Road Trip 2018 #16 – Memphis

Mr Pict and I had fond memories of Memphis so wanted to expose the boys to at least a little bit of the city.  They were not especially up for it but we dragged them anyway.

We parked up near the Peabody Hotel and entered the lobby.  Unfortunately we had literally just missed the famous procession of ducks.  The ducks were not even frolicking in the fountain, having retired to their rooftop palace for the day.  The kids were irked to have been dragged into the hotel without the payoff of seeing the ducks.  The oldest two were virtually snarling.  Our foray into Memphis was not going too well.  We hoped we would win them over with a stroll along Beale Street.

One of the Beale Street locations I remembered finding fun was Schwab’s store so we headed there for some respite from the sizzling afternoon sun.  The store opened in the 1870s selling men’s clothing, evolving into a dry goods store.  I remembered it being a bit like a junk store or jumble sale, with items heaped on tables, and lots of unexpected finds.  It basically retained that old-fashioned feel.  Visiting again, it had been transformed as items were neatly organised on tables and displays.  There were still quirky items among the usual fare so there was still fun to be had.  I was happy to see that a pair of the World’s Largest Overalls (what I would call dungarees) were still on display.  We ascended the stairs to see an area designated as a museum as it housed such items as vintage cash registers and stiff collars.  The boys, however, were much more interested in the extensive range of candy available for purchase.  Schwab’s contains a soda fountain and sells delicious ice cream but the queue on such a baking hot day was ridiculous so the kids instead chose some candy as a treat.

We didn’t feel we could bring the kids to Memphis without taking them to see the Lorraine Motel given its significance in American history.  The motel was, of course, the location of Martin Luther King’s assassination 50 years ago.  It is now the site of the National Civil Rights Museum, with the motel complex preserved within its architecture.  We were unfortunately too late to go into the museum (being too late being a theme of our road trip) but it was quite powerful regardless.  We spent some time outside, in silent reflection, feeling subdued.

The casualty of our spontaneous decision to switch to Tennessee from Kentucky was the quality of our hotel room.  The hotel was shabby and run down.  I would guess it had not been updated since the 1980s.  I took the stairs rather than the elevator and could barely breathe because of the reek of cigarette smoke.  Our room was clean but very basic.  The bathroom was reminiscent of school gym showers, there was constant noise from adjacent rooms coming through the thin walls, and the ceiling fan was not working so the room was utterly stifling.  I admit I had thought of ‘The Shining’.  We consoled ourselves that at least it was not as awful as the horror hotel of 2016.

 

First Time Ice Skating

When we travel, we tend to be so busy from sun up to beyond sun down that we really only need our accommodation to provide us with a clean space in which to sleep.  Not requiring much out of a hotel room beyond it being clean and tidy allows us to travel on a budget and stretch a dime.  We, therefore, had little concern about choosing a super cheap room in a large hotel in Ocean City, Maryland.  The room turned out to be a good size and was clean and tidy. The hotel was a bit dated and could do with a lick of paint and polish but we can overlook such things when just treating the room like a dormitory.  The only real issue was that the walls were really thin and we unfortunately had super noisy neighbours.

As far as the kids were concerned, however, the hotel was a win because it not only had a larger than average indoor pool but also had an ice skating rink.  After filling up on breakfast at a local cafe, therefore, we headed back to the hotel so that our youngest two sons – aged 8 and 10 – could go ice skating for the first time ever.  They donned their ice skates and headed out onto the ice.  At first their legs were wonky and wobbly, like newborn deer, so we gave them some support frames so that they could get used to the required gait and rhythm without worrying about falling or even concerning themselves with balance.  After just a few circuits of the rink, however, they were ready to ditch the frames and skate unassisted.  They absolutely loved it, had a whale of a time, were excited to have learned a new skill, and experienced a sense of achievement as a result.

Road Trip #6 – Horror Hotel

I think anyone undertaking a road trip has to have a few horrible accommodation experiences just to generate good anecdotes and make one more appreciative for basic motels.

Back in 2001, when touring New York, New England and South-Eastern Canada, Mr Pict and I had a run of cruddy hotel experiences, things like cigarette burns in bedlinen and mouldy sealant around showers.  So when we turned up at our hotel in Nova Scotia and discovered the room reeked of smoke – and both being non-smokers – we decided to cancel our booking and find an alternative.  That proved to be pretty challenging, however, and we ended up at a motel we now refer to as the Werewolf Motel.  We gave it that moniker because of the deep grooves running down the door of our room that looked ever so much like gigantic claw marks.  More terrifying, however, was the fact that the manager was sitting in his office in his yellowed underpants and vest (singlet) with his stained and moth-bitten laundry hanging above his head.  We spent the entire night expecting to either hear a howl or be devoured by bed bugs.

