I've just finished writing captions for the photos from my trip last week down south with Draplin and need to go to bed. Would've liked to have had it posted sooner, so it'd be more relevant, but it's still just as interesting as ever for those who didn't know about the trip or haven't read Draplin's account on his own site. (Also, I've been addicted to watching the BBC comedy The Office DVDs lately). I won't go into great detail here, because the captions give you a pretty good idea of what interested me and what we saw.
Overall impressions:
New Orleans is an amazing city. Really alive in a fundamental way that Chicago isn't...a feeling I've only really gotten in New York City. Hard to describe, but a very satisfying mix of beautiful and mysterious old stuff, cutting-edge new stuff, big-city stuff, and southern mystique. People dancing on the sidewalks for no apparent reason, just hanging out everywhere. Lots of porches, lots of secrets, lots of music, lots of food, warm temperatures year round, those swamps in the rural areas, cajun/zydeco music, the blues, jazz... Bourbon street is obnoxious and everything you've seen on TV, some of the best and worst of the city in a few blocks. Too much drunken idiocy for my taste, and that puke smell. My only complaint about the city is that it's too spread out in a weird way and kind of perplexing for the uninitiated. Not a nice clean NSEW grid like Chicago. I'll go so far as to say I like all of Louisiana I've seen, it was my favorite state in the trip.
The Mississippi Delta area is also nothing to sneeze at.
Plenty of juke joints and little towns full of buildings to broken down and colorful and weird that they are almost incomprehensible to my yankee midwestern mind. It's really like being in another world, knowing what it's like to be an alien...until you drive out and just see miles and miles of agricultural fields. The difference is just that the crops are stuff like cotton, sugarcane and tobacco instead of corn or soybeans. It's cool, epecially cotton. The Natchez Trace Parkway comes highly recommended, the bit of it that we drove was impeccably manicured and picturebook perfect.
Didn't see a hell of a lot of Tennessee...
But Memphis is always a good place to spend some time. Mystery Train. The rest of the western part of the state seemed fairly unremarkable, as did western Kaintuck, which we cut through by nightfall. Love the goddamn accents though.
Missoura is better than Illinois in physical geography (most of the time).
Illinois is oppressively boring once outside of Chicagoland, with very few exceptions. Never been down by Carbondale, but what I've seen largely sucks. Missouri has some hills, and it has them old Ozarks, and Branson for Christ's sake. And Ste. Genevieve...I think Draplin and I both fell in love with that town south of St. Louis on the river. Maybe a little too done-up for tourists with all the crafts and wine and little shops, but attractive in a very real way, not all repainted and architecturally reinvented in some perversion of "the good old days." Lots of cracking paint, it looked lived-in and I appreciate that.
St. Louis was unimpressive the second time as the first.
I don't care much for the downtown, but East St. Louis offered a sad and fascinating glimpse at yet another poor and crumbling midwestern industrial town. "Man, fuck your mother" indeed. We were short for time (I had to get back to work) so we had to leave the river at St. Louis and haul ass up uber-boring Interstate 55 to Chicago, seeing bits of old Route 66 along the way; now relegated to "frontage road" for an ugly superhighway. What a cruel fate.
Anyway, here are the photos from our trip from New Orleans to St. Louis, October 04. Hope you enjoy them. I had a fucking blast on the trip and only wish Ryan could've joined us, but it was short notice and sometimes a man just can't get off work.
Posted by pj at October 27, 2004 12:58 AMChrist, man.
Wish I could have been along.
A little disappointed that you opted to not re-visit the "Admiral Benbow," however.
r