Westward Ho!

Maps, They Don't Love You Like I Love You, Part Deux

Frontier Airlines hub-and-spoke style route map, you are v. v. pretty.

APA '07

The nor'easter is in full swing -- with wind, rain, and ice bearing down on Philadelphia, and conference attendees who've been promised a most "walkable" city are lining up in droves to catch a taxi five blocks back to their hotel. I just left early because my toasty room at the Sheraton suddenly seemed very inviting; I nearly fell asleep in the comforting darkness of a convention center screening room where an Ed Bacon film festival was going on (mostly his 1983 ULI documentaries), having dosed myself up on Robitussin a few hours prior. I bought a t-shirt before I took off.

Conference is going OK; the highlight so far was RFK Jr.'s keynote address, crucifying the Bush administration and all the corporate polluters that Dubya hired to run the various federal environmental offices (run them into the ground, that is). Kennedy is very clear on who his enemies are and he's not afraid to name names. Frankly, I worry for his safety.

Over the past few days I've been gravitating towards the transportation/infrastructure sessions, including panels on airports, bus shelters, short-haul rail travel across megaregions, and sidewalk building and maintenance. There's been a nice assortment of of planning books on sale -- some of which I'll make a mental note to look for used on Amazon, although I did order a copy of a former professor's book through the on-site APA display.

We've been eating well too: last night was a reception where the Yuengling and Tastykakes flowed freely, and on Friday night we had great Senegalese food near the Penn campus. Thumbs way up on the Reading Terminal Market -- which, incidentally, is across from the erstwhile Reading Railroad station, now the convention center.

I'm In An Airport

LAX, Gate 42A, 5:02 a.m., and I can't believe I just paid for a T-Mobile wireless day pass... well, it was a better deal than the one-hour access. I'm on my way to the big-kahuna APA Conference in Philly. See ya there. I may forge a pathetic attempt at liveblogging.

I'm In An Airport

In Burbank, to be exact, looking at the mountains outside the windows at the JetBlue terminal. This airport is an absolute pleasure compared to LAX -- it's totally non-stressful, and there are some cool aviation-history display cases on the way to the gates, and there was hardly anyone in line at the security checkpoints and I breezed right through with two hours to spare before my departure time.

Still, I remember last time I flew into Burbank, and the baggage carousels had crowds around them eight deep as people from multiple arriving flights fought their way towards their luggage. It's a very small airport, and it's probably experiencing growing pains with all the spillover from overloaded LAX.

Admittedly, getting here today was costlier than I would have liked. My M.O. was to take a cab to Union Station and grab the Metrolink to Union Station, but I had just missed my train by a few minutes once my cab arrived, and there wasn't one leaving for at least three hours. There was a Metrolink to the city of Burbank that would have cost me $5, but that wasn't due to leave for another couple of hours either -- and I worried about not having enough time to check in and go through security. So I ended up taking a cab from Union Station to Bob Hope Airport, which lightened my wallet pretty significantly, but I guess I didn't have much of a choice. Next time I'll leave earlier. Oh, and I bought breakfast when I got here, and now I'm even poorer: $10 and change for a breakfast sandwich and a Diet Dr Pepper. Ouch.

I'll be in New York for the next month, by the by. I'm done with my fall semester and I'm looking forward to a nice long break. I plan to sleep a lot and watch as much of my parents' digital cable as possible. I'll check in here for sure.

Two Items

1) I saw an odd MTA house ad on the bus today. It was pimping its website's intermittently useful Trip Planner. Nothing odd about that, but the sample destination address the ad showed was "Fairfax/La Brea." I know they don't mean to imply that Fairfax and La Brea intersect, seeing how the two avenues are both north/south (and don't have a little arc intersecting them the way Glendale Blvd/Silver Lake Blvd do) and are separated by at least ten smaller streets at any given longitude (rough estimate: I spent 5 seconds looking at GoogleMaps).

I'm still new here, so forgive me, but if "Fairfax/La Brea" is one of those cutesy real-estate neighborhood designations I haven't heard it yet -- but it could just be a lazy conflation of the Fairfax District and Park La Brea.

I just typed "Fairfax/La Brea" into the Trip Planner with Union Station as the starting address, with a departure time of Sunday at 10:00 AM. It recognized Union Station and for the former it came up with "NO LOCATION" and this message: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'brea-ycoord) AS subdwalk, hdsgn1 AS dhs, MIN(freqx) AS dfr.

2) I'm doing the AIDS Walk next Sunday, in and around West Hollywood. Here's my donation page -- the proceeds go to AIDS Project Los Angeles and other HIV/AIDS nonprofits. (The walk's 6.2 miles, and yes, we cross both Fairfax and La Brea Avenues -- on foot, so who needs that stinky Trip Planner anyway?)

