Astounding Cabinet of Wonders

Notes in Italian: Arriving in Florence

These are notes and journal entries from my trip to and around Italy in November 2004. Sorry for the inconsistent tenses. But these really are just notes.

I knew there would be issues. Other than cycling or having the time to walk, there is no better way to travel through Tuscany — as with any countryside — than by car. Plane? Worthless. Train? A little better than plane, but still, it’s best to be under your own power and guidance. Still, there are moments when driving a car in a foreign country for the first time can prove somewhat problematic. Case in point: Florence. Firenze, if you’re nasty. The capital of the Renaissance. Ground zero for the revolution in art and thinking that finally propelled Europe out of the Dark Ages and into something with considerably fewer illiterate peasants in burlap sacks poking around in the mud. And like many old, old cities, it was crisscrossed with roads that were useful several hundred years ago but today prove rather on the challenging side to navigate.

Getting from Siena to Florence was simple enough and quite a nice drive with the sun slowly setting behind rolling hills. And heck, getting into Florence was pretty easy, too. You just follow the traffic over the bridge. We had no particular plan in mind, and no hotel room booked for the night, but I had a couple decent looking spots marked in the guide, and we figured on staying at whichever one of them we happened to find first. In the meantime, we were getting a nice, if somewhat random and directionless, driving tour of Florence, including the hulking duomo at the center of town and San Croce Cathedral, the birthplace of the concept of the Stendahl Syndrome, which we’ll get to later. Having found both the big church and the main train station, I figured we were in good shape for managing to find our way to wherever we decided to stay.

We decided on a place called the Pensione Bellavista, which was supposed to be cheap but very nice, with balconies that overlook the cathedral. After an hour or so of driving around in circles and, on at least two occasions, ending up back on the other side of the Arno River, it started to sink in that what looked easy on a map was greatly complicated by Florence’s Byzantine labyrinth of microscopic side streets and randomly assigned one-way designations that sometimes, I would swear, marked the same block of street one-way in opposite directions, depending on which side from which you entered.

As we seemed destined in life to drive endlessly in a circle around the Piazza del Duomo, we decided to alter our plans and pick a hotel within that vicinity. Hey! Via Roma turns into Via Camilla, and then you just hang a right onto Via Porta Rossa, and there you are! Hotel Dali, which was also supposed to be nice and offered free parking in their enclosed courtyard. Perfect! Except that, once again, the lunatic system of one-way streets kept diverting us, farther and farther, spiraling out of control. For a good half hour, once we found our way back to Piazza del Duomo, we were completely lost within sight of the hotel’s sign! But there was no way to get there, as the street was one way in the opposite direction no matter which direction we approached it from. Eventually, with my nerves uncharacteristically starting to fray a bit around the edges, I just slammed the car into reverse and drove backwards down the narrow street — a trick I learned from a parking attendant was actually quite common in Florence.

Thus arrived somewhat ass-first at the Hotel Dali, we were faced with another challenge: the entrance to their parking area was one street down, on the opposite side of the building. Throwing my hands up toward yon tumultuous heavens, I cursed Jupiter and all the gods who mocked me and swore I would, though but a mortal, one day have my vengeance. Surely this system of streets had been designed by Machiavelli himself. And yet, the temptation — how hard could it be to go straight, make a left, then make another left? It made sense to me. If this street was one-way in X direction, surely the street down would be one-way in Y direction, where Y was the direction I needed to travel to get to the sweet, sweet haven of the parking area. I am, by and large, a man weak in the face of temptation. So I drove. And half an hour later, I was back to cursing Jupiter and all those who toyed with mankind for their twisted divine amusement.

Eventually, I found my way back to the correct street, and this time, somehow, even though it was as far as I could tell the exact same approach as the first time, I was able to drive down the street in the proper direction. Having been primed by several years in New York, at this point, I simply pulled the car up onto the sidewalk and sent Ellie in to arrange our lodgings before it got so late that no one would want to give us a room. And if possible, perhaps whoever was running the place could tell us how the hell to get to the parking area.

“Si, it is a bit confusing,” Marco explained. Marco ran the hotel with his wife. He was a young, good-looking guy, she was a young, good-looking chick, and both of them heaped pity upon us. As we settled our bill for our stay in Florence — all in cash, up front, which meant we burned through a hunk of our cash right then and there — Marco took the car key and performed some sort of sinister voodoo that allowed him to navigate the car into the courtyard, where it rested blissfully next to a Mini Cooper and would not be moved until we left Florence.

