Road food

...as distinct from street food.

We didn't have any truly great meals on our trip east, nothing to compare with some of our memories of eating in Europe or on some other American trips (like our wedding feast of lobster in Maine, or an Italian meal I had in San Francisco back in the '70's that I remember almost bite for bite...mmmm!). And we were good and ate most of our lunches in the car.

But we did eat out at some interesting places.

Unfortunately, I don't have my friend JaPRA's habit of taking pictures of food, and I didn't even take a picture everywhere we stopped. But I do have a few gastronomic experiences to share with you.

Like the obligatory Waffle House, where you can always count on a good, filling breakfast for a good price, served up quickly. You can find them in any southern town with a population of more than a dozen [strangely, in some areas—we think it's further east than we went this time—it's Pancake House instead, with the same yellow sign with a letter in each block and probably nearly identical menus]. We had our Waffle House breakfast this time in London, Kentucky.

We also sampled a Waffle-House-like, but more locally-flavored breakfast place in Waynesville, North Carolina. This was Clyde's, recommended by the clerk at our ridiculously cheap motel (in case you find yourself needing a bed on the east side of the Great Smokies sometime, check out The Lodge in Waynesville). Henry loves to get restaurant recommendations from the locals and they almost always prove to be spot on.

Another North Carolina town that proved to have good eats was Bryson City, right at the back door of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We were camping that night, our only night spent in the tent instead of in beds, but had made the executive decision before leaving home that we just wouldn't deal with cooking at any campsites.

So we had a rather luxurious dinner before turning in to our primitive [not really, but it was outside] shelter for the night, at Anthony's Pizza in the middle of touristy—but charming and nicely uncrowded—downtown Bryson City. (We beat the surely massive crowds that visit here during the peak summer season, a situation we'll take every time, even if it means having to hunt around a bit longer to find someplace open.)

The next morning we ate breakfast in style on the same little street, at Mountain Perks, a free-wifi coffee shop Hal and Carey had visited just a month or so before. Tea, bagels, and checking email—what more do you need?

The most unusual dining area on the trip was many hundreds of feet below the Kentucky countryside in Mammoth Cave's Snowball lunchroom. Halfway through our 4-mile Grand Avenue tour, they gave us a nice lunch/bathroom break in the really interesting eatery you can see at the right. We had taken munchies for ourselves (although we supplemented them with a candy bar from the canteen) but if we'd realized the variety of food we could have bought there for a fairly reasonable price (soup and sandwich would have been good) we might have saved ourselves the trouble.

Below is a look at some of our fellow diners. The ranger speaking to the folks at one of the tables is the gentleman that I mentioned in an earlier post—a fifth-generation Mammoth Cave guide!

We had one of our most "authentic" culinary experiences our last night on the road, in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Again following a motel clerk's recommendation, we hunted out the original Mulate's, where the seafood was good but the atmosphere was the real draw. Even though the place wasn't crowded by any means, on this weeknight, there were some enthusiastic fans and a few folks even got up and danced to the live Cajun music that accompanied our meal. [Amazingly, we made the acquaintance of a couple of other San Antonians at the register! It's a big country, but really a pretty small world, I guess.]

We sampled a local brew as well, just to top off the experience, as you can see on the left.

But we had one more road meal in us, meeting my brother in Houston for a well-timed lunch to break up the long homestretch drive. Here are Steve and Henry at the yummy Dry Creek sandwich shop in the Houston Heights, a neighborhood full of great restaurants and handily just off I-10 so we had little Houston traffic to deal with.

A combination of all this good food, too much sitting in the car, and too little exercising, pumped my weight up a few pounds over the course of the trip, travellers' hazard, I suppose. But it's worth it to enjoy the road cuisine that comes with an enjoyable road trip.

Wordless Wednesday: must be summer

The world below...

...below the blue grass of Kentucky, that is.

Our visit to Mammoth Cave National Park was one of the highlights of our trip east last month.

It was difficult to take good pictures there, but we, especially Henry, did manage to get a few shots that might give you an idea of how neat this amazing place is.

