On The Road Again

There are some blue notes from the road including not visiting friends in places such as Omaha, and various cities and towns in Texas. Choosing October to travel rather than August is another, since that fact alone forced me on a southern trajectory across the country not only for warmer weather, but primarily so that I could cross the Rocky Mountains at their lowest altitude. I did not want to risk running into snow, which in Colorado and points north can happen even in summer. 

I will make that crossing over the Rockies in the next 48 hours. Right now, I am chilling in a fabulous and luxurious resort in the mountains of Santa Fe, New Mexico… trying not to let the thin air or my tweaked back get me down.

I have gotten ahead of myself. You last heard from this intrepid… and rapidly aging… traveler as I was preparing to leave Rosemary Beach in the Florida Panhandle. Normally, I would continue to go west to New Orleans and then visit with friends in Houston and another couple I have not seen in a very long time who reside in the beautiful community ofRound Top, Texas.

Hurricane Helene had decimated the West Coast of Florida, impacting on my initial plan of a drive up my home state’s West Coast; then, as I travelled, a new storm (Milton) formed in the Gulf bringing into question a drive along the Panhandle’s coast to New Orleans.

I decided---prematurely it turned out---to hightail it northward, away from the storm, into Alabama, and to revisit what I had remembered as the fabulous tributes to the Civil Rights movement in both Montgomery and Birmingham. It had been two decades since I visited the area with my eldest grandchild when she was a Black Studies Major at Oberlin College in Ohio.

I left Rosemary Beach that Sunday morning and stayed faithful to the country roads on which I love to drive. Alabama is beautiful, thecountryside pristine and replete with two-lane roads that are well paved.

The BMW cruised through Brantley which has a high school that appeared to be housed in a trailer. Brantley High School is for pre-K through 12th grade and the town, founded over a hundred and thirty years ago in 1891, still has not reached a population of 1,000. It is a long way from my birthplace in East Los Angeles, or my adopted home of Miami… and not only in miles. Even my Island paradise has more residents.

I was in Selma by late in the afternoon. It was all but deserted. I parked the car and took the time to walk over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. 

Onward to Montgomery which has improved dramatically in the time that has gone by since my last visit nearly twenty years ago. The bad news was that all the museums and historical tributes to Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and the Civil Rights Movement were closed by the time I got there that Sunday night; none would reopen until Wednesday.

The Legacy Sites did not exist when I last visited the Civil Rights Trail,but the reviews were so powerful I felt compelled to at least drive-bythem and was glad that I did. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened in 2018, informally known as The National Lynching Museum, is an architectural wonder. Even as I peeked in through the gates of the nearby Freedom Monument Sculpture Park near the banks of the Alabama River where countless slaves began their journeys, there was more than a hint of the worthwhile visit within. It is unlikely this old guy will make it back there, but you should… with your children and theirs.

I moved on to Birmingham… often referred to in my youth as BOMBingham for all the terror brought down on that city’s Black population. I remembered the museum there as one of the most impactful I had ever seen. It too was closed until Wednesday. I walked across the street to Kelly Ingram Park which had left indelible images all those years ago with its lifelike sculptures of police attack dogs, power water hoses and other offenses against Black people. Unless my memory was playing tricks, this park is no longer the powerful visit that it was. Stuff happens in 20 years. Not all of it is progress.

Now, well into Monday afternoon, I drove south and west to Tuscaloosato see the campus of the University of Alabama. Absolutely gorgeous… and alive with young people everywhere making their ways across the multiple quads to seemingly innumerable numbers of beautiful brick buildings. 

Hot Springs, Arkansas was my next destination point. I had never been, despite multiple trips across the country, and the name only jumped off my map because of some vague recollection I had of the town being anescape from the trials of life in Chicago for Al Capone and Lucky Luciano in the 1930s.

There are a lot of tributes to the two mobsters in Hot Springs, which one must believe has seen much better days. I think “tacky” covers it today. I did not leap at the chance to try the baths. To give the place its due, the locals could not have been friendlier.

It was just after all this that I drove through a very tiny town in Arkansas called De Queen. Best chicken fried steak I have ever had and the best meal so far on this entire trip… admittedly a low bar on this kind of adventure, but still… the food was so good it is worthy of note: Ranch House Café of De Queen, 208 East Collin Raye Drive, Arkansas… just in case you find yourself in the neighborhood.

The drive westward across Oklahoma and then down into Albuquerque provided little amusement over the two days it required. I decided to reward myself and book the best room I could find in New Mexico’s largest city. I picked the historic Hotel Andaluz… built around the time I was born and the pride of Conrad Hilton who spent his honeymoon there with Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Once inside the Hotel I came to realize that I had stumbled into the city at a most propitious time… The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta was happening. There had been a cancellation… some dude from Florida could not make it because of Hurricane Milton. He had to give up his room. Apparently, that is how I had gotten mine. I also took his place on the bus that would leave the Hotel at 4AM the next morning to watch the ascension of the hundreds of hot air balloons that would begin in the pre-dawn hours and go on until about 9AM.

It was all very impressive. I have never seen anything like it and felt fortunate to have lucked into such an event. Back at the Hotel, later that morning, I napped with the intention of rising in time to watch the USC-Penn State game on the extra-large screen my hotel room provided. Good plan, but a failure with the Internet blacked out all TV in the entire area.

With a little help from the Hotel concierge, I was off to a distant sports bar in time to watch my Trojans go down to defeat… again. My passion for this team is being tested, but this season fits right into the time of loss I have been experiencing too often with friends and family. A tough year.

That is why I elected to spoil myself in Santa Fe. My trip is close to an end.  I will soon cross the Rocky Mountains and make my way to Phoenix and the Biltmore Hotel, of Frank Lloyd Wright fame. It is where, at the age of twenty-one, I spent my wedding night with my recently deceased first wife and where I will watch USC play its next game against another Big 10 rival. 

What could possibly go wrong? 

 

Barney Rosenzweig