Travelin’ Thornberries Do What Floats Their Boat in Lake Cumberland

 May 13 to May 16, 2013

           Salvete, Mi Amici!  Times and circumstances being what they are, the Travelin' Thornberries have been far less prodigious in their excursions these past several years.  Nevertheless, we haven't been completely inactive, and this year, we are sharing our small, thematic experience with you.  We took a cabin trip to Lake Cumberland, Kentucky.  Yes, we've been forced to adapt to so many new changes--both welcome and unwelcome--that once again, we weren't feeling favorably disposed toward dealing with the public.  Ergo, we planned a more contemplative retreat to better serve our abraded sensibilities.  My plans this year were to read a couple of nonfiction books about language and government, and Jennifer wanted to delve into books about higher education.  Where better than in a venue that sits closer to wind and wave?  Behold, our  four themes:

The Trip--Sucky as Usual

            And there's not much more to say than that.  The Travelin' Thornberries always have bad luck when it comes to road trips.  This one was no different.  It took longer than necessary because of a combination of highway construction and weird-ass street name changes that everyone in the state but us seems to already know about.  Even with a combination of GPS and printed directions, we got lost.  Luckily, Jennifer was able to call the cabin rental place, and they set us straight enough that we finally got there well into the third hour of our 2.5-hour drive.  The homemade spaghetti and sausage dinner we crafted later helped offset the frazz.  :)

The Cabin—A Review

            We've stayed in hotels and motels around the country.  Some, like the Drury Inn, were quaint, supportive little places, with receptive staff and lots of free little perks.  Others, like the New York-New York, in Las Vegas, were sprawling Sin Cathedrals, comfortable but frustrating to navigate, with a "pecked to death" tendency to require tips for any little service.  And finally, there's the example of the Milner in Boston, an atrocious sweat box hell-hole, so far beneath the price of admission in quality that the only way to renovate it would be to burn it down to the sidewalk and then sow salt over top of the ashen ruins. 

            But this was our first cabin.  On the surface, the concept seems rather silly.  Why pay money to stay somewhere that requires you to bring all your own food and drinks?  How is it a vacation when you have to cook your own meals in the kitchen and then wash all the dishes afterward?  In other words, how was this different from just staying home? 

            Except it is different.  Don't ask me exactly how; I can't entirely explain it.  Maybe the change in venue makes it feel like a new and unique experience, even with all the same chores in tow.  Plus, it is away from the hassles of home, with more unstructured time to be as creatively proactive or vegetatively inactive as one wishes.  Doing cooking and dishes isn't painful when it is freely chosen, alongside someone you care about, in a peaceful setting, with the ambiance of music or educational audio entertainment in the background.

            The cabin was relatively small--only two bedrooms--but that was plenty of space for two people who share a bed.  It had a fully functional kitchen, stove, table, couch, and a gateway to hell, designed to flood the place with gush after gush of fire and damnation, the better to roast the occupants to blackened piles of calcium. 

            Wait, back up, there... 

            The fact is that the place was pretty sweet, and reasonably priced.  More, since tourist season wouldn't really begin for another two weeks, we had the area pretty much to ourselves.  Only one other cabin around us seemed occupied, and naturally, it had to be the loud, lederhosen-clad, drunken yodelers.  But we just closed the shades in that direction and threw open all the rest to flood the place with sunlight, tranquility and serenity.  Exactly what we needed. 

            Light and heat were the only real weaknesses of the venue.  It seems our destiny to find places that want to keep internal illumination to a guttering fifteen candlepower.  Recreational Braille.  At night, the cabin was dim, and I had to swipe a bedroom lamp for the living room just to get enough light by which to read my nonfiction books.  And like that

unfortunately memorable Milner, this place had problems with the climate control.  We stayed swelteringly hot for most of our time there until I pulled out the air conditioning filter and found it so caked with debris that it looked like someone had used it in a crematorium for seven years without a break.  Rather than try to remedy that corpse-laden article, I simply laid it aside, and thereafter, the air inside was cooler, if not completely satisfactory.  Nevertheless, we were content.

The Lake—The Travelin' Thornberries, Aboard the S.S. Minnow

            Jennifer has some familiarity with Lake Cumberland, as her father lived there for many years, and she'd been exposed to water-based recreation by boat.  She was highly excited this time to rent a boat ourselves and take it out on the lake for a half-day of getaway time.  Our cabin was within walking distance of the rental facilities, so it didn't take us long to todder down the mountainside and find ourselves a boat manager.  This lady was no-nonsense, typically managerial, but she laid out everything we needed to do to navigate the craft, including how to use the emergency radio if we got into a jam.  Apparently, it is always on, and she has a standing channel on it.  No sweat. 

            Jennifer tooled us out of the marina area, observing the "no wake" laws around the large houseboats docked nearby, and then pushed the throttle to full on our li'l S.S. Minnow!  For several hours, we pushed up and down Lake Cumberland, enjoying the sunshine and the fact that there wasn't another human being for what looked like miles.  We had to adjust to the fact that we couldn't just stop anywhere.  Our craft lacked an anchor, so if we cut the engine, the currents pushed us either out into the middle of nowhere, or (more likely) into the shoreline.  Neither of us was exactly sure how the boat would react to being too close to shore.   

 

Jennifer pours the coal to our little S.S. Minnow, and pushes us around Lake Cumberland.

  Our manager had explained that it was possible to beach the boat deliberately for a land excursion, but we didn't fancy the chances of screwing up the boat's rotors and ending up marooned out there.  Instead, Jennifer just deactivated the engines at a decent distance from any land, and we ate our quaint little sandwich lunch while drifting about.  We took

pictures.  I used my binoculars, now that I was in a place where I felt I could pull them out without someone shooting me in my pudgy gut for spying.  Eventually, while Jennifer puttered us thither and yon, watching the scenery, I pulled out a book I'd started by Charles Goodsell, A Case for Bureaucracy.  It's a book that takes a favorable view of government services, but that's beyond the scope of this review.  :) 

            Did you catch that we're referring to our boat as the S.S. Minnow?  If you know your 1960s pop culture, you'll recognize that name and see a bit of foreshadowing here.  That's the name of the ship that carried the seven castaways on ­Gilligan's Island.  