We got a jumbo nice room for the night, though we’d have to move to a smaller room the next day to make room for someone who had reservations. No worries. All I wanted was a shower and possibly some food, though I was betting the latter would be difficult to come by as it was getting late and we both knew the Italians loved to close up shop as quickly and as often as possible. Plus, various guidebooks had warned us that the left-leaning city of Florence was big on lazy Commie labor, so you were less likely than usual to be able to get anything done.

Luckily, we found a Middle eastern walk-in restaurant and ate the single best lamb gyro I have had in my entire life, and buddy, I can eat some lamb gyro.

Meramec Caverns, MO

These are notes and journal entries from our road trip across America during the summer of 2002.

I am a sucker for a lot of things, most of them connected to women. A pretty smile, a nice pair of legs, a bottle of bourbon. I’m also a sucker for a good cave tour, or even a bad cave tour, and if you want to read some horrifying Freudian meaning into that, be my guest. It won’t affect my enjoyment of women, liquor, or cave tours in the slightest. A grew up an easy day trip to Mammoth Cave, the biggest cave system in the world, or at least that’s the record as I remember it. And my grandfather’s farm was pock-marked with caves, many of which were large enough for a kid high on Mark Twain adventures to explore, provided they weren’t staked out by a pack of wild dogs. That I have never outgrown my fascination with caves means that, even at my more advanced age, I rarely pass up a cave tour.

Meramec Caverns is one of the big ones. Not Mammoth Cave big, but plenty big in terms of the amount of tourism advertising they’ve done. It was a mainstay on the Route 66 drive, and an easy day trip from St. Louis. We packed up and headed out early, not the least bit tempted by the promise of breakfast at Denny’s, where I assumed the dirty plates from last night would still be sitting on the tables and my scrambled eggs and bacon would be served to me as a living chicken and pig. We had two must-see sites for the day: Meramec Caverns and the Route 66 Toy Museum, which I thought I might be able to turn into another article for the magazine, though that was a pretty dumb thought that came to me at night, when thoughts have freer reign and come to you without the benefit of consideration or rationality. Exactly why a magazine about modern action figures would be interested in a travel tale about some crazy old guy’s mad menagerie of old toys didn’t make much sense when I thought about it in the warm blaze of the morning sun. But we were still going.

Meramec Caverns — America’s Cave, as it had dubbed itself — is the largest single cave formation in the world, with 26 miles of underground passages spanning seven stories. All but two of the levels are open to the public. The two closed levels are, assumed, occupied by boxes full of secret government files detailing our various contacts with alien life forms, and by cryo-freeze units containing the DNA of the great leaders of the world, which will one day be combined to give birth to the ultimate leader, who will spend an inordinate amount of time wearing a ridiculous snake-head bodysuit and green cape and yelling, “THIS I COMMAND!”

Missouri itself is known by some as the Cave State, with over 6,000 surveyed caves, many of which are open to the public. Meramec, at least according to Meramec, is the jewel in this subterranean treasure trove. Tracing its origins back some 400 million years, the cave served as shelter for the local American Indian tribes, who I assume used to hide in the cave whenever their native brothers from nearby Branson came by with flyers advertising Chief Red Moon’s Osage Stampede and Dinner Theater featuring the comic stylings of the Osage Nation’s number one comedian, Drops His Breeches. Some time in the 1700s, a Frenchman by the name of Jacques Renault discovered that the cave was rich in saltpeter, which was mined for use in gunpowder production just in time to facilitate America having had just about enough of the King of England getting in their face.

Gunpowder production at Meramec Caverns continued up until the Civil war, when a band of Confederate rebels blew the powder mill up. Among the rebels was a guy by the name of Jesse James, who would rise to some prominence and who would use the caverns as a hideout throughout his illustrious career as a bandit and hellraiser. In 1933, the full extent of the cavern was surveyed, and in 1935, it was open to the public for guided tours. Once the home of local Indians and infamous bank robbers, Meramec caverns was developed, walkways were put in place for easy access, and the main hall became the site of a grand ballroom and, judging from the advertisements hanging up, an occasional roller disco. A gift shop and restaurant, all within the cave, were also opened.

