Category: Travel

When I last left my travel log updates, I was in the historic Linden Row Inn. Now I am in a less historic hotel in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where we are visiting an old friend from PhD studies. At one point, Annette had grand plans of hikes on some nearby trail through the bucolic hills. But with the wind howling and being more or less “tourist-ed out,” I think the plan is to meet our friend, go to her house, and eat pizza and drink beer.

Anyway, a few highlight from where I left off before:

• Thursday night we met Dennis Danvers for computer fun and dinner. Dennis and I were in the MFA program at the same time at Virginia Commonwealth University, which means I have known him and been friends with him now for over 20 years. Kinda scary. And also interesting is that I think we’ve become better friends since I left Richmond in 1993 via email.
  
  Anyway, we went over to his house first so I could help him update the software he’s using to run his web site, a job that I thought would take about 15 minutes. Instead, I screwed it up royal and I had to restore one of the two backups I wisely made before I began the process. Oh, and while I was doing that, Will and Annette played with Dennis’ incredibly energetic dog, Ethel.
  
  But I’m happy to say that all is back to the way that Dennis’ web site was before I started, so no harm, no foul. Still, after causing Dennis some obvious worry, I thought the least I could do was buy at Cajun Bangkok, which was a fusion restaurant of sorts between Cajun and Thai food. It was a fine time– a very sweet and shy waitress, good food, and the fusion stuff worked pretty well for me. I had chicken-fried steak (though it was actually “chicken-fried chicken”) with a peanut sauce. And we talked and tried to convince Dennis to sign up for Facebook and appreciate the joys of the iPhone, both unsuccessfully.
• Friday morning, we had breakfast at Joe’s Inn, which is a kind of “must stop” for us whenever we are in Richmond (which isn’t often, really). Dennis joined us again, and there was much chatting of science fiction, fantasy, and young adult readings, mostly between Annette and Dennis. Then we took a little walking tour that included stops at Annette’s parent’s house before they moved to Florida and a bit of a stroll down Monument Avenue.
• Then it was on the road again to Harrisonburg (with a brief drive-through visit in Staunton, where Annette had her first reporting job way back when, and which has become in recent years kind of a quaint and quasi-touristy sort of town) to visit Mary. And there’s not much to report there, though with homemade pizza, wine/beer, and complicated television in the form of the new series Dollhouse, it did feel a lot like the way we often would get together in Bowling Green. Thanks Mary for good times and also for letting us watch the kooky new Dollhouse instead of your usual Friday Night Lights.

And that’s pretty much it. Back on the road today to Ypsilanti, hopefully an uneventful trip.

Here’s the first of three (maybe four?) posts about our recent travels to Naples, Florida to see the in-laws:

One morning during our trip (I think it was last Sunday), Annette and I went on a bike ride while Annette’s parents took Will to the beach by the pier in Naples. The neighborhood we rode around in was called Port Royal, which has cool street names like Gin Lane and Rum Row, lovely landscape and Banyan trees, and which has obscenely large and garish houses. This was the “front version” of the house porn tour.

A few years ago, Annette and I went on a sunset cruise that passed through the canals behind all these giant houses. I called that experience “the house porn cruise,” because, like pornography, me and my fellow passengers were disgusted by what we saw (“my God, those people have three swimming pools!”), and yet we also found it all kind of arousing, we were all a little envious and no one could take our eyes off of it.

The “full frontal” view of the tour wasn’t quite as titillating as seeing the back-end a couple years ago. True, many of the houses had over-the-top facades, most of a weird faux Italian or French Rivera style, and many had rather elaborate security camera systems. But with the landscaping and such, they were mostly on the verge of tasteful, though rather palatial.

I guess the thing that I found more striking than the display of wealth was the number of “for sale” signs. The downturn in the economy is visible here in Naples, and it seems particularly visible in the richy-rich neighborhoods. There are a lot of houses for sale and foreclosures in my neighborhood too, but it kind of seemed like there was more going on here. And I guess that makes a certain amount of sense. The kinds of people who own these houses are the kinds of people who had all their money with Lehman Brothers or AIG.

Anyway, the day after this bike ride, we made a day-trip to Sarasota and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, and the things around it. Ringling was the last living brother of the Ringling Brothers, and, as far as I can tell, kind of a Charles Foster Kane/Donald Trump of his times. He amassed a huge fortune through the circus business and other operations, he and his wife collected a ton of art and other goodies from Europe, and he built for himself and his wife this faux Venetian/Italian styled mansion of a house: Cá d’ Zan, a one of a kind and eccentric design that included all kinds of balconies, a bar, tons of art, and a church organ built into the living room. (I know little about Ringling, but I think this image of him playing the organ alone in this giant house is kind of telling).

In other words, this too was house porn, 1920s style.

Surprisingly, the circus part of the museums were kind of under-played. There was one large building that had a few circus wagons, costumes, and posters, but it seemed kind of like a work in progress. The coolest part of the circus stuff—and maybe the coolest part of the whole trip to Sarasota—was the Howard Brothers Circus Model, which was this immense miniature model of a circus built over decades by Howard Tibbals. I’ve got a few pictures in the Flickr set, but they don’t really do justice to the scale and detail of this thing. And I can only wonder what it was like to be married to the guy who did that project in his basement for fifty or sixty years.

Also surprising to me was the impressiveness of the museum of art, which is really the centerpiece of the facility. We hit the art museum last and were kind of pooped by then, and that was too bad, in a way. There was a lot of very impressive old European art in there—quite a bit of Paul Reubens and “Dutch Masters” kinds of things—which the Ringlings brought back from their frequent trips to Europe.

Interestingly, Mable Ringling died in the late 20s, and, as I understand it, John Ringling had willed all of his estate and art to the state of Florida– I don’t think he had any children. Ringling, like today’s modern house porn operators, pretty much lost it all during the stock market crash, and just a few days before he would have been sold to sell his house and art, he died, thus making this all available to the public. Kinda strange, huh?

Here is a link to my Flickr set from the trip to Sarasota. More to come, I am sure.