Our boat excursion has thus far been exhilarating and relaxing; what could go wrong?

            Oh, boy.  Now what's going to happen to our intrepid gluttons for punishment?

            Here it comes.  Jennifer was guiding us through the Caney Creek section of the Lake, and I was delightfully enjoying my reading, when suddenly, our boat's engine made a noise like a cat with a ball of steel wool stuck in its throat, and then it skipped above the water slightly.  "What the hell!?" I exclaimed, slamming down my book.  Turns out, because of the recent increase in the lake's water level, there are currently many obstacles out there now submerged, that would have once been easily seen.  And avoided.  But not now.  And Jennifer had ran us over an underwater tree.  At this point, it was little more than a waterlogged…well, log, but one still securely rooted to the bottom of the lake.  Our boat's motor had scraped across it.  Fortunately, we determined we still had engine power, and figured we'd dodged a soggy, wooden bullet. 

            Then Jennifer tried to take us back to the marina.

Thomas reads intently, blithely unaware that disaster is about to strike!

            Yes, that's when she discovered we'd lost attitude control.  The impact had apparently jarred loose something between the wheel and the engine.  The former would now turn 360 degrees without having any influence on the latter at the stern end of our craft.  We could go forward, but not to port or starboard.  In other words, we were adrift in the middle of Lake Cumberland.  I know, only the Travelin' Thornberries, right?  Our one and only boat excursion ever, and disaster strikes. 

            [Sigh]

            Alright, so it was time to put that emergency radio to the test.  Jennifer pulled out the mic and sent out a distress call.

            [Cricket-cricket]  No answer.

            Oka-a-a-y…  Now what?  The water was too cold for us to swim anywhere.  Even if we could, we were only near little spits of land that gave us no bearing on how to find a public highway, let alone phone access. 

            We had one last act of desperation, and that was my cell phone.  I was pretty sure it wouldn't work, since I'd been unable to get a signal even in the more populous marina area.  But to our relief, it connected to the number on the manager's business card.  I called her, explained our situation and she naturally stated she'd "never heard of anything like that."  Of course. 

The Thornberries are trapped somewhere out in this intestinal Lake!

            It turns out our particular location was both our greatest liability and our greatest benefit.  No surprise, Caney Creek seems to be the one part of Lake Cumberland where the radio habitually doesn't work.  Yeah, that figures.  On the other hand, it was also the only part Jennifer knew by name from her father's history of living there, and it was the reason we were in that section.  When you're on the phone, trying to explain to someone where you are on a lake in which pretty much every landmark is "water, more water and a bunch of trees on the shore," it could literally take hours and hours for help to find you.  But Jennifer was able to tell them the name of the only area she recognized and give them a couple of relatively unique landmarks to help track us down.

            So the Bobbing Thornberries settled down to wait for rescue.  I read a little more, and Jennifer sat contemplating the weather, water and scenery.  Finally, after about thirty minutes or so, another craft just like ours showed up, and the pilot yoked us to it.  Then, using both engines and the steering capabilities of the one, he took us back to the marina, where we thankfully plopped our feet safely onto terra firma.  

Yoked securely to another craft, Jennifer and Thomas are hauled back to civilization.

            Despite that one drawback, however, we still felt we'd had a good experience.  And even still, we'd go back out there again.  The prior serenity was worth it.

The Hidden Hiking Trail—WTF!?

            Our other major excursion was a simple hiking trail. 

            Jennifer and I are neither one new to recreational hiking while on vacation.  In May

2000, we joined our friend Paris and endured a 4-mile trip virtually straight up that ended with clawing our way up a mountainside to get a panoramic view of Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains.  Then in May 2005, we subjected ourselves and our friend Gena to the mammoth 10.1-slog through the hellish backwoods of Lake Barkley in Western Kentucky's Land Between the Lakes.

            By contrast, at about four miles, this particular trail was far shorter than the 10.1 of LBL, and much more forgiving in grade than the Mount Olympus we'd climbed in the Smokies.  It seemed like a quaint, cheap way to spend the second day of our trip.  And in fact, it started out as just that.  We gathered lots of pictures of rocks, trees, bugs, sunshine and so on.  At a point of relatively high elevation, we got a stunning view of Lake Cumberland, which we enjoyed while munching a couple of homemade ration bars we'd brought along for just this sort of event. 

A nice view of Lake Barkley from the Lake Bluff Trail.

             Then things started to get hairy. 

            First of all, the trail kept dumping us out onto major highways.  Luckily, at this time of year, they weren't really that busy, but even still, it broke the illusion of taking on rugged nature when every ten minutes we were walking along an asphalt road with a yellow line in the middle of it, listening for approaching traffic. 

            Second, the signs for the trail we were hiking were pretty obscure in places.  Each time we came out on the road and dodged a car or two, we had to walk up and down for a quarter of a mile before we could find where the trail resumed on the other side.  Half the routes we thought were the right ones ended up terminating at "no trespassing" signs on homeowners' private driveways.   The rest went to utility buildings, many of which looked like they hadn't been active since the Nixon Administration. 

            At the very end, despite our best ranging and roving, we lost the trail completely.  Now very irritated, we located a deserted lodge in the middle of nowhere and used the public map they had outside to just navigate our way back to the car by walking alongside the highway.  Maybe that was the way the trail would have went anyway, but we never found out one way or the other.  By that point, we were sweaty, out of drinking water, tired and frustrated.  Again, we're glad we went and gathered so many good pictures…but neither of us thinks we'd do that particular trail again.  At least the brutal trails of our past made it clear when you were on said trails, from beginning to end. 

            And that's the broad themes of our trip!

            We've long come to expect setbacks and hassles when we try to engage with all the details of a good vacation.  That means we've evolved away from believing we'll have a flawless experience.  Our goals now are to enjoy a bit of unstructured time in the pursuit of our proactive hobbies, and to mold the events of our trips into pictures and stories to share with others. 

            How are we doing?  Are you entertained, our Darlings?

All Funked Up:
Travelin’ Thornberries Enjoy “Wrap” Music from Here Come The Mummies
 June 14 to June 16, 2012 

Hello, Our Darlings!