After trying on various novelty hats in the gift shop, we began our tour, and I soon discovered that the curse that had affected me the night before was still upon me. A sullen teenager with the look of a sullen teenager forced to do something by his parents while on vacation, decided Ellie and I were the best company of the lot, most of whom were retirees and bikers. Everywhere I go, bikers are always taking tours and stopping to read historical markers. From his opening salvo of, “Heh, caves are like big pussies,” we knew we were in for a treat.

Despite our impromptu narrator, and despite the high level of development in the cave to make it tourist-friendly, Meramec Caverns is really pretty impressive. Among its signature formations include: the Wine Table, a massive six-foot high slab of onyx propped up by three naturally formed legs; the Mirror Room, in which a naturally occurring pool so perfectly reflects the cave ceiling that it creates the illusion of it being a massive cavern rather than a shallow pool; and the Hollywood Room, where various TV shows and movies that tended to feature young boy protagonists getting in a heap a’ trouble (Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, that kid from Lassie) were filmed. Despite all this, I still found the coolest part of the cave to be the massive, natural-looking tunnel right at the beginning of the tour after you pass through the Ballroom. Statues of Jesse and Frank James seem surprised to see you at various points along the tour. At some point, as the difference between stalactites and stalagmites was being explained to the group, our teenage ward offered up the sage observation, “Stalagmites, heh. Looks like big piles of shit,” which caused a rotund elder gentleman in a checkered shirt, suspenders, and a WWII Veteran baseball cap to whirl around and angrily bark, “Look, you little assholes, you may not give a damn about any of this, but some of us want to be here, so shut up!”

“No!” I wanted to cry. “We’re on your side! I don’t even know this asshole! I just turned 30!” but it was too late, and in the book of that guy who probably stormed Utah Beach alongside my Grandpa Harley and punched Hitler in the face, I am just another disrespectful teen who deserves a slap upside the head. Alas.

The tour winds up with the Greatest Show Under the Earth. We took seats in a naturally formed auditorium facing a massive, amazing cave formation that serves as the “screen.” As patriotic anthems were blared over a tinny loudspeaker from 1930 or so, the tour guide flipped on and off various colored lights — always with an audible “ka-chunk” of the switches — culminating at the crescendo of “God Bless America” with a projection of the American flag being cast upon the wall of the cave, the Ethel Merman-esque vocals being eventually drowned out by the raucous applause of those in attendance.

The St. Louis Arch

These are notes and journal entries from our road trip across America during the summer of 2002.

For someone making the drive from east to west, hitting St. Louis is a major milestone. The traditional “gateway to the west” is marked by the St. Louis Arch (Jefferson’s monument to the notion of Manifest Destiny) and the crossing of the mighty Mississippi River. I reckon the Mississippi doesn’t have the mystique it once possessed, that mine was perhaps the last generation to be reared with familiarity of all thinks Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Mark Twain. But it is still a tremendously powerful symbol of American mythology to me, and crossing it is always an event. Plus, this was my first time crossing it on my own, driving myself west rather than riding int he back of my parents’ car.

I’d also never actually been up into the Arch or the accompany museum. Both were well worth the trip. Ellie and I picked up a Parks passport, which allows you to get a little stamp for each National Park you visit so you can look back and try to remember what all of them were. Some are easy. Others, since we then determined to visit every park we came across, are more obscure. But a summer spent with a US National Parks pass is a good time.

The Arch museum was great, with a ton of weird animatronic dioramas that creeped kids out. To go up the arch, you sit in a little egg shaped pod designed to let you know what Mork from Ork felt like. They zip you up to the top, where everyone gets to crowd around little windows and look out either upon the sprawl of St. Louis to the west or the span of the Mississippi River to the east. Either way, it all meant one thing to me: we were heading west.

