Advertisement
Memphis Songsters
Despite delays from starter failure, Matilda carried us all the way to Memphis, Tenn., where blues are big on Beale Street.
Leavenworth, Kan. - Lake Chicot, Ark.
Mile 7,125
1,750 Miles this Leg Driving a 17-year-old vehicle around the country, we expected to have periodic mechanical troubles. And a few hours after the last blog posting, we had to tap into the “repairs” reserve in our trip budget. Matilda “gave us a start” when her starter failed!
We had packed up on April 18 and left our relatives’ house near Leavenworth, Kan., to head toward southern Missouri. We stopped in the tongue-twister town of Osawatomie, Kan., to fill our propane tank and upon trying to restart Matilda, she responded only with a horrible grinding noise. The starter had given us only two shaky starts as a warning before it died completely.
Thanks to the helpful folks at the Farmers Co-op, we ruled out the battery as a problem, and got Matilda push-started (popping the clutch in 2nd gear). Back to Jan and Jamie’s house we drove, phoning mechanics and parts shops along the way. In the end, we had to wait a day for a new starter to be ordered, but the 19th turned out to be a much-needed rest day. By
Matilda Under Tow
Matilda's starter failed after many years of service, so she got a ride into Kansas City for a replacement. midday on the 20th, the Volkswagen mechanics at Vee Village in Kansas City had done their jobs and we were back on the road that afternoon.
While we were delayed in Kansas City, we visited the
Arabia Steamboat Museum, which houses an absolutely incredible collection of pre-Civil War household and frontier goods that sank on the sidewheeler Arabia in 1856. The sinking occurred on the Missouri River only a few miles away from the downtown museum, but by the time the cargo was excavated in 1988-89, the steamboat was resting 45 feet under a Kansas corn field because the river had shifted course! It’s really worth a visit to get the full story of how the 200-ton cargo was recovered and preserved, but I will just say that for an American Studies major who was taught to appreciate “material culture,” this museum was a treat. The Arabia was headed to the Western frontier with a load of pioneers, so everything they would have needed to start their new lives was aboard - and survived remarkably intact. School slates, pen nibs, boots, canned fruit, padlocks, dishes, harnesses, even lumber for pre-fab houses…truly a treasure trove.
But wait…the starter story’s not
Matilda's Starter
This fellow and the good folks at the Osawatomie Farmers Co-op helped us roll-start Matilda after her starter started having troubles. over! On the 21st, we paused at a rest stop in Illinois and the new starter made the same grinding noise the dying one had. This was truly puzzling and disheartening. We had to recruit some beefy fellow travelers to push-start poor Matilda, and spent the rest of our drive to Fort Knox, Ky., on the cell phone, lining up a mechanic in Louisville. The Volksdoktor (!) had a starter made by Bosch (an original equipment manufacturer for Volkswagen) that he could swap out. To make a long story short, the general after-market O’Reilly starter that had been installed in Kansas City proved faulty. We could have had a Bosch starter installed in Kansas City, but we would have had to have waited an extra day for the part to be delivered. I think we learned our lesson.
One outcome of the starter saga was that we made a beeline from Kansas City to Fort Knox in a day and a half so that we could visit my cousin’s family there on the weekend, as originally planned. We were really looking forward to visiting Laura Ingalls Wilder’s home in southern Missouri and Mark Twain’s home in Hannibal, and exploring
Emily & Jeff
Once we got back on the road and made it to Kentucky, Jeff found a fellow banjo fan in our 4-year-old relation Emily. St. Louis. But we ended up blasting through Missouri on I-70 and through southern Illinois and Indiana as well.
It was worth it, though, because we hadn’t seen my cousin Jamie and her husband Louis and nearly-four-year-old Emily for two and a half years -and in that time, little Jack had been born. He is five months old with an ear-to-ear grin, and he rivaled his sister at being the life of the party.
The family lives on post at Fort Knox, and Louis is a captain in the U.S. Army who trains other soldiers. For the first time since this Gulf War began, he is due to deploy to Afghanistan for a year starting in August to oversee security at one of the military bases. But for now, he has weekends off, and on Saturday all six of us made an outing to Louisville to eat out, walk the downtown, and visit the Louisville Slugger Museum - yes, where they make the wooden baseball bats. We bought a rare souvenir for us: a factory-second bat that doesn’t take up much room in Matilda’s closet.
Mostly, our visit revolved around hanging out with the kids, eating dinners
Family of Four
Emily's family includes Shelly's cousin Jamie, her husband Louis, and 5-month-old Jack. Louis is a captain in the Army and trains new soliders at Fort Knox, Ky. on the outdoor patio, playing music and teaching Emily the fine points of whiffleball. Jack only fussed once the whole time we were there, earning the distinction of the happiest baby we’ve encountered yet! Oh, and we “Dynamited” Jamie and Louis by introducing them to the movie “Napoleon Dynamite,” one of two DVDs we brought with us. (The other is “Super Size Me,” reserved for anyone who tries to take us out to eat at McDonalds!)
We spent three nights on the road to Memphis, and the highlights were:
* Stumbling across the home of the late
Bill Monroe in Rosine, Ky. The “Father of Bluegrass” grew up in a lovely rambling house on Jerusalem Ridge, with a front porch big enough for dozens of jamming musicians. Our tour guides encouraged us to play some music of our own on the porch, “because the wood of this house has heard so much music, some folks say it vibrates differently.” Sounded pretty good to us, and to them.