Yes, we know only too well how bland, colorless and without meaning or purpose have been your lives these past months, lacking as they have the sparkle, the luster, the verve and the enrichment from the words and deeds of the Traveling Thornberries.  But be apprised that the pendulum for your period of privation is at a precarious point in which it must now plummet, placing you, post haste, on a particularly pulchritudinous perch for a perspective on our proud plot in this proceeding page.   More than a year has passed since our last tale of angst and awesomeness.  Yes, thirteen months of financial fits, scholastic sandpapering and the inevitably overwhelming insecurities inherent in the upheavals of the current operations of our existences.  Jennifer and I have faced a number of new crises in our lives, especially these past months.  Ergo, we felt we were long-overdue for a nice and relaxing getaway.

As you longtime fans of the Traveling Thornberries narratives know, Jennifer and I are normally fans of air travel.  True, one surrenders much of the control and sees little of the country in the travel process, but in exchange, many, many headaches of highway travel get bypassed.  But finances being what they’ve been, austerity is everyone’s new reality; we knew this year’s excursion would have to be a humble one.  No planes for us.  We decided maybe getting there could be part of the fun.  After all, Jennifer’s brother and his better half have told many grand stories of their adventures on the road together, and they seemed to be doing great.  In fact, here’s a shameless plug for their tales of goats, cheeses and caves:

           http://www.onesixtyk.com

Ultimately, then, Jennifer and I settled on our own road trip to a place called Spartanburg, South Carolina.  Why that particular destination?  Why, to attend a music concert put on by what is perhaps one of the most unique performing groups we’ve ever encountered: Here Come The Mummies.  A friend turned us on to them as far back as April 12, 2011 (you know who you are, Dan!), and they’ve fascinated us ever since.  Like KISS in the 1970s, HCTM wear elaborate makeup—in this case, mummy wrappings—during performances.  They do so specifically to ensure no one knows who they are.  

The mystique not only allows established musicians to perform together (even though they are otherwise committed to preexisting contracts at rival companies, as rumor has it), but also makes for endlessly fascinating theorizing among fans about their potential identities.  The group’s music is mostly feel-good funk, brass instrumentation and a great deal of suggestive—if innocent—innuendo.  They usually play small venues, allowing for a near-unprecedented connection and responsiveness to the fans.  And we hungered to be a part of the Mummy mystique!

I think it only fair to give our gratitude to HCTM for their hard work by linking as many themes of this chronicle as possible to their songs and lyrics.  If you’re unfamiliar with their brand of performance, then you’ll have plenty of clickable opportunities to URLs where you can play the songs and let Here Come The Mummies seriously “funk” you up.  Read on!

Thursday, June 14, 2012—Our “Terrifying Funk From Beyond the Grave”

It always seems like the terrifying stresses of our lives before a trip steadily pile up and reach their peak only days or even hours before time to actually leave.  So it was with this one.  In those days beforehand, we were, quite frankly…

“Running Hot”—The Thornberries Crack Skulls with Life

Yes, we would both “overheat” with our obligations for this week.  On Monday, Jennifer had to do a teaching demonstration as part of the application process for another one-year job with her current college campus employer.  She found it a surreal experience, performing as she was for colleagues who already knew and respected her.

I faced my own demons that following Wednesday, getting up at the ass-crack of dawn to give myself plenty of time to get to campus for the Comprehensive graduate examination for which I’d studied the previous six weeks.  Well, as HCTM observe, “Ra Ra, Ra, when all is said and done, we’re not the first to be here. There’s nothin’ new underneath the sun.”  That includes the essential nature of life as a wellspring of suffering.  In context, when I stopped early in my trip at a Speedway station for fuel, it only seemed natural when another customer pointed out to me that my car’s engine was smoking.  The damn thing had blown a heater hose.  **Groan!!**   We had planned to get on the road early that next Thursday morning, but now we had to wait on my car repairs.  Oh, well, we figured.  It’s only a six hour trip, so how much damage could it do for our leisurely car trip?

Doh!!  If only we had known….

We thought we’d never tire, that nothing was gonna stop us, not…

Hurricanes, Floods and Fire

We packed Jennifer’s car, Tinky, with all necessary supplies, and headed out of the state.  The first two hours of the trip were relatively smooth.  Oh, sure, we knew our first Interstate was eventually going to be blocked, but we were prepared by advanced news reports online to address that.  Apparently, a rock slide had fallen over it.  So we had planned a detour route around it, and figured smugly that the trip would be smooth sailing thereafter.

[Sigh].  If only we had known….

Apparently, once we entered the state of Tennessee, we must have stumbled into a Roach Motel superimposed over the highway system.  We checked in, but we sure as hell couldn’t check out.  The state became an agrarian Alcatraz.  It started when we hit a slowdown in traffic on 25E and were routed around some unseen snarl, driving Gypsy (our GPS unit) nuts.  Then, we got to I-40 near the North Carolina border. And stopped. Yep, every car gridlocked against the bumper of the car in front of it, like some sort of arthritic Amtrak train.  We’d inch forward a few hungry feet, then sit and listen to the egg salad in our cooler spoiling.  A couple of cars would shift, and then it was back to feeling the water in our bodies evaporate.  At last, we spotted an exit off this ridiculous FUBAR, and on impulse, we took it.  Perhaps, we surmised, we could simply take a back road or two, and maybe pick the interstate back up at a point beyond whatever the hell was clogging it up like so much bowel impaction. 

Thus began a fight against all the very forces of the universe set to thwart our progress.  It literally was like facing wind, water and flame.  Every road we took seemed to dead-end.  We once had to take a detour of our detour.  Each time, at least twenty miles of snaky-ass roadway, and forty-five minutes, got added to the trip.   We watched our planned evening on arrival get sucked into a more and more shriveled, anemic shape.  It was like a timewarp, this state, like we would never find a way out of it.  And this was a scary region of it too.  The settlements seemed like places Mad Max would hide out, with names like The Slab Café (really, “Slab?”  How does any food offering become more appetizing with that word in it?)
At long last, we finally cleared the Tennessee border and renewed our faith that other states in the Union actually continue to exist.  Even still, after endless reroutes and clogs, we had to ask ourselves…

Do You Believe in Things You Cannot See?

