University of Miami

I began this post with another crack about my sleeping habits when I figured I’ve started enough of these for you to know the drill: I am not a morning person. So I’ll just say I woke up at 1 p.m. and it was fabulous.

Our plan for today was to lie low, run to Costco and Ikea for Round 2 and waltz around the University of Miami campus if there was daylight left. A delicious Costco hotdog, fitting a desk and bed from Ikea into Eric’s car, and a two-minute drive from Eric’s house later and we made it to campus at magic hour a little before dusk. There – tension relieved! But first, the weather.

We ran into a little rain yesterday, but it took another day for Florida’s maddening weather to make some sort of sense. Clouds flow over Florida with alarming rapidity, dispensing moderate downpour on a regular basis. When those clouds pass, stunning blue sky emerges from the slate-gray cloud cover. During the middle of the day, odds are the sky will be striped with dark clouds and true blue.

And there’s lightning. Every few minutes.

Back where I come from (Southern California), rain is a GD event. Drivers cut 30 mph off their speed and drive like idiots as the asphalt darkens under a thirty-minute shower. An instantaneous streak of lightning will be told to awed children around dinner. Thunder is legend.

Here, thunder is every three minutes and nobody bats an eye. Eric and I sat in Costco dumbfounded at the regular rumbling thunder and looked around incredulously as no-one responded to a fifteen-second heart-stopping firework detonation we felt in our hearts.

Well, now we know why it’s so green. The rain doesn’t stop. Ever.

University of Miami campus is reasonably small, but it’s incredibly green (obviously) and peppered with bands of water that wind through campus. These rivulets (though often twenty feet across) are common in Miami. Rain’s gotta go somewhere. There’s also a large lake. Coming from California, I’d assume this lake to be manufactured. The “NO SWIMMING – CROCODILES” sign speaks differently. Seriously.

Unfortunately, nothing’s open, as classes don’t start for another three weeks. Sadness. At least we got to see the practice football field, the psychology building Eric will be spending damn near all his time in, and the school color-decked rocking tables that crop up in social areas. Rocking tables. Why has nobody learned from this??

Humidity aside, Eric is excited for his school. His excitement ramped up when we visited the Five Guys across the street. Five Guys is the East Coast’s answer to In-n-Out, and despite threat of having my California card revoked, their burgers are better. I got grilled onions and mushrooms on my burger, people. Rad. However, Five Guys loses on fries for not having Animal Style. Pyhrric victory.

Tomorrow, we wake up early (AUGH) to make the drive down the Florida Keys. That’s where we want to go.

The U of M Hurricanes’ Greentree practice field.

The Flipse psych building, where Eric will be spending the majority of his next 5 or so years.

A typical rivulet.

“Genesis” by Jane Washburn, on the shores of the campus lake.

The campus grill, with those sweet rocking tables.

Official U of M Snuggies. God bless higher ed.

The Dauer Clock Tower in front of the Richter Library.

Art on the green.

Bookstore.

Bus stop.

Look what we found on top of some machinery…

Rocking table!

Melbourne to Miami

We’d driven 170 miles extra the night before to ease our victory march into Miami, but truth be told, the last 180 miles of our 2700-mile journey was cheerless and overdue. Being so close was and exhausting anticlimax, and as we were quite physically drained from waking up early (9 a.m.) with a drive ahead of us, even the two-and-change-hour drive was a chore.

Finally, with odd irritation at the paltry miles we still had to accomplish, we finished the journey. As GPS Jill (named after the female voice pattern – we needed a name to swear at when GPS magic went awry) belted “Arriving at home,” we pulled into a quaint yellow bungalow in suburban Miami. The house Eric is sharing with two other grad students is spacious, tiled, repainted and – thank god – air-conditioned.

The humidity is more manageable compared to Melbourne’s thick wet air, but the moisture still takes getting used to. Night doesn’t quite cool down, and standing outside for more than fifteen minutes saps you. Luckily, the house is insulated and every room has a fan. Geckos scramble inside and climb the walls. Cicadas and pterodactyls call into the night. And damn, is this state green.

An Ikea with a parking structure. Yeah, sounds like Orange County.

We got into Miami a little after noon and spent the rest of the day trekking to Costco and Ikea for amenities. Trekking may be the wrong word; groping blindly works better, as we panic after discovering the GPS isn’t foolproof when its maps are out of date. So after a phantom Costco (now a Lowe’s) and lunch, we shop for the things Eric will need in his house for the next five years he’s here earning his Ph. D.

