, weren't all that reliable in winter when the Straits of Mackinac iced over.

Although I have lived in Michigan all my life, and visited Mackinac Island twice (it is located just off the Straits nearer to the Upper Penninsula than the Lower), I hadn't actually explored the UP until 1994.
Once across the bridge, there are several destinations of interest. Almost directly north, the top of the UP almost touches Canada at Sault Ste. Marie (pronounced "Soo Saint Marie") which is also called just "The Soo". There are the famous locks that allow large ships to move from Lake Superior to Lake Huron and vice versa. Nearby is the Anchor Bar, where you can have a burger and a beer and look at trash and treasures covering every wall, from old license plates to stuffed deer heads, street signs, traffic lights, etc.

Watching a ship move through the locks is a slow but completely fascinating process, as the locks are barely wider than the ships that pass through them. The ship stops, the rear gates close, and then the water is pumped in to raise the ship, or out to lower it. It is fun to see the ship slowly rise or fall as the water fills or empties the chamber.

Then, later, we went to see the famous Taquamenon Falls. The upper falls drop 50 feet and the falls are over 200 feet across. The water looks rusty brown due to the iron content, but it still foams white at the foot. The lower falls are not as tall but still are worth seeing.

But the Taquamenon are only two of the many waterfalls in the UP. They are the "Niagras" of Michigan, but all over the UP you can park and hike along a trail, sometimes going carefully down wooden stairs with a wooden railing, or a wood-paved walkway deep into the woods. You will hear the water before you see it, but then, suddenly, there it will be. Some are barely a foot wide, others are quite large. The one I remember the best, although I didn't take a picture, was in a very green woods, curved toward us like a half a glass, and some parts fell ten feet to a rock ledge, boiled, and fell again in numerous cascades, while other parts fell freely fifty feet or more.

One more attraction that we saw that was memorable was the Pictured Rocks on Lake Superior. It requires you board a boat at the town of Munising, and even in July the wind on the lake is very cold. But the view of the carved and colored rock formations is breathtaking.

Almost as numerous as waterfalls are lighthouses on the Lake Superior shoreline. Some of them are very old and have been preserved as state or national historical sites. Some of them have houses attached, where the lightkeepers lived. Now most of them are museums or visitors' centers. One could spend many days looking at lighthouses.

Our trip to the Upper Penninsula took place in high summer, so we did get the benefit of good weather and easy driving, sunny days, and were able to spend a lot of our time outdoors. It made for a grand trip overall.

The License Plate Game

Summer is the construction season in Michigan, and to while away my time while I am stuck in traffic, I've been playing the license plate game. In the last weeks of August, as the students begin to return to East Lansing for another school year, I am seeing out of state plates that reminds me that we have students from every state in the US attending Michigan State University, and reminds me again about my goal to see them all.

In the three weeks starting the school year, I have seen plates from Idaho, Florida, Texas, Colorado, and New Jersey (day one); Maryland, California, and Minnesota on day two; Indiana, Montana, Illinois, Virginia, Utah, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, Ohio, Nevada, and Pennsylvania (days three through twelve).

I have been in perhaps half of these. It makes me want to get in the car and just go - there is so much more to see than I have seen!

(I especially like the plates from the mountain west such as Nevada's -- I grew up with water but I find mountains equally fascinating. )

Growing up "Pure Michigan"

I went downstate to college, as most upstaters do. It may be hard to fathom, but one could draw a line, east to west, through the middle of Michigan's mitten, and it would be true that 90% of the population and the colleges are south of that line. Northern lower Michigan and the Upper Penninsula are very rural areas, sparsely populated, good vacation spots and wonderful places to raise children, but it is also the case that there isn't much there. It is hard to find work and one needs to drive tens of miles to do any major shopping.

After college, I moved to Lansing and have lived in the area around the Capitol City ever since. It is said that there are only three places to work in Lansing - state government, the auto industry, or at Michigan State University in neighboring East Lansing. Both state government and the auto industry have struggled in recent years, but I was fortunate to choose to work at Michigan State, so I have a secure job and, not incidentally, it has afforded me the opportunity to visit and cross off a number of the fifty states. More on that follows, of course, but attending conferences has taken me to many places in representing the university that I probably never would have seen in another line of work. It has enhanced my taste for travel far beyond what I would have been able to do on my own.

Lansing is a good place to live. A city of around 100,000, it is large enough that you can get a pizza delivered or find a video to rent within a mile of work or home, with three major malls to shop - no more driving fifty miles to buy bulk food or pick out a new refridgerator - and there are even international selections in restaurants due to the large international population drawn by the university. I find I like having the choice of twelve Chinese restaurants, another half-dozen sushi bars, Greek pizza, Italian and Mexican and Middle Eastern choices in abundance. Okay, I only know of one Thai place - but I am not that fond of Thai food so it's a matter of indifference to me.

Working on the campus of Michigan State University is a delight, every single day. It is one of the most beautiful campuses I have ever seen. On my drive to work, I pass the horse farm where mares and their foals graze in the spring. Then I pass between two golf courses and work my way past south campus, with their modern buildings, to the best part of the campus, North Campus, where the old architecture rules. Out of my window, I can see a garden with a fountain and a classroom building with gables and brick. An example can be seen at the left.

Lansing and its near neighbor communities have a lot to offer and I have been content to live here for more than 30 years. It's a wonderful jumping-off point, at the center of the mitten, and from here I have launched myself on many travels which I will journal here in later postings.

Born in Michigan

Michigan is my first state of the 50, since I was born here and have lived here my entire life. But I have had many homes in Michigan, in several cities and towns, and have traveled extensively through the state as well. I've had sixteen addresses in six cities and towns in Michigan, starting with in Harper Woods, a Detroit suburb, where I lived the first seven years of my life. I was actually born in the city of Detroit (the hospital was located there).

At the age of seven, I moved to Frankfort, a small town in northern Lower Michigan located on the Lake Michigan shoreline. The photo at right shows the archway over highway M-115 as you enter the town. It always made me feel like I was coming home to see the gateway, even years after I no longer lived there.

I think I learned to love the water while I lived in Frankfort. Whenever I was having a bout of teenage angst, I would go out and walk the lake shore. It was incredibly soothing - quiet and beautiful, even in the winter, and allowed the silence and solitude I needed to think things through.

The cry of the lighthouse on foggy mornings and the low bellowing of the car ferries as they prepared to voyage to Wisconsin were the background music of my life there. It was a great place to grow up.

Of course, things didn't last. My mother remarried when I was about fourteen, and for a short while - about nine months to a year - I was relocated to a suburb of Grand Rapids. I didn't think much of it either way - it was another city, not unlike Harper Woods, and I knew we were planning to return to Frankfort eventually so I didn't invest much in the city. These days, I enjoy. Grand Rapids and often visit there, but at the time it meant very little to me.

Next up - college and beyond