This morning I am hitting the road to visit a gigantic humanoid mouse and his other anthropomorphic pals. This’ll be my niece and nephews’ first trip to Disney World, and we’re all eager to get down there.
I’ll be posting as usual while I am down there, but posts may be a tad shorter than usual.
I’ll also resume my SubscribeStar Saturday series on my trip to Arizona as soon as possible.
Godspeed!
—TPP
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On our way back from visiting the Grand Canyon, my brother and I stopped in Prescott, Arizona. Despite it’s spelling, “Prescott” is pronounced almost like “press kit.” For my Central Savannah River Area readers, it’s akin to Martinez, Georgia, which is not pronounced like a Mexican’s surname, but as “Martin-ez.”
Anyway, Prescott is an Old West town—it used to be the territorial capital of Arizona, from 1864-1867—that has now turned into something like a yuppie outdoor shopping mall. That sounds facetious, yes, but it’s actually a pretty cool little town. The entire town square was bedecked in Christmas lights, and as it was unseasonably cold for Arizona in late December, it actually felt like Christmas in a cowboy town.
Prescott really plays up its heritage as a bustling town of the Old West: Western wear stores line the main shopping area, and bars and restaurants play up the legendary Western folk heroes and villains who frequented the establishments (or the spots where those establishments now stand).
It was in one of those Western wear stores that I came face to face with sartorial destiny.
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Every now and then we get something for Christmas that really sparks our imaginations, allowing them to run—or, in this case, drive—wildly to other lands. For a young Portly, it was receiving a copy of Sid Meier’s Civilization II from my aunt one Christmas. That game opened up vast new worlds and incredible historical “what-ifs,” and was partially responsible for my decision to study and teach history for a living.
For Ponty, it’s an annual copy of Fodor’s Best Road Trips in the USA.
Travel guides have always been one of my favorite genres, too. Sure, travelogues are more engaging and adventurous, but travel guides let us learn about places without a great deal of authorial embellishment. We get the basics about an area, and then can put ourselves immediately into those places, imagining visiting the great sites and destinations—or the backwater burgs and forgotten byways—of the world.
Ponty captures that spirit of adventure and fun in this touching, personal, and engaging little piece about his imaginary—and, let us hope, someday real!—travels around the United States.
With that, here’s Ponty with some reflections on Christmas and road trips:
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As our plane took off from Indianapolis in dead silence—everyone was quiet, and the only sound was that of the jets roaring—my older brother loudly exclaimed, “my wallet!,” which elicited some stifled chuckles from yours portly, and I think I heard one other person react. Otherwise, no one bit on his hilarious joke about leaving his wallet in the airport.
After a very brief layover in Detroit, which saw us running to the next gate for our flight to Phoenix, we enjoyed a quiet flight to Phoenix. I’ve grown accustomed to airlines abusing passengers, but Delta is a great airline and my older brother has achieved a status where he gets some actual respect from the flight crew, so it was a welcome change. The snacks and soft drinks flowed freely, and I discovered that the chess app in the Delta entertainment console is impossible to beat, even on “Easy” mode—something that people who are actually good at chess have discussed at length online.
We landed in Phoenix and made it to the rental car area, where we managed to score a sweet Kia Niro, a car so laden with technology, it was difficult to figure out how to turn on the heat. Yes, despite being in Arizona, it was unseasonably cold, with temperatures comparable to those in South Carolina at the time (we arrived the evening of Monday, 19 December 2022).
Our AirBnB was a cool little duplex in downtown Phoenix, decorated in the Southwestern style. It sported an impressive fireplace, though we didn’t mess with it. The interior reminded me of smaller homes built in the 1920s, although I don’t know how old this home was. It had a cute (if tight) breakfast nook, where my brother and I were able to get some writing done during our stay, and a good, powerful shower. The host left us some coffee from a local roaster, which we tore through in a couple of days.
One of our major goals for the week was to visit Grand Canyon National Park. I’ve always wanted to see Grand Canyon, and this trip was the perfect opportunity to do so. We decided to knock out the visit—which took the entire day, as it’s roughly four hours to the north of Phoenix—on Tuesday, 20 December 2022, our first full day in Arizona.
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One of the perks—as I often point out—of teaching is all of the glorious break time that we get. Other than summer vacation, my favorite time break of the year is the two weeks we get at Christmas.
Sure, it’s nowhere near as decadent as the full month that college professors and students get off, but it’s just the right amount of time to unwind and refresh—and to get in some travel.
My older brother, a well-traveled college professor residing in Indianapolis, flies so frequently that he’s ascended to one of the lower tiers of godhood in the Delta Airlines rewards pantheon. One of the divine gifts his apotheosis bestows is a free companion ticket each year.
Unfortunately, the ticket was due to expire, and his hardworking attorney wife could not take time to travel anywhere with him before it expired. As such, we concocted a trip to the American Southwest for the week before Christmas.
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My (perhaps disappointed) readers will know that I fell woefully behind on posts earlier this week, delaying both my Monday Morning Movie Review of 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life (which should be live by the time you read this post) and my Tuesday post. My intent Tuesday was to write a bit of an overview of my travels the week before Christmas into the Christmas weekend. Ironically, those travels, as well as family get-togethers and being a hardworking (if grumpy—from lack of rest, I promise!) uncle created delays in my writing.
That said, I want to make good on my daily posting commitment, so consider this short preview of my recent travels a make-up post for Tuesday. After starving earlier this week for portly content, you might find yourselves soon o’er-engorged with the meaty, chubby goodness of my self-indulgent, navel-gazing posts.
