Love Among the Coconuts

The hula that stole a heart

A lot of people, Americans and Japanese, go to Hawaii to get married and honeymoon.  We saw a couple of seaside weddings while we were there, and with the consistently perfect weather and bright blue sea on Maui's southwest coast, it's obviously a great choice.  One couple, still remembered fondly almost a hundred years later, did not come to Hawaii and never married, but their lives were a storybook romance.

Today by Keawa'iki Bay on the shore of the Big Island the remains of an estate built in the 1920s, a dozen stone buildings that are only accessible by water, would remind you of Gatsby's if you knew its story.  Francis I'i Brown was not only a championship worldwide golfer, a legislator, and an all-around sportsman, but also a descendant of an advisor to Kings Kamehamea II through IV, and thus a member of the nobility, the ali'i, who still occupy the top level of local society.  His family had once owned a big chunk of Oahu, including Pearl Harbor; the the estate land on Keawa'iki Bay was once royal.  A baseball fan and initmate of film stars, photos exist today of Francis gripping and grinning with Babe Ruth and a young Bob Hope, among dozens of others, and surfing godfather Duke Kahanamoku was a longtime friend.

His already pretty spectacular life was changed forever when he was among the first guests at the new (1927) Royal Hawaiian Hotel at Waikiki.  He caught sight of  popular hula dancer Winona Love who was starring at the grand opening with Johnny Noble's orchestra.  The story goes they fell in love while strolling through the Queen's old coconut palm grove by the hotel.  Winona was also ali'i, her mother being of the royal family, so their match would seem perfect, but her mother supposedly would not approve of marriage.  Poor Gatsby was denied Daisy, too, but like Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, this couple stayed together for the rest of their lives.

Francis I'i Brown

 

Introduced to Hollywood by Francis, Winona was in two short films and taught Delores del Rio to hula for the film "Bird of Paradise" at the request of David O. Selznick.  Their golden koa wood bed survives today, as does a set of eight engraved silver goblets.  They never had children, but relatives and friends recall their sunny lives and legendary parties in many stories; one visitor remembers that a mynah bird greeted Mr. Brown every morning.

Almost too much like a fairy tale to be believed, Winona and Francis had hideaways on the estate like a pavilion on an island in the restored royal fish pond and a snug cottage nearby which is a popular spot for weddings today, now attached to the Mauna Lani resort.  Two championship golf courses there are named after Francis, and the resort's catamaran is the Winona.

If that story isn't enough to give love a good name, I don't know what is.
 
 

5000 Light-Years from Home

We covered a lot of ground while in Maui, but there's a good deal left for next time, if there is one.  Visited Kihei, Maalaea harbor (the GPS led us to a sugar cane field, but the harbor was two blocks away), and especially the old royal capital and port city of Lahaina.  The park behind the courthouse barely contains a huge banyan tree colony, where we incredulously watched a man carry a large silver fish over his shoulder on his way from the dock.  What was he going to do with it?  It would have fit into a minivan, but not into any cooler.  We dived into Hawaiian history in the courthouse museum and saw where King Kahehamea had his motu, or residence, and where the royal taro patch was.  OK, I like this stuff.

 

Actually the national flag of Hawaii, before it was adopted as the state flag

We made sure to stop at the Ma'la Oceanside Tavern, which was very much at the edge of the ocean, a little north of town, where the green turtles that are said to hang out around the rocks outside; they certainly were there.  About a half-dozen of the creatures were going bottoms-up, raising their heads to observe us with big dark eyes, and turning on their sides to give flipper waves.  I did get close to one, within a few feet, in the water in front of our hotel, and he gave me the once-over and a flipper wave, too.

Where the green turtles are

Later that night, we attended a sold-out installment of the Old Lahaina Luau, because how could you miss that?  There were demonstrations beforehand about casting fish nets, beating out bark cloth and drumming.  The dancers, who portrayed succeeding periods in history from the original Tahitians to the missionary period (as you can imagine, there were a lot more clothes in the latter than in the former), were ridiculously young, fit and tan.  Add drums, fire torches and several Mai Tais, and I guarantee a fine evening.