On this road trip, our kids got to have their first – but probably not last – horrible hotel experience.  Our stop for the night was Toledo, chosen only because it was a convenient place to stop on that day’s journey.  Photos on the website had been taken from convenient angles to not reveal how utterly dilapidated the hotel was.  As we pulled up, our stomachs sank.  The surrounding street were rough as a badger’s butt and as we entered the hotel car park we could see mattresses and chairs piled up outside some of the rooms.  The place was really run down and falling to pieces.  Then we saw the yellow police tape across one patio door.  Gulp.

It was pretty late in the evening and finding accommodation for six of us was going to be problematic so we decided just to treat it as an adventure for the night and stick with it.  As we walked along the dank and dim corridor towards our suite, our youngest son asked, “Is this a haunted house?”  The corridor was eerily reminiscent of the Overlook Hotel.

Our room was actually OK.  It was dated and very battered around the edges, the decor was very tired, but it was spacious and the beds were comfy – which was pretty critical.  Nevertheless, my 9 year old refused to open any cupboard doors in the kitchenette in case he found a severed head.  What the hotel did have going for it, as far as the kids were concerned, was a large thermal heated swimming pool but I don’t think even that mitigated against the fear of disease or death.

Toledo was clearly a place struggling to recover from the collapse of traditional industries and deep recession.  Every street we drove through suggested depression and hopelessness.  It was apparent that the hotel we were staying at was not being used by tourists very much but was instead catering to people living there paycheck to paycheck.  It was all really sad and I actually felt guilty being in that context as a tourist on vacation.

We did not want to hang around the hotel so we decided to go out and see a movie.  My kids have never been to a proper drive-in cinema so we headed to the Sundance Kid Drive In at a place called Oregon.  Disappointingly there was no raked parking so we had to reorganise all of the seating so that everyone could get a decent though imperfect view of the screen.  The sound quality through the radio was fantastic though.  We saw the new version of ‘Ghostbusters’ which I found entertaining and, not being much of a fan of the original, actually enjoyed the new version more.

Despite an almost full moon, a rattling and rasping AC unit, and our imaginations running wild, we all managed to get a decent sleep.  We survived the Horror Hotel.

Diving into Vacation

For the first time since I was seventeen years old, I went on vacation with my parents.  As this is their first time visiting America, we wanted to give them an impression of the scale of America and the variety of cultures and architecture, landscape and food.  A road trip was necessary.  We picked Massachusetts because New England is tangibly different from Pennsylvania without being too long a car journey.

Mr Pict and I had booked the accommodation months ago, having researched to find the location we needed at a price that suited our budget.  Then, with just days before we were due to set off, we were contacted to say that the boiler in our hotel had packed up and we would have to be transplanted – at the booking agency’s expense – to a more expensive hotel, though it was further away from the coast.   We accepted this.  Then, with under 24 hours to go, Mr Pict phoned the hotel to check that they understood all of the details of our original booking which had  been transferred to them.  That was when he discovered we had been billeted in smoking rooms.  None of us smoke and we certainly did not want to stay in a room that smelled like an ashtray with nicotine-stained walls when we had specifically booked non-smoking rooms.  During one road trip around Canada, we had made the error of accepting a mis-booked smoking room and the experience had been ghastly.  It was so ghastly indeed that a few days later, when we were again mistakenly given smoking rooms, we refused to accept them and had to go off-piste and desperately scramble to find alternative accommodation.  We ended up a a motel where the owner was sitting in reception beneath rows of hanging laundry wearing a grubby vest and yellowed underpants.  When we went to our room, we discovered deep claw marks in our door.  Perhaps from a werewolf.  Despite that experience of refusing a smoking room, we once again refused to accept the booking.  Finally, the evening before we were setting off, the booking agents found us some acceptable accommodation – again with them picking up the tab for the price differential – and we were back closer to the coast again.  Phew.  We could set off on our vacation knowing that we had a bed to lie in at the other end.

You may recall that my rule for claiming a new state is that you have to do two of three things in that state: pee, eat or sleep.  Following those rules, I am able to claim 25 US states and Mr Pict is able to claim 47.  On our journey to Massachusetts, we breakfasted in Cracker Barrel and by using the restrooms, my parents were able to claim New Jersey.  A little later on the journey, we stopped to pee at a McDonalds in Connecticut.  In addition to the bathroom break, my parents and kids had a milkshake which meant that technically they were all able to claim a new state.  No new states for me on this vacation.  That pit stop broke up a long and tedious journey with heavy traffic around New York and at spots along the I95.

