Dateline: North Little Rock, AR

Shiloh National Military Park

There are two things travelers to Memphis should do - listen to blues in a club on Beale Street, and pay homage to the King at Graceland. We, of course, did neither. Were I thirty years younger, I would've spent an evening soaking up the atmosphere in one of Beale Street's raucous establishments, but I'm now a middle-aged family man who prefers to return to his hotel after dinner to update his blog. As for Graceland, while I of course understand the importance of Elvis Presley in American popular culture, I'm just not enough of a fan to pay the whopping ticket price for a tour of the mansion. So instead of venturing into Memphis after checking out of our hotel in Jackson, we detoured south to visit the Shiloh National Military Park.

(It turns out there are Amish communities in southwestern Tennessee. On the way to Shiloh we saw signs along the road alerting drivers to the presence of horse-drawn carriages; soon after, we passed an Amish family in a buggy heading in the opposite direction.) 

You don't need to be a Civil War buff (and I'm not) to appreciate the significance of the Battle of Shiloh. Taking place over two days in the spring of 1862, it was the bloodiest battle of the conflict up to that point - more than 3500 soldiers were killed, while nearly 24,000 were wounded. After making initial gains, the attacking Confederates were turned back by the Army of Tennessee, led by a Union major general named Ulysses S. Grant. We began our visit at where else but the visitor center:

We then embarked on a driving tour of the battlefield. As with so many Civil War sites, it's hard to fathom the carnage that took place in such a bucolic setting of fields and forests:

The fighting took place among the largest Native American mound complex on the Tennessee River:

Two Federal gunboats positioned in the Tennessee River also took part in the fight, shelling the rebel troops:

 

From Shiloh, we resumed our inexorable journey west. Our GPS directed us into Mississippi (another state to add to the tally), and so proceeded along U.S. Route 72, paralleling the Tennessee state line, with my daughter behind the wheel. It was a monotonous stretch of highway, with very little in the way of interesting scenery to distract from the tedium. After spending the previous day carping about the unchanging forest backdrop along Interstate 40, Amber had developed a newfound appreciation for the beauty of Tennessee once we crossed back into the Volunteer State.

We stopped for lunch (while simultaneously seeking shelter from a spell of lightning and rain) in Collierville, a town of around 45,000 in the Memphis suburbs. It was while reading the Wikipedia entry on Collierville that we learned Parade magazine in 2014 had named the town square America's "Best Main Street", so of course we couldn't leave town without seeing it for ourselves. It was certainly pleasant, but not what I would rank as number one in the country. It didn't help that most of the stores were closed on a Sunday:

Leaving Collierville, we drove through Memphis before crossing the mighty Mississippi (the mightiness of which couldn't be seen from the freeway as we drove over the water) and entering Arkansas. We eventually called it a day as we reached North Little Rock, finishing things off with dinner at BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse:

Tomorrow we continue our travels along I-40. Will Arkansas prove to be more interesting than Tennessee, or will it be just as tedious as Mississippi? Stay tuned...

 

Dateline: Jackson, TN

At the World's Fair Park in Knoxville, TN

As I write this in a decaying Howard Johnson's in Jackson, Tennessee, the temperature outside at 2130 hours is still a muggy 82°F/28°C, after having reached a high of 99°F/37°C. It's only our second day on the Great American Road Trek, but with the recent Supreme Court rulings on gun rights and abortion, it feels like we're in a desperate race to outrun the reactionary forces that seem poised to overturn many of the positive steps this country has made since the 1960's. Sooner or later, however, we're going to run out of space (and time) when we reach the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps when we arrive in the Pacific Northwest, we should just keep going, crossing over into the comparative sanity of British Columbia.

But as of this moment, we're in the Bible Belt, where masks have stopped being worn, and middle-aged women sport Let's Go Brandon T-shirts. Our sojourn into the South started with our departure yesterday morning from Falls Church. While packing up our Honda Accord, we came across our old Lithuanian license plates, hidden away in the inner recesses of the trunk:

The drive was a tedious one, as we transitioned from Interstate 66 to I-81, before merging onto I-40 heading west soon after leaving Virginia and crossing into Tennessee, with only occasional breaks at freeway rest areas:

There was this bizarre sight on I-81 just before Bristol, VA. I learned later from a friend via Facebook that this was none other than the "Lady in the Lake", returning to Elberta, Alabama after being repaired in Virginia:

We ended up getting a room for the night at a Best Western in Morristown, TN. For dinner we strolled over to a Cracker Barrel next door. As we were getting ready to go inside, a woman with the thickest southern drawl I'd ever heard in real life asked me a question. She had to repeat it to me twice before I realized she was asking if the Best Western was expensive (I assume she must have seen us walking over from there). I've been to Scotland and Yorkshire, and those accents sounded like the English heard on BBC news broadcasts in comparison to this woman whom I assume was a fellow native English speaker. As Shu-E pointed out, it was easier understanding people in lands where English is considered a foreign tongue!

