Typical Day on the Road

June 2007

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June 1

Can it really be time to start the summer season already? It must be, because here we were returning to the Marion Co. Library in Yellville, AR to kick off the summer reading programs. After that, we drove on to the site of tomorrow's show, Mountain Home, where we had arranged to park for the night on the library lot. Took a bike ride downtown, where a musical event was in progress in the courthouse square. In front of the building, a hillbilly band played to an audience of about 300. In the rear of the building, a saxophonist played jazz to a smaller, but equally appreciative audience.

June 2

Performed at the Mountain Home Library for the third time (as best we can recall). Mountain Home is listed among the "100 Best Places to Retire in America", according to the book of the same name (a copy of which is displayed prominently in the library) and everyone in town, naturally, seems aware of that fact. There does seem to be a certain richness of diversity here, although there are also a few Confederate flags on pickups. (One bumper sticker appropriated Marin Luther King's slogan "I Have A Dream", which appeared next to a picture of the White House with a Confederate flag flying over it. No kidding!)

We hung around the library for a while working online and waiting for a thunderstorm to clear up. In the meantime, we had a ball watching a DVD of The Three Stooges.

June 3

Back to the Yellville area, where we outfitted ourselves at Dillard Family Outfitters and floated 10 miles down the Buffalo River, starting near Maumee (formerly an actual town until the zinc mines closed) down to Dillard's Ferry (formerly an actual ferry until the bridge was built.) What a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon. It was worth all the trouble just to see Zephyr's kayak capsize!

Drove on to Fayetteville.

June 4

At the RV park in Fayetteville, we burrowed in to enjoy the air conditioning and get some work done. Except Dennis actually napped for a couple of hours, the first nap he's taken in years--obviously, he was feeling a bit out of kilter. But he recovered in time for an early evening bike ride on the ridiculously short bike trail (about a mile) leading to downtown Fayetteville, where he came to the aid of two elderly ladies whose car had stalled.

June 5

After doing laundry, we headed on to the Fayetteville Library, where we did some computer work.

June 6

Performed at the Fayetteville Library for about the 7th or 8th year. Normally we do 2 performances here, but this year there was a scheduling problem; school is not out yet, so there was not enough expected audience to justify 2 shows, and we did only one.

Spent the evening tucked into books at Barnes & Noble.

June 7

Fayetteville Panera in the morning for the online-ness, then to the Bank to deposit our long-awaited first earnings of the summer, then off to Rogers for our third appearance at the library. Our show included only the third performance ever of "The Fourth Question", and it got a very good response.

Started driving southeast, and pulled over for the night in Mountain View, a little folk heritage capital where an outdoor musical extravaganza of some kind was just letting out. During the night there was a weather extravaganza, with another one of those dynamic thunderstorms common to this part of the country at this time of year.

June 8

Pulled out of Mountain View after failing to find a place with wi-fi easily accessible. Noticed one building in town with a "pickers' porch", where musicians were invited to hang out and strum their instruments; we wondered if that invitation would extend to Zephyr and his punk electric guitar.

Drove on to visit Dennis' parents, who live in Arkansas. His brother and sister-in-law also dropped in for a while.

June 9

Drove to the little town of Black Rock to perform for the Lawrence Co. Library (our third time) at Black Rock High School. Normally, the programs are held in Walnut Ridge, the largest town in the county.

Back at the home of Dennis' parents, we saw his other brother who had dropped by for a while. And we learned that only an hour earlier, a man whom Dennis knew many years ago was killed by a train while driving across a track where no gate was in place. The ironic thing is that only yesterday, Dennis had commented about how dangerous such crossings are when we drove past it.

June 10

Said goodbye to Dennis' parents, then drove all the way back up into the hills in northwestern Arkansas (where we'd just come from a couple of days ago) for tomorrow's shows. More thunderstorms tonight, but we were safely inside the RV watching DVD's of the old "Burns and Allen" TV show (it should have been Allen and Burns, since Gracie was, hands down, the real comic genius) and the Steven Seagall movie "Fire Down Below" which we watched only because Dennis worked on the film back in L.A. ten years ago, and we'd never seen it. Big Deal. The movie was every bit as lackluster as we'd always figured.

June 11

Performed for the triple play circuit of libraries in Eureka Springs, Berryville and Green Forest, for the third (or is it fourth?) time. The first half of the day was rather rainy, and this was the first time we'd actually had to unload our bikes in the rain during the entire year and a half that we've owned them.

June 12

This morning we had our first show ever in Paragould, AR. We were performing for the library, but the show was held at Paragould High School, in the rather luxurious (especially for a high school) theatre.

This afternoon, we were at the library in Marion (second time? third?), and after our show we stuck around using the library's wi-fi until it closed at 6:00, and then we stuck around, parked just outside, and used it even longer.

June 13

Morning show at Parker Park Community Center in Jonesboro, then an afternoon show at Turtle Creek Mall. In between, we were taken to lunch by Kay, the cool librarian.

Spent the night at the home of Dennis' sister, in the town of Heber Springs.

June 14

Drove to Conway, where we performed at the library for the third time. In the audience was a family that Kimberly has been in touch with online; they're about to hit the road too, and in fact made final preparations today.

Dennis' sister was also there, and afterward we went out to eat with her, and she told us some horror stories about her job working with the police on child abuse cases.