Finally arrived at our hotel in late afternoon.  Our accommodation for the next three evenings was the Fairfield Marriott in Middleborough.  The rooms were nice.  We keep busy on our vacation so all we really need is somewhere comfy and clean to sleep and shower and it exceeded expectations on that basis.  My parents had a large room and Mr Pict and I had a room that was smaller but still spacious enough.  There were two double beds in each room so the each pair of kids had to share beds, which was a bit of an adventure in and of itself.  The best thing about the hotel, as far as the kids are concerned, is that it had an outdoor pool.

Within half an hour of arriving, the boys were in their swimming costumes and were splashing around in the pool.  When we arrived, there was a poor guy trying to chill out on a lilo.  He said he was happy to hear the sounds of my kids having fun – and they were very loud – but both Mr Pict and I were impressed by how zen he was, looking entirely relaxed and as if there was no chaos going on at the other end of the pool.  They had a whale of a time in the pool.

 

We didn’t want to go far for dinner so we went to a Friendly’s just two minutes along the road.  In all my years of travelling around America, I had never once eaten in a Friendly’s.  This is somewhat odd since they were founded in 1935 so have certainly been around for long enough for me to have had the opportunity.  The choice was actually apt since Friendly’s was founded by two brothers – Prestley and Curtis Blake, aged 20 and 18 – in Massachusetts, Springfield to be precise, so we were eating “local” in a way.  Really, however, the choice was because of convenience.  And because my kids really wanted to have shark drinks.  The younger kids had been taken to Friendly’s by Mr Pict one afternoon a couple of months ago and had been raving about these shark drinks ever since.  It was a cocktail of blue raspberry sprite filled with jelly sharks and then they pour raspberry syrup in to represent blood in the water.  My kids are shark daft and love anything macabre so it was perfect for them.  The kids had food on skewers: cheeseburgers or chicken strips on sticks, served in a metal cone that contained their sides and dips.  They loved the fun presentation of the food.  Dessert was then a concoction named worms in dirt.  My first ever Friendly’s meal was fish tacos which were surprisingly delicious bu quite frankly any eatery that keeps my kids engaged in eating gets brownie points from me.

And now the vacation could properly begin.

New York, You Nork – Day 1: Comic Books and Ripley’s

We decided that our first family mini-vacation in America should be to New York City.  This was partly because, at under two hours away, it was an easy city break to accomplish and plan for and partly because one of the first things our boys asked when they learned we were emigrating to the States was, “Can we go up the Empire State Building?” closely followed by, “Can we see the Statue of Liberty?”  New York is, of course, also of historic significance in many an immigrant story but that was not a factor in our decision making.

 It’s been an arduous six months for us all as a family.  We were separated, of course, when Mr Pict moved to America in advance of the kids and I following and then the whole process of settling into some sort of normal life and routine has been a bit of a strain at times, not to mention the ups and downs of trying to adjust to a new way of life in a new country.  Mr Pict and I also felt that it was important for the boys to gain a better understanding of the geography of and the expanse that is America by experiencing some travel.

 We aimed to leave the house before 8am and, thanks to our kids being pretty well seasoned travellers and Mr Pict and I being experienced packers, we managed to leave just shortly after 7.  Just under two hours later – including a pit stop in New Jersey – we were in the centre of New York City.  It was an incredibly easy journey in, a pretty straightforward route that took us through the Lincoln Tunnel and straight into midtown Manhattan.  We parked up the car – or rather a valet did, something that always freaks me out about US multi-storey car parks – and headed along 42^nd Street to do some exploring.

 The boys were instantly enthralled by the sights and sounds: electronic billboards, neon signs, yellow taxi cabs, skyscrapers, honking horns, theatre posters, music; it was a sensory overload.  Although they have been to major cities in Britain, including London, I don’t think they had ever experienced anything quite like it.  From 42^nd Street, we headed down Broadway – passing en route the office building that Mr Pict works from when he is in New York, a bit of personal sight seeing – and headed towards the Empire State Building. 

 First stop was a comic book store spread across two floors.  Mr Pict and I are unabashed and avid geeks in lots of areas of obscure knowledge – things like ancient Rome for him and plagues for me – so it is not surprising at all that our children have all turned out to be wee geeks.  However, neither he nor I have any connection to superheroes or comic books yet our sons are somewhat obsessed with them.  Our oldest son loves to pore over the comic books whenever we are in a comic book store – and we are delighted that we have a great one not ten minutes drive from our house – and the other three love the comics and the merchandise, the cult bits and bobs, just the idea of collecting.  So we spent a good 40 minutes in there as they oohed and aahed at the cases of books, shelves of comics and displays of models and figures and toys.