A passionate dedication to quality was clear in various enterprises, beginning with the luau production, and continuing through restaurants such as the Oceanside and the Monkeypod.  We were at the latter, in Wailea, twice and both times the entertainment was excellent.  We did not fail to add to the tip bucket, either.  Our favorite drink there was the No Ka Oi, which translates as "It's the best."  Featuring a lilykoi and honey syrup, it was almost to pretty to... all right, it wasn't.  They sell fast because they disappear fast.

 

Go ahead, have a couple

Other superior spots: Ululani's Shave Ice, purported to be the best on the islands.  Of course we had to try a few others for comparison before finding this one, around the corner from Mick Fleetwood's restaurant (they say he stops in to jam frequently, and is quite eccentric), and yes, it is the best.  It would take months to try all the flavor combinations.  Like gelato in Italy, this is the right stuff.  And, the Ocean Vodka distillery, up about 1000 feet above sea level near Kula, which is on the way to the volcano.  Their goal is not only a to make a superb product, but to be as self-sufficient as possible.  The owners designed and built the building, planted about two dozen varieties of organic sugar cane on several re-graded fields, and do the graphics in-house (the artist, Kai, was our tour guide).  We saw how family members hand-bottle, label and pack.  The containers come from Ontario, but almost everything else is local or done by them.  Sugar cane is normally a destructive, chemical- and machine-intensive enterprise, but they will have none of that.  The fields are not burned, as is usual, and the stands are carefully harvested by hand so that they regrow; the standard method is to tear up the roots and replant for each crop.  Chickens take care of the bugs.  The water used is the essential story, though:  it is drawn from the ocean floor at the edge of the Big Island by a Japanese company, which normally sells it back in Japan for quite a price, since it is perfectly balanced to the chemistry of the human body.  The water originated from Greenland around 2000 years ago, and travelled along the worldwide ocean current, very slow and deep, since it's very cold, to pass by Hawaii.  It's desalinated, of course, but retains the ancient minerals.  The only ancient glacier water, organic sugar cane vodka in the world, as you can imagine.

The old banyan

And the goat farm?  It's almost next door to the distillery, and is also completely organic.  Old surfboards are everywhere, as are hundreds of extremely contented goats.  Their goat cheese is used by the high-end restaurants on the islands and in far-away metropolitan areas of the mainland.  It is exquisite.  Maybe we were distracted by the wide-open scenery or the funny old surfboards or the lingering taste of the samples, but while we were petting the one- to four-week-old babies, one slid his head through the wide mesh of the fence and quietly chewed on N.'s new white shorts.  I didn't think it was possible to have a better day than we were having, but that was a hoot!

Since we couldn't figure out how to just stay so we could keep on learning about and enjoying this island, it was eventually time to say aloha.  Our driver back to the airport was quite a character who had more stories than he could fit in to the 45 minutes, and the trip back was long but problem-free.  We can't imagine now not having gone there at least once.

 

                       




 

The Goat Ate My Shorts! ~and other tales from the Valley Isle

The guilty parties

                 Where the slogan is "Olu pua"  -- "Feeling peaceful with flowers"


I should have immediately remembered something when I bent over and heard the glasses snap in my front pocket.  That thing is that bad stuff comes in threes.  This was only the first and, it turned out, the least.

We took a mile walk to a Wawa -- we were staying in an airport hotel to be in Philadelphia airport on the following morning for our big birthday trip (for N., not me) to Maui, Hawaii -- but no reading glasses there.  So, we resigned ourselves to paying four times too much at the airport newsstand the next day (and so it proved to be, but they had exactly the same ones).  That evening in our room, it was time to get into the big suitcase, and it proved that was not going to happen, since the battered zipper was not budging.  Not only did we need things from it, can you imagine what the security people would have done with a suitcase that would not open for inspection?  Yep, sliced it up like a cantaloupe.