Our return home is still totally dependent on Jill’s tinny speaker directions, but we’re learning. As Eric puts together his furniture and I watch Apocalypse Now, we share a victory drink. We did it.

And now, your moment of Zen:

WHAT?

We fit all this in Eric’s Nissan Altima and drove it 2800 miles across country.

WHAT?

The street Eric’s house is on. So green. So green.

Miami: like Orange County with more GREEN.

Juuuuuust like Orange County.

An Ikea with a parking structure. Yeah, sounds like Orange County.

The backyard. And whatever spooked Eric. He was so startled.

From the Mississippi River to Melbourne

Getting up at 8 a.m. used to be easier. I can recall an entire Senior Year of high school when I got up at 5:45 a.m. to get to class at 7. To be fair, I got out of class at noon that year and watched much more LOST than did homework. I certainly didn’t drive 800 miles and sit in a car seat for ten hours.

Getting out of Slidell, suburb of New Orleans, was cake. Another area we like better than Houston. Fifteen minutes out of  our hotel east on I-10 found us crossing Lake Pontchartrain, a five-minute drive across open water. Were we scared? Of course not! There were huge railings that ruined my pictures.

Finding ourselves bereft of breakfast (RIP, box of donuts from Day 1), we made a stop for coffee at McDonald’s. Unfortunately, we fell in love with said coffee. And stopped at Mickey D’s two more times for pick-me-ups. Don’t judge us.

I-10 had us jumping little bays and deltas all the way from Lake  Pontchartrain through the little “feet” of Mississippi and Alabama to a bit inside Florida before the road went inland. These bridge-spanned bodies of water are much closer to entrenched rivers than the swamps we encountered in Louisiana.

In other news, Mobile, Alabama, has big skyscrapers. Huh.

The last leg of today’s drive was an unending loop, an eternity of two-lane freeway lined by hundred-foot forest walls on either side. Only darkness after dinner changed the scenery (but not the treeline, as far as we could tell), though we’d used the 295 to skirt Jacksonville and start south on the 95 – the last freeway we’ll take to roll into Miami.

Eric’s original original plan for the penultimate drive was to end up in Jacksonville, about 350 miles from Miami. But, as he notes while I type this, “Every day besides the one we spent in New Orleans, we went farther than I thought.” Brilliant! Thus, while we cautiously ballparked Daytona Beach as our final motel of the trip, the aforementioned McDonald’s coffee juiced us down to Melbourne (ironically, Person of the Road Kevin’s destination), which is 180 miles from Miami.

I’m typing from the last motel we’ll occupy during our trip, and I am very excited to get to Miami and

stay in one location. Well, maybe not just Miami – there may be some Keys in our near future…

I leave you with the reason our country is great:

God bless you, Two Wolf Truck.

I’m closer than I appear! And I forgot to switch modes. NUTS.

The USS Alabama in Battleship Memorial Park off I-10 in Mobile Bay, AL.

God bless you, Two Wolf Truck.

To my New U friends: we must visit the South and investigate!

Florida gave us a bit of rain. Juuuust a bit.

Nawlins!

After three days of driving over 2100 miles, waking up at a leisurely 1 p.m. (11 a.m. Pacific) was a gift. The automatic motions of packing up and getting ready for a long day of driving were checked and the warm comfort of the upcoming leisure day in the Big Easy made for the most pleasant morning of the trip thus far.

The late (late late late) start got us into the city by 3 in the afternoon – an unfortunate hour to start exploring, we found, as the sun is high and the air is thick.

Down Canal street toward the Mississippi River: uptown is right, downtown is left.

Regardless, Eric and I set out to get some au-thentic NOLA cuisine, and wandered downtown from Canal Street (a sort of main street, dividing downtown and uptown, alternately downriver and upriver of the Mississippi) into the French Quarter. Fact: these streets are old, and therefore narrow. The Quarter winds in a seemingly endless grid, and no buildings we saw in our not-so-thorough search appeared to be central or prominent. By pure happenstance, we found The Original Pierre Maspero’s.

According to the restaurant, Pierre Maspero’s was built in 1788 by Don Juan Paillet and was known as Pierre Maspero’s Slave Exchange. In the early 19th century, privateer (i.e. pirate!) brothers Jean and Pierre Lafitte met with their men to plan pirate-ey deeds in the then-coffee shop. Later, General Andrew Jackson offered the Laffite brothers letters of marque (amnesty) if they helped plan the defense of Louisiana in the War of 1812, and it was here where they laid plans to repel the British.

