48stateroadtrip.com

Fortunately my headlines jumped the shark a couple months ago, so no need to feel embarrassed by this one.

My mom flew out to New Orleans to join the road trip for a few days, btw. She was the one who insisted we go to the French Quarter. Well, “insisted”. Anyway — it was everything everyone told me it would be (i.e., “a bunch of old buildings and it smells like vomit”).

I’m sure it smelled better before Katrina.

We had a cool hotel, in no small part because the room had its own loft.

See? Loft.

(Prytania Park Hotel — it’s located right in between the Garden District and Warehouse+Museum District.)

Then we walked to the French quarter.

There was an underpass along the way!

They have porches like this there.

A door as crooked as a Louisiana politician.

St. Louis Cathedral and tourists taking photos of same.

Tour carriages lined up at Jackson Square.

I learned that Jackson Square was *meant* to be the town’s center. And then the person who ended up owning the land built buildings on either side of it, but that it wasn’t pretty enough — so she had it beatified (park ranger’s word, not mine).

And I’m still waiting for someone to explain why Andrew Jackson doesn’t net out to be a villain for killing all the Indians he did. (In protest, I no longer use $20 bills.)

Me with cannon. Cannon with me.

I’m thinking about opening my own voodoo shop in Mission Viejo.

The New Orleans house my mom grew up in lived in for two years as a kid.

Anyway.

I think the people that love New Orleans so much are people who first went there in college with all their friends and got drunk and partied so that now every time they go there, they remember being 19 and getting drunk and partying with their friends.

It’s basically how I feel about Hohenstein-Ernstthal.

(No, I never got drunk in Hohenstein-Ernstthal — except on my own sense of self-importance, which is much headier anyway.)

Out,

bkd

Here’s how my Day 103 started:

And thus the Blue Angels canceled their practice session.

It supposedly rained like three inches in Pensacola that morning, which seems like a lot. We were the top news on the Weather Channel that day. That’s right, The Weather Channel. Which, btw, has some good-looking on-screen personalities.

One day I’m going to find a flag that’s not flying at half-mast. Maybe.

Fiercest of the Navy’s 1920s night-fighters: the Gling.

F8F.

Dauntless.

Come to think of it, we may have already been fighting Japan when they attacked Pearl Harbor.

It’s like a tails and folded wings convention in there.

Navy art. I like the composition.

I am deeply concerned about naval blimpery.

Any color you want, so long as it’s navy blue.

Trainer.

Forever stuck in formation.

It eventually stopped raining.

Chopper row.

Fat Albert: always a crowd-pleaser.

You asked me once, what was in Room 21. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 21 is the worst thing in the world.

Yes, it *does* seem to be listing to port.

Beyond that:

• The museum is actually on-base, which I thought was very cool.
• I think the one thing this museum has going for it that no other flight museum has is the Blue Angels practices. Which get canceled when it rains three inches.
• The museum has some usability issues, for instance: some of the displays are hard to read (see: “gling”); it was difficult to tell what the organization at the museum was meant to be — there are grouped displays, but their locations seem randomly selected; and some of the aircraft did not seem to have signs describing them.
• Dave, our flight line tour guide, was exactly what you want a retired-Marine tour guide to be. Well done, very entertaining.
• For some reason the four Blue Angels displayed in the museum (the old A-4s) are angled in a downward attitude. Seems sort of wrong.
• The other thing this museum has that I thought was unusual and pretty cool was the artwork. They got a ton of artwork and a lot of it rulz — especially the WW2 stuff, which covered subjects I always thought should’ve been covered on canvas, but which I hadn’t seen before. Wish the National Museum of the Marine Corps had had that (seems like it’d be the rightful place for some of these, for instance — or maybe I just failed to notice them there).
• I don’t think this museum quite nailed The Navy’s Big Moment (IMHO, that’d be Midway). I mean, they talk about it, but it doesn’t come alive or command attention the way you’d think it should. IMHO. Always IMHO.

But it was fun. Again, I thought it was particularly great that the museum was on-base.

It was also interesting to me that the base has its own lighthouse (what base doesn’t?):

It keeps PBYs from hitting the control tower, I assume.

Once I got over the lighthouse, I left the base and headed to Warrington, which is where my parents lived when my dad was stationed in Pensacola. This is what the house looks like now:

I like the gully.

Anyway — big day of naval aviation. And it’s still sort of disappointing to go to these places where my parents (and siblings) lived before I was born and then to find them to not be stuck in the era in which my family lived there. I mean, how hard would it be for Pensacola to pull off 1961? Oh well: maybe next year.

bkd

If I weren’t still sick, I would probably hold back, act circumspect, and shine bright, happy lights on the events of Day 78. But I *am* still sick, therefore: visiting the Statue of Liberty is the national monument equivalent of waiting 45 minutes to get fried meatloaf on toast.

• You need a reservation to see the crown or pedestal.
• Crown reservations must be secured two months in advance (the next available was December 11th).
• When you get to the boat, you have to go through TSA-style screening.
• Then you have to wait for the boat.
• When you get to the statue, there are no signs telling you where to go for your pedestal tour.
• When you ask the Parks Service person where the line is, he’ll ignore you because he’s just seen someone he would rather talk to.
• Then you get to wait in line.
• The first line takes about 15 minutes, and then they’ll open up the cordon and let people into the next holding area.
• This line takes probably 45 minutes to wait through.
• At the end of this line, you go through airport-style super-security, where they blow air on you for some reason and act all serious about it.
• Then you get to enter the statue — the stairs to the pedestal take about ten minutes, and a self-tour of the pedestal itself deserves about five more.
• Then you go back down and get in line to get on the boat to go back.
• The boat is slow and, if it’s heading to Manhattan, very crowded.
• And it’s taken you six daylight hours just to get about five minutes of good part.

If I weren’t sick, I’d probably talk about the spectacular views during the boat-ride over, but since I’m sick: it was cloudy, the sun’s in the wrong place for half the trip, and, on this day at least, there were no Sully landings to break up the monotony. The best part was seeing European tourists at Ellis Island and wondering whether they understood that it’s a monument to people who said “Europe sucks so bad that I’m gonna live somewhere else” and then acted on that sentiment.

Meh:

The docks at Liberty State Park. You can choose to depart from NJ or Battery Park. This is NJ.

A giant pigeon swoops in to attack the Woolworth Building. (He’s already missed the Woolworth Building — next pass, maybe.)

A bird, unfed.

Doesn’t look so big when you compare it to the *sky*, now, does it?! (Actually, it doesn’t look that big when you’re anywhere near it, either, IMHO. It’s barely even taller than the Colossus at Rhodes was.)

The backside of Liberty.

Looking up her skirt reveals little of interest.

Lean into it.

I also took about 30 or 40 photos of lower Manhattan and the SOL with some sort of aircraft in the frame so that I could make (more) jokes about stuff crashing into other stuff. It *is* amazing how many aircraft still buzz around that place (mostly helicopters and MD-80s).

And this is the house I used to live in:

I was in apartment 9-V — you know, like the battery.

But most importantly, I can check the Statue of Liberty off the list. And to all a good night.

bkd

PS, The worst part of the SOL experience is that it stole so much of my available NYC time (and virus-depleted energy). I blame the French.