Thank heaven for the new iPad.  With the excellent wi-fi (thanks, Hampton Inn), we located a Kohl's nearby and used the GPS to wind our way through Chester's suburbs to eventually find a nice-sized purple suitcase.  I dispatched the old zipper with some scissors, we re-packed, and I fed the very old and now useless suitcase to the dumpster.  Up very early the next morning, we were locked, loaded and ready to go.

Not so fast:  Bad Thing #3 was up next.  N. found an e-mail that had appeared at 2 a.m. announcing that our flight was cancelled due to the crew's absence.  Now, we'd planned this itinerary carefully, in plenty of time to make good seat choices, with only one layover in Phoenix, and that three hours long to allow for the usual lateness.  Oh, no.  Now we'd have two very short layovers and terrible seats.  We remembered why we'd said we would never fly on US Air again.

Mrs. Rice went medieval on them and got our good seats back, but the short layovers had exactly the effect we had tried to avoid:  due to screwing around on the ground both in Phila and L.A., we missed our flight; the one that counted, to the green isle in the Pacific we'd dreamed about.

I won't even describe what a night in the L.A. airport is like, except that the music became insanely loud between midnight and 5 a.m. when no one was there to absorb it.  The bright lights all stayed on, of course, and the seats all had arms and were fixed, as we were, in a semi-upright position after trying out the hard floor.  Later that morning we found out they had given cots and blankets and a closed room to a number of those on our missed flight, just not us.  Nice.

So we'd gone through all Three Bad Things, and it could only get better from there.  It not only did, it got great. 

We landed in the breezy, partly open-air airport on the eastern side of Maui, the approach to which was beautiful, with all the shades of blue everyone loves in tropic waters.  Our arranged transport to the resort on the far southwestern corner was right there, and we enjoyed talking to the driver, a native Hawaiian, as pleasant and relaxed as you might imagine such a person to be.  We were eager to start learning about our new environment for the next ten days, and he was pleased to help us do so.

The resort was in the Makena area, below the ritzy Wailea, and it was just our style:  not too grand or new, but surrounded by lush nature and the crashing Pacific, quiet and at the end of the road.  The towering Haleakala volcano dominated the view from the front, and the greenery, palms and bright blue ocean was on the back side.  The western half of the island is pretty arid and looks a lot like southern California (in fact, the suburbs of Kihei we toured around in looked exactly like it), while the east is windy, wet and warmly humid.  Surrounded by golf courses, gated homes and a state park, though, the southwestern corner is irrigated and lush with flowering trees (the Plumeria was covered in fragrant white blossoms and the speading Monkeypod was on fire with red) and outside our balcony alone I counted 60 palms.

In Rome, a local once pointed out how different were the sides of the city; to the east of the Tiber, it was "about sex."  To the west, where the Vatican was, he said it was "about power."  And that was all you really needed to know.  Scrape off the American commercial veneer and cars and the overpopulation, and what Maui is about is living in the embrace of nature.  The native woods like koa -- those which are still there, as some important species like sandalwood were stripped away and sold -- are all rich and beautiful deep red and brown.  The sand can be palomino tan, black, and even, in very secluded southern coast coves, green or red.  The red-crested cardinals and mynah birds and darting lizards are fine companions -- Hawaii has no predators or snakes! Coming across the tiny Axis Deer (brought in from Asia as a gift to the King) in the evening is a treat.  I understand feral dogs, pigs and some really nasty centipedes are out in the country, more on the Big Island than Maui, but that was pretty far away.

Maluaka Beach fronted the hotel, but the three beaches of Makena State Park were just down the road, and we explored the black sand one, and both Big (it is -- huge expanse and even bigger waves, called "shore breaks") and Little, accessible over a lava ridge.  Little Beach is about the best tropical beach and view one could imagine.  There are some others on the wild south shore reserved for the more adventurous, accessed by raft, kayak or boat.  We could only go as far as our new rental Mustang covertible could, but that was more than enough.

