Tag Archives: roadside america
Scenes of Greater Spokane
Madonna Inn Urinal Report (MIUR)
On Saturday morning I drove to San Luis Obispo and had breakfast at the Madonna Inn. I don’t think I’ve been there since the ’70s, but it hasn’t really changed. The only difference I noticed was that the building that used to be a gas station isn’t anymore, and next to it is a long row of Tesla chargers.
I had breakfast at the Copper Cafe and afterward availed myself of the facilities. I thought there were several restrooms with elaborate designs, but the only one I remembered clearly (and the only one I found) had a sort of rock grotto urinal (RGU) with water that starts pouring down the back when you pass an electric eye. It provides considerably less privacy than I would normally want, but no one else was in there, so I could enjoy the full rock grotto experience.
The faucets are water pumps, also automatic.
I looked around for other noteworthy restrooms, but the others were all conventional and lacking in pizazz.
Santa Barbara, Phase 1
In Santa Barbara for the first time since 2011, I ubered to pick up my Turo car, then checked into the Oasis motel on State near Las Positas, the same place I stayed 12 years ago.
For dinner I walked to 3771 State Street, former home of Char West, to pay homage to the Creek of Life and have dinner at Taqueria la Única. Some have impugned the quality and prices of T la Ú, but I liked their tacos al pastor and think that maybe some people could try being a little less complainy sometimes.
The next day I drove out to Ellwood, took a picture of the Barnsdall-Rio Grande gas station (still in a state of sad decay), then hiked through the Ellwood Butterfly Preserve. The scent of the eucalyptus trees was an instant childhood flashback. The butterflies won’t show up for another month, but it was a pleasant walk, and without even trying I emerged from the woods at the end of Coronado Drive, where I lived from 1968-1970. My old house has been painted sometime in the last half century, but otherwise looks the same.
I spent most of the rest of the day downtown, wandering around and refreshing my memory on where things are, starting with the Courthouse Tower and working my way down State. State Street below Victoria is a combination of bustling and empty, the same problem it’s had for decades, only now they’ve made it pedestrian-only except for cross traffic.
I paid my respects to the late Santa Barbara News-Press and had a saison at Third Window Brewery. I was going to buy a shirt, but they didn’t have the kind I wanted. Third Window is on Haley Street, just a few blocks from Mac’s Grog ‘n’ Grog, where I called my mom from a pay phone when I was nine years old because I was too tired to ride my bike home, and I got in trouble because I wasn’t supposed to be down on Haley.
Down on Haley, Haley Street
— Nerf Herder, “Down on Haley”
Where the drugs are easy and the sex is cheap
You never know just who you’ll meet
On Haley!
The next day I met Lobo and Mrs. Lobo at the Santa Barbara Public Market, one of the nicer additions to the downtown area. It’s on the site of the former Vons/Safeway on Victoria and Chapala. Mrs. Lobo had a butternut squash taco, which is an actual thing that exists in this world. I had beef skewers from Three Monkeys.
After some confusion over what day it was and who was where when, it was determined that I should check out of Oasis a day early and move into Casa Mesa the next day, after Mrs. Lobo ditched Lobo for the second time in as many weeks. That left me with a few extra hours the next morning after checkout, so I took the tour at the Mission.
The Mission gift shop sells containers for holy water, so I bought a small one with St. Barbara on it. I was going to just fill it up at the water fountain outside, on the theory that water from the Mission water fountain would still be pretty holy, just by virtue of running through the Mission pipes, and anyway how much holiness do I really need? But the cashier asked me if I wanted it filled, and there was no extra charge, so I ended up with the full complement of holiness. For all I know, they just filled it at the water fountain anyway, but I’m no worse off, and it didn’t cost any extra. And the container is small enough to be within TSA limits.
These are the types of things you need to keep in mind if you want to be a savvy consumer of holy relics.
I had intended to go to the Presidio, and in fact I did go to the Presidio, but the cashier was talking to the British couple in front of me, and going on at great length about Santa Barbara history. After several minutes of this, I thought she was wrapping up, but she came up with a map she wanted to show them in another room, so I could see I was never going to get to buy a ticket and I left.
Subsequently I met Lobo in the BevMo parking lot and began Phase 2 of the Santa Barbara Excursion.
Space Needle Climb
I was given to understand that there would be donuts.
There were no donuts. There were t-shirts and medals, but no donuts. They had donuts in previous years, but no mention of them this year.
