A Lap Around America

by Shawn Inmon

  We don’t have a lot of houses built to withstand floods like this in Washington state, so it looked slightly foreign to our eyes. We felt as though we were a long way from home. The first chance we got, we pulled off onto a side road leading to the beach.

  The first thing we saw was a sign that warned Alligators may be present. Uh-huh. That’s a new one on us. We don’t typically see alligators on the Washington coast. That wasn’t the only thing that felt strange. On the west coast, the sun sets over the ocean. Here, peering out at the Gulf of Mexico, it was setting somewhere off to my right. It felt a bit like my world had shifted on its axis.

  See ya later, alligator

  I haven’t written much about hotels, motels, bed and breakfasts, and the cost of staying at them, because it’s mostly a personal decision. For this trip, we were on a budget, so we were mostly staying in modest accommodations. Here’s something I’ve learned, though: The cost of a place doesn’t have all that much bearing on how nice it is.

  Our stay in Galveston was a perfect example. Galveston is a tourist town. We were hitting it on a Friday night. We were past the prime tourist season, but the town was still crowded and bustling when we drove through. Most hotels and motels had no vacancy signs lit up. So, our equation for a Galveston room looked something like this: Friday night + tourist town + lots of no vacancies = Shawn and Dawn spending a lot to stay in a pretty terrible place.

  Do you remember the quote from Leo Tolstoy that goes, “All happy families are happy in the same way, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way?” Right. I think the same holds true for lodging. Great hotels are great in the same way, but awful motels each seem to find a way to be awful in their own unique way.

  This one was awful in that it just felt … wrong. There were odd smells in what passed for a lobby, but the family who owned and operated the place were very kind. In fact, they had a turtle tank in one corner and got into an extended conversation with Dawn about how best to care for turtles. That’s important to us, because we have a turtle named Kumar. We used to have a turtle named Harold, too, but he ran away. (How does a turtle manage to run away? That’s probably the subject for another book.)

  In any case, they gave us what I’m sure was their equivalent of the Presidential Suite. It had an odd vibe about it. Dawn gave me her look that said, “You owe me one,” and I gave her my look that said, “I know, I know.” This is the great thing about being married for a few years; you can have entire conversations without speaking.

  Day Nineteen

  One thing I’ve noticed is that the worse the motel, the earlier Dawn wants to get up and going early in the day. Silver linings. One last thing about this awful little motel, which I have not named because I really did like the owners: This would not be even close to the worst spot we would stay during the trip. More on that when we reach the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

  We had arrived in Galveston late enough Friday that we wanted to spend at least half a day or so cruising the town. Our first stop was at the memorial for the 6,000 people who died in the 1900 hurricane that ravaged the island. It wasn’t the loveliest memorial we saw on the trip, but it was moving. It depicts a man with his arm raised in the air, pleading with God, and a woman holding an infant against her chest.

  I’ve mentioned the humidity we’d encountered since we crossed over into Texas, but nothing matched what we felt in Galveston. It felt like it was raining even when it wasn’t. And, on this Saturday, if it wasn’t raining, it was about to rain.

  We had parked the Silver Bullet on the opposite side of a busy four-lane road to see the Galveston Memorial, so on the way back, we stood waiting for all four lanes to clear. I felt a single raindrop. I turned to Dawn to say, “I think maybe it’s about to rain,” but she couldn’t hear me because buckets of water from somewhere were being dumped directly on our heads. I’ve never seen or felt rain like it. We could not have gotten any wetter if we had jumped directly into the Gulf of Mexico.

  We made it safely back to the car, but all the windows fogged up immediately. We almost bagged Galveston right there, but we are made of stronger stuff than that.

  Our next stop was in front of the Beach Break store, where an eight-foot shark with legs stood holding a surfboard. I could see Dawn was immediately drawn to him, for his outstanding abs, if nothing else. I named him Bruce and did my best not to be jealous as Dawn asked me to take twenty or thirty pictures of her posing with Bruce.