Once in Cracker Barrel, I was surprised to learn two things: beer was on the menu, and those brews only consisted of Bud, Bud Lite, Miller Lite, Michelob Ultra and Blue Moon. And Pabst Blue Ribbon. The ironic hipster in me was desperate for a beer after a long day behind the wheel, so I went with the PBR. It was a shame I'd left my MAGA hat and "Stop the Steal" shirt back at the hotel:

 

Catfish, with mashed potatoes and green beans:

Determined not to repeat the monotony of the previous day's drive, this morning we stopped at the World's Fair Park in Knoxville to visit the Sunsphere:

A gold orb atop a 266-foot (81.1 meters)-high tower, the fourth floor observation deck provides a 360°-view of the city (the greenish hue the result of the tinted glass):

Amber tries her hand at a vintage Pac-Man game:

The Tennessee River can be glimpsed in the distance:

Yes, the 1982 World's Fair was staged in Knoxville, Tennessee, and by all accounts was a tremendous success. One of the captions on the interior wall described the event as the last successful American-held expo - it turns out the 1984 edition held in New Orleans ended in bankruptcy:

A final look at the Sunsphere before departing Knoxville:

For lunch we stopped at Lefty's Bar-B-Q, serving up barbeque dishes in Crossville, TN since 1982. My wife and daughter had ham and pulled pork melts, respectively, while your humble scribe opted for the pulled pork sandwich, with green beans and potato salad as sides, and all washed down with sweet tea (of course):

Amber and I shared a "fudge pie" for dessert:

Apparently, the seamstress couldn't think of anything for the letter Q. "Quest", perhaps?:

We reached Nashville by the middle of the afternoon. Celebrated as the home of country music and the Grand Ole Opry, we made a beeline instead for the suburbs, stopping for a look at an independent bookstore. My appreciation for country music ends with Johnny Cash, while my daughter has even less of a liking for the genre. We spent the drive between Morristown and Knoxville this morning desperately working the FM radio scan for any station that was playing modern country music (what non-country stations we did find played a strange mix of modern hits and tunes from the 1980's): 

It was a school board in Tennessee that earlier this year voted to ban Maus from its 8th-grade curriculum, in another example of the downward American cultural spiral:

To cap off our brief stay in relatively progressive Nashville, we purchased refreshments for the road from a bubble tea shop before plunging back into the heart of rural Tennessee:

And this is how we ended up this evening in Jackson. For dinner we went to Redbone's Grill and Bar, where I had bayou pasta and a real-to-goodness locally-brewed IPA:

Oh, and some key lime pie for dessert. Take that, waistline!:

Tennessee may be in the Bible Belt, but it sure seemed like there were a lot of adult toy shops located along Interstate 40.

To be continued...

On the road to gawd only knows where

The entrance to Washington D.C.'s underwhelming Chinatown

We're off...almost. Unless something comes up at the last moment, tomorrow will kick off the start of our cross-country road trip, traveling from one Washington to the other, in the opposite direction of the trek we undertook back in the summer of 2015. When you're an American and life is throwing up too many curve balls, you answer the siren song of the open road, even if that means doing it with a wife and child in a ten-year-old Honda Accord, and not with a cool bebopper like Dean Moriarty in a 1949 Hudson Commodore.

And what has been vomited recently? A lot, for these past two years have been the roughest since I committed marital suicide just prior to the start of this century. My father died in late February 2020, unfortunately coinciding with the onset of COVID-19 in the U.S. (for the record he didn't pass because of the coronavirus). As a result of the pandemic, we left Addis Ababa under front office pressure, and ended up spending six months of our lives doing next to nothing holed up in an apartment in Arlington, Virginia, a half-year wasted that I will never get back. The coronavirus wiped out a long-planned and eagerly-anticipated trip to Japan's Chūbu region 中部地方 scheduled for the summer of 2020 - after traveling with Amber for a week in central and eastern Taiwan in 2018, we were going to do a 2½-week-long, father-daughter excursion to my favorite destination in the world. But alas, it wasn't to be. Our time in Arlington also coincided with bidding, a humiliating, confidence-shattering rigmarole where it quickly became apparent I haven't kissed enough asses cultivated a deep enough network to land any of the assignments I was aiming for (hence, the out-of-cone job I'll be doing in Beijing 北京).  When it was time to return to Ethiopia, the ongoing COVID-19 crisis teamed up with the outbreak of a civil war in the country's Tigray region to ensure that for the remainder of our tour we were marooned in Addis Ababa.