Base 2 Space is an annual run up the Space Needle stairs to raise money for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. That’s a good charity, but my main motivation was running up the Space Needle. My belief is that you should generally go up things that can be gone up, at least if they’re interesting things. There’s another Seattle charity stair run that’s taller, but it’s just in a regular skyscraper. Base 2 Space is “Seattle’s Most Iconic Climb.”
I made it to the top, but there was some problem with the timekeeping. According to the follow-up email:
Our apologizes for the timing issues that arose during and after climb day. We have been working directly with the timing company to resolve these issues and ensure all times are accurate.
Despite their apologizes, I doubt if they can do anything about my time. What I think happened is that the chip reader didn’t register my time at the top until I’d been there for a while and happened to walk by it later. My official arrival time is 9:09 AM, but my first photo has a time stamp of 8:49 AM. So while my official time is 42:57, I think my real time was about 20 minutes. Which is still terrible. There were five runners over the age of 80 and four of them had better times than that. So I’m going to have to do it again next year, just to redeem myself.
And they’d better have donuts.
Run for the Border
The reminder email had told me that if they didn’t have my test results by the next day, I would receive a phone call. They emphasized that it was important for me to answer this phone call. I left Calgary at 7:30 that morning with the phone propped up on the seat next to me, ready to respond to Canada’s call.
My first stop was Tim Hortons in Fort Macleod where I had a mediocre breakfast sandwich and a pretty good donut. Contrary to rumor, there was no poutine.
NB: Tim Hortons has no apostrophe. It did originally, but Quebec does not allow such non-French indignities as apostrophes, so it had to go. TH opted for standardizing their signs everywhere, rather than maintaining different names for Quebec and the rest of North America.
Not far from Fort Macleod is the main attraction of my Canada ramble: Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. I’ve been wanting to go to HSI BJ since Dave Barry wrote about in 1989. Roadside America only rates it “Worth a Detour,” rather than “Major Fun,” but I think that has to be a mistake.
I had just parked and gotten out of my car when I received The Phone Call. It was a robocall. I had to use the numeric keypad to respond to questions. I decided to get back in my car to cut down on wind noise, but when I plugged the phone in, it activated the Bluetooth connection with the car, which disabled the numeric keypad. I tried to get the keypad back without hanging up while the recording pretended it was having trouble hearing me (“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that…”). I had just gotten the keypad back when it disconnected (“I’m sorry you’re having difficulty. Disconnecting now.”).
So much for that. Since it was a robocall, there was no way to call them back. Time for Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump! The welcome sign explains the name.
In the 1800s, according to legend, a young brave wanted to witness the plunge of buffalo as his people drove them to their deaths over the cliffs. Standing under the shelter of a ledge, he watched the great beasts fall past him. The hunt was unusually good that day. As the bodies mounted, he became trapped between the animals and the cliff. When his people came to do the butchering, they found him with his skull crushed under the weight of the buffalo carcasses. Thus, they named the place “Head-Smashed-In.”
The place had been in use for thousands of years at that point, so they certainly took their sweet time naming it.
HSI is really a lot more interesting than you might think. It’s an archaeological site with a multi-story museum detailing and explaining the finds. The cliff was used over a period of 6000 years, minus a gap of about 2000 years when it was abandoned. People were in the area and eating buffalo for that whole time, but no one knows why they stopped using the cliff, then started again 2000 years later.
The cliff itself just looks like a cliff, but it’s not hard to imagine thousands of buffalo plummeting over the edge onto some hapless doofus below.
I would have stayed longer, but I didn’t know how long I would have before the RCMP put out an APB on me, so I had Google Maps give me the fastest route to the border.
This turned out to mean going west from HSI on highway 785, which almost immediately turned into a gravel road that continued for the next 25 miles. So I raced for the border at about 30mph, fishtailing slightly in the gravel.
Eventually I got back to a regular highway and crossed back into BC, where I discovered the biggest truck in the world. Or what used to be the biggest truck in the world back in the ’70s. Now it’s just a very big truck. Worth a quick stop, even for those of us on the lam.
Every couple hours I got the Canadian robocall, which went to voice mail because I was driving and couldn’t answer it. I got to the Kingsgate/Eastport border crossing around 3 PM.
I handed the US border guard my Nexus card and she asked me the usual questions. Then there was a very long pause.
BG: “Have you ever been convicted or charged with a crime?”
Me: “Nooo.”
BG: “In your whole life?”
Me: “No.”
BG: “You have a common name. I’ll need to have you go inside. You can just pull your car around here.”
She gave my card to another border guard who told me to have a seat. After about five minutes on his computer he gave me my card back and said, “You’re good to go, sir. Thank you for your time.” No explanation, and I didn’t ask. I got in my car and disappeared into the Idaho panhandle.