Drove on to the resort town of Hot Springs for the night, and for our next show.

June 15

Got online at San Francisco Bread Company (and we quickly noted that it's really not very San Francisco at all) then went to seek out the bath house at which we pampered ourselves on a previous visit. But we discovered that it was closed!! And there is no other establishment in town remotely like it. The hot water baths put this town on the map and made it a national park, but today the only vestiges of it (aside from former bath house buildings that have been converted to other use or left vacant) are the spas, mostly at hotels, which simply offer mineral baths in private tubs. The place we visited had several POOLS to soak in. Alas, it appears to be past tense now.

We spent some time strolling about town, and following Zephyr's lead in the French-origin extreme sport called Parkour, with which he's become obsessed, and which consists of climbing/leaping over obstacles found in the urban environment.

June 16

A long, eventful day in Hot springs. We started with another morning online at the San Francisco Bread Company. (Why on earth do they call it that?) Then on to the Garland County Library, where we presented our first-ever performance in Hot Springs. And we met another boy named Zephyr! He was in the audience with his sister and his parents -- who also turned out to be performers, musicians to be exact. Zach and Cheryl, who moved here a few years ago from Seattle, invited us to see and hear them play tonight at a German restaurant called the Brauhaus.

After taking a brief bike ride around town (nearly getting drenched in the process), we made our way to the Brauhaus (which didn't offer much in the way of main courses that we vegetarians could indulge in, but did concoct a tasty dessert or two) where we were pleasantly surprised by the evening's entertainment. The Itinerant Locals, as they call themselves, didn't perform German folk music (which we would have been open to hearing), but delightfully odd oom-pah renditions of American pop tunes. It was like Mick Jagger with a tuba teamed with Cyndi Lauper on accordion. We know, the mind reels trying to imagine it; you just had to be there! You haven't lived until you've experienced their versions of "Crimson and Clover", "Lawyers, Guns and Money" and even the theme from "Star Wars".

After hearing their set and chatting with them a bit, we said goodbye and prepared to start making our way out of town. But first we stopped at the Visitors' Center to fill up our many plastic jugs one more time. It was difficult to find a place to park nearby, because this part of town was buzzing like a beehive, this being Saturday night.

In addition to people dining and attending performances, there were carfuls of teens out cruising and egging each other on. The passengers of 3 such vehicles -- at least a dozen people in all -- got into a shouting match which, before our very eyes, escalated into an all-out street brawl, with boys and girls in approximately equal numbers going at each other with fists and curses a-flying. One fellow was thrown to the pavement and ended up with a bloodied face. There were too many combatants for us to break it up, but fortunately the police soon arrived, just as we were in the process of calling them ourselves.

June 17

Dennis is admiring his Father's Day gift from Kimberly: a set of beautiful Chinese "health balls" that produce musical tones as you roll them around in your hand to relieve tension and accomplish other therapeutic goals that seem to be understood only by the masters of traditional Asian medicine. They may or may not do what they're supposed to, but they're nice to hold and admire.

We had a change of plans and stuck around for part of the day to have another Internet session at San Francisco Bread Company (as you may have gathered, there is no Panera in this neck of the woods).

Then we went for a workout at "our" YMCA. Yes, the "Y" here in Hot Springs is officially our home branch, even though we haven't been here since we signed up for our membership over two years ago. Since then, of course, we've been using our membership cards to frequent branches all over the country under the Away Program which, thank heavens, seems to have been designed for folks just like us. It felt strange to walk into a facility, take out our cards and swipe them under the electronic scanner for admission, without having to fill out any paperwork. And speaking of cards, we finally applied to have Zephyr issued a new one, since his name is spelled "Zaphyl" on his current one.

We then drove 60 miles to the town of Murfreesboro, where tomorrow we plan to do something we've been wanting to do for years.

June 18

And here we are at Crater of Diamonds State Park, the only patch of ground in the whole country that produces diamonds, and the only place in the WHOLE WORLD where the public can harvest them and take them home. How could you pass up an opportunity like that?

The entrance fee is low, and you can rent all the gear you need for a few dollars more. We obtained a bucket, a shovel, two sluicing screens and a special fine-mesh screen called a saruca. Then we watched a brief orientation film that showed us what to look for and how to look for it. The diamonds found here are essentially of three varieties: white, yellow and brown. And of course they don't look anything like the polished and cut gems you think of when someone says "diamond" (and you're not a baseball fanatic).

The slightly hilly 17-acre field is plowed into furrows periodically to help bring any buried treasures to the surface. In addition to just walking around and seeing what you can spot on the top of the soil, you have a choice of dry sluicing or wet sluicing. Recent rains have rendered the former pretty problematic, so we scooped up pailfuls of muddy soil and took them to the big water troughs (there's probably a better name for them, but we don't know what it is) to start sifting the dirt through the two square sluices, one of which is a larger mesh and one a smaller. You eventually end up with nothing but rocks, which you dump into the round, slightly convex saruca and swish them around, causing the heavier diamonds to sift to the bottom. Then you dump the pile out upside-down, and the diamonds should be on top -- a typical find is about the size of a match head. As the day wears on, though, the water in the trough becomes so muddy that it's as thick as sorghum (as they say in these parts) and it's really hard to glean anything except experience.

Zephyr decided he'd had enough after about an hour, but Mom and Dad stayed until mid-afternoon. We didn't