Average Jane

Average Jane Goes on Vacation

I just got back from four days in gorgeous Eureka Springs, Arkansas. I went with a group of friends and my sister—there were 17 of us in total. We spent the trip in a very leisurely fashion, gathering in smaller groups to visit various attractions and larger groups for meals.

One of the first things we noticed is that it's butterfly season there. Wherever we went there were beautiful butterflies flitting around the flowers. My sister led us in a yoga practice on Friday and Saturday mornings and we enjoyed seeing the butterflies on the plants as we exercised.

We stayed at the 1905 Basin Park Hotel in downtown Eureka Springs. Supposedly it's haunted and they offer nightly ghost tours. I didn't think it seemed haunted to me, but what do I know? The only semi-weird experience I had was one afternoon while I was taking a nap. I heard the sound of a door creaking several times and assumed that one of my roommates was coming in. However, I never heard the floor creak to indicate someone walking across it. Once I got up, I checked all the doors in the room and none of them were as noisy as what I'd heard. So if that's my ghost story, it's a pretty tame one.

On the first evening we were there, they had a little festival in Basin Park, right next to the hotel. It featured music, performers, bubble making, etc. What fun!

Every morning I went walking for an hour or so. The hotel was on Spring Street, and as with most towns with the word "springs" in their names, Eureka Springs has a history that included a tourist boom attracted to the healing waters. All along the street you can still see many of the historic springs, although several are dry and the rest are mere trickles of water.

The water isn't drinkable, but I can attest that it's ice-cold and feels great on your hands after a long, hot walk.

My sister and I had decided in advance that we wanted to visit Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge, so we gathered a group of six and went on Friday afternoon. Turpentine Creek is a non-profit that rescues big cats, most of which had been bred as "pets" but were obviously not tameable. It's a much more widespread problem than you would think.

As you can imagine, it's incredibly expensive to build safe habitats and feed these animals properly for the rest of their lives. I wish I had the wherewithal to donate lots of money to their organization.

In case you've ever wondered if a liger is a real thing, here's one. This guy is still young and they expect him to double in size. Ligers are bigger than either lions or tigers once they mature.

On Saturday, my sister and I fulfilled our other sightseeing goal: to visit one of the local caves. We chose Onyx Cave, which apparently doesn't have a website.

What they DO have is self-guided walking tours complete with state-of-the-art 1970s technology including bulky radio headphones that pick up sections of a recorded message that you trigger at various points by pushing a button.

The cave is not as pristine as some I've visited. In the past it was the site of illicit activities by moonshiners and bandits, but it was most ill-used during a time when many of the stalactites were broken off for the onyx. Still, it has a lot of cool formations and it was well worth the $7 admission price.

To give you an idea of the age of the audio presentation, it ended with, "Take only photos and leave behind only flashbulbs."

I really loved the town and I am always drawn to turn-of-the-20th-century architecture and design.

If I could afford it, I'd buy this little cottage and retire there, enjoying the mountain views every morning from my back porch.

I'd walk through the hilly neighborhoods every morning keeping an eye out for deer.

I was very impressed by the number, variety and quality of shops and restaurants within walking distance of our hotel. If you were willing to drive a short distance, the options increased even more.

After my sister and I went to Onyx Cave, we stopped for a tasting at Keels Creek Winery and then chowed down on Grandma's Beans and Cornbread before heading to the 1886 Crescent Hotel to go swimming.

This morning I extended my walk all the way to the Crescent, partly to have a destination and partly because I knew I could buy a bottle of water there and pet the lobby cat. Yes, I missed my cats.

Of course, this story leaves out all the fun I had with my friends, gathering for meals and drinks at various parts of the day. I went out with the group on Friday night to see Mountain Sprout play at The Squid & Whale Pub, which is the kind of place that serves your pint of beer in a Ball canning jar and you don't blink an eye.

So what I'm saying is that I had fun, I relaxed, I stayed off the internet for days and, most important, I let 85 work emails go unread until Monday. It was exactly the kind of vacation I needed.

Average Jane: Passport and Reality

I ran across a mention of the Passport and Reality gallery, which shows people's photos from their valid passports side-by-side with what they look like now.

I have a particularly unrepresentative passport photo from 2001 (my passport expires this summer), so I knew I had to do my own comparison.

As with most of the photos in the gallery, it doesn't even look like the same person. Of course, no one looks good with Serious Face.

Funny thing is I've already changed my hair since the "recent" photo shown above. Now my hair is medium brown with chunky blonde highlights and I've been wearing it curly. So I guess you you don't need ten years to change your look; you can do it pretty thoroughly in less than a year.