 We emerged from the comic store as the snow began to fall, just tiny flakes at first but then getting chunkier.  The ground was quite wet from the thaw of the previous snow fall and the air temperature relatively mild, however, so the snow was not settling on the ground.  That was when the boys decided they were peckish so Mr Pict stopped at a food cart and bought a hot dog for the littlest one and pretzels for the other three boys.  So they stood, the four of them, huddled in the snow against the side of a bank, chomping their way through NYC street food.  I think they had it on their checklists all along that they wanted to eat food from a street cart as part of their tourist itinerary.

 Ultimately, just as we arrived at the entrance to the Empire State Building, we decided to jettison the whole plan.  The snow had made the sky murky grey and the visibility was so reduced we would have been spending money on a limited view and seriously reducing the impact of the entire experience for the boys.  So we turned heel and headed back the way we came.  However, we took a diversion through Macy’s, just so we could say we had been through what was until 2009 the world’s largest department store and – much more importantly – to have some respite from the biting wind. 

Our 8 year old, the family magpie, loved all the displays of bling and I had to tell him to stop touching brightly coloured leather bags as he walked past them.  He was entranced by the chandeliers in the jewellery section of the store, one that fell like sparkling raindrops from an oval in the ceiling and one that was a combination of crystals and white feathers – like the debris from an angel.  You can tell our kids have grown up in the sticks by the way they behave around escalators: to them escalators hold the same allure as amusement park rides.  It’s sweetly sad really.  So we had an excursion up one set of escalators just so we could immediately come back down again.  Even I, however, got excited when I spotted some escalators that led to the basement level.  So excited in fact that I shouted my husband and kids back.  The cause of my excitement was that the escalators were wooden.  Presumably they were the original escalators from the shop’s opening.  I had never, in my whole life, seen let alone been on wooden escalators.  It had to be done.  So the six of us were transported downstairs on a set of wooden escalators to then immediately return to the ground floor on the companion set.  I can’t imagine where the kids get it from.  It seriously stands as one of the highlights of this trip that I can now say I have been on wooden escalators.

 We popped out the other side of Macy’s and it was then a brief but bracing walk from there – past a whole legion of yellow taxi cabs – back to 42^nd Street.  We had had a discussion about which indoor activity to do with the kids as we walked, presenting them with a choice of either Madam Tussaud’s or Ripley’s Believe It or Not.  In Madam Tussaud’s favour was the fact that they had a whole display about the Avengers – which my little comic book nerds loved the idea of – but against it was the fact there would be a whole host of models, sports stars being the obvious example, that really only my husband would recognise.  In Ripley’s favour was the fact it was going to be a varied collection of exhibits, rather than just room after room of looky-likey wax models, but against it was the fact that the boys might just find it a bit too obscure or maybe even grotesque in parts.  I personally was rooting for Ripley’s.  One of my geeky interests is the history of sideshows.  I am intrigued by society’s relationship with what is categorised as and perceived to be weird and abnormal.  I find it a fascinating and absorbing topic and have read all the books I have ever found on the topic of sideshows, including histories and biographies of famous “freaks” and of PT Barnum.  I find the whole idea of exploiting human difference and disability for entertainment morally repellent but, on the other hand, in a bygone era when many of these people might have been outcasts or at best dependent on others for their welfare, they were able to support themselves financially by being employed as sideshow acts.  It’s that ethical dichotomy that I find so interesting as well as the light it casts on social mores and attitudes of the time and also of our understanding of either obscure or misunderstood medical conditions and physical phenomenon. So that is another reason why Ripley’s was very much my cup of tea.  I was glad, therefore, when the decision was taken that that was where we would go.

 We had not even reached the head of the queue to buy tickets when our 8 year old was overcome with excitement seeing a Perspex case containing some swirling water because he seems to be obsessed with the word vortex.  I meanwhile was excited to see a two-headed calf in a glass case and our 4 year old loved a small glass case in which some stuffed ferrets, dressed in their gladrags, were having a dinner party.

