Seattle

My travel to Washington state is limited to a single visit to Seattle, but it was a particularly good one. Again, it was for a conference, and the flight was long enough that we actually had a large plane - I don't know model numbers but it was one that has 2 seats on either side and 5 in the middle. It doesn't feel so cramped for a long flight as does a standard plane.

In Seattle, we visited the Space Needle, saw the famous Pike Place Market, and ate in a couple of great restaurants, one of which practically hung out over the Sound. We also saw the Seattle Aquarium and took a boat trip to Tillicum Village on Blake Island, where we ate a traditional Native American meal and saw a stage show of their dances.


Seattle has wonderful coffee. Even before Starbucks won the "every coffee shop on the corner" contest, Seattle had shops all over offering Seattle's Best. At the time I visited there, so many years back, that was a new thing.


I would like to go back. I only got a glimpse of the nearby Mt Ranier and Mt St Helens from the plane (there may have been a clear day or two while there but I don't remember). I would like to see either of them from a better vantage point.

Chicago, Evanston, Urbana-Champagne

Illinois is pretty close by, and so when I wanted a city to play in, I'd plan a trip to Chicago. I've been to many conferences there since it is a hub city that is easy to fly into. And I've visited Urbana-Champagne and Evanston as part of my tour of Big Ten universities (U of Illinois and Northwestern, respectively).


The attractions of Chicago/Evanston are twofold. One, a nice big city, lots of bookstores and restaurants and shops, combined with the comfortable familiarity of Lake Michigan from my childhood. All right, Lake Michigan is on the "wrong" side of the city from the small town where I grew up, but that doesn't matter. It's still as big and beautiful and soothing to me in Illinois as it was to me in Frankfort.


I've been to Chicago by plane, by car, and by train - the latter is actually my favorite way to arrive. I fly many places - too many, really - and after a while all flights seem the same. I don't like to drive long distances unless I have company to share the driving, and even then it seems a bit like a forced march. But on a train you can see the scenery, get a coffee, read, and there is absolutely no pressure to go faster. You don't have to worry about traffic. Someone else is responsible for getting you there, so no need for maps or triptiks or GPS announcements on where to turn. It is leisurely and I like it very much.


Once in Chicago, the El is a wonderful option for getting around, although there are numerous cabs available as well. I prefer not to drive in Chicago after one memorable trip where we were stuck on the Dan Ryan Expressway through town for several hours in 90 degree heat. Cars were overheating and dying on all sides of us and it served as a caution to me for the future.


Northwestern's campus is gorgeous - the buildings are fancy and probably reflect the fact that as a private school (the only private in the Big Ten), it is pricey. The students there do enjoy a very nice campus. Good bookstores and restaurants and shops in the area make for a very pretty college town. And a commuter train gets you back into the heart of Chicago in only a little time.

Urbana-Champagne (or sometimes, Champagne-Urbana) is the home of the University of Illinois, another Big Ten school. I don't know why the town name is sometimes one, sometimes the other way. I also admit I remember very little about the university campus or nearby area. Although we did stay at the hotel/inn on campus (almost every Big Ten school has at least one), we encountered quite a bit of rain while we were there and thus the obligatory tour of campus was obscured by viewing through rain-smeared bus windows. Nice enough, I am sure, but not memorable for me.

McAllen and Brownsville

My trips to Texas, unlike almost all my other trips to other states, have been completely personal rather than business. My parents were snowbirds for about five years. They summered in Michigan and wintered in McAllen, Texas, near the Mexican border. I made three trips - two for Christmas and once for Thanksgiving. I saw both the Dallas/Fort Worth and the Houston airports on the way.

I liked McAllen very much. It's not a huge city but felt comparable to Lansing, my home town, which is a little over 100,000 people. It had a airport, so that was convenient for visits. The terrain and vegetation were alien - cypress trees dripping Spanish moss in some places, cacti in others. At Christmas, it was pleasantly warm. (My Thanksgiving visit, it was uncomfortably hot.)

My parents spent the winters with other snowbirds, mostly their own age, in a retirement park there. The cats, experience travelers, had their own tethers so they could lie on the patio and watch people walk by, or even get up and visit passersby at their whim.