All the photos featured in today's post were taken on our long hike through the cave, called the Grand Avenue tour. On our first day in the area, we took the Mammoth Passage tour, a short one that gave us a good introduction to the space. It entered at the historical entrance and we saw some neat geological features, some evidence of historical use of the cave (by prehistoric peoples and for War of 1812 saltpeter mining), and learned some more of its fascinating history.

The next day we were ready for the big time. The Grand Avenue tour takes over four hours, covers four miles, including parts, if not all, of several shorter tours, and provides a good variety of cave scenery.

For example, in the photo on the right, I'm in one of the "canyons" that were my favorite part. Just a few feet wide, these sheer walls climb up a few hundred feet before they reach the "ceiling." On the left is a much more expansive chamber, seen from one of the steeper parts of the trail.

The following picture will give you a good idea of the steepness encountered on this section of the tour. There are 3 or 4 climbs up what were once piles of rubble, but were smoothed over into nice—but strenuous—trails by CCC workers in the 1930's. These industrious workers also provided tourists with the nice handrails like those you can see at the bottom of this shot.

By contrast, the first part mile or so of the hike is the "Grand Avenue" of the tour title, this wide, level, thoroughfare, carved by nothing more than the rushing water of the Echo River, centuries ago.

As I indicated in an earlier post, the history of the Cave is almost as compelling as its subterranean scenery. You can see examples of the history often during the tour, such as this "smoke writing." Earlier generations carried lanterns and candles when touring the Cave, and would sometimes write their names with the soot on the cavern walls. Some of the writing in the picture below was done in 1852:

Nowadays, though, we're lucky to have nicely placed LED lights throughout the cave that illuminate its larger spaces and its tiny treasures, such as the gypsum crystals on the right. This is one of the important mineral riches that might have brought prehistoric hunter-gatherers into the cave. Although our Mammoth Passage guide admitted the experts don't know what they would have done with the substance.

Those lights aren't always on, though, as during a rest stop mid-way through our tour our team of guides turned all the lights off in an area so we'd have an experience of total darkness for a few moments. What a strange sensation! While we sat there, our guide told us a story of a guy who got left behind from a group and accidentally "locked in" over night—in total dark. He apparently kept safe and sane by sitting still and singing every song he knew over and over to himself!

Another surprising detail of the cave, at least near its entrances, is wildlife. Like these cute cave crickets that you see on the left. They were revealed on the dark cave ceiling by our guide's flashlight—a tool that would come in handy should you find yourself locked in!

Mammoth Cave doesn't have the big spectacular rooms of Carlsbad Caverns or its many chambers of massive stalactites, stalagmites*, and draperies. But it does have one nifty room loaded with these neat features—poetically named "Frozen Niagara"—that comes right at the end of the Grand Avenue tour.

At the right are some amazing "drapery" formations in this area. Hard to believe this isn't chocolate frosting, isn't it? Skillfully extruded from some Willy Wonka machine.

Here are a couple of great shots Henry took of the Frozen Niagara area. What a great way to cap off a wonderful tour of this subterranean wonderland.

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*How many times have I tried to find a way to remember which goes up and which goes down? Perhaps the mnemonic our guide gave us on this tour will stick:

• Stalactites hold tight to the top of the cave
• Stalagmites might someday grow to reach the ceiling

Wordless Wednesday: Sally snaps the big city

Trip east: water features

We went paddling on the upper Guadalupe River yesterday, and had a great time (the water level was perfect). But I deliberately didn't take my camera along since I'm so backed up with untold stories and unused photos from our trip back east.

Since a pleasant paddle is on my mind, though, I thought I'd give you a look at some of the many various rivers, streams, lakes, etc., that we saw (and interacted with) on the trip.

First, the closest interaction.

After picking up raft #1 (the surprise raft; see this post for pictures of the rafts) we actually had the opportunity to use it. We took a short paddle on the Rockcastle River in Kentucky. The photo on the left is Henry in the back seat of the raft (I'm in the front one—it swivels!) taking a break from trying to learn to row it with the oars. (We ended up giving up on the oars and made pretty good time just paddling.)