We’d spent a fair amount of the morning traveling across Indiana and Illinois — two flat and endless fields of corn and soybeans — most of the day at the Arch in St. Louis, and the rest of the afternoon hopelessly lost and trying to find and follow Route 66 out of the jumble of traffic-choked St. Louis streets. By the time we tracked down our road out of the city proper, the day was already growing rather long in the tooth. And by the time we’d located a suitable motel for the evening close to Meramac Caverns and the Jesse James and Antique Toy museums we planned to visit the following day, it was well past the bedtime of small-town Missouri, and getting pretty close to past my own rather liberal bedtime. The realization then set in that in my fervor to continuously find our way to the most disagreeable and menacing crannies of St. Louis all in an idiotic attempt to find some frozen custard stand I’d read about in a guidebook, we’d completely neglected to get anything to eat during the day. My failure to track down said custard stand meant we didn’t even have that small confectionery in our bellies. The only options presenting themselves at present were wrinkled hot dogs that had been rotating on a wire rack for twelve or thirteen hours at a gas station convenience store or a meal at Denny’s.

In retrospect, we should have had dinner at the gas station.

Denny’s was, to put it kindly, a wretched scumpit resembling the area behind a dumpster where unidentifiable fluids and bits of rotting meat and brown lettuce tend to congregate. The place was, at this hour, staffed entirely by bleary-eyed teenagers who fulfilled every nasty stereotype imaginable about the youth of America. The tables were littered with teetering towers of sullied plates and stinking refuse. It was obvious by odor alone that, bereft as they were of any responsible supervision and left to their own devices, they’d simply stopped cleaning the place up sometime several hours beforehand. The stench of past-due chicken and warm mayonnaise hung heavy in the humid July air, air which was dotted with tiny pockets of gnats who were at least making more of an effort than the employees to clean away the garbage.

One of the kids shoveled away the trash from a booth and made a cursory wipe-down of the table before taking our complicated orders. BLT and a grilled chicken sandwich, two Sprites. Then he decided to have a seat with us. I have the gift and curse of a youthful appearance. Though in my thirties, I can easily pass for a teenager with the exception of the fact that I don’t wear carpenter jeans ten sizes too large and hanging off my ass. While it makes pulling off the debonair, man-of-the world appearance to which I aspire a chore at times, I’m joyfully aware of the benefits in terms of aging and health that come with my state, and I shall be forever grateful that in a time when my contemporaries are beginning down the long road of chronic back pain, hair loss, and irritable bowel syndrome, I’m still fit as a fiddle. Not one of those magical golden fiddles that the devil is always playing, but still a decent enough fiddle if you give it to someone like Charlie Daniels.

Unfortunately, this also means that teenagers often want to talk to me, mistaking me as they do for one of their own. Now I’m not so far removed from my teenage years that I can’t remember all the stupid things I did back then, and although I am as irritated now as adults were then, I acknowledge that it is every teenager’s right to make an ass of themselves. But this knowledge, empathy even, has its limits, and they were tighter than usual after a day of wondering why, if we were supposed to be heading west, we kept ending up in East St. Louis. I really wasn’t in the mood to submerge myself in dead-end conversation with a sixteen-year-old Denny’s employee.

“No shit?” he said in response to my response to his obvious first question. “You’re from New York?”

“I live in New York, but I’m from Kentucky.” It’s a hair-splitting point, I know, but one I’m always compelled to make. I live in New York, but I’m not from New York and am not and never will be a New Yorker. I’m a Southerner in general and a Kentuckian in particular. We’re a proud and confused race drunk on Appalachian hooch and Bluegrass money, and we’re all so confused about exactly where we stand in the grand scheme of things that during the Civil War, we simply fought amongst ourselves.

“Yeah,” he repeated obliviously, “I really want to go to New York. You ever been on TRL?”

The only reason I, well past the age at which you should know what those letters stand for, knew what the hell he was talking about was because I’d spent a summer freelancing at Atlantic Records, where my duties included writing five-word ad copy for internet banners and watching MTV’s Total Request Live whenever someone from Atlantic Records appeared to whore their latest CD. Watching Willa Ford explaining why she was a “bad girl” had no bearing whatsoever on, say, my assignment to update The Cult’s online tour diary with another batch of sad “has-been rock star who thinks he’s packing arenas” antics, but still I had to pay attention while the fool of the day showed up to blather endlessly about what they thought was “off da hook” to Carson Daly, a grown man paid large sums of money to pretend like he takes anything Willa Ford has to say seriously.

“I’d like to get on camera on TRL, you know, doing some crazy shit. That’s how they pick you out to be in the audience, if you do some crazy shit down on the street.”

I shrugged. “Not really my thing.”