…Like, for example, in the existence of Spartanburg?  With the temporal dislocation and the spatial delays, our destination had begun to seem like Shell Beach in the movie Dark City (1998).  For those of you who haven’t seen the film, hero John Murdock keeps trying to take subways and buses out of his home city to a place called Shell Beach, only to be defeated at every turn by some sort of “convenient” mishap, technological SNAFU or misdirection.  He learns ultimately that the city is really a construct in space, a metaphorical snow globe in which no world exists beyond its borders.  There is no Shell Beach.

Finally, finally, FINALLY, long after we’d stopped taking our superstitions seriously, we found Shell Beach—er, Spartanburg.  Of course, a little south of Asheville, North Carolina on I-26, we hit yet another slow-down, and lost forty five more minutes creaking and rotting our way through it.  By the time we saw the Spartanburg city limit, we were only four hours later than we had planned.  Arrrg!!  By this point, we were starving, as our original intent had been to get a nice meal at one of the restaurants in the Marriot hotel where we intended to stay.  But now most of those places were probably going to be closed.  We hoped instead to find a restaurant within walking distance of the hotel and grab something to take up to the room.  We were sick and tired of traffic, people breaking the speed limit law when it was actually possible to drive on the interstate, and the endless recursive looping around the highway system.  To avoid the public would be divine.

But it was not to be.

No, apparently, the only part of the route through Spartanburg to the Marriot without any restaurants was the area within a mile radius of the Marriot itself.  **Sigh**  This time, we refused to be denied.  Jennifer turned us around and we left the hotel area, seeking a Jimmy John’s restaurant we’d passed on the way in.  The place was nigh deserted this late, and the employees had the Backstreet Boys blasting so loud over the intercom system that we could barely hear ourselves salivating for the sandwiches on display…and we didn’t care at all.  The girl making the sandwiches had about as much personality as the loaf of bread she used to put our fare together, but even still, we almost cried to see delicious, Italian subs ready for our jaw-slamming mastication.Returning to the hotel, we were nearly unstrung yet again when the attractive young Jailbait Marriot hotel attendant got us registered with no hitches, and she even told us that when we eventually went upstairs and wanted to apply for wifi service, there would be no charge.  She escorted us to the elevator, bid us goodnight, and we were on our own.  We were tired and worn to stubs.  Making one more trip to the parking garage to get the rest of our stuff, we threw ourselves into those sandwiches realizing that our long impatience to arrive would be rewarded. We looked at them lovingly and said, “Damn, you really are so luscious!”

Friday, June 15, 2012—Life in the “Boom Boom” Room

We slept ridiculously late the next day, determined to make up for some of the lost relaxation our trip through the Highway to Hell had forced on us (whoops, sorry to put a bit of AC/DC in there!)  Overall, though, this day would generally compensate us for so much suffering.  The Traveling Thornberries were finally going to take on Spartanburg; we were “larger than life and twice as appealing!”

Almost.

I finished washing my hair in the restroom, came out and to find Jennifer covered in coffee grounds and evidencing a tourniquet around the steaming stump of what had been her right hand.

Luke Skywalker's memorable loss of his hand to a lightsaber slash from Darth Vader best captures Jennifer's pain and suffering from the Hot Side of the Grounds.

Why?  It goes back to Diabolus ex machina; the Devil in the machine.  We had brought our own coffee, figuring we might save some money on Starbucks purchases.  So what if, as we found, the room’s coffee machine wasn’t quite up to the task?  No problem!  I had my own coffee maker I’d purchased for just such an emergency…I have a travel job, after all, and keeping redundant equipment is a sure safeguard against inconvenience.  All we needed was to get it from my car…

Oh.

Damn.

That’s right, my car was in the shop.  And guess what, we’d forgotten to get the coffee maker out of it before we left.  **Arrrg!!**  Even though Jennifer had tried so hard to force the dumpy little maker in the room to accommodate our own delicious coffee grounds, it wasn’t up to the task.  Within minutes of her starting it up, the stupid thing burbled and churgled, then blew a wad of superheated sludge all over her.  She was quite happy about that when I came out.  **Sigh**

Still, that was the only real shadow on this particular day.  To get it started, though, we wanted to return to what we had planned for the previous night, before the Paradoxical Parkways had conspired to rob us that irreplaceable time.  And that was a chance to…

Splurge!!

“…By the hour!”

Yes, we wanted a couple of nice meals, and had packed everything else on the cheap to make financial room for such indulgences.  At risk of boring our readers with detailed verbal descriptions of us chewing, we’ll limit the talk here to saying that for lunch, we went to a hotel establishment called Sparks. 

For dinner, we went another direction in the hotel to a classy place called Mesh.  There, we had a sexually satisfying steak, medium-rare for Jennifer, and cooked to completion for moi.  I looked at Jennifer’s large slab of cow meat and asked her, “Tell me baby, U gonna eat alla that?”
Alongside this caro boris (that’s Latin for “flesh of the cow”), we treated ourselves to a few martinis.  I learned I liked these elegant ladies “a little dirty.”  Basically, that means that in addition to a chilled vodka and light Vermouth combo, I liked the taste from a bit of olive brine added to the mix.  Jennifer didn’t. 

We otherwise just enjoyed the relaxing facilities of our “Boom Boom Room,” until it was time for a …

Welcome to our Everlasting Party

At long last, tummies full and sensibilities only slightly buzzy, we were ready for the show!  We had deliberately settled on this hotel because it was within walking distance of the Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium, where the concert was to be shown.  We only had to hang around outside for a few minutes before the doors opened, and inside we went!

HCTM tend to play small, understated venues, but we were nonetheless surprised to find ourselves in what was essentially a basement.  I was proudly wearing a new set of Bushnell binoculars around my neck, in anticipation of our usual luck, which would probably involve our being folded up and crammed into seats so far away from the action that we’d think we were watching Here Come the Moths instead of those eight Mummies. 
 But in fact, we discovered the room boasted a small stage and plenty of seating.  Since we were so early, we grabbed a seat up front for one of the better vantage points! We were the early birds catching “The Worm!”