  After letting Dawn spend a few more quiet moments with Bruce, we took the Galveston Tree Tour. When Hurricane Ike tore across the island in 2008, it took many of the island’s proud old trees with it. Many of the residents took that strong blast of lemon and did their best to turn it into lemonade by hiring sculptors to carve the dead trees into something beautiful and meaningful to them.

  That’s when I learned something else: There is a lot of old money in Galveston. We saw some of the most elegant mansions of the whole trip on our little tour of carved trees.

  We chose to leave the island by taking a trip on the Galveston–Port Bolivar Ferry. The ferry operation is a well-oiled machine. Even with the weekend rush, boarding and exiting was smooth and fast. We enjoyed the ride and wished it had been a little longer. The cool ocean breezes went a long way toward drying out our still-wet clothing.

  When we got off on the other side, we considered driving up to Port Arthur, Texas. It’s not exactly a happening place, but it is where Janis Joplin was born and raised. I poked around the Internet, though, and saw that there wasn’t a lot of Janis left to be seen there. The home she was raised in has been remodeled so much that almost all that’s left of her there is a set of handprints in concrete. The local museum claims to have a display, but most of the online comments were along the lines of, “Hey, why don’t you have more of Janis’s stuff?” In the end, we decided to pass.

  Instead, we drove quiet back roads up eastern Texas and over into Louisiana. I know I insulted Texans a couple of days back when I said the people we ran into there weren’t friendly, but we found just the opposite in Louisiana.

  Just after crossing the state line, we pulled off to get gas and refill our ice chest. Before I could add more ice, I had to drain the water. As I was wrestling the ice chest to the ground, a guy fifty feet away saw me and shouted, “Hey, you need some help with that?”

  Dawn said, “I already like Louisiana better.” And, she was right. Everywhere we met, people were friendly, said hello, and went out of their way to make us feel welcome.

  That includes the bugs. It was in Louisiana that we met odd black bugs, everywhere. Called lovebugs, they look like they have two heads, one at each end of the body. I soon got into the habit of cleaning lovebugs off the grill every time I cleaned the windshield.

  We drove straight through to Lafayette, Louisiana, for the night, because I had a couple of things planned in the area before our departure for New Orleans. Also, we hadn’t been able to do laundry in about six days, and our pile of dirty clothes was reaching critical mass. So we checked into our little motel, which had a laundry room, and I volunteered to do the honors while Dawn relaxed. I took the pile of clothes and my laptop, so I could write my blog while the machines did their thing.

  This, of course, is where I experienced my near-death experience that I related at the very beginning of the book, which left off with both Dawn and our desk clerk weak with laughter, and me gasping for air. My day started in Galveston with an involuntary second shower and ended with me almost dying in a tiny laundry room. Since Dawn had ultimately decided to rescue me, I forgave her flirtation with Bruce, the tall, well-built land shark in Galveston.

  Day Twenty

  We awoke in Lafayette with a busy day before us. For one thing, it was 9/11, and even though we were nowhere near Ground Zero in New York, I had found a place where we could mark the occasion and pay our respects.

  The Lafayette 9/11 Memorial is very cool. The city asked for a steel beam from World Trade Center buildings 1 and 2, and N
ew York sent them down. They stand 13.5 feet tall, matching the WTC buildings at exactly 1/100 scale. The base of the memorial has five sides to represent the Pentagon, which was also hit that day. Finally, the soil in the base was brought in from the field in Pennsylvania where Flight 93 went down.

  It’s not huge, but it is well done and thoughtful. A perfect place to mark the 15th anniversary of the tragedy. We thought it might be crowded, but the little plaza was almost empty. There were a few police present, and the local fire department had brought a truck down, but that was about it. It was early, though, so maybe there were ceremonies scheduled later in the day.

  When we got back into the Silver Bullet to head toward New Orleans, I glanced at our odometer and realized we were past due for an oil change. Sundays in Lafayette are not great for finding businesses open. In fact, all the oil change places were closed, except for one—Walmart. We’ve been trying to avoid huge corporations wherever possible, but I didn’t want to go another day or two without changing the oil, so we toddled off to Wal Marche.