Sadly, there's only one pair of stamps in my passport, from a trip to Jamaica in 2006. When I renew it, I'm going to promise myself that I'll do more international travel in the following ten years. There are lots of places I want to go!

Average Jane Goes to Texas

Last Thursday, I left town with three other Soroptimist Club members and traveled to Rockwall, Texas for our Region Conference. There were no conference activities scheduled until Friday, so we took our time getting there and the first two days felt almost vacation-y.

We stayed at the new Hilton that overlooks Lake Ray Hubbard. It's flanked by a row of restaurants and shops, and we almost made it to the movie theater one evening, but everyone was too tired to stay up that late.

On Friday afternoon, we were treated to a cruise on the Seawolf, a 40-foot catamaran that had been hand-built by its captain. As you can see, it was a bit windy that day and we got sprayed with lake water from time to time, but it was a very relaxing and pleasant jaunt around the lake.

The conference became a little more thrilling than expected when I arrived for the Saturday morning session and spotted my name on the agenda. No one had told me I was supposed to stand up and give a five-minute report, so I did some quick research on my iPhone, scribbled notes on my notepad, and said a whole bunch of stuff when it was my turn. Fortunately I had known I was doing another presentation later on, so I basically just introduced that subject, padded it with some additional information and called it good. Whew.

It wasn't all just conference, even on Saturday. My travel companions and I managed to squeeze in some time for shopping near the hotel and in downtown Rockwall, which netted me a cute top and some new tea towels.

After breakfast and a brief meeting on Sunday, we packed the van and headed toward Kansas City. It had been 90 degrees most of the trip, but Sunday was windy, rainy and chilly. As we crossed through Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri, the weather remained that way.

When I wasn't driving, I took photos of roadside attractions like Bigfoot's BBQ:

We even stopped for fresh produce. I got five juicy tomatoes and a bag of new potatoes.

Even with the rainy weather, I was glad we'd taken a road trip rather than flying. The gas was expensive, but not anywhere near as expensive as plane fare for four people, and I got to see a part of the country I'd never seen before.

I'm looking forward to my next road trip.

Average Jane's Miscellaneous Nashville Fun

So what else did we do in Nashville? Well, eating featured prominently. Even before we left, we were actually discussing how many times we were going to have breakfast at the Pancake Pantry. (As it turned out: twice.)

We happened to catch it at times when the wait was minimal. Sometimes the line stretches halfway around the building and down the block. I highly recommend the pecan pancakes, even though the portion was so enormous that I couldn't finish mine.

Nashville also has a number of good brewpubs. We had dinner at Blackstone one evening and enjoyed the nut brown ale that was their cask option of the day. Later on in our trip we ate at Big River Grille downtown, which also had a good brown ale. Their food and service were nothing to write home about, but at least we got to sit on their patio and enjoy the downtown sights while we ate.

While we were exploring Lower Broadway, we stopped by Hatch Show Print and I got a very cool poster. The store is well worth seeing just for its gigantic letterpress and shelf after shelf of wooden type and graphics blocks. There are also two shop cats, but we didn't see them.

Naturally, we took photos of the Ryman Auditorium while we were nearby. We would have taken the tour, but we didn't have time.

Most of our shopping was confined to music stores. In fact, the first place we stopped when we got to Nashville was Fork's Drum Closet, where my husband eventually traded two of the snare drums he'd brought for one he'd been wanting. Here's my husband reveling in their snare drum room:

We were hoping that the Nashville music stores would have some good deals on used gear, but it turns out that Ebay is now the default distribution channel for all such merchandise. It was still interesting to go to the stores, if only to see the professional-grade gear they had available. I also noticed at their musicians wanted/available bulletin boards were significantly bigger than what we see in Kansas City:

Speaking of the music business, my husband had us stop by the Musicians' Union building, for old time's sake. He said it looks exactly the same as it always has.

Before we left Kansas City, I'd contacted a representative from the Nashville Social Media Club to see if there were any meetups or Tweetups going on during my visit. There turned out to be a Digital Nashville mixer on Thursday evening, so I signed up and attended. It was held at an interactive firm called centre{source} in their very cool office:

As our visit was drawing to a close, we met up with one of my husband's friends at the 12South Taproom and Grill, which is the kind of neighborhood bar I wish I had in my own neighborhood. We learned from our Nashville insider that Dolly Parton's empire is headquartered at the building across the street:

So that pretty much covers our trip. We had a great time, possibly gained some weight, and saw pretty much everyone and everything my husband was nostalgic to see. Nashville's a great town and I look forward to our next visit, whenever it might be.