Another observation we made was the range of ages here.  Unlike most classic rock concerts, where we expect an overwhelming majority of Baby Boomers, or more contemporary bands, where we might think the bulk of the audience would be in their twenties, this one had pretty much every adult age represented (we suspect HCTM would be a bit risqué for children).  There was even the usual slew of groupies, albeit those of a more lumpy, dumpy and dimply variety than at most venues.  A few of them stood right in the way before the stage, naturally.  But we could overlook such things, since everyone was there to have a good time.  Where a few of them really started to bug us, however, was in their displays of PDA.  Apparently, some people take the anonymity of a concert as a license to engage in acts of virtual public fornication.  Two of our characters here, both women just for the mental image, were eventually gyrating atop each other and swallowing one another’s tongues all through the show.  Alright, ladies, HCTM makes all the girls hot, but you should really get a room, huh?

 After the opening band made their gracious exit, it was time for HCTM….

The aura of expectation was palpable, a thrumming energy that vibrated through the room like sexual tension.  Here at last was the moment for which we’d been willing to do battle with the entire Tennessee highway system, and all the inexorable grinding of the forward momentum made manifest in Father Time himself.

And then suddenly, in a hail of marching band drums, there they were, the true Terrifying Funk From Beyond the Grave.  Here Come The Mummies entered the scene from the back of the room, carrying bigass drums and hammering them as they walked through the crowd to the stage.  Immediately, everyone left their seats and moved up to the floor right before said stage.  I was hesitant to leave our choicy spot, but Jennifer pointed out that everyone else in the building was going to do so, and if we didn’t move, we’d be left unable to see anyway.  So reluctantly I joined her.  They started the act with a classic Mummy moan, which prefaced their hit, “Believe (In Things You Cannot See).”  Hell, why am I describing it!?  Here, take a look at a chunk of the video for yourself:


Yeah, yeah, the camera on my iPod Touch is a bit weeny, making the venue look overly constricted, the stage lights washed out and the sound tinny.  But you can at least get the idea that everyone was having a good time, right?  Jennifer and I had neither one been to a concert since Barenaked Ladies did a performance in our home city way back in 2004.  Now that we were far from home and amidst a crowd of people who shared our interest in this esoteric, energetic ensemble of Egyptian entertainers, we felt free to groove to the music and let our idiosyncratic Freak Flags fly.  Let’s watch HCTM teach how to do that, shall we?


Since HCTM keep their identities concealed, none of them really talk.  They sing, sure, and they sing damn well.  But they don’t risk giving audible biometric cues as to who they really are.  As we would eventually see, in face-to-face encounters, they grunt in true ancient mummy fashion.  To free them from the risks of speech, they have a “front man,” who does all the crowd-rousing and engagement.  His name is Java Mummy (pronounced Jay-Vah, not Jah-Vah, like the coffee).  A true party mummy, rabble-rouser and self-proclaimed “Sexual Stuntman,” Java makes sure everyone gets into the action happening on stage.  He does so with such acts as teaching the audience how to do the Fenk Shui dance, fluttering his talented tongue in a way that makes all the ladies weak in the knees with where their imaginations take them, or doing his pelvic gyrations with HCTM’s patented “Cowbelt.”  But again, there’s no way to capture Java with words.  You have to behold this “Libido Knievel” with your own eyes:
Alright, we can’t recapitulate the entire show, but suffice it to say we had a helluva time.  Other than the two ladies publicly licking on each other throughout the performance, we only had a couple of other minor irritants.

Jennifer had an incident in which some dumbass figured it was a good idea to spend $5 on beer just so he could throw it on her and other members of the crowd.  In this time of economic recession, we only wish we had that kind of money to waste.  Yeah, thanks for that experience, Numbnuts.

On my end, I had some big ox who thought he could keep leaving his spot at the front near the stage to buy beer, then hog his way back through everyone and take his original position.  Most folks at a concert understand that once you leave a cherished piece of real estate, the crowd is going to surge forward and close that gap.  So you have to choose: do you want a position or would you rather drink?  But this lummox went past me so many times, I was ready to tell him that he should have just stayed the hell at home with a twelve-pack and watched HTCM on YouTube.  Eventually, I stopped giving ground for him.  I just planted both feet wide apart  and refused to budge when he tried to shoulder past me.

But let us leave this section by reiterating that the concert was awesome!  HCTM went strong for almost two full hours.  No breaks.  They jumped around, whaled on their guitars, blasted out supersonic excellence on their brass instrumentation, and in general, saved nothing for later.  They gave their all.  We couldn’t shake the spell they put us under; they must be one of the Wonders of the World!

And it didn’t stop there.

After HCTM left the stage, the group members started to mingle with the audience in an up-close and personal way we’d never observed in performing musicians before.  I managed to bang knuckles with one member who we suspect was Eddie Mummy, the drummer.  As a bonus, we got Jennifer’s picture with him, and he was more than gracious about posing with her.  So from the Traveling Thornberries to Here Come the Mummies, thanks guys!  You put on a helluva show and we’re so unbelievably grateful to you for your energy and sacrifices; so grateful that…well, we wrote this story about you!

Saturday, June 16, 2012—Bags of Bones

We checked out the next morning, ears still ringing from the funk-ass concert of the night before.  This time, we held out no hopes for a smooth ride home, and dammit, we were right.  Granted, I took the first leg of the drive out of Spartanburg and it unfolded with minimal hassle.  Then Jennifer took over, and we got about fifteen minutes out on the I-40 before it was Parking Lot City all over again.Inch by inch, row by row, we creeped and crawled so damn slow…and finally back up to normal roadway speed after only an hour.  We actually managed to listen to two Great Courses lectures back-to-back off my iPod before we broke through the morass.  Although we loved the concert, this trip scarred us enough that we’re really hesitant to take another road trip any time soon.  By the time we got home, even with our love, we were nothing but a bag o’bones.

Hey, HCTM…any thoughts of performing in our home state again soon!?

Really guys…you were great.  We’d love to see your mummy-wrapped asses again!

Thanks for reading!

Finis

Travelin’ Thornberries Hurry Up and Stop in Nashville

May 26 to May 28, 2011

Far too much time has passed since we’ve shared one of our travel experiences with you, and now it is our pleasure to break that long dry spell with a new set of experiences, reflections and maybe just a wee bit of entertainment. Move forward!