On a more serious note, HIV/AIDS is still a real crisis in this country (and in the larger world), despite the deafening silence on the issue from career politicians and the mainstream media. It's great that events like the AIDS Walk(s) do their share in keeping the epidemic in the spotlight, albeit for short bursts of time. I wish more could be done (I wish we could wipe the whole f-in' thing out; I also wish I could go back in time and prevent Ronald Reagan from being born), but the total monies raised by this walk will go a very long way indeed -- toward research, education, treatment, counseling, advocacy, and fulfilling such basic needs as groceries for HIV-infected people and their families. Please donate a few dollars if you can. (That link again.)

Riding on the Metro-oh-oh

In the several months I've been in Los Angeles, I think today was the first day that the Metro bus service actually made me throw up my hands and silently scream "Gah! It's 2006! Figure your shit out!" I left my just-southwest-of-downtown apartment at 10:45 AM to catch a 1:10 movie (the riotously funny Idiocracy) at the Arclight, and finally got to Sunset and Ivar at about 1:01. I was stressing over it because I'd bought my ticket online and didn't want to have to eat the eleven bucks and catch a later show. Not only did I end up taking multiple buses to get to my destination (I didn't take the Red Line, for reasons too boring to explain), but one bus that seemed fine to me mysteriously went out of service and kicked everyone off, leaving us waiting a half-hour for the next bus. Also, ugh, traffic. And constant red lights. And a guy in a wheelchair (I'm normally very sympathetic to the plight of the other-abled, but not today).

But you know what? It's a holiday weekend. Every single time I've stuck around in NYC over a major holiday weekend, I've had the same thing -- trains and buses going out of service or not showing up at all, me playing tour guide for my out-of-town friends and feeling embarrassed that one of the most complex and consistently reliable public transit systems in the world should malfunction just when I had a great opportunity to show it off to people. There was one July 4th weekend where a group of us had a Warriors-like adventure getting from uptown Manhattan down to Coney Island -- usually this trip doesn't take more than an hour and a half even with the slow slog of rush hour, but thanks to various breakdowns and no-shows and re-routes, it took about three hours. What gives?? If the city wants to up its tourist dollars, shouldn't it, like, not pull the plug on service at a time when there's a strong likelihood of people from other cities coming in for a visit? In order for them to generate all that revenue you hope they'll generate, they need to be able to get to their upmarket urban-retail-and-entertainment-complex and family-friendly greenspace McFunstertown. And it's not like any residents would want to go anyplace within city limits to enjoy their time off, nope nope.

So take heart, Angelenos, it's not just you. Remember that all the good drivers, conductors, and coordinator-types are probably lying naked on a beach in Aruba right now, and that holiday workers are typically the bottom of the employee barrel. Things'll be better on Tuesday... but for now, if you don't have a car, you're screwed. (Eh, it's fine; I have a lot to read this weekend anyway.)

Flickr set: Lake of the Ozarks

Some of my favorite states are the ones that aren't rigidly northeast, southeast, southwest, northwest, or even what we think of as "midwest" (which can mean "west of Pittsburgh" or "north of Kentucky" or "east of Colorado," with some general agreement about where it all begins and ends but no consensus). I love the mid-Atlantic/Delmarva/Chesapeake states (New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia) because they're neither New York, New England, nor (strictly) the south, but driving through the farms and swamps of lower New Jersey, you can really start to feel the eastern seaboard's southward gravitational tug. Historically, the Mason-Dixon line starts along the bottom border of Pennsylvania, and if the line continued east out to the ocean instead of taking a downward right-angle, about a third of New Jersey would be "the south." And many people jokingly refer to the red-headed stepchild northern-bordering the MDL as "Pennsyltucky."

Parts of the mid-south are weird like that too -- the aforementioned Kentucky is directly below Indiana and Ohio (either far-west northeast rust belt or far-east midwest, depending on where you live), but Kentucky is invariably considered either midwest or mid-south. (Is there an upper south?) (If "Pennsyltucky" is rust-belt, is Kentucky itself at all rust-belt?) Missouri shares a border with Kentucky, and faces a similar identity crisis. As does Kansas, although much of that stems from confusion between Kansas City, KS and Kansas City, MO. And thanks to Route 66 running through Illinois, the "west" arguably starts way back in Chicago. Another thing that begins in Chicago is Amtrak's Southwest Chief line, which eventually hooks up with the right-of-way of the Santa Fe Trail, starting in... Missouri.

All this is leading up to Neato Coolville's Flickr photoset called Lake of the Ozarks, taken at the Lake Ozark amusement park and around central Missouri. Motel signs, muffler men, Indian kitsch, and best of all, the Jesse James Hideout. Reminds me of The Thing (Mystery of the Desert!) in Arizona. America is so beautifully bizarre; every time I get angry at the state of things and ponder fucking off to Chile or something, I see pictures like these and instead become really sentimental about the can-do spirit and warped creativity that made this country what it is.