“No way! Really? If I lived in New York, I’d be out there every day.”

Normally, not only am I forgiving of the shameful depths of youthful stupidity, I’m also rather on the talkative side, even with people I don’t particularly like. Comes with the territory of being a Southerner and a storyteller. You don’t get very far as either one without a tendency to launch into long-winded conversations with strangers about a really good pie you once had down in Savannah. But tonight I was feeling more New York and just wasn’t in the mood, especially not for conversation as uninteresting as some kid’s dream of one day standing in a crowd and yelling “Yeahhhhh!!!” into a camera while a member of the Backstreet Boys tried to talk like he was from the streets. Getting lost earlier in the day had been, all in all, no more than mildly irritating. Eating at Denny’s had been worse.

I was dying for ribs. Or for anything other than the pathetic looking chicken sandwich that had just been slung in front of me. I bit in, famished enough not to care, up to the point where I realized with some small degree of horror that the chicken wasn’t undercooked; it was completely and utterly raw. A razor-thin layer gave it the appearance of being cooked, but the insides were as cold and gelatinous and raw as if it had just come out of the Tyson package. What the hell had the cook been doing back there for the last fifteen minutes? No, scratch that question.

“I think you forgot something,” I said to the girl who had brought me the plate.

“You wanted it plain, right?”

“Yeah, but I also wanted it cooked.”

To their credit, we did eat that night for the price of two sodas. Everything else was free.

Tud: Evansville, IN

These are notes and journal entries from our road trip across America during the summer of 2002.

We spent much of the morning hanging out with some wild old biker just east of Albany, Indiana, who built gigantic metal replicas of assorted military aircraft and then mounted them on towering metal poles in his yard, and he was cool.

His name was Tud, and we’d stumbled across him and his works of art while doing our best to get out of southern Indiana. Since we weren’t yet through the Arch, and since I’d spent much of my life growing up just across the river in Kentucky and knew enough about the rolling, rich, but not exactly interesting farmland of Indiana, we opted to hit I-64 west with quick detours to visit Lincoln’s home (we have one in Kentucky, too, and I know they have some in Illinois) and drive through scenic Santa Claus, Indiana. And it was there that we saw the giant airplanes and helicopters, and I figured what the hell? It didn’t look that hard to find the house if we took the next exit to get a closer look. And so it was that we met Tud, who was just pulling out of his driveway on his Harley, he told us, to go get himself some BBQ ribs. It’s a kind and generous man indeed who will put off ribs in order to take a couple strangers on a tour of his workshop and the creations that came from within it. And it’s a right wonderful kind of guy who will then put gooey, delicious sustenance off even longer so he can shoot the bull for a couple hours on everything from how to work with metal to all the places he’d traveled, from Vietnam to 9/11 to getting cancer from asbestos to his strangely humanitarian outlook on life that seemed at odds with the proliferation of signs stating things like, “These premises protected by Smith and Wesson.”

Tud, at least, was a man who had lived some serious life and put a lot of miles on his odometer. Someone worth talking to and a fine example of why there are few pleasures in life finer than running across some old guy with a bit of crackpot in him and a whole pile of experience. It’s why I enjoy conversation with old Army vets and coal miners more than with, say, college pseudo-intellectuals and artists and so-called activists who have never been outside New York City. Part of the reason I think movies now are so much worse than they used to be s because old movies were written by guys who really had something from which to draw, who had been fighter pilots in the Pacific or stormed the beaches at Normandy or been blacklisted by Joe McCarthy. They’d survived one, sometimes two, world wars, a great depression, Prohibition, Korea. They traveled the world when it was still free of strip malls and automated convenience and interstates, and some of them had blown a fair bit of it up along the way. By contrast, most of the people writing movies today never left a college campus and have little more experience with life than what you get from reading Syd Field’s “Screenplay.” These old men and women, these are my heroes.

“When you get to the Grand Canyon,” he told us, “it’ll blow your mind. Doesn’t matter how cynical you are or what you saw before. It’ll get you. It’s one of those things that makes you understand the spirit of the land.”

And then he was off, riding into the early afternoon sun in search of BBQ ribs.

“I guess they’ll kill me,” he said of the ribs, “But what the hell? I’m already dying of cancer, and I’d rather die of ribs.”