Wednesday, May 26, 2011—Flipping off 2010

Alright, first of all, did anyone find the year 2010 to be a particularly good year? If you did, congratulations. I’m glad for your luck, but you’re the only one I might know about. Pretty much everyone else with whom we’ve spoken found it to be a trying, frightening and uncertain time. Many of my friends suffered losses, particularly the deaths of family members and friends. Never mind the economic woes. Sure, the Great Recession might have technically been over. The economy was rebuilding by 2-3% and over 80% of the 2008 government bailout had been repaid. But the aftershocks continued to reverberate all through our lives, and Americans were facing some of the worst constrictions on their lifestyles that anyone had endured since the stock market crash in 1929. In the words of Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity….”

The Travelin’ Thornberries had suffered their own trials and tribulations through the Recession.

I got downsized from my job of nearly nine years on Wednesday March 24, 2010. It was from a dysfunctional workplace, one led by a morally compromised management, and it had reached a point where it was taking more out of me than it would ever be able to give back in the form of an income. So the chance to move on was ultimately enough better for me that it balanced out the trauma of how it actually happened. Jennifer helped me to navigate the difficult waters of what was to come. Over the summer, I had to apply for unemployment, and then take the GRE to start another career path. On Monday June 14, 2010, I began working part-time as a much more poorly paid mental health contractor at Behavioral Medicine Network. My position there had no benefits, and high liability. It was August 23 when I began graduate school for the first time in thirteen years, alongside fellow students who had only been in the fifth grade when I earned my first Master’s degree. The days seemed darkest on Friday, February 11, 2011, when BMN went bankrupt and closed down, leaving me again without a ready source of income.

Jennifer suffered through her own hassles and worries, which included the usual issues of difficult students and bureaucratic hullaballoo. But she also had the anxiety that came of trying to keep her student yearbook project solvent, since her continued employment rested on it. She's been on a year-to-year visiting instructor's track for the past three years, and university policy is that three years is really the maximum number of times they can renew the position. Afterward, they have to either hire on a visiting staff member as a full-time lecturer, or terminate their employment completely. With no clear answer on whether or not her efforts were going to bear fruit, we were facing the prospect that if she lost her position, it would put both of us out of work, and without an income. We were looking at folding up the house, maybe moving to Louisville, or somewhere else with better employment prospects. It was a pretty dismal time, and definitely not one that allowed the Travelin’ Thornberries to do what they do best - travel somewhere and then tell all of you about it.

Luckily, a couple of windfalls came through, enough to buy us time and help us get back on our financial feet. Ergo, Jennifer and I decided we could use a short getaway, a chance to recharge our depleted spirits and perhaps take stock a little.

We settled on a trip to the Opryland Resort in Nashville, Tennessee. We had been there before, first for a chronic pain conference in 2007, and then for a brief visit in early 2008. This was virtually a snap decision for the two of us, since we’re accustomed to making travel plans on the level of months in advance. But the resort was offering a May special, one too juicy for us to pass up with our resources being what they are. Ergo, with only ten days of preparation, we were on the road in Jennifer’s car, "Tinky," on Wednesday morning. Destination: fun and relaxation!

Sitting on Our Food

We stayed budget-conscious, taking most of our essential food and drink with us via cooler. We aimed to get out of the city before lunch hour, figuring we’d stop and fix a meal for ourselves in a podunk gas station somewhere beyond the Bluegrass Parkway. Well, when we stopped and pulled out our paper plates, flatbread rounds, mustard, mayonnaise, hog flesh and cheese, we couldn’t have planned to be in the middle of Oz. Yes, we were using the trunk of the car for an impromptu workspace, when a gale-force, cyclonic wind immediately swept up on us. It was like being inside a vacuum cleaner. We were smearing our condiments, when we were suddenly forced to duck a flying Kansas home that had a ruby-slippered chick and her lapdog inside. Off went our supplies in all directions. Moving quickly, Jennifer managed to get a hand on our paper plates, an elbow on the mustard bottle, a knee on her coffee cup, a buttcheek over the mayonnaise and a chin affixed to our stack of napkins. I swatted away the flying monkeys.

Finally, we moved everything inside the car itself. Good for our nerves and stomachs, but boring for a story. Moving on…

Hooters vs. Heaven?

Conventional wisdom holds that a picture is worth a thousand words. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture for this chapter, and must rely on what I hope will be considerably less than a thousand words to convey the concept. Basically, at one point in our trip, we drove past a couple of billboards. On the left billboard was an advertisement for all sorts of [ahem] intimate paraphernalia, be it books, videos, inflatable donkeys or edible smallclothes. Immediately across the road was a billboard advertising the Ten Commandments. We thought the juxtaposition, while unlikely to be coincidence, was still a salute to irony.

I-65: The Sardine Street

Our first trip to Nasvhille, way back in 2007, was a sublimely uneventful affair. We found the Resort easily and parked with little difficulty.

So what the hell happened this time!?

Well, first of all, I-65 is truly a Highway to Hell. Or maybe a Highway of Hell. We knew as soon as we merged on to it that we were going to suffer for it. First of all, it was cramped. Only two lanes, both of them crammed with sluggish 18-wheelers trying to pass each other and scrap for that extra four feet of advantage. From the air, this Interstate probably looked like two parallel sets of train cars running across the landscape. Crushed in between them was a couple of jangled Thornberries, holding tight to the arm rests with their toes, and praying they didn’t end up as asphalt goop before they found their proper exit. The only bright side to the whole bumper-to-bumper, high-speed exodus was that there wasn’t any roadwork to slow us down.

Then the roadwork came up to slow us down.

In fact, a good ten miles before we arrived at the section of road under construction, the traffic was slowing from the legal 70 mph to 25 mph. After that, we found ourselves slowing down to 8 mph. Tops. Of course, with one lane closed, there are always those dipsh*ts who think they can race past the rest of us and then come over at the last minute before the lane ends. Jennifer smashed them out of her way, like the “cow”-catcher on the front of a locomotive. We figure that they had the same 20-mile warning about when to merge over that we did, and they don’t get a pass to crowd in on top of us because they were too obstinate, selfish or just plain stupid to heed the warning before it was too late.