  Ever-efficient, they promised to have the oil change done in thirty minutes.

  Ninety minutes later, I was still sitting in their waiting area, wishing I had left this whole chore for another day, another town. There were two sweet young girls working the counter, though, so we talked with them while we waited. Mostly, we talked about food, because it was getting to be afternoon and we hadn’t eaten a bite.

  “So, if you had company coming, and they were going to be in town for just one day, where would you take them?”

  They looked at each other, smiled, and in unison, said: “Laura’s.”

  By the time they were done telling me about Laura’s, I was glad our car was done, because we were ready to start eating the tires behind us. There’s something about hearing someone describe food in such loving detail that makes my stomach growl.

  Their recommendation more than made up for the slow service. Laura’s turned out to be one of the most memorable meals of the whole trip, though the restaurant itself, located in an unattractive strip mall, looks inauspicious.

  When we walked in, I knew we’d found a winner. The first clue was the intoxicating smell. The second was the line, which was prodigious. Laura’s serves soul food, and whatever wonderful image that just conjured in your mind, the reality was better. They open at 11 a.m. and close when they run out of food. They never have to stay open late, because the flocks inevitably descend.

  They don’t have a set menu, but just cook whatever they want on a particular day. This day was barbecue day. Dawn ordered what was described as ribs, but she didn’t get a lot of rib. Mostly, the meat had been marinated and cooked until it fell off the bone. I got barbecue sausage, along with coleslaw, baked beans and rice with gravy. I’ll just say this: If you ever find yourself in Lafayette, Louisiana, do yourself a favor and track down Laura’s. Get there early, though—Dawn got the next-to-last serving of ribs, and there were a lot of disappointed people behind us in line.

  As it was Sunday, a lot of customers had come straight from church. There were many Sunday dresses and men’s suits on display, albeit with the ties loosened. Football games flickered on a couple of televisions scattered around the restaurant, but nobody paid any attention. I didn’t see a single cellphone, either. Everybody just talked and laughed and ate. We felt like we had stepped back in time about twenty years.

  On our way to New Orleans, we took a one-hour detour to hit Abita Springs, Louisiana, a town that, like so many we passed through, didn’t have a lot going for it. Abita Springs has just a little more than 2,000 people and, aside from a small local brewery, there isn’t a lot of commerce. The reason we drove an hour out of our way is the UCM Museum. While you’re trying to puzzle that out, I’ll tell you it’s a play on words. If you pronounce it out loud, it sounds like “You See ‘Em Museum.” I knew I had to see any place willing to subject itself to such an awful name.

  The UCM Museum, also called the Abita Mystery House, might just be the very best or very worst stop on any tour of America. Once upon a time, John Preble, on his own tour of America, stopped at the Tinkertown Museum in New Mexico. Preble thought to himself: I would love to have a place just like this.

  And now he does.

  It’s hard to describe the Abita Mystery House to anyone who hasn’t been there. It is housed in what looks like an old gas station that has been added to over the years. The admission is as reasonable as you could hope for—just three dollars. In the gift shop you can do all your Christmas shopping for any eccentric friends you might have. I was impressed with the “In Case You Touched Your Genitals” hand sanitizer and “Understand What Your Dog is Thinking” breath spray. I can’t speak as to the efficacy of either item.

  I’ll be honest. I’m not sure the UCM Museum is for everyone. Or even, for most. For that small minority that loves Americana and kitsch, though, it’s a dream come true. The displays are offbeat and unique. For instance, the world’s largest display of paint-by-numbers paintings adorns an entire section of the museum. Preble says inflation has struck the paint-by-numbers painting industry, but he is holding firm at a $1-per-painting acquisition price.

  You can also see a bassigator and a dogigator, and a miniature jazz funeral, and … well, by this point, either your eyes have glazed over and you’ve skipped on to the next section, or you’re already sold on a stop at the Abita Mystery House, so I’ll just stop there. I will just say that I absolutely loved the place, and Dawn was a good sport about it.