Here's a picture that shows how lovely this river is. Although it was not moving as much as we'd expected, so the paddle was very good exercise.

You will also notice the downed trees. This picture is looking back upstream, so we obviously made it past these obstacles. We squeezed between the big clump of green in the middle of the picture, a small island, and the roots of the downed tree on the right.

Little did we know at this point that we had a much tighter squeeze ahead. A bit further downstream there was a fallen tree that extended across the entire river! We did eventually get past it, but it was not easy. We had to pull the raft over a large rock on the bank were the top of the tree was resting. I slipped on a slanted face of the rock and smacked my shin (a body part that I'm very hard on when paddling, historically). But a bigger almost-disaster happened while we were trying to get the raft over the rock: I forgot that my camera was around my neck and not in its dry bag. Horrors!

Long-time readers of this blog might remember how feisty and robust my little camera is. But I was pretty sure that I'd finally done it in. On the right is a sample picture taken with it not too long after the dunking.

But, I kept it open and in the sun as much as I could for the rest of the paddle, and opened it up and held it out the car window while we drove the rest of the day, and it seemed to dry out pretty well. I was able to take pictures with it the next day that looked as good as my pictures usually do. What a great little piece of technology! [I think its electronics are damaged, though, as I can't set the time and date and now all my photos say they were taken January 1, 1980, at midnight. Where it came up with this date, I have no idea. So I think I'll be in the market soon for a new camera. Any recommendations? Please leave them in the comments.]

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On to other water features. And don't worry, none of these have such long stories attached.

We saw some more really lovely streams after our Rockcastle paddle. Here are a couple (a few more are in my last post):

Deep Creek (with a toober) near our Great Smoky Mountains campsite, in North Carolina

Henry taking pictures of kayakers on the Ocoee in Tennessee

Some rafters in a raft like one of ours on the Ocoee
(although I imagine they don't have to store this raft in their garage...)

We saw other types of rivers, too. From the small...

A car being ferried across the Green River in Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky

... to the much larger:

bridge across the Mississippi at Memphis, with the picturesque Pyramid peeping above the roadway
(I know you can't see the river here but it's under the bridge, trust me)

And lakes...

Nentahala Lake in North Carolina
(from which the world class whitewater river of the same name flows)

We got to see some great waterfalls, too, always a favorite photo subject with us. (See some great Welsh waterfalls here.)

The first two below were on our Deep Creek Campground hike in the Great Smokies.

Tom Branch Falls on the Deep Creek

Indian Creek falls, on a Deep Creek tributary

And here's one just outside the Historic Entrance to Mammoth Cave. It was rainy while we were there, so we got see this pretty fall, one that doesn't always run:

There were hard-to-classify water features, too, like this drip from the roof of Mammoth Cave...(maybe some of the rainwater from the fall shown above?)

The swimming pool seen from our astonishingly inexpensive motel room in Waynesville, North Carolina, in the foothills of the Great Smokies...


And the wonderful Achafalaya Basin in Louisiana, seen from the elevated roadway that IH-10 becomes to transport you over it. We were there at sunset, lucky to get views like this at the end of a very rainy day. A fitting close to this summary of the great waterways we encountered on the trip.

It IS a good idea

I'm referring, of course, to what Ken Burns calls our best idea: national parks. And although the Bill of Rights was also a spot-on innovation, the parks certainly rank pretty high up on our best ideas list.

We were lucky to be able to visit several of these wonderful places on our recent trip east, and their variety, beauty, and fascination made us extremely proud to be Americans.

I'll be giving you more details about our trip in upcoming posts, but here are some glimpses and a few words of description about the parks we visited.

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Mammoth Cave National Park is one of the oldest tourist destinations in the country. While in private hands, it hosted guests as long ago as the 1820's. This is a look from just inside the historical entrance to the cave, the only one that was known back then. We were at the beginning of a short guided tour that took us a little way into the amazing cave complex, which is by far the longest known cave system in the WORLD!