Average Jane's Other Traveling Companion

No description of our vacation would be complete without a mention of our Garmin StreetPilot c550, whom we've dubbed Inga.

If you have a GPS that speaks to you, I highly recommend that you assign a name to the voice. It's a lot more fun to refer to it as a character rather than just "the GPS."

Inga shepherded us to Nashville and all over the city while we were there. My husband has a good basic understanding of Nashville's layout from having lived there, but even he admitted that Inga knew the good, fast ways to get places.

She was also handy for finding nearby restaurants and other points of interest by name or category. "Cracker Barrel" appears pretty prominently in our "Recently found" list right now.

The one thing that Inga didn't handle very well was detours for gas and food while we were on the long highway drives back and forth from Kansas City to Nashville. This is probably due to my refusal to RTFM, because there must be some way to tell the GPS that you're just pausing your trip.

It was after one of these stops that Inga tried to lead us off the main highway somewhere in Illinois and divert us to many miles of two-lane highway. We speculated that this was where she turned us over to the brigands and highwaymen who really control her. Fortunately, she snapped out of it when we reminded her that we were heading home.

She redeemed herself by finding a shortcut through downtown St. Louis that must have saved us a good 10 minutes. Inga knows all the sneaky routes.

I have to admit that I don't use Inga particularly often at home, but she's fantastic for traveling. We'll definitely be working together a lot as summer road trip season kicks in.

Why Average Jane Planned the Nashville Trip

From the late 1970s through the early 1990s, my husband lived and worked in Nashville. He eventually became a respected studio drummer, as well as a touring drummer for bands including James Brown and the Famous Flames and Wayne Jackson and the Memphis Horns.

He moved back to Kansas City around 1991 after his mother was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis. She outlived the two years the doctors had estimated and passed away in 1998. In the meantime, he met and married me, we bought a house, established careers, and settled in the Kansas City area.

I know my husband has always considered Nashville his second home and wondered what might have happened if he'd moved back. We've traveled there a couple of times since we met, but it had been a while, so I wanted to give him a whole week to look up old friends and take the time to reminisce and, if the opportunity arose, sit in with their bands.

So that's what we did.

Most of his friends are still part of the music scene in some capacity. Some are quite well-known; others are still hitting the road every week to play wherever the money is decent. One has recently found new careers as a wood carver and occasional actor.

One of the best things about the trip was that my husband managed to reconnect some of his Nashville-area friends with each other.

At this late date, it seems unlikely that we'll ever relocate to Nashville, but I'm glad my husband had the opportunity to get in touch with his old friends again. They're now his friends on MySpace and Facebook, and there's a real possibility that some of them can actually send work his way, now that technology has made it possible for him to record tracks here and FTP them to Nashville.

Either way, my husband had a wonderful time and I enjoyed seeing him so happy.

Average Jane Visits the Parthenon

One of the few touristy things we did in Nashville was visit their full-scale replica of the Parthenon. The Nashville version was built in 1897 as part of the city's Centennial Exposition. It was originally meant to be a temporary structure, but was restored beginning in the 1920s to the permanent building that exists today.

 

I visited once on a family vacation when I was growing up, but didn't really remember much about it. Since then, they've added an enormous statue of Athena inside the main chamber.

Around the perimeter are casts from some of the marble statuary from the original Parthenon.

They also have scale models of the statuary from the outside of the building.

If you click the photo, you can see more detail of the artwork. There's mesh all around the statuary to keep these guys from nesting there (the pigeons, not the gryphons or the gargoyles):

Nashville's Parthenon is the only full-scale model of the building in the world. Pretty cool, huh?

Average Jane Hits the Road

Last Monday, my husband and I loaded up the car in the morning and took the nine-hour drive to Nashville, Tennessee for the week. Because the rancorous interactions between Xena and Trillian were more than we wanted our cat-sitter to have to deal with, we decided to take Trillian with us.

I booked us a room at the pet-friendly Studio Plus near the Nashville airport, bought Trillian a harness and leash, and we arranged her food, water and a cat box in the back of the Honda Element as we packed the car.

My husband used to have "road cats" who traveled with his various bands when they were on tour. From Trillian's personality, he judged that she would have the temperament to be a good road cat. Some of our friends thought we were crazy, but we put her in her new harness, gave her a nice, comfy blanket on the back seat and took off.

At first she was a little stressed out. She did NOT like riding in the front with us because of all of the scary movement out the windows. It didn't help that it rained almost the entire way there, which made the ride noisy. However, she settled down and chilled out on her seat most of the way, even though I'm sure she was bored and a little freaked out.

