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 StreetOur 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.
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