* Finding Paradise on the Kentucky map, which we know from the John Prine folk song that describes a town demolished by coal strip-mining. Today there is only a large coal-fired
Jamie & Jack
Mom Jamie with baby Jack -- the mellowest, happiest baby we've met! power plant and several manmade “lakes” at the end of the road leading to Paradise (see the ironic photo).
* Recreating at the
Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area, on the border between Kentucky and Tennessee and between the lakes formed by the dammed-up waters of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. We stayed in a campground devoted entirely to horseback riders and went bicycling instead. We also visited an 1850s recreated farmstead where all the log buildings were collected from within a 10-mile radius. There we heard the story of how thousands of residents were forcibly relocated from Land Between the Lakes when the Tennessee Valley Authority (runs the Paradise coal plant, too) acquired the land by eminent domain. It was only transferred to the US Forest Service in 2001. A park still in the making, with a controversial past to overcome.
* Starting to encounter Civil War historical sites - a favorite of Jeff, the military history buff. So far we’ve visited two battlefield sites, both in Tennessee: Fort Donelson and Shiloh. Both were Union victories led by General Grant early in the war. We bicycled the battlefield loop road at the latter site and found it a superior way to experience
Puppet Players
Emily and Shelly share a theatrical streak (they were born on the same day) that extends to puppeteering. the landscape and the myriad signs and markers.
Our list of host contacts slims considerably in the Southeast, so in Memphis we experimented with booking a homestay through a web-based network of travelers called
Global Freeloaders. Mark and Valerie and their three children live in large suburban home just outside the city and welcomed us with all the hospitality we could ask for. We stayed three nights, exchanging recipes, songs, and good food and conversation (no cash involved). The deal is that if you use the network, you also add yourself as a potential host (searchable by hometown, not by any identifying personal information, with a blind email used for initial contact). Yes, you'll find us and half a dozen others listed under Port Townsend.
Arriving just in time for dinner on Friday night, we were invited to attend 7-year-old daughter Kylie’s theatrical debut with a children’s theatre troupe. They performed a series of very cute skits, and Kylie was a star! Unfortunately, after a sugary birthday party and extra Easter candy instead of dinner, she had a disabling stomach ache on the day we arranged to do an outing with her and her 11-year-old brother Zach, so she
Downtown Louisville
Emily & Jeff stroll downtown Louisville, Ky., where we were headed to the museum where they make the famous baseball bats... had to stay home. Zach came with us to the
National Civil Rights Museum on Sunday. He already knew a lot about the civil rights movement from his studies in school, which impressed us. It was a bold move to build a civil rights museum on the site of the motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, and to have the exhibit hall end at the balcony where he was gunned down. Chilling.
On Saturday night, Mark and Valerie got a sitter - their third child is a two-year-old - and joined us for dinner in the city. Then we strolled along the three blocks of Beale Street that are famous for the blues and booze. (Guess what? They’re blocked off to cars, with a policeman at each intersection directing traffic across, so as not to shut down the side streets. Pedestrians are also allowed to stroll outdoors with alcohol in these three blocks.) From every establishment, live music was pouring out the open windows and doors, as well as the occasional beer bottle, one of which crashed right in front of us. No one got hurt or wet. Jeff and I had been sightseeing earlier that day in the
Louisville Slugger Museum
The Louisville Slugger Museum included a factory tour and a sculpture gallery of famous batters' hands. With the mini baseball bat that came with admission, Jeff tries to replicate a handhold. pouring rain, and it was so wet and gusty that we’d ducked inside a historic building that was being converted to condos and was hosting an open house, and we chatted for an hour with the salesperson about historic preservation and revitalization. It’s encouraging to see downtown Memphis coming back to life.
We departed Tennessee on May 1, encountering no signs of the nationwide Hispanic boycott. (We ate at a Mexican restaurant today in Greenville, Miss., whose owner seemed to not understand what we were taking about when we asked if he had closed yesterday. “Yes, we were open,” he said, puzzled.)
And we departed our Global Freeloaders hosts with an invitation to visit Mark’s parents -either at their winter home in Florida or their summer home in Wisconsin. Yay, this just is the way networks are supposed to work!
Staying in a series of state parks in Mississippi and Arkansas, we are currently following the Mississippi River south to New Orleans, where we anticipate arriving this coming weekend for Jazz Fest. The intensifying humidity and bug activity verify that we are indeed in the Deep South. Jeff is busy retrofitting Matilda to plug the gaps in
Julie on Dash
Our newest travel companion is a 4-inch blonde named Julie, gifted to us by a 7-year-old host in Memphis. She gets to sit on the dash, where she can "see the world," as our host implored us to let Julie do. the screened windows. We have an electric fan, which is a necessity when we're parked for the night. (It’s only May…we don’t know if we’ll be able to take four more months of an east-coast summer!)
Lastly, we have to introduce you to a new member of our traveling company. This is Julie, a four-inch-tall personality pressed upon us by Kylie in Memphis. We tried to beg off the gift on the grounds of limited space, but Kylie employed all of her 7-year-old eloquence: “She wants to go away and see the world.
Please take her. You
have to.” How could we refuse?
Advertisement
Tot: 0.097s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 12; qc: 35; dbt: 0.0352s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Pete Helsell
non-member comment
Starter Blues
Jeff and Shelly, I was thinking I can't wait to hear your new song about your "Starter Blues" - reminds me of listening to Daubie sing his many verses of the "Officer Elmore Blues". I expect that you might add a few more verses (or let others create new ones as Daubie does) along the way. Best of luck- looking forward to meeting Julie when you get home to Port Townsend! Pete