Breezing Through

I enjoy Chicago. It's a charming place, a bastion of urban seduction lying at the end of many a long highway stretched across the Midwest. It has all the trappings of a major metropolis, good and bad, but manages to maintain a certain energy that I can't really pin down. It eludes me, so mostly I attribute it to the irresistible influence of the Midwest's charms. It's not as crowded or rushed as New York, but still remains bustling. The people -- and their stories -- are diverse, and yet there isn't the same kind of coldness that gets attached to the anonymity of urban life. Granted, I can only see Chicago with a visitor's eye, but its vibe speaks of openness and space -- enough for everyone to carve out their own lives while remaining comfortably linked to their neighbors, their neighborhoods, their city.

Or maybe it's just the FREE city zoo.

One of the highlights of the road trip as a whole was the meal at Alinea. Our last month in New York, we basically went all out, trying to eat at as many of the restaurants on our bucket list as possible, knowing that fine dining still has some catching up to do on the west coast. That enthusiasm carried over to Chicago. My wallet was not pleased. My stomach was ecstatic. Ultimately, it was worth the hype and the hit to the pocketbook. Even more than the many standouts on the impressive 19-course tasting menu, what stuck with me most was just that it was the most fun I've ever had at a meal. I look forward to when I'll be able to do it again.

Here's a peek at just one of the courses.

We also caught up and caught a meal with our friend Mina. There's something so joyous, and just a touch maudlin, about seeing your New York friends when none of you are New Yorkers any more. But life always moves us forward. And Chicago always treats me well.

After that, it was back onto the I-90 with those august Midwestern skies...

...kicking off the most bewitching leg of our trip that would last the next several days. It started with Wisconsin.

A pleasant lunch stop in Madison. A good friend of mine got arrested here once. I had better luck.

The clouds turn quickly out here.

But the storms turn just as quick.

Next stop, Minneapolis.

Holy Land

Eight or nine months before I left New York, I started compiling a list of places in the U.S. that I wanted to visit. These weren't major cities, but out-of-the-way stops that had to be trekked to in something other than an airplane. I had the intention of driving back to California when I eventually moved out of the city, if not an actual idea of how that would work out, so I started keeping track of intriguing places that I would otherwise probably never have the opportunity to visit. And as tends to happen when you mix enough intention with good fortune, it worked out. When I started planning the move, I opened the list and saw that three or four lines down, just below some stops in Texas that it looked like I wasn't going to be able to hit, I had written "garden of the gods, southern illinois".

"Yes," I remember thinking, "I want to go there." This was immediately followed by, "What the hell is the garden of the gods?"

I had to do a Google Image search, and then some further Googling to determine that it was a national park within the Shawnee National Forest (separate from another (equally stunning) national park in Colorado going by the same name. The gods have many gardens, I suppose). I had no recollection of where or how or from whom I originally learned about the place, but when you collect as much miscellany as I have filed away on my computer, you will eventually bury and unearth something that actually has some use. It didn't take many pictures to convince me that yes, I did in fact want to go there, to the garden of the gods.

And so, after Louisville, we drove west from Kentucky, through Indiana, and into the southern tip of Illinois (the area, incidentally, is also known as the Tri-State Area). After passing through many small towns, we saw a horizon of trees sprout along the horizon and then grow steadily until they towered over us. The winding road swung back and away, leading -- almost inevitably it seemed -- to the Garden of the Gods. Summer having just ended and it being the middle of the week, the park was almost entirely deserted. A recent rain lent an added aura of calm. As we set out to hike around the trails, the sun founds its way back out from behind the exhausted rain clouds, and the landscape opened up, swallowing us whole because that's the only way I care to describe it.

Pump your own water.

Our lonely campsite.

Back into the woods.

Obligatory self-portraits.

And then some long-exposure fun at night. Those stars sure don't like to sit still.

The next morning, we packed up camp early, a little whole-r, a little fuller. There's a quiet kind of peace that comes with rising with the sun in a forest tended by gods, and I hope I find it again.

The Start of Something

I often imagined the way I left New York would be captured in one of those iconic moments, where I catch the buildings receding in the rearview and sigh a wistful breath, or watch it diminish and vanish thousands of feet below me as I literally fight free of its weighty pull. Instead, I left the city late at night, a day's worth of sweat and the smell of bleach clinging to my skin, driving east into Queens to avoid the tolls on the westside on my way north to a Marriott in Yonkers. Traffic was sparse coming out of the city, but thick going in; my brother and I squinted at all the headlights across the center divider as my parents crowded in the backseat beneath a minivan's worth of recently-packed luggage and boxes. I did not mark the moment I crossed the city's boundaries. I did not envy the people honking impatiently as they waited their turn to go in.

Later, after a night on a pull-out couch and a lunch with a cadre of my mother's old classmates she hadn't seen in forty-odd years, Roy and I would swing into the city one last time to say a final goodbye to a couple of friends we'd missed the day before. Traffic snarled through seemingly every street we turned down and getting back out became a chore. When the city eventually loomed and shrank and passed, outside the window to my left as Roy drove us south down the turnpike on the Jersey side of the Hudson, I snapped a couple pictures before New York disappeared behind a turn in the highway. None of them came out right; the city always looked too small. There was no time to get a better shot, and when I looked back up, we had rounded the turn. Sometimes, the past just disappears, before you get the chance to frame it in the rearview.

And then I was no longer leaving New York, but heading toward the first stop on the long journey back to my once and future home.

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Despite the fact that I lived in New York for the same three years that really saw my wanderlust spark and swell, I never made it to a lot of the major cities that lie nearby. In a late effort to correct some of those missed opportunities (and to see some friends), Roy and I chose Philly and D.C. as the first two stops on our trip. We spent a good night in Philly, demolishing a couple of cheesesteaks, hanging out at a bar with some locals, and partying with Sung, who I've never seen having as much fun as he is now that he's enrolled in business school.

Sung's view from his apartment:

We kept it moving, though, taking off the next day after lunch. It was fun, Philly. D.C. up next.

Into the belly of the beast.

D.C.'s metro system really likes that brutalist look.

All the national monuments are pretty cool to see in person. The chili dogs from Ben's Chili Bowl were pretty cool to see in person, too. Better to eat. No picture, though. On through Maryland...

...where I took the first of very many pictures of corn on the side of the highway...

...and into West Virginia.

We stayed a very shitty night at a very shitty motel in presumably shitty Charleston (we didn't see much of the empirically shitty capital). Before all of that, though, we saw them Friday Saturday night lights over WVU's stadium.

Kentucky was our next real stop. We had a really pleasant lunch in Frankfort, but zoomed on out of there to make it to the bourbon tour at one of the region's many famed distilleries -- Buffalo Trace Distillery. This is the part of the trip where we slipped real comfortable-like into Kentucky accents. The two seasons of Justified we had watched the previous month probably had a lot to do with that.

Blanton's, one of their specialty batches, is still hand-bottled.

The distillery had its own well-kempt gardens, rich with Kentucky bluegrass.

After, it was on to Louisville, where we popped by Churchill Downs and its Dixieland castle aesthetic.

And then drove into downtown to grab a meal just down the street from the Louisville slugger museum.

In case you hadn't noticed, I've started to toy with the HDR capabilities of my camera. Still getting the hang of it.

I crammed a lot into this post. Illinois next time.