Awesome.

From left to right: pistolettes, fried alligator and the muffuletta!

After a Muffuletta sandwich, seafood-stuffed pistolettes and fried alligator (alligator!), we headed to the waterfront and investigated the Riverfront. What we thought would be a bit of culture turned out to be a little culture for sale. A mall.

Fortunately, it had a Cafe du Monde, which I’d been instructed to visit for beignets, which are essentially rectangular funnel cake-tasting sugared pastries. They are so choice.

We tried to make it down to Jackson Square before realizing it was very, very far from Canal Street. So we doubled back and headed for Bourbon Street. This is, according to Eric, the street where Mardi Gras goes down. What we found was the single most impacted street of debauchery and alcohol. Lots of bars, gentlemen’s clubs, and living statue performers on the street. Under orders from a dear friend of mine, we turned the corner down Bourbon to get into Pat O’Briens bar.

Pat O’Briens, opened in 1933, concocted and sold the first Hurricane, now a New Orleans staple. The drink is good; the bar is better. The complex has expanded into a courtyard restaurant, but ducking into a side door brought us to the old bar. The smoke’s aged into the extensive wood paneling, so you don’t smell smoke – you smell time, and the dimly lit bar, perhaps a visual pastiche, becomes tactile. Stoneware beer steins hang in rows from the ceiling, and the TVs complicate the simplest relationship in the world – between any soul off the street and the bartender. A bare five steps from Bourbon Street’s cacophony of shitty bar music clashing with live music from better scenes, Pat O’s lets you step into an old neighborhood secret.

Our warm, fuzzy neonostalgia was cut short by drooping lids from the drinks and the heat. Feeling the medium day made long by the humidity, we sallied back to the motel. Tomorrow is another drive, another state.

Behold: the New Orleans food court.

Stores just off Bourbon Street.

The horror of Bourbon Street.

Eric and a Hurricane in the best 200 sq feet of New Orleans.

These and other homes pictured are in the French Quarter.

The buildings in the background run along Canal Street.

Houston, Thou Dost Suck

Houston, you are the worst city we’ve visited thus far. El Paso has a quarter of your population – and you know what? We pulled out of our classy motel in El Paso and got onto the freeway in thirty seconds. Houston? We got on the Sam Houston Parkway, paid $8 in tolls and circumvented Houston to get out – a 40-minute drive. Houston, you can shove it.

The rest of the drive was pleasant. East Texas, you’re fine. As the tree-lined grass gradually bled into forested swamp, I-10 periodically inclined up (think rollercoaster) and ramped down just as quick – presumably over swamp territory, presumably for poor road foundation. Hooray! Swamp country!

Half a mile into Louisiana, we picked up the state’s opinion of gambling. As in, it’s legal, and the cluster of cheap roadside casinos hugging the border was clearly there to cater to escaping Texans. Worried citizens, never fear – some state law requires every gambling advertisement to have a tiny banner listing a gambling addiction hotline.

Due to what we later learned was a “chemical spill” (i.e. zombie outbreak), I-10 was closed 50 miles from Baton Rouge, so we were diverted to the 49 and 190. The 49 is a freeway, but the 190 is a little highway. Just like the snippets of old 66 I encountered on the last trip, the 190 is lined with little burger stands, grocery stores, old homes and churches. Oh, the churches. We’re definitely in the Bible Belt.

We breezed through Baton Rouge and skirted New Orleans to stay in Slidell, a suburb 10 miles north.

And then we tried to get dinner.

GPS “Jill” failed in her duty of finding us dinner not once, but four times; Eric and I are considering a punishment that fits the crime and will ensure her competence in the future.

Despite our subordinate’s hindrance, we eventually stopped at “We Never Close: Overstuffed Po-Boys.” To the uninitiated, a Po-Boy is a simple sandwich with lettuce, tomato, mayo and any meat stuffed in a french roll. Got it pictured? Add more meat. More. My Po-Boy had breaded crawfish spilling out the sides – I had to use the paper wrapping because the bread couldn’t contain the meat.

Oh yeah. Mecha-Rally’s-Chicken? I hope we never meet on the field of battle.

Oh, sorry. It was 1:30 in the morning. Had to be there.

Tomorrow – The Big Easy.

“Incident” in the usual case meaning hurricaine, although we were diverted for a “chemical spill.”

The mighty Mississippi

Railings are the bane of my existence.