 

Wish we had a view like this back home
 

Of course we had to do touristy things, with long breaks alternating between pool and ocean.  First we attended the last night, Sunday, of the Film Festival and saw "Cuban Fury," starring my fave Rashida Jones, outdoors at the Grand Wailea.  I tried a drink made with native P'ua Vodka, made from pineapples (they had two bars!) which I highly recommend, and it was a lovely evening.  No stars showed up (last night and all that; back to Hollywood, I guess), but those in the sky were bright and looked cool in the ocean breeze. The next day, we drove back toward the airport and the main commercial hub of Kahului, stopping in the bohemian town of Pa'ia where we made one of those serendipitous discoveries that happen every once in a while.  We had seen an episode of the cable TV show "Buying Hawaii" which featured a coconut wood home designed and built in Bali.  Wouldn't you know we were looking in storefronts and found the real estate office that was the dealership for that unusual product.  We should have stopped at the legendary Fish House, but it was too early.  From there we made a mighty effort to tackle the long drive down the twisty, narrow Road to Hana (as it's called, always in caps) but after dodging sudden rains, way too much traffic and the tension of coming head-on to trucks and minivans on half of the 56 one-lane bridges, we turned around at the Garden of Eden and headed back.  We did see the falls there and a valley looking out to the sea which was featured in the helicopter scene in "Jurassic Park," which was, I guess, worth the hair-raising trip.

Our next trip to the interior, or "upcountry," involved some irresistible baby goats who weren't quite educated on what goats should eat yet, and a visit to an astonishing distillery.

The "Jurassic Park" scene

To be continued tomorrow...





 

Yesterday's Gone

Looking at some construction projects over the past few years, I wonder about the persistence of obsolete technologies.  A hotel built alongside Interstate 81 was made of wood 2x4s, insulated with fiberglas batts, and sheathed with that oriented strand board stuff, topped with the usual shingle or rubber roof.  It's like all the far superior materials that have been developed were not known or available, I guess because we have no ships, trucks, internet or technical schools. 

Single roofs are particularly out of date, as well as being prone to ugliness due to limestone having been substituted for asbestos, which grows that black algae like crazy.  Metal roofs today aren't your grandparents rusty, uninsulated galvanized stuff anymore.  Not only will they last an incredibly long time, they will save you on homeowner's insurance and damaging leaks due to storms.  The best deal is the photovoltaic sheets you see being applied in the above picture, which will generate electricty with no bulky panels installed.  A few years ago the township built a big new government center, and I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see they bypassed this option (and the roofs are huge) for shingles.  Imagine what their electric bill would have been compared with what they will pay every month for the life of the building as it is.

The aforementioned 2x4s themselves are easy to use but poor and trouble-prone as framing members.  In places like Georgia and California where termites destroy millions of dollars worth of housing every year, you'd think steel construction would have gotten a good foothold a while ago.  A steel and concrete house will laugh off termites and storms, and as global warming encourages both to go wild, it would be wise to leave the rotting, weak 2x4 to history and move on.

And what's on the outside -- on the sides and back of big new houses, and most all of townhouses and the other more affordable ones, that would be vinyl.  People sick of faded, dented aluminum, dangerous old asbestos or continual-maintenance wood siding embraced vinyl like mad.  We have it all over.  I hate it.  The shady or north-facing areas grow green algae, and it has been permanently stained with spider pesticide (when we had an insane infestation around the garage lights) and my mistaken attempt to clean off splashed deck stain with lacquer thinner.  Plus, the more I think of being clad in plastic, the more I want to see it gone.  Today's far superior replacement is fiber-cement board, sold under the brand name of Hardie.  It will only creep into use, however, since it's more expensive and more difficult -- and very dusty -- to cut.  It's painted on site or predone, and not only lasts so much longer, looks better, but it won't curl up and die if your grill gets too close.  Admit it, you've done that at least once.  So, add vinyl siding to the list of technologies which have had their day but are so yesterday.