Kelowna
The Kelowna waterfront is touristy but nice. The lake is beautiful and sparkly. Beyond the waterfront the downtown is old and beat-up, but interspersed with high-rise condos and older buildings repurposed into restaurants and brewpubs, all of which looks very new. There are a fair number of small old houses for sale as teardowns.
And there’s a curling club, which I believe is some sort of national requirement.
Alcalde was right about the saison at the Red Bird brewery. It’s not too tart the way some of them are. I’ve had four or five saisons in my life, so I think I’m something of an expert.
I’m staying in the Hotel Zed on the waterfront, which is a ridiculously fun, unpretentious hotel that looks damn good on your Instagram, it says here. They’ve basically taken an old motel and fixed it up with flashy, retro decor. They have rotary phones in the rooms, plus instructions on how to use them. I don’t have an Instagram account, so I’ll have to put the pictures here.
When I arrived on Sunday afternoon, it was sunny and hot and there were pscrillions of tourists. On Monday morning it was a lot cooler and there was hardly anyone around except for the street people. I promenaded on the promenade and bought an Ogopogo sweatshirt.
There are surprisingly few Ogopogo-themed items for sale. Even Ogopogo Giftland had only two choices. Shockingly, the visitor’s centre had nothing on the Ogopogo at all! It was as if he doesn’t even exist!
Mapparium
For my final experience of Major Fun on this trip, I visited the Mapparium at the Mary Baker Eddy Library in the Christian Science Publishing Society building, which is part of the sprawling Christian Science Center not far from Fenway Park.
The Publishing Society building is a great example of the economic clout of publishing in the 1930s, with grand marble-floored entryways and globe lamps that function as a clock and a calendar.
The actual publishing is done elsewhere now, and the first floor of the building is given over to a presentation of the life of Mary Baker Eddy, with interactive video displays and films and inspirational quotes.
The Mapparium itself is a giant stained-glass globe, with countries and borders as of 1935. The globe is inverted, so the layout appears normal from the inside. The globe was restored and enhanced in 2002, but they kept the original 1935 layout, which is good, because how else could you see Chosen, French Indochina, and Königsberg?
There’s dramatic audio about how seeing the world unifies us or something, but it doesn’t really add anything. The globe is really very impressive on its own. Unfortunately photos weren’t allowed, due to “copyright issues,” which I’m starting to suspect is just an excuse.
I tried to take a photo on the sly, but it didn’t turn out well. You can see better photos here.
Mark Twain wrote quite a bit about Christian Science, although I didn’t see any of his writings in the Library. They must be in one of the rooms I missed.
Boston
I arrived in Boston to find out that my Airbnb room wasn’t ready. Workmen were glazing the bathtub (or something like that) and it wouldn’t be done until the next morning, but they had another room for me that night in the same building. The room was considerably smaller but no big deal for one night.
The next morning the workmen still weren’t done. After a lot of messaging back and forth, they finally left the keys for me at the pizza parlor in the same building. I dropped off the other keys in the Keycafe about a half mile away.
The new room—the one I originally rented—was perfectly positioned to be the noisiest room in the building. The pizza parlor seems to be a gathering place, and when it closes at 2:00 AM, people stand on the sidewalk in front of it for another hour or so talking as loudly as possible. The same for the two adjacent bars. Also, everyone in Boston honks their horns at all times to indicate displeasure with what everyone else is doing, or possibly just for the sheer love of honking.
The room was in a good central location, though, about a block from Boston Common. It’s a beautiful park, dating to 1634, and the only park I’ve ever seen with a cemetery in it.
The adjacent Boston Public Garden dates to 1837 and is even beautifuler.
I also followed the Freedom Trail, which starts at Boston Common. It’s a relatively short path that contains significant sites of the colonial and revolutionary periods, including the Old State House, Old South Meeting House, and Granary Burying Ground (where Sam Adams and Paul Revere are buried). Colonial and revolutionary sites are most of what I wanted to see in Boston, so it was thoughtful of Boston to locate them near my Airbnb.
And Roadside America sights there were a-plenty, including a teapot from 1873, a plaque commemorating the creation of the gerrymander, an ether monument, and an Irish famine statue.
Salem
Salem was a whole lot cheesier than I expected. Lots of tarot reading and chakra balancing and stores with names like Coven’s Cottage. Even the panhandlers know how to market themselves.
The more historical spots were still attractions, and more focused on presentation. I almost went to the Salem Witch Museum, but you have to buy tickets in advance, so I wouldn’t have been able to get in right away.
But at least I got to see the Bewitched statue.