In totum, we lost at least half an hour in that spaghetti swirl of traffic, carbon monoxide, and bubbles of human dumb. At the Tennessee border, we stopped at a roadside rest for a restroom break…but we had been so scared in the crush, that I’m not sure we really needed to stop for that purpose by then. Napkins and cleanup, maybe… *Har*

Return to the Opryland Resort

As noted above, this was our third visit to the area of Nashville housing the Opryland Resort. One of the new technological upgrades we were bringing with us this time was a GPS unit my brother and his wife had given us for the previous Christmas. We nicknamed the unit “Gypsy,” since it helps with travel, and since you just add the y’s to GPS to get GyPSy. Clever, huh? It locks anywhere from two to eight satellites on us, and shows us exact distances to turnoffs and such. No doubt, Gypsy has made many parts of our travel easier and less hassling.

This trip wasn’t one of them.

No, instead, she ran us in circles for an extra 15 minutes, telling us to make U-turns and to find our destination in open fields full of hedgehogs and whirring cicadas.

But find the place we did, finally. And unlike last time, we got through the registration line without too much difficulty. The hostess who entered us into the computer even offered to upgrade our room from one with a “traditional view” (in other words, an unscintillating panorama of the parking lot) to an internal balcony room, which would let us see the gardens and waterfalls on the inside of the Resort. We’re frugal, but we’re not stupid, and this was too good a deal to pass up. Look at what kinds of wonderful views such money would allow:



So we agreed. Of course, the receptionist took our acceptance as a signal to put a long rubber glove on her left hand, while she wielded a saw-toothed pizza cutter with the other. Then she reached forward, slit open our abdomens with the cutter, and extracted a huge handful of our entrails. Wetly slopping them into a sterilized metal bucket behind her, she considered that payment enough for the upgrade, and gave us our keys. Gutless and shrunken, off we hobbled up to the fifth floor.

One thing worth noting was that as we left, I could smell sawdust around the registration desk. You know, that new smell of freshly assembled carpentry? That’s significant, because the Opryland Resort has been through a Year 2010 hell of its own. On May 3 of that year, the entire place was bitch-slapped with five to ten feet of floodwaters from the bloated Cumberland River.

That effectively ruined large portions of the Resort. Like us, it has spent the past year clawing its way back, rebuilding and trying to rise from the ashes of economic ruin. The parallel struggle wasn’t lost on us, and made the fact that we had returned here even more salient and apt.

Our Enchanted Evening

Jennifer and I hadn’t had a truly elegant dinner out together in well over a year. This would be our first since Las Vegas 2010. We’d hobbled here on grocery store hog flesh and windblown mustard to save money for a more extensive dining experience. More, part of the resort’s May special offer was a $100 dining credit. We planned to put it to good use.

As with so many other luxuries, new outfits were something we’d not had in two to three years. Prior to leaving, Jennifer picked herself up several cute outfits, and she surprised me with a JC Penney’s purchase as a birthday gift. Ergo, we went out for a nice meal, looking more snazzy and upbeat than we had in way too long.

ABOVE: Jennifer enjoying the Opryland Resort in a highly treasured, new outfit.
BELOW: Thomas rejoices in a long-awaited set of new duds himself.

We settled on an elegant place inside the resort called Ravello. An Italian restaurant, it was a small but classy place. It was a bit close-quarters, in that our seats were only a few feet from two guys with Jersey dialects on one side, and a guy eating from a dog dish on the other. We breathed easier when they left.

As soon as we sat down, someone came up and offered us a choice of normal or carbonated bottled water. We chose the former. Then our waiter arrived and spoke in an accent we couldn’t place, but one so thick he sounded like he was gargling a chalkboard eraser. We listened patiently to his description of the wines and dinner specials for two; then we chose iced tea and to split a one-person order of Angel Hair Pasta Shrimp Scampi. Just for gits and shiggles, we also added an appetizer of crab dip and bread chunks. It was like nibbling on God. The entire meal was that divine.

The only crimper on the experience was that bottled water. As it turned out, it wasn’t complementary, as with ordinary water in most places. No, they tacked on a $6 charge for it. Hell, if we had known that, we’d have just asked them to bring us tap water! *Snort*

Speaking of water, remember that balcony room we paid out our bowels to enjoy? Worth every penny. We could hear the Resort’s waterfall at will, if we just opened both curtains and the balcony doors. It was lulling, and we sat outside for a big part of the remaining evening, just enjoying…well, just enjoying. In fact, at one point, another wrack of storms rolled through the region, what felt like the 53rd such occurrence over a three-week period. Jennifer spent a part of the evening capturing it for your benefit, our Darlings.

A cocktail waitress at The Falls the next evening would later tell us that the weather was severe enough this night that she would encounter two trees across the road that should have taken her home.

But the Travelin’ Thornberries got to sit smugly and safe amidst the lightning and thunder. We stayed gloriously dry, watching the rivulets of rainwater as they ran harmlessly down the 6,200 panes of glass ceiling. In fact, if you'd like to have a little piece of the experience for yourselves, you've only to click on the video link below to see what Jennifer captured for you:

Overall, it was a sedate and relaxing night that segued into a wonderful night’s sleep.

Thursday, May 26, 2011—Thornberry Preserves

We woke up the next morning, had a cheap meal of oatmeal and then prepared to enjoy our day’s excursions.

Meditations—Practical Wisdom and the Year’s Reflections

Then we rejected them.

Yes, the Travelin’ Thornberries are approaching middle age, and we’re much more oriented to meditative experiences than we are to adventure. And after having lightning shoved up and down our orifices for a month, plus being squelched into Caucasian corn chowder by 18-wheelers, we just weren’t in the mood to take an excursion that might subject us to further lightning-chafed orifices and human cud-crunchers all over again. Instead, we acted on our growing conviction that a vacation doesn’t require intense activities to be beneficial. Sure, we like having experiences, converting them into stories and sharing them with you, our Darlings. But vacations are also a time to recharge, take stock, do soul searching. That was what we wanted to do now.