 On entering the Odditorium, the first display was of some incredible metal armour for an elephant which the boys thought was cool.  That was opposite a stuffed six-legged cow and the world’s largest hairball.  That is just a little indication of how varied this “museum” was.  I loved it!  Weird and random is so up my street.  Happily, as well as being little geeks, my kids are also fans of the random and strange so they also scuttled from exhibit to exhibit to see what fascinating weirdness there was to find there.  There were lots of taxidermies of animals with additional limbs or heads and also an albino giraffe.  There were also models of some famous sideshow acts such as Robert Wadlow, the giant, and Johnny Eck, who was often billed as the “amazing half-boy”. 

The youngest two boys loved the fact there was a bookcase that slid away from the wall to reveal another room, and every new room in fact contained a plethora of diverting, intriguing and fascinating items.  That is another reason why the visit worked so well: whereas a visit to a less eclectic exhibition might lead the kids to get bored (and even I admit to being thoroughly sick of Minoan libation cups after seeing the umpteenth display of them in the Heraklion Museum), the very diversity and randomness of this collection of oddities meant that every room could be relied upon to have something for everyone.  Our oldest son, for instance, finds scientific things interesting so he thought it was cool to see a knobbly shard of glass that had formed when lightning struck sand; our second son likes creativity so he loved a display, showcased beneath a glass platform floor, of the Spanish Armada made entirely from matchsticks, a feat of human patience and fine motor dexterity; our 6 year old likes anything rude or gross so both he and I were amused by a club made out of walrus penis; and our youngest loves animals so was captivated by the calves with extra heads and the chickens with extra legs or the length of the stuffed anaconda or the wine in a bottle filled with snakes.  My poor husband really doesn’t get the appeal of freaky stuff so was just dragged along in our wake but even he found Napoleon’s death mask interesting and the locks of hair from historical figures diverting.

 

There was one particularly gross room – which is a positive in my regard – containing instruments of torture.  My kids are pretty gruesome so loved the macabre items such as the Iron Maiden, the iron gibbet (which they recognised from pirate movies) and they all had a turn in the stocks.  There was also half a human head, sectioned in profile, which they found appealing and repellent in equal measure.

 

 A nauseating, dizzifying walk through a rotating tunnel – a very clever optical illusion in which the brain convinces the body it is doing something other than walking on level ground in a straight line – took us into a room full of shrunken heads.  We all had a go on an interactive screen at turning our own portraits into shrunken heads, which was fun, and my oldest son and I (both having a long-standing interest in such things as shrunken heads and mummies) toured the cases looking at each of the examples.  I am always morally torn when looking at things like mummies: I find them utterly fascinating and enjoy the opportunity to study them up close but at the same time I cannot shake the feeling that this was once someone’s child, someone’s parents, someone’s sibling and now here they are shoved in a glass case on display for the entertainment of others.  They are quite amazing things, however, and for all that they are grotesque and perhaps a bit on the creepy side to our 21^st Century, western standards, the fact that people put the heads through this process as an act of preservation, to keep their ancestors and loved ones close to them, is quite touching at the same time – though I am not going to be shrinking anyone’s head for posterity when the time comes for my loved ones to shuffle off their mortal coils.

Having enjoyed our tour of Ripley’s, the kids needed to rest their legs and have an energy boost so we found a nearby café where Mr Pict bought them each hot chocolate and a soft baked cookie to dunk in it.  I sipped a cup of tea and we had a rest and a chat before we then headed to our hotel to check in.

My husband had found a hotel with an apartment room that could sleep six and which had a small kitchen which would enable us to eat in for two meals per day while taking packed lunches for the third.  It was ideally situated not far from 42^nd Street.  We checked in with ease and Mr Pict went off to the car park to collect our suitcases and the bags of food we had brought while the kids and I explored our “home” for the next two nights.  It was a lovely set of rooms – a bedroom for all four boys to sleep in and a multi-purpose room for cooking, dining, sitting and where the husband and I would sleep on the sofa and a folding bed – smartly decorated and nicely presented, bland but comfy.  We even had a balcony, although it overlooked a busy interchange and some water tanks on the adjacent rooftop, except we could also see One World Trade Center in the distance and, if you looked sideways, it was possible to see the Empire State Building.

We had had a plan to go out to find something to eat – a meal out as a treat – and then wander around Times Square in the dark to see all the lights but the snow was falling again and actually settling plus we could sense a rebellion might be mounted by at least half of the kids so we decided not to push our luck at the end of what had been a really great day of family fun.  Instead Mr Pict went out to get some Chinese takeaway and thus fulfilled one of my ambitions since I have never before had Chinese food served in those little cardboard cartons.  So we ate our takeaway buffet and the middle children watched ‘Iron Man 2’ on the TV while the rest of us played pontoon.  Then we read to the boys and settled them down to sleep at the end of a successful first day in New York.