Before launching into the preview, I’ll note that I’ll be dedicating the next two or three editions of SubscribeStar Saturday to more extensive overviews of my travels, complete with loads of pictures and other goodies. If you want to read all about my adventures in Arizona and beyond, subscribe today!
Note—when I first scheduled this post, I was still scheduled to go to Florida. Due to The Virus afflicting one of my girlfriend’s sisters, we’ve postponed that trip. So, instead, we’re going to do a little road-tripping around South Carolina this weekend. We’ll be getting down to Florida in December, though, so while my return to Florida is delayed, I’m looking forward to visiting down there later this year. Just pray for my sweet girlfriend—while we will have fun this weekend, I know she is heartbroken that she won’t get to see her family as planned. —TPP
Tomorrow after school I’ll be riding down with my girlfriend to visit with her family in Florida. After The Year of Universal Studios back in 2020, I haven’t made it back down that way in awhile, and I’m looking forward to a few days over Labor Day weekend in sunny central Florida.
We’ll be taking the Interstate Highway System most of the way, and I doubt there’ll be many backroads, but I’ve always enjoyed cruising the less-traveled pathways to see what little bits of Americana are out there, waiting to be discovered. There’s still plenty of what John Derbyshire calls the “old, weird America” out there, and I love finding it (and, perhaps, living in it!).
Well, even if we aren’t hitting many backroads, I’m excited to be out and about on another footloose adventure!
With that, here is 22 July 2022’s “Road Trip!“:
A couple of years ago, I wrote a post entitled “Walkin’,” in which I detailed the pleasures of short walks around town. In that post, I also mused about long-distance walking, and even about its popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. One of my readers and subscribers even noted the construction of The Palmetto Trail, a five-hundred-mile trail that cuts diagonally from the Upstate (the northwestern corner of South Carolina) down to the Lowcountry (the southeastern side of our State’s triangle), of which roughly 380 miles are completed. That trail wends through State parks and towns, offering a variety of landscapes and scenes.
In listening to John Taylor Gatto excessively over Spring Break (and nursing a bad foot-and-ankle sprain), he frequently mentioned stories about famous individuals who completed massive, almost absurd tasks, often with little training. For example, he frequently told the story of a six-year old Richard Branson walking home in London after his mother drove him around for a few hours, and then asked, “Richard, do you think you can find your way home?” When the child responded yes, the mother told him to get to it, booted him from the car, and drove home. Branson (per Gatto) said that after that experience, he was never afraid of anything again, and could face any challenge.
I’m not advocating we drop six-year olds off in the middle of nowhere and make them walk home (my niece is six, and while she is brave and confident, I shudder to think what might become of her if my brother pulled the same stunt). But there is a real need for adventure in our lives. There’s also something to be said for the benefits of taking on and conquering—or even just attempting and failing—a large-scale undertaking.
I flew to and from Indianapolis, Indiana this past weekend (as readers are wearily familiar by now), and it gave me another opportunity to interact with that most loathsome of institutions, the American airline.
Honestly, I was blessed with two easy, uneventful flights—no delays, no missed connections, no overly officious airport functionaries. I even got two Coke Zeroes on my flight up.
One jarring element of flying was the abundance of mask propaganda at the airport. Living in South Carolina—free territory—I seldom have to wear a mask anywhere anymore, so wearing one on the plane was a bit shocking. A friend reminded me that I would need one, and that gaiters are not allowed, so I begrudgingly took a pack along.
In the Charlotte, North Carolina airport, one guy asked me, as I got into the security line, if I had a mask. I started fumbling for it in my pocket, and he said, “You’re good.” Apparently, he just wanted to ask make sure I had one so they wouldn’t boot me off the plane. I did put it on before passing through security (where you have to pull it down so they can check your face against your ID), but ripped it off again as soon as possible.
I’m still blown away by how many folks wear them, but especially at the airport. Out of the hundreds of people I saw, I was probably one of five people in the entire Charlotte airport not wearing a mask. In the Indianapolis airport, there were even fewer facial nudists.
Regardless, it seems like a lot of the mask hysteria has died down. Yeah, there was tons of mask propaganda plastered all over the Charlotte airport, and the flight attendants made a big deal about it rhetorically on the flights (especially the one from Indianapolis back to Charlotte), but I got the impression that if I wanted to sit maskless for the entire flight, no one would bother me about it.
The airline industry is probably the worst of all about treating human beings like cattle to be herded mindlessly on board flying metal tubes. Probably only credit agencies are worse, and at least on a plane you get some pretzels (thanks to the peanut allergy folks for ruining something else for us). I don’t think TransUnion is going to send me any treats anytime soon.
So if airlines are cooling on the mask hysteria, we might finally—finally—putting that absurdity behind us.
Anyway, I didn’t mean to go on a mask rant, but here we are.
With that, here is “Wayback Wednesday: Airlines; Back to the Grind“:
As I noted Saturday, I was in Indianapolis, Indiana this weekend for my older brother’s wedding. The last time I’d been to Indianapolis was twenty years ago, for a Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) Teen Talent competition.
This trip I did not get to see much of the city, as I arrived late in the afternoon Friday and flew back Sunday, and everything in between involved wedding events (and, of course, the wedding itself).
I’m notoriously bad about taking pictures, so I don’t have many of my own to share. But the wedding was at Laurel Hall, which I’ve been describing to people as “a Gilded Age castle.” It’s not properly a castle, but it’s certainly a mansion, and was constructed in 1916 as the residence of a wealthy family. It served many functions, including as a children’s hospital, and a fraternity owns it now.
All that said, it was a very good trip, even if I had to fly to get there.
The Portly Politico 