So I sat and read an intriguing book called Practical Wisdom - outside on the balcony, while I listened to the roar of the waterfall. It was absorbing, and I could even feel tension and toxicity of the past year’s stress just draining out of me. Jennifer joined me, reading The Age of American Unreason in her new clothing, and she too poured stress out of every poor pore.

Metamorphoses

We didn’t even leave the room until close to 3:00 p.m. At that time, we decided to tour some of the resort’s various garden branches, places we’d seen the first time. We wanted to see how they had weathered the flooding.

Like the Travelin’ Thornberries, the Opyrland Resort had come through loss and tragedy, nearly restored in some ways, clearly still reeling and ailing in others. When we had dinner later, we learned from our waitress, Lynn—one of 1,600 employees rehired after the remodeling—that they had had to pile up food and supplies on shelves to shield it when the flood waters first started rising inside the Resort. Apparently, the evacuation process had been hellish, because people couldn’t wade out to the parking lot to get to their cars, and they had to be bused out on highways already hopelessly clogged with fleeing Nashville citizens.

The evidence for the disaster was all around us. Insofar as internal décor, for example, we found several places where carpets had clearly been replaced since our first trip. The filthy flood waters had inflicted permanent damage on them.

On September 30, 2007, Jennifer sits on the stairs of the main staircase.

After May 3, 2010, the same area suffers nearly 10 feet of flood water damage.

On Thursday, May 26, 2011, Thomas stands on the same floor, where the carpet has been thoroughly replaced.

Some of the fountains we captured in our story the first time had been bricked over, likely because the Resort could not yet afford to overhaul them or replace them.

This structure was probably once a vibrant fountain, now bricked over until the Resort can restore it to its original glory.

Fortunately, there were many fountains and lively sources of watery vitality that had resisted the flood damage. Jennifer captured them in their ongoing burbling enthusiasm:



The gardens too had taken a pummeling. On our first trip four years ago, they had been lush and well-tended. Greenery spread as far as the eye could see. It was like being inside a half-mile of terrarium. Now, by contrast, the plants had clearly lost vigor. Many had brown leaves or sickly stalks. We could see evidence of pruning by the gardening staff, attempts to cut away necrotic leaves to make way for new growth that had yet to appear.

Whole areas of the waterfalls were now showing bare rock where once chlorophyll reigned supreme.

But you know what? The place was still beautiful and awesome. Beaten down, yes, but not defeated. Much like us. And also like the Travelin’ Thornberries, it was all slowly bouncing back. We found plenty of awesome examples of engineering and plant life worth grabbing in a few pictures and videos.

ABOVE: The Cascades Waterfall as it appeared on Sunday, September 30, 2007. Lush and full of greenery.
BELOW: The same Cascades Waterfall on May 26, 2011, significantly shrunken after its battle with the 2010 floods.

And at least from a distance, the view of the facility didn’t look so different from our first time. A few restaurants had closed, a few new ones had opened and some had changed locations. But the facility had survived. In fact, it was a pleasure this time to bring our new technology to bear on what hadn’t changed. In 2007, we had used a reliable little workhorse of a digital camera, one that ultimately gave us more than 5,000 pictures. But it had been low-end and outdated even then. Now we were back with a much upgraded picture camera and a video camera, technologies that first served us during our 2009 trip to Las Vegas. You can see some of the benefits here:

ABOVE: The apex of the Resort's glass ceiling, as taken with our Workhorse camera on Sunday, September 30, 2007.
BELOW: The same ceiling, captured with the more advanced telephoto lens of our updated 2009 digital camera. This one brings out not only the employee staircase, but the blue light show projector(s) adjacent to it.

Munching, Margarita and Martini

The problem with amenities trips is that they aren’t that exciting to read about. The short version of the rest of this day was that we had a delicious South American meal at a place called Solario. Jennifer had Barbacoa Enchilada Roja, while I had Tres Taco Traditionales. Then we had a quick nightcap at The Falls mentioned above. Jennifer enjoyed a salt-encrusted glass of margarita, while I had a James Bond-esque vodka martini, with two enormous olives in it. Fortunately, we had predetermined that we would only have the two drinks, because with tip for our Californian waitress, Erin, it ended up costing more than $10 each! Ulp! But that one drink was worth it. We sat quietly next to the internal roaring waterfall, took a few pictures and just absorbed the serenity. In fact, that’s pretty much how we spent the entire rest of the evening, when we went back up on our balcony. We paid for that damn balcony, but we used the crap out of it to make sure we got our money’s worth!

Friday, May 27, 2011—A Sucky Trip Home

The title pretty much says it all, huh? The experience of a scenic road trip is what always reminds us of the virtues of air travel.

Jennifer had recommended that we avoid getting back onto I-65 for our return trip, since it had been such a bimfizzle of homicidal truckers, sluggish traffic and deadly earnest games of bumper-cars. Instead, she thought we could take a more sedate route, and eventually still catch the Bluegrass Parkway back home.

Wrong again.

True, we did actually find the back roads had a little less hassle. It was just that they had a lot less of everything else too. Speed. Convenience. Destination-orientation. Sleepy little pathways, these routes ran through Mayberry, Smallville, Wisteria Lane, Elm Street and Green Acres, while subjecting us to Golmer Pyle-driven tractors and Snuffy Smith sedans. At one point, we cringed when Bo and Luke Duke jumped the General Lee over our heads as we drove past the Boar’s Nest. Here was Mr. Haney trundling by in his truck, there was Jed Clampant shootin’ at some food, and over there in the middle of the street were Wally and the Beaver, waiting for Ward to come home to tell them not to stand in the middle of the street.

What we didn’t see was a single sign for the Bluegrass Parkway. Deep in the rural parts of the state, we encountered assorted vehicles and establishments that had only one common trait. None of them could hustle worth a damn. By the end of it all, once we pulled out an atlas and navigated our way to the ever-elusive Bluegrass Parkway, we had made a three hour trip in just over five hours. *Sigh* That old Thornberry Luck.

So the trip there and back sucked bowling pins, but the time in the Resort was priceless and oh-so-necessary. We wouldn’t have changed anything about the place and had no regrets. *Smile*

Thank you, Our Darlings, for listening to us spout off our story! Until next time….

Ye Ende