  With my need for funky roadside attractions momentarily satisfied, we lit out for New Orleans. As it happened, our route called for us to go directly across Lake Pontchartrain on a bridge about as long as Rhode Island is wide. Not quite, but surprisingly close: Rhode Island is 37 miles across; the Lake Pontchartrain Bridge is 23-plus miles. Dawn, who is occasionally nervous about driving across bridges, drove it, in her words, “Like a boss.”

  I agreed with her as I sat silently, white-knuckled, in the passenger seat.

  We’d been looking forward to seeing New Orleans since we started planning the trip. As with San Antonio, we knew we needed to dedicate some time there, so I made a reservation for two nights at what billed itself as a bed-and-breakfast.

  I say “billed itself as” because it was not like any B&B I had ever seen. The Marigny district, where our temporary home was located, is old. And, when you say “old” in New Orleans, that can mean something different than it does in say, Seattle.

  This B&B wasn’t a quaint little house, with an apple-cheeked matron serving a piping hot breakfast every morning. Instead, it was a series of leaning buildings next door to a small bar. The bar served as the lobby as well as a source of refreshments.

  Our room was at the top of three narrow, rickety flights of stairs. At least, the first trip up the stairs was three flights. By the time I was on my third and final trip with the bags, that had magically extended out to twelve or thirteen flights.

  The room itself was fine. The building had obviously served other purposes over its 130 years of life, as the rooms were all at odd angles to one another, and the “kitchen” in the room was smaller than our closet back home. Still, the bed was comfy, and if you didn’t mind the heat and humidity, there was a cute little balcony outside both the bedroom and the living room.

  I thought the whole place was old and dilapidated. Dawn loved it. When I arched one eyebrow at her, she said, “You should be thankful that I love things that are old and decrepit.” She always knows how to put things into perspective for me.

  The best part, really, was that the Marigny neighborhood is a great location. It was close to everything we wanted to see and do while we were in NO. In fact, we were able to park the Silver Bullet and give her a well-deserved rest for a few days.

  We changed into clean clothes, a necessary step in southern Louisiana as you will sweat through at least three or four sets of clothes each day, and headed for Frenchman Street. New Orleans has so many things to recom
mend it: history, an unmatched artistic community, wonderful food, and music. I couldn’t wait to hear the jazz.

  We walked for three or four miles and listened to three jazz bands. I swear if I lived in New Orleans I would never get any writing done, because I would be hanging out, listening to music all day and night.

  Finally, it got dark, and we realized we hadn’t eaten anything since Laura’s. When we’d left, we thought we might never eat again, but the aroma that wafted through the air outside the restaurants changed our minds.

  I had one thing on my mind: red beans and rice. It had been twenty-five years since I had been to New Orleans, and I had been dreaming about that dish ever since. Dawn ordered shrimp. Of course Dawn ordered shrimp. She loves the little buggers and orders them every chance she gets. She just had never had the chance in New Orleans before.

  When the food arrived, she found her order staring back at her. Granted, the eyes were dead, but they were definitely looking in her direction. Everything was present and accounted for: the head, the tail, all parts in between. There were curly little whiskers everywhere. Dawn looked a little green, but dove in like a soldier. She peeled and ate every one of them. She didn’t say it this time, but I will: like a boss.

  Long before midnight, we gave up and trekked back to our room. Had we arrived here thirty years earlier, we would have stayed out late, shut the places down, and likely been looking for an after-hours club. Instead, we were back in our B&B-that-is-not-a-B&B, fast asleep, before the witching hour struck.

  Day Twenty-One

  Since we got to bed at a decent hour the night before, I woke up at my usual time: 6 a.m. After being with Dawn for a little more than seven years, I have learned that she never, ever, under any circumstances, wakes up at 6 a.m. So I killed a few hours on my phone, checking out things we could do in New Orleans. By 8:30, I felt like a six-year-old on Christmas morning. I couldn’t wait any longer to open the presents that New Orleans had for us. I shook Dawn awake and told her I was going to go and find her coffee somewhere.