Teleport City Video Podcast #001

Well, it took some time, and I’m still ironing out the wrinkles to get the podcast to appear on iTunes, but while that’s going on, here it is: the inaugural episode of the Teleport City video podcast, complete with narration that makes me sound like a lethargic cross between Paul Jr from American Chopper, Tom Bodett, and one of those guys who narrates an old 4H nature documentary. And sorry about the video quality — I’m still getting the hang of prepping my massive uncompressed 2 gig avi’s into Quicktime.

EPISODE #1: Bouldering in Central Park
Direct Download (13 megs) | Subscribe to RSS Feed | iTunes

This video podcast requires Quicktime

Show Notes:
This video podcast is set here: Rat Rock, Central Park, New York City

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View Larger Map

Rat Rock: take the subway to 59th Street/Columbus Circle and enter the park near the fountain right outside the subway station (the southwest corner of the park). Rat Rock will be the first big rock you see, just across the paved road, and probably covered with kids, couples, and climbers. It’s adjacent to the Heckscher Children’s Playground and south of the Heckscher softball fields.

Santa Claus and Abraham Lincoln

These are notes and journal entries from our road trip across America during the summer of 2002.

When I was little, I always wanted to visit Santa Claus, Indiana. I assume you need not be told why a little kid would want to visit a place called Santa Claus. But for whatever reason, even though it was just down the road a spell from Louisville, I was never able to go. By 2002, though, I was a man, and like a man, I could finally actualize my dream and go visit a small town in Indiana named after a jolly fat guy who used to bring me GI Joe and Buck Rogers toys. Oh, we could also visit the Abraham Lincoln boyhood home, finally completing my “Life and Locations of Abraham Lincoln” collection (which previously included his birthplace in Kentucky, his home in Springfield, Gettysburg, the Lincoln Memorial in DC, Ford’s Theater, and his grave).

Santa Claus is pretty much what you would expect. The highlights of the small town are, of course, the giant statues of Santa Claus, a disturbing snowman fountain that just looked like a screaming snowman gushing water as he melted in the painful fashion, and the ever-popular “Santa Claus Cemetery,” used for years by cruel fathers to torment their children.

Santa Claus was originally called Santa Fe, but according to the story, when they applied to the US Postal Service for a post office in the mid-1800s, they were told they couldn’t be Santa Fe, and had to come up with a different name. Exactly how and why Santa Claus became plan B, and how much spite and grumbling went into submitting the name, is a matter of suburban legend. Now it’s home to a couple scary, grinning Santa statues, that snowman I will forever see in my nightmares, and Holiday World, a seasonal holiday themed amusement park boasting a really good roller coaster.

Nearby is the Lincoln Boyhood Home was of interest to me because I’m always interested in Presidential residencies for some reason. I’ve learned more than anyone needs to about Thomas Jefferson’s riding boots and Woodrow Wilson’s childhood dressing gowns. My goal is to visit at least one home of every President. I’ve got Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Adams (both of them), Madison, Cleveland, Arthur, Carter, Roosevelt (both of them), Garfield, and if you want to count him, Jefferson Davis, under my belt. Still a long way to go.

The site includes a museum, a chapel, and a short nature walk through corn fields and randomly scattered farm implements to the cabin itself, where you can also chase chickens and such, just like I assume Lincoln used to do when he wasn’t wrestling or counting the days until he could grow a beard.

BotCon 2002: Ft. Wayne, IN

These are notes and journal entries from our road trip across America during the summer of 2002.

One of the great things about the road trip was that Ellie was a school teacher, meaning she had the summer off but was still collecting a paycheck, and I was a freelance writer, meaning that I could take jobs as they came and work on them during my down time. My most consistent employer was Toyfare magazine, a journal dedicated to the world of action figures and the grown men and women who should know better than to be buying them. While my friend and fellow University of Florida School of Journalism graduate, Stephanie, was busy working on the assignment that would net her her first (of what will undoubtedly be several) Pulitzer, I was writing articles about He-Man toys and who was more awesome: Starscream or Destro.

Anyway, Ellie is a Transformers collectors, and when she learned that BotCon, the annual Transformers convention and marketplace, was going to be happening right along our prospective road trip route, right at the time we would be passing through, attendance became a done deal. We went to the previous year’s BotCon as well, and as it is largely a dealer’s room where people fork over cash for a wide array of Transformers merchandise, I was the odd man out, not being a collector of such things. But things were different this year, and I was able to turn my attendance into a paying gig, albeit pay of like $35.