Feasting On Asphalt

In a previous post I gave a shout-out to the then-upcoming Food Network miniseries Feasting On Asphalt (starring Alton Brown and his production crew riding tricked-out motorcycles across the USA). Westward Ho is a blog about California and the West (as I see them through my NYC-tinted lens), and a little more than half of Feasting takes place west of St. Louis, so I feel it's appropriate to give a rundown on what I've seen so far (although the first two episodes focus on the Southeast and Mid-South and Midwest, the second installment does leave us a bit west of the start of the Mother Road, Route 66, the gateway drug to Manifest Destiny). The show eventually ends up in Los Angeles, which I'll definitely cover.

Two episodes in, Feasting is the best travel special (or series) the Food Network has done (and they do a lot). It's got Alton's trademark historical bent and pursuit of deep knowledge, but the editing and camerawork is less frenetic and kidlike than Good Eats.

It's very charming -- the premise is that he wants to travel the "old" roads of the United States, the pre-interstate ones, and look for the last vestiges of that kind of road food -- and he goes from the typical soul-food places and lovingly restored railroad-car diners (getting that out of the way in the first episode) to scenes where he's munching on just-picked kudzu and zooming the camera into bee-infested honey trees. He samples the vending machine coffee at an Indiana Greyhound station (it's awful, he says) and talks about vended food and Automats, and eats canned cling peaches and cottage cheese with bluehairs at a YWCA tea room (it's great, he says) to track the development of dining options for ladies traveling alone. There's a whole segment on how Duncan Hines, well before he started the cake-mix juggernaut, was the inventor and lone food-service critic of the AAA-style hospitality guide -- any restaurant listed in Hines' guide bore his personal stamp of quality assurance. Alton holds up a tattered book called Adventures In Good Eating, and doesn't bother to point out an obvious connection. But there's a sense of pure joy that he's got this link to America's forgotten past right there in his hands. He's like Huell Howser that way. (The obsessive-compulsive Marc Summers would just flash a fake smile and go wash his hands at the end of the take.)

Alton's honest, too: If he doesn't like something he tries, he'll tell us, even if it's not in the presence of the person who prepared it. I loved his theory on why foods like fried brain sandwiches have survived in tiny ethnic enclaves of the USA while never managing to imperialize the rest of the country -- it may be an acquired taste to broader American audiences, but it's a beloved staple of that culture's culture (in this case, Germany), and they're probably proud to hold on to a tradition that n00bz don't wanna get with.

I admit that I cheered when Alton went to Ted Drewes (the custard stand in St. Louis, along the eastern edge of the former Route 66); I insisted on stopping there when a friend and I road-tripped cross-country last year, and the custard was indeed pretty revelatory. Alton says that when he announced his plans for Feasting on Asphalt on the Food Network's website, he got hundreds of letters beseeching him to check the shop out. But Ted Drewes ALWAYS gets talked about on these Food Network things, and if AB had known that, maybe he would have kept going, in search of something more blue-highway and obscurantist. Seriously though, that's great custard, and you sorta have to bring up Rte. 66 on shows like these.

Downsides: As on Good Eats and the play-by-play of Iron Chef America, Alton has a nasty habit of saying "culinary" and "very very" too many times in one episode. (Some TV-forum dwellers have criticized him for all the "uh"s that pepper his sentences, but I LOVE that; it gives the narration an off-the-cuff, professorial feel, like he's mulling over his words rather than merely reading cue cards.)

Another negative, which I think was more of a problem in the first episode than the second, is his somewhat rockist insistence that this early 20C road cuisine is "real" American food -- e.g., denigrating one of his stops for now serving tuna niçoise and Starbucks coffee instead of sticking to its roots as a homespun, owner-operated, shining beacon of cheap, reliable sustenance. But he has a point when he says that if your restaurant is exceptionally good at one thing, it shouldn't stray too far from that basic concept -- it's just good business sense, and virtually all of our most beloved fast-food establishments became famous for adhering to this rule.

Longest Continuously Named Roads

The longest continuously named road in the U.S. isn't Sunset Boulevard, although it can sometimes feel that way when stuck in traffic on the 2 bus. Sunset is 22 miles, narrowly missing the big win. I can't find a better resource on the length of New York's Broadway than Mapquest -- but if you follow it from Battery Park ("1 Broadway") to where Broadway becomes the Albany Post Road (adjacent to the Rockefeller State Park in Tarrytown), it's 33.62 miles. However, it bears the names "North Broadway" and "South Broadway" a few times in between, and is better-known as U.S. Route 9 for much of the trip. Sounds fishy to me. The real title belongs to Denver's Colfax Avenue, at 26 miles.

I mention this because my friend charltonlido, who lives in London, speculated that the 11-mile Whitehall Road was the longest such road in England. (Amateurs, I thought, until another acquaintance offered "Peterborough-Grantham Great North Road: about 31 miles." Some debate followed over whether citing the entire 409-mile length of the A1 would be cheating.)

Edit: Sepulveda goes 31.7 miles without changing its name. Take that, Denver!