Fossil fuels have inarguably reached their peak of production (we've been in a plateau since about 2005) while the population, and thus demand, skyrocket upward.  Time for a new approach, don't ya think?  Electric automobiles are the metal roofs of the transportation sphere.  Tesla's 85KW model and its free supercharging stations not only look like the future, it really looks too easy.  We don't always need to make it hard though by refusing to adapt and change.  (Electric bikes, scooters, motorcycles and small commuter cars are already available and work just fine, for those who don't have $73,000 for the high-power Tesla).

 

Harder Than It Has To Be

We have had our car for seven years and 95,000 miles.  After all that familiarity, there are a number of buttons with symbols or nonsense words on them that I still don't know what they do.  Fortunately, you do not have to wade through a menu list to turn the radio on; you can still push the big button.  But there are about four groups you can pre-set radio stations to -- why?  Like most people, I only have three stations pre-set on the first group, and only listen to one station very occasionally.  Who knows how many stations we can receive here, but they're all junk, and even my favorite one has too much jabber in recent years.  All electronics are massively over-featured.  I sold our bread-maker on Amazon after one use; it had a small, almost unreadable computerized menu to tell it what to do and it never did the simple thing I tried to instruct it to do (i.e., start).  I have happily junked VCRs by the dozen because they too had extensive menus, using words in obscure and arbitrary ways to, it seems, prevent you from doing the only two things you wanted to do with it: record or re-play.

I understand local or amateur signage won't be of the best quality, but why this:  recently, on boarding an airplane, I searched the usual place for the seat numbers, below the latch of the overhead bins, and found only faint smudges of tiny grey type, completely unreadable.  Meanwhile impatient people are doing unpleasant things to my backside with their enormous sharp-edged luggage.  Designers just don't understand that is the very first thing you need to determine upon boarding, and have only a half-second to do it.  Much of the population has below-perfect vision; some are height-challenged.  A label with dark letters in an clear font of a useful size would solve this problem and cost no more.  Why make a routine task impossible?

Appliances and clothing are now made to sell all over the world, so manufacturers have gone from short, clear words to symbols.  They are usually tiny and useless, since no one knows what most of them mean.  Speaking of tiny: we recently had to get a serial number off a large Sony product; it was on a sticker, with numbers the size of sand grains.  There was enough room on the back of the TV to inscribe Hamlet, and serial numbers should not be removable.

Does anyone know what all those cable TV remote buttons, which are shaped and color-coded in wildly random fashion, do?  Ours has fifty.  The ones you use all the time are not labelled, so you have to find them by experimentation.  It is fun to see what comes up on the screen, though.

We recently went to a specialty farm with high hopes of cute animal entertainment and could not find out how to sign up for, or where to be, for the tour.  There were at least 20 signs with long lists of prizes won by their products with all the dates and specifics, and some so dense with information it was not clear what the sign was about at all.  I was not the only wandering around trying to figure out how to get started.

And it is pretty amusing that in order to stop your computer, you have to click on START.  Talkin' to you, Microsoft.













 

Time to Wonder

Lone Wolf the Younger, last chief of the Kiowa

Tomorrow I'll finish up work on Zach's upstairs bathroom, and I must say I've enjoyed aiding the contractor in bringing both baths to a fine-looking, and fully functional, state.

Both walking around outdoors and working on inside or outside projects provide lots of time to let your thoughts wander around; a really productive mental time, unlike watching television (especially news).  Not so good is doing this while driving, which can shorten, or complicate, your life quickly.  I think you can solve problems at some deeper subconscious level at the same time as your hands and forebrain are busy with the tasks and ruminations, so along with the exercise, it's a sort of triple play.