There isn’t a whole lot to say about the convention. As far as these things go, it’s pretty sedate. It doesn’t even come close to the sheer insanity and geeky glory of a sci-fi or anime convention, which is both good and bad, depending on how you look at things. There are a few people in costume, but where as anime cons are overstuffed with young women in skimpy costumes, about all the pervy photo hounds here had to photograph was one chick dressed as Arcee, the Smurfette of the Transformers universe. There were panel discussions with voice actors and artists as well, but the focal point of the weekend is dealer’s room, where people pick through merchandise both old and new, including stuff that was exclusive to other countries (usually Japan), and CDs featuring the inspiring hero metal of Stan “You’ve Got the Touch” Bush.

And then there’s this fat dude who wears a cape. We saw him the previous year, too, and I gather he’s something of a BotCon legend known only as “Cape Thing.”

Neil Armstrong Air and Space Museum: Wapakoneta, OH

These are notes and journal entries from our road trip across America during the summer of 2002.

After the Piper Museum, we hit the road en route to a friend’s house in Bowling Green, Ohio. The plan for the next couple of days was to hang out with them, hit Cedar Point, go to the drive-in theater outside of Toledo, then head to Ft. Wayne for Botcon, the Transformers convention, which had Ellie mighty excited. I was going on behalf of Toyfare magazine, my current employer, to poke around and report back with a short article.

We rolled in to Bowling Green in late afternoon and found the house we’d be staying at. It was a nice little duplex with paper thin walls and a Nigerian neighbor prone to fits of extreme dramatics involving his live-in girlfriend. In fact, as Stacey and Handsome Dan, our hosts for the next couple days, welcomed us into their home, we could hear the neighbor screaming, “Woman! I can feel your evil in my blood. You make me want to slit my own throat to escape your evil!” with a thick Nigerian accent.

We spent the rest of the night listening to his sing-song voice, eating dinner, and watching drive-in movies on DVD from Something Weird Video, then made plans to spend the following day first at the Neil Armstrong space museum and boyhood home, where among other things we could see the droppings of the first man on the moon, then spend the evening at Cedar Point riding roller coasters and eating funnel cake.

It sometimes sends shivers up my spine when I have to explain to people who Neil Armstrong is. I’m not going to do that here. I’d read many times before about the Neil Armstrong space museum and boyhood home in Ohio, usually because it was part of some article mentioning the fact that they have Neil Armstrong feces on display, among other things. So if you have ever wanted to marvel at first man on the moon scat, this is the place.

We loaded up on a stormy morning with our host Handsome Dan to make the drive down to the Neil Armstrong Air and Space Museum, yet another in a long line of testaments to Ohio’s tumultuous relationship with space and aviation. It seems like they’re always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Oh sure, the Wright Brothers were born here, but they didn’t actually fly here, though that doesn’t stop Ohio from cleverly claiming to be the “birthplace of aviation.” And Neil Armstrong may hail from Ohio, but they never got to launch any rockets from here. But such is life. If nothing else, they have the Dayton Air Fair, which is a pretty boss event. I went back when I was a wee one and got to pal around with the Thunderbirds pilots.

The Museum, which opened in 1972, starts off promising enough with a huge spherical building and the requisite Apollo style space capsule for you to sit in. The rest of the museum doesn’t disappoint, as you get to tour the history of space flight, with an obvious focus on the Apollo program and life in space. There’s a space shuttle landing simulator which is there primarily to prove that I should not be attempting to land the space shuttle. Lots of space suits, in-spacecraft artifacts and food, and more than a few actual spacecrafts from NASA’s greatest hits (Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo). One of the big attractions is the moon rock exhibit, where you get to marvel at dull grey chunks of stone brought back from the Sea of Tranquility.

And of course, all roads lead to the gift shop, where we bought replica “Man Walks on Moon!” newspapers and, obviously, some Astronaut Ice Cream that everyone took one bite of before casually dropping it in the trash. I have taken a bite out of astronaut ice cream dozens of time sover dozens of years, and it is always unpleasant. Yet I keep on doing it. Because that is the can-do pioneering attitude that lands a man on the moon.