Once we got to the hotel, Trillian started to realize she had us all to herself and she had a blast. Here she is suggesting that we read the Nashville Scene to decide what to do that day.

She behaved just as perfectly as we could have hoped...except for Tuesday morning. After she'd slept off the stress of the trip, she woke up at around 5 a.m., realized she wasn't at home, and decided that we all needed to wake up right away to address the situation. She was so insistent that we almost started wondering if it was a, "Lassie, is the hotel on fire?" type of situation. It was not.

Before we went to bed that night, I explained to her that I needed to sleep until at least 7:30 the next morning. On Wednesday morning, she popped up onto the bed right around 7:30 a.m. I got up, played with her a while and got online to read my e-mail and do some work. She went back to bed.

As we traveled around town each day, we'd pop back by the hotel periodically to give her some attention, check her food and water supplies, and let her play fetch with her favorite toy mousies.

It was nice having a kitty with us on vacation. I always miss the cats when we're away.

Trillian was much more relaxed on the way home. She even slept for several hours at a time. We made it home by 7:30 p.m. on Saturday and installed her in the studio rather than throwing her back into the mix with her cat buddies (not Xena, of course).

She was just as good a road cat as my husband had predicted. I can definitely envision us taking her on future road trips.

We did a lot more than just hang out in the room and play with the cat. More Nashville posts to follow all week.

Average Jane's Las Vegas Adventures

It occurs to me that I never really posted about my trip to Las Vegas, even though I scheduled in some fun stuff before and after BlogWorld Expo. Another thing I made a point of not mentioning anywhere in social media, for security reasons, is that my husband went with me.

We got into town on Friday afternoon and grabbed a quick dinner at the Las Vegas Hilton, where we were staying, before taking a cab to see Tower of Power in concert. As you can see from the photos, we had amazing seats.

 

One bittersweet thing about staying at the Las Vegas Hilton is that they'd just closed Star Trek: The Experience a few weeks before we arrived. If it had been open, we totally would have paid to go through it. Here's what part of the attraction looks like shuttered:

On Saturday, I spent all day and evening at the conference and associated social events while my husband hung out with his friend, blues musician Glenn Patrik.

After the conference on Sunday night, Glenn and his wife took us to an amazing Vietnamese restaurant and we spent the evening hanging out at their house talking about music and playing with their dogs.

Our flight back on Monday wasn't until 7:45 p.m., so my husband and I spent the day shopping and goofing around on the Strip. Breakfast was at a cafe inside Paris.

Later that afternoon we went to the Bellagio to visit the Modernist Artists gallery exhibition. First, we took some photos of their autumn-decorated courtyard:

Once we got through airport security, I decided I'd kill some time by finally doing a bit of gambling. I allotted $15 to spend and began playing 25-cent draw poker. I was down to my last five-quarter bet and ready to call it a day when I drew three 7s. On the re-draw I got a fourth 7 and won $62.50! I cashed out immediately and went back to reading my book.

I always enjoy a trip to Las Vegas and this one was no exception. After all, I got married there and renewed my vows there ten years later. It's always going to be "our place," so I'm glad my husband came along.

Average Jane in Las Vegas

Hello all! BlogWorld Expo wrapped up yesterday, but I'm still in Las Vegas for one more day. It was great to meet a bunch of cool new social media people and touch base with old friends. I took copious notes at all the sessions I attended and I'll be posting them and links to the people I met when I get back.

There's one thing about my trip this time that's different than previous trips to Las Vegas that I've taken: my feet don't hurt anywhere near as much as usual.

I've still been doing a lot of walking, but because my footwear of choice these days is Converse Chuck Taylors, I decided to purchase some Dr. Scholl's gel insoles before I left home.

I've always cringed at and made fun of the "Gellin'" commercials, so I'm here to say that I officially eat my words because my feet feel a zillion times better than I had any reason to expect. You'll never get me to agree that the phrase "Gellin' like Magellan" isn't completely stupid, but the product itself definitely works as advertised.

Today my plan is to check my bags with the front desk and spend the day exploring and shopping. I'd like to see if I can find some good stage clothes for my upcoming gigs this weekend (Friday / Saturday).

So far I've spent exactly $1 gambling (20 cents at a time in a penny slot machine - I was up to $5.20 at one point!) and I might go crazy and spend another dollar before I leave town.

I'm looking forward to getting home to snuggle with the cats and sleep in tomorrow before I go back to work on Wednesday. More tomorrow!