Well, you can work on your own questions, be they little or larger in scope.  Ideas about fixing state- or nation-wide ones might be developed but, sigh, you know that will go nowhere.  Bringing them up in a casual conversation will usually kill the room's mood, so we'll keep them to our self.  And you, unfortunate reader.

  -- Schools' dilemmas (and dumb local crime) fill up most of the newspaper, and despite most people agreeing on some solutions, year after year nothing is done.  This year the legislature is wasting time on a Republican's bill to place the "In God We Trust" motto in each school building.  This is so important that other members are suggesting amendments and coordinating between committee, the House and the Senate.  Beyond silly, we know, but keeping the "base" stirred up is what they think they're there for.  We have 67 counties, but 501 school districts in Pennsylvania.  It doesn't take a genius to figure out that is expensively redundant.  The school districts straddle all sorts of township and county borders, so a new resident would need quite a while to figure things out; the gerrymandered congressional districts are a nightmare no one can figure out except the dedicated hard-core GOP party members who never miss a primary election and thus keep sending the inept personnel who fill said legislature.

  -- The police departments here are based in towns, cities, boroughs and whatever instead of being county-wide.  Imagine how much more efficient a county-based single administration would be, not only in terms of equipment and administrative expertise, but resources for crime solving.  But noooo....

 -- My jaw dropped when I saw the 21st century urban transit -- a slim modern train, not a lurching bus -- in an episode of "House Hunters" set in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.  We send thousands of multimillion-dollar helicopters and vehicles to Afghanistan, but can't have clean, fast, convenient public transportation.

  --  The folks in the Ukraine would recognize the fracas that Clive Bundy has stirred up for about 25 years in Nevada:  armed nuts getting away with violating the law and defying civil order itself.  He's been fined since 1993 for grazing cattle on protected Federal land, refusing to pay both those and any grazing fees.  If you tried to occupy a landlord's property for free, he and Fox News would call you a moocher.  Even a neighbor rancher ("he's just a lawbreaker") and the Nevada Cattlemen's Association don't support Clive's insane cowboy clown posse! 

And that made me think of how all that land became Federal property. 

Palo Duro canyon, end of the road for the Comanche

After their defeat at Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, in 1874, the Kiowas and Comanches were forced onto two Oklahoma reservations.  Fed up with losing their land (an empire consisting of most of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and eastern Colorado), their children being dragged into government schools, and themselves being forced into becoming farmers and Christians, respected chief Lone Wolf took it to the Supreme Court (where justice, then as now, goes to die), but lost the case in 1903.  By 1906, their last refuge, 480,000 acres on the reservation, was opened up to white settlement.  The decision against Lone Wolf et al was based on a change of definition of the tribes' status as sovereign nations to wards of the state, which meant Congress could abrogate any treaty if that was in the national interest.  Thus, a formal legal justification to take any and all of the natives' land and resources, especially if there were railroad rights-of-way to be established or any gold to be found (as the Cherokees and Sioux had found out earlier).

The history of the vast western U.S. looks like nothing better than seagulls on the beach:  one just stealing from the other.  I'm going to think about something else, like whether to use the shorter or the taller baseboard...
















  












 

Through the Three States of Tennessee

 

Jo on the microscopic stage at Tootsie's

We spent Easter weekend in Memphis, catching up with family, stopping by Nancy's childhood home, scooping up some barbeque, and spending a pleasant Sunday evening in the revitalized Overton Square with cousin Jeff.  Daughter Allison will be graduating (magna cum laude, no less) early this month from the University of Memphis, so we wished her well at this pivotal point.