There are now several more entrances and we took a long tour the next day starting in one of the newer ones, a hike that included some of the early-explored territory and some passages not discovered until later. One of our guides on that tour was an African-American who is a fifth-generation Mammoth Cave guide. Yes, that means that his earliest guide forebears were slaves owned by the folks who owned the cave in the early 1800's. Talk about history coming alive!

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More history was on offer at another one of our stops: Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. This small area at the point where Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virgina come together was one of the best passes through the mountains for the colonists and early Americans wanting to move westward.

Thanks to Henry for taking this picture of the valley into which the Gap leads. (My camera was busy drying out from an unfortunate incident that I might—or might not—describe in a future post.)

An inexplicably vivid memory from childhood perusing of my parents' history coffee table books is the painting at the right of Daniel Boone leading settlers through the Gap...how neat to be able to visit it! [The stop also allowed us to claim 10 states on this junket, since we briefly crossed over into Virginia climbing up the winding trail to the top of the overlook: see the photo of me half in Virginia and half in Kentucky at the left.]

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And more history was to come, at the Chickamaugua and Chattanooga National Military Park, a fascinating place whose cheery Chick/Chatt nickname isn't all that appropriate for the somber sites it memorializes. Here's one of the photos we took on the drive around the Chickamaugua Battlefield section of the park:

We really learned a lot on our drive and the next morning in the great Chickamaugua visitor center/museum. Unfortunately we didn't have time to tour the other major battlefield that's part of the park: Lookout Mountain. There was a lot of very important Civil War action in the Chattanooga vicinity in 1863.

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The other big park we visited was Great Smoky Mountains National Park, another boundary-straddling area with a parking lot where you can have one foot in Tennessee and one in North Carolina. It features the Appalachians at their loveliest, but unfortunately low-season road maintenance kept us from being able to hike up to Clingman's Dome, the highest point in the park. We did take a nice ramble along the Appalachian Trail, which traces the spine of the Smokies through most of the park, although we didn't make it all the way to Maine! And we had our one camp-out of the trip near the picturesque North Carolina town of Bryson City.

This photo, however, was taken just off the highway, when we made a little stop to admire the Oconaluftee River flowing alongside the main park road.

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We were able to take advantage of another very scenic road before we even got into the park, as the Blue Ridge Parkway, which starts in Virginia, where we've driven on it briefly before, ends at the border of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This is a wonderful, wind-y (and, at least occasionally, windy) road with so many pull-outs for great views that it would take you hours to go a few miles if you stopped at all of them. Perfect—apparently, judging from the number of riders we saw—for motorcyclists and little sports cars, it's a great way to get to the park.

This photo was taken at the Waterrock Knob Visitor Center on the parkway, where we stopped for a short hike and a little souvenir shopping.

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These parks and historical sites are the jewels in the "best idea" crown, but there are national forests with lots of great scenery, too. Here's an example, taken in the Nantahala National Forest in North Carolina. The river with the same name is a highly-regarded whitewater stream, judging by the numbers of outfitters we saw and the large number, for a weekday, of kayakers and rafters actually on the river. It was tempting to think about inflating the raft safely stowed in the back of our car, but we contented ourselves with watching the boaters and taking pictures of this really beautiful stream.

Yes, these parks and other collectively-owned lands are a very good idea*.

And citizens from all over were taking advantage of them. This is a collage of license plates we saw in the parking lot at Mammoth Cave. The diversity of states is particularly striking for this location, since Mammoth Cave isn't really near any other large tourist area. These people wanted to go there!

We were very happy to be joining them enjoying the fruits of this wonderful idea.

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*This isn't supposed to be a political blog, but I couldn't help thinking about the tax dollars required to support this network of parks and other great sites and how some of my fellow citizens don't think this is such a good idea. Perhaps they should show their feelings by putting an appropriate sticker on their cars that would forbid them entry to any of these "socialist" enterprises. I also rather think they should eschew driving on the interstate highway system, too, but I realize that would be a regulation rather difficult to enforce.

Wordless Wednesday: 2-sport weekend!

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