Later in the day, we headed up Toledo way to hit the drive-in movie theater. No road trip is complete without one. In between nachos and soda, we watched Austin Powers: Goldmember and Eight-Legged Freaks. All I can say is, Eight-Legged Freaks sure is lucky I saw it in a good mood while high on astronaut ice cream (Neopolitan flavor!), because when a movie is so lame that even a drive-in can’t make it seem cool, you know you are in trouble.

Piper Museum: Loch Haven, PA

These are notes and journal entries from our road trip across America during the summer of 2002.

Part of what I like most about road trips are the mistakes and accidents that lead to something you did not plan on or expect to see. Case in point, our impromptu trip to the Piper Aviation Museum in Loch Haven, Pennsylvania. En route from Centralia to wherever it was we were heading (which was actually Ft. Wayne, Indiana, for a Transformers convention in a few days), we decided to search for a place to eat and sleep along Highway 20 through Pennsylvania. We ended up in Loch Haven. It looked nice enough, but unfortunately, we rolled into town late, and pretty much every restaurant we could find was closed. However, we did stumble across a flyer for a Piper Museum at the municipal airport in town, apparently the birthplace of Piper.

Ellie is a sort-of pilot, in that she’s a member of Civil Air Patrol and goes on regular search and rescue flights around the New York area, though never as the actual pilot of the plane. Still, she loves aviation stuff, as do I, so whenever we travel, we hit any and pretty much every aviation or aerospace related museum and attraction across which we stumble. So something like the Piper Museum, a small museum in a small town with a small airport, was right up our alley. A bit further up the road, we finally found a motel and an open restaurant, called it a night, and prepared for the Piper Museum and a picnic at the lake the next day.

Piper began his aviation career in 1929, in nearby Bradford, PA, when he purchased a stake in the Taylor Brothers Aircraft Corporation. It was, by all accounts, not the greatest time to be investing in something as high end as an airplane company, what with the Great Depression suddenly kicking America into a tailspin. But he stuck it out, and during the late 1930s and early 1940s, the recovery of the United States along with the outbreak of WWII caused a substantial uptick in the demand for light aircraft the like sof which Piper was producing. A fire in 1937 destroyed the factory, so Piper uprooted and established itself in Loch Haven. Piper sold thousands of its signature Cub to the US military during WWII, where they were used for flight training, medical evacuation, reconnaissance, and artillery spotting.

After the war, the demand for recreation aircraft skyrocketed, or whatever it is small aircraft do (I would guess maybe you don’t want them to skyrocket, as the end result of that is usually an explosion and a tiny parachute popping out to let your cardboard tube drift gracefully back down to earth, or in the case of my rocketry experience, into a nearby tree from which rocket retrieval was nigh impossible). Piper remained at the forefront of the industry, along with competing company Cessna, until the rise of the private jet age. Piper’s current production facility is located in Vero Beach, Florida, with the museumr emaining at the airport in Loch Haven to commemorate Piper’s legacy in that town.

The museum turned out to be pretty cool. definitely a nice accidental find, and a fun way to spend a morning. A few bucks for admission gets you into a big room stuffed with relics and models of the history of Piper aviation and the Golden era of private aviation adventures (around World War II). A Realistic tape recorder from the 1970s provides running narration as you tour the exhibition, and then you get to go outside to the museum hangar and poke around a bunch of cool old airplanes while pilots land and take-off from the runway in the front.

After the museum, we found a spot on the shores of Loch Haven and ate sandwiches while a group of kids rode their dirt bikes down a dock and into the lake, right in front of a “No Swimming” sign. Such youthful disregard for cumbersome restrictions brightened an already sunny day. When I was little and first learning to ride a bike, the bike I was using was way too big, thus making it hard to stop without falling on my side. My solution? No problem. I just rode the bike to the end of the street, down a hill, and plowed into a pond.

Sandwiches consumed, I thought it was high time I unstrapped the bike from the back of the car and got it wet.

Rat Rock Video, Take One

So here’s the first bit of video I shot as a test for the upcoming Teleport City video podcast. More on that later (hopefully sooner, actually). The final product come episode one will be presented in higher quality, but until then, enjoy the smooth grooves of Fugazi and that kid’s amazingly refined technique.