West Tennessee is flat and you can still find cotton fields not far from town.  Speaking of cotton culture, the historical setting of Roots is in the northwestern corner near the town of Ripley.  As we travelled toward Nashville, Middle TN is defined by gentle hills and denser green.  Before we unloaded our considerable road bulk (how can two people need so much?) at the luxurious Opryland hotel complex, we stopped by Jack White's Third Man studio and record shop.  The antique photo booth restored by TV's "American Restoration" crew was there, along with some strange devices and animatronic figures that would surely be scary in the dark.  I was hoping their LP reissue of bluesman Charley Patton's first recordings (1929) would be in stock -- having seen it in Rolling Stone -- and it was, and was soon mine, along with a reproduction 45 of Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire," in honor of the late, great Joe Sheets, whose version played in my old Grove Ave. apartment in Richmond, in front of the giant beer can pyramid, will never be forgot.

 

Opryland hotel

N. had been to Opryland many years ago, and I was eager to see the plant-filled atrium, which turned out to be three separate atria, joined by walkways, bridges and an internal river.  We sprang for a room with a balcony overlooking all this lushness, and were not disappointed.  Could have stayed put happily for a few days, but we needed to head out and see the real and the tourist Nashville, which were respectively, Music Row and Lower Broadway.  There are more music-related businesses like publishers, studios, equipment people, and producers than you can imagine, but strangely, we hardly saw a human being.  Maybe everydown was downtown at the Country Music Hall of Fame or something.  We did pay homage to the legendary RCA Studio B, where 35,000 songs were recorded, 200 of them by Elvis.  It has not been Disneyfied, and remains its compact 1950s self.  You can not, unfortunately, visit it without being on a tour from the aforementioned Hall of Fame.  But it was memorable to be there.

Lower Broadway is the three-block strip of honkytonks and boot shops stuck alongside the old Ryman Auditorium, and it was quite lively for a weekday before tourist season.  I especially wanted to walk the alley beside the Ryman where Loretta Lynn tore into the woman who was in the parked Cadillac with her husband many years ago, and all the rest of the legends were in some state of awe or intoxication many times over the decades.  It was clean, newly paved, and probably didn't look like it did when all the craziness was happening.  We've really got to go back and see a show at the Ryman, though; it's supposed to have great acoustics and certainly has a lot of positive energy.

Tootsie's Orchid Lounge backs up to the Ryman alley and is the pinnacle of funky.  At least three acts were or had just played; you can hear music in Nashville anywhere and anytime.  The level of quality is as high as you would expect.  The walls are covered by pictures decayed by time and cigarette smoke, and I didn't recognize but three of them.  This wasn't Planet Hollywood; it was the real sticky, gritty thing.  And then on to Gruhn's Guitar Shop, which has moved away from the crowds on Broadway several miles.  Once again, I didn't recognize most of the instruments:  if you want a rare vintage one, this is the place to go.  My guitar-collector friends should visit it once in their lives -- should be one of the top ten in any music fan's bucket list.

 

Gruhn's guitar porn

 

Back at Opryland, we parked next to a fleet of Mustangs on a nationwide 50th anniversary trek.  The hotel itself was mostly full of business people meeting in the Rhode Island-size conference rooms; much better company than hordes of summer Griswolds.  They kept the bars busy.  Speaking of which, we enjoyed a pear martini, or two, by the cascading waterfalls and rested our tired legs.  On our way east to Knoxville and the rocky spine of western Virgnia to get home the next day, we stopped in Centennial Park to wander around the full-size reproduction Parthenon (if you're old enough, you remember this from the Robert Altman movie).  The mountains around Knoxville bring to mind the torturous Civil War campaigns through here which led to the downfall of Atlanta, but it was all sun and green, with purple flowering Pawlonia trees everywhere.  Each of the three Tennessees has its own charms, but for excitement in the air it's hard to beat Music City; we had hardly seen or done enough despite long days and many miles.

Despite the indignity of losing a tire and limping home on the spongy "doughnut" spare, our dusty, bug-smacked Honda did well, achieving a record 29 mpg, and we became addicted to the ease of GPS on the easy-to-read (and hear) iPad. I'm surprised Siri didn't say "Ya'll come back now!"