tdaxp

Welcome to Shreveport, Louisiana, a city where a sign like this is necessary:



If indeed random strangers calling the fire department because of a piercing bell is a backup system, good. However, if the alarms of passers-bye is the primary method for informing the fire department of a disaster in Louisiana, then... no wonder.

(The rest of this post is harsher than I intended. I assume I am still recovering my wits from the bus ride from hell).

While I was in Fort Wayne, my friend Biz suggested that I calculate the states I had visited. He says that a state only counts as visited if one had mingled among the local people by buying some thing, and that airports did not count. I thus looked online for a clickable states visited map, and I was unimpressed with what was available. So I used a clickable electoral college map similar to the one I used for my analysis of the West Wing election

While I have an absolute electoral votes without them, I have included Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia as "undecided." Like every other American I have spent time in Atlanta's airport, I drove through Tennessee on my recent interesting adventure, and was previously in a bus in Mississippi.

I am writing this on a comfortable and safe-feeling Kerrville Buss Company vehicle, in Texas just after US 84 crosses the state line with Louisiana. Greyhound bus travel in the South is as terrible as Eddie and Sonny predicted. For much of the journey I was jammed next to the toilet between a very fat woman and a very scary-looking man. Worse, Greyhound's magical-mystery philosophy of bus scheduling -- such as overbooking a bus by nearly 100% and sending on my checked luggage two buses late, meant much of the travel was mentally stressful, as well. Then there were the extra connections which contradicted earlier information, chronically late vehicles, the fact that Southerns can't line up...

Oh, that brings me to another part of the rant. Part of my vacation reading is P.J. O'Rourke's Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism, and in it he makes the point that one of the hallmarks of civilization is the ability to form a line. The context was the rowdy and riotous behavior of Iraqis during (unneeded) aid dispensation, but O'Rourke may well have been describing the behavior of Southerners in Tennessee. The most charitable position that I (as a supposed descendant of CSA General John "Swamp Fox" Mosby) could make of this is that the evolutionary biologist Steven Pinker was right to describe the south as possessing a noxious "culture of honor." Physical aggressiveness almost matching the anarchic-but-non-violent behavior of Beijngers in the subway was the norm, and may be a way of indicating that one is not to be trifled with (even if one is old, fat, and theoretical female).

Part of my anger comes from seeing how those even less familiar with bus trave than I fared. Through much of the trip Mexican families, an Asian Indian couple, and a Chinese man were sharing the bus with me. Their stress rose visible through our hastles and indignities, and I shudder to think that many will see that slice of the South as "America."

Yet perhaps my anger at the Land of the Lost Cause is misplaced. (Incidentally, I wonder if it is aggravated by constant displays of the Confederate National flags, the Confederate battle flag, the Confederate Naval Jack, etc. I don't recall being upset by the iconography before, as part of my family was pro-Confederate West Virginian, and I generally favor the preservation of whatever images people love. But you lost, I kept wanting to say, get over it. I could continue, but back to bashing Greyhound...) Several of the riders I traveled with blamed Greyhound's sorry state on lack of competition. Certainly my earlier positive Greyhound experiences were largely supported by the happy treatment I received before Indianapolis and after Texarkana.

(Hmm... this opens up whole new areas of exploration. A Barnettian economicist v. a Huntington culturalist view of bus services? Some cool Catholicgauze maps showing the overlap between Dixie, transportation competition, and shoddy services? An excellent reflection on bus quality and poetry from Phatic Communion.)

Well, theoretically we are approaching Nacogdoches by-and-by. I shall sign off, weary from my travels.

And oh yes, there will be a rant.

Not just the 1486th anniversary of Mohammed bin Abdullah's flight from Mecca to Medina. Not just the 237th anniversary of the first western settlement in California. Not just the 223rd anniversary of the United Empire Loyalists receiving their bloody-money from the Crown. Not just the 61st anniversary of the Manhattan Project nor the 37th anniversary of Apollo 11's Liftoff. Nope, it's the end of Fort Wayne's Three Rivers Festival, and that means...



Fireworks!

"Let's go eat Conney dogs at Three Rivers Fest," said Biz.
"I've never been to Ohio. We should eat there," said I.

And within a matter of minutes, we were....



Welcomed to Ohio!

Curzon at Coming Anarchy may try to impress us with his photographs of New York skyscrapers, but all the cool people know that Downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana is the place to be.

Yet the Fort has more than just a skyscraper. Come to north-east Indie, and also experience...

Before pictures of the town, check this out. Is this the cutest picture ever, or what?

Anyway, sorry for that. The photoadventure today was the journey to the Three Rivers Festival, so read on and get ready to party!

Before my friend moved to Fort Wayne, the most I knew of the city came from Planet of the Apes, where Charlton Heston's character is from the town. Fittingly a conversation in the movie revolves around education

Monkey; Where did you learn to do this?
Heston: "Jefferson Public School. Fort Wayne, Indiana. "

Yet Fort Wayne isn't just known for its monkey-fighters, but also its killer mastodons.

As happened to me in China (when I saw a gorgeous Hindu-Buddhist temple), the most beautiful parts of my journey hit me when I was without my camera. (Ironically, I do see a Hindu-style temple outside Chicago.)



I had a four-hour layover in Chicago, and hoping for some distraction I checked my bags into a locker and proceeded to explore the neighborhood.

It turns out that the Chicago Greyhound station borders the financial district. It is just blocks from Union Station and the Sears Tower. I spent the $11, took the ride up, and enjoyed one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful sites of my life.

Visibility was "zero," our guides warned us, so I was prepared to be disappointed. Indeed, as for much of the beginning of the trip I was all alone, I figured the view must be terrible. How wrong I was. To see thick, billowy clouds shredded by the tops of skyscrapers -- to see the sea of the sky underlit by a great American city -- is beyond my ability to describe.

The people were wonderful and friendly, too. I met a Taiwanese man and his American son, where a small faux-paus (tdaxp: Ah yes, Taipei -- the greatest city of the Republic of China. Man: Peking is the greatest city in the Republic of China!) begin a friendly encounter. Or the former space engineer, proud of his work on the Hubble Space Telescope but grumbling of the "politically-driven" selection of the Galileo Mission over his own company's proposal.

Yet no photographs remain of that. So what continues below is from the journey, and is far less photogenic. I had a great time on my Greyhound trip, and even the schizophrenic woman damning us to hell was taken in good humor (well, humor -- not all of it was kind) by my fellow passengers.