My mother and I visited a small Mexican town (Hidalgo) right across the Rio Grande. It was fun - very touristy - with lots of shops selling boots, whips, blankets, hats, and jewelry. My mother did use the trips to visit the pharmacia to stock up on meds she and my stepfather used. They were very cheap, and some things requiring a prescription in the US are sold over the counter in Mexico. I don't recall that she actually smuggled them back, but I don't recall a border agent asking us either. They really only wanted to know we were citizens. Probably unfair, but since I am blue-eyed and was blondish before I went grey, I had no problem getting back in, even before I presented my Michigan driver's license.

Another trip we took was to Brownsville, on the Gulf coast, where we spent a wonderful afternoon at the Brownsville Zoo. As I have said before, I will go to a zoo anywhere, anytime. I love animals and most zoos these days try to make a reasonable accomodation to their needs in terms of space and terrain. Sometimes I regret that they have to live in captivity but I also covet zookeeper's ability to put their hands on big cats and get to know them. I want that job.

Once my parents passed away, I had no more personal reason to go to Texas and haven't been back since. It's a nice enough place, but I don't miss it either.

Minneapolis Times Four

The only times I have been in Minnesota, I have been in Minneapolis. Knowing nothing about the rest of the state, I have to count my four trips to Minneapolis as my experience with the state - probably not representative - but since I love the city, it's all good.

All of my trips have been for conferences, three of them in the city center where the famous statue of Mary Tyler Moore tossing her hat into the air stands on a street corner. I was delighted the first time I saw it, just a block from my hotel.

Minneapolis is pretty decent in the summer and fall, but my third trip there was in January. It is cold there, windy in the canyons between the buildings, and thus the skywalks are a very nice convenience. When I was in Atlanta, I saw that they also had some skywalks, but I thought those were nice but not necessary. In Minneapolis, they definitely are needed - and when the wind chill is 20 below zero, it makes walking around the city a lot easier.

Another trip was to the University of Minnesota across the river, for a conference and tour of the campus as part of our Big Ten exchange program. Again, I have been fortunate enough to visit every Big Ten campus, and while I prefer the land grant universities with lots of grass and trees, the U of Minnesota campus is urban - but very slick and modern.

However, when all is said and done, it is just another large city. There is a nice shopping area - Nicollet Mall - downtown. And for those who really really love to shop, the Mall of America is also in Minneapolis, though a bit out of the city. I was, I admit, impressed by it. I guess the amusement park, complete with a (small) roller coaster and Ferris wheel, was the memorable part. Wow, that is a big mall. I had a couple nice meals there, and bought a souvenir Minnesota Golden Gophers hoodie there. You know a mall is big when it has to have two Starbucks within it.

I like Minneapolis and would be willing to return, but I think it might be nice some time to see the rest of the state.

Return to DC

Just got back from a long weekend in DC. This one was pure fun, and we drove, so we hit other states on the way. Pennsylvania in October is absolutely glorious. In the mountains the leaves are turning and the scenery is wonderful. I am glad I wasn't driving on that part of the trip out, because it was really worth looking at.


We arrived in DC on Friday evening after a 12-hour drive (which included time getting lost and retracing our steps), then had a meal and a drink in the hotel pub, then hit the sack to rest up for the weekend activities.


Saturday morning we spent at the National Zoo. This time I actually got to see the pandas, which on my last visit had stubbornly refused to emerge for viewing. They actually are not as big as I had imagined, as I had envisioned something about the size of a black bear. They aren't - they are more the size of a St. Bernard dog. But they are well worth seeing. The first one that came in for viewing stared at the people on the other side of the glass while rhythmically scratching his backside against a (fake) boulder. He looked pretty happy.


Of course we had to visit the big cats - tiger and lion - and the smaller ones, cheetahs that were very interested in the zoo keeper who apparently had the bucket of meat scraps for dinner. The cheetah enclosure is next to the zebras, and one cheetah kept venturning that way - he really wanted that zebra but there was no way he could get to it. This must have been an old game because the zebra just went on grazing. He would not have done that in the wild.