And that was just in 2020. In 2021 I learned the hard way that I have a certain heart condition that resulted in an unexpected trip to Pretoria, South Africa. Our return to the U.S. and the Washington, D.C. area proved to be less than triumphant, as two TIA's led to the discovery of an artery that needed to be cleaned out (and hopefully prevented anything worse from occurring, at least for the time being). As last year segued into this one, issues with concentration and memory retention continue, possibly cardio-vascular related, but possibly not, though a battery of psychological tests I recently undertook at least confirmed (contrary to popular belief) dementia isn't the issue. Finally, a recent sleep study concluded that the amount of time I stopped breathing (or experienced shallow breaths) during deep sleep periods was at a dangerous level, so it looks like I'll be using a CPAP machines at nights starting soon. As my sixth decade starts coming into view, so does the realization that the aging process absolutely bites the big one.

And then there's the fact that for the past seven months I've been "learning" Mandarin at FSI, i.e. being taught language I will never use for jobs that I will never perform, a waste of my time and your tax dollars. And all this in preparation to pack up and move to a country where nobody wants to be posted anymore, and which continues to adhere to a zero COVID policy, meaning we're going to be trapped in China with no escape (or at least no chance to get out and visit Taiwan, Japan et al) until the government faces up to reality and follows the rest of the world. In other words, for a very long time to come.

In case you haven't figured it out already, I'm having the proverbial existential (post) midlife crisis, wondering what the fuck I'm doing with (and have done to) my life (not to mention that of my family). Has this line of work been worth it, or would I have been better off had I not made some absolutely asinine mistakes twenty-plus years ago? Instead of dealing with bidding, EER's, front offices, language training, preclusions and all the other baggage that comes with this line of work, could I have been feeling my heart beating irregularly while contentedly watching the rest of the world pass me by in Matsumoto 松本 (or, perhaps, even Fukuoka 福岡)?

As they say, only time will tell. And according to my neurologist, if my current blood pressure readings don't change, I'll "live forever"! All I know is I'm getting too fragile old for this shit...

Photos are scant this time around. Amber is always complaining she never gets to see the local wildlife. Well, here she is encountering a deer:

My daughter has been playing Go 囲碁 (日)/圍棋 (中) ever since she started watching Hikaru no Go ヒカルの碁 while a kindergarten student in Taiwan. She didn't play much while we were in Ethiopia, but since returning to Virginia, she's been regularly going to Go club get togethers to hone her skills. She's also participated in a couple of tournaments at the National Go Center - during the most recent event she won 3 of her 4 matches, and came away with this T-shirt for her efforts:

I'm not really sure why I took this shot inside of one of the Metro stations, but it turned out rather well if I say so myself (and I do):

Speaking of Metro stations, a bird of prey keeps watch for its next meal outside East Falls Church:

Enjoying a tea and doughnut at Eden Center:

She may have come across a deer (see above), but Amber was a little perturbed when I showed her this photo taken during my daily morning stroll:

What 59 looks like:

59 also looks like this:

On our last weekend before departing into the American outback, we took the Metro into the district. D.C. has a rather pathetic Chinatown - many of the businesses there are representatives of well-known chains which happen to include their names in Chinese characters because, you know, they're in Chinatown. So when we learned there would be a community festival in Chinatown, we weren't expecting much, which at least ensured we wouldn't be disappointed. The local Go club was there to promote the game, but my daughter was too shy to go over and say hello:

We showed up just as the gentleman on stage was explaining that Lou Reed was a practitioner of the ancient Chinese martial art of tai chi 太极拳. I guess it gave something to do while he was waiting for the man:

There are remarkably few Chinese restaurants in Chinatown; according to the missus, many have closed in recent years. We had lunch at Reren Lemen, which was next door to a very non-Sino Nando's. My bowl of noodles was more akin to Taiwanese-style 拉麵 than the Japanese ラーメン I prefer:

You can question my choice of outerwear if you so desire, but note that one of the groups with a table at the Chinatown Community Festival was a Japanese tea ceremony club, staffed by kimono-wearing adherents. So there:

On a Saturday evening after sunset, the three of us went for a walk through the cemetery to look for fireflies. We were rewarded for our efforts (video courtesy of Shu-E):

What Father's Day 2022 looked like:

Although not a believer in omens, signs, spirits and other New Age/superstitious claptrap (preferring instead to take responsibility for my actions), I couldn't help but wonder if encountering a deer and three of her offspring playing in the local cemetery while on one of my last morning walks augured well for our upcoming adventure. In any event, it further annoyed Amber when I later showed her these videos. Serves her right for sleeping in:

As you can see, I was allowed to get surprisingly close:

Will this American road trip help to overcome the burnout being resulting from the existential blues? That's the RMB430,000 question. Stay tuned...

A final walk through the cemetery along with my daughter on the eve of our departure. No deer, but a lot of fireflies, none of which could be caught on camera