After the zoo, and a wonderful brunch, we got on the Metro for a trip to the Mall to see some of the monuments. We passed by the Washington Monument and spent a little time at the World War II memorial - not my favorite by a long shot - there is way too much froofraw on it. It was an important war but the iron wreaths and iron eagles and stone plinths are awfully aggressive. I wish they had done better.


The Korean War memorial is new since my last trip. That was a better one - the statues of the soldiers were solemn and sad. On a wall facing them are etchings of faces of service men and women.


Then we went to the Lincoln memorial - I had been there several times but not all of our group had, so we stayed a while there, then walked the Vietnam memorial wall to finish our tour. That one is my favorite and always is moving. Of course, Vietnam was "my" war - it ended when I was in my teens, but it was high in my consciousness for obvious reasons.


Across Constituition Avenue is the National Science Academy with a huge statue of Albert Einstein out front. He is sitting casually there - and apparently wearing Birkenstocks. Tourists were climbing up into his lap for photos, so I did too.


Then we walked north past the State Department - and quite a ways longer - onto the campus of George Washington University. Even more walking finally got us to a Metro stop, and we headed back to the area of our hotel to find a restaurant and have a drink and dinner. We had done more walking that day than I normally do in a week, so we were all ready for food and beer.


On Sunday, we all participated in the National Equality March. As with all marches, one can count on the fact that it will never start when it is supposed to. With a scheduled noon kickoff, the staging area was so full and crowded that it extended for several blocks and filled the side streets as well. We stood in the sun for over an hour before we detected movement. After about a block of marching, we were told that the front of the march had reached the Capitol Lawn, 2 miles away. Hmm. Sure seemed like there were a lot of people!


Anyway, we did make our way around the White House and down to the Capitol, listened to some speeches, then drifted off to the National Air and Space Museum for a while. Then it was on to the metro to the restaurant we had chosen the night before. Good move. We got there before the dinner rush and had another wonderful meal. I was the only one who skipped dessert, trying to be good after a weekend (so far) of eating things I probably shouldn't have - but the desserts my tablemates shared were pretty awesome, too.


Then it was back to the hotel to take our shoes off, relax, and repack for the trip home on Monday. A nice drive, good weather, but as always, it seems longer when you are going home.

Washington, DC

As I prepare for a weekend trip to Washington, DC, I realize that I should have named this blog "Wandering Through 50.1" or some such name. DC certainly counts as a unique visiting spot, although of course it isn't a state.


My first trip to DC is probably the most memorable for me, although I have since been there on at least three other occasions. The first visit was an actual vacation, as opposed to the subsequent trips which were for business reasons, so that is the one I want to write about... I went a lot more places on that trip.


My partner and I stayed with a friend who at the time lived in the bottom floor of a brownstone just east of the Mall, only a subway stop or two away. The friend worked at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian, so of course we had to visit there on our trip. Our visit happened to occur at the same time that the museum had a Star Trek exhibit - a retrospective of the original television series. So we got to view uniforms and equipment. I have a photo of my 20-something self standing in the transporter room with cardboard cutout figures of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, and another of me in the Captain's chair from the Enterprise bridge. (Not digital photos, so I don't have copies to post here.) Since we were all huge fans, it was quite a treat.


I didn't realize before visiting Washington that the Smithsonian Institution was more than just one building. To this day I don't believe I have visited them all. National Air and Space and the American History Museum were on our schedule, along with the National Zoological Park (part of the Smithsonian! Who knew?)


The American History Museum had an exhibit at the time of the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. I find it unbelievable that I, after all my formal education, did not know that America had done this. One more reason we should applaud our museums. The exhibit was sobering, to say the least.


On the other hand, the museum also had more lighthearted displays, such as gowns of First Ladies and memorabilia from various famous television shows.


Then there are the national monuments. We ascended the Washington Monument and peered out its small windows in all four directions. I don't recommend the trip - it was pretty cramped. We saw the Capitol, of course, and the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials. The one that touched me most - being from the Vietnam generation, or close to it - was the Wall. It is beautiful in its simplicity and very moving. Especially when you find a name on it that you know.

I learned to eat sushi in DC. Before my first visit, I had never tried it and honestly didn't think I would care for it. On the other hand, it was before the current trend of sushi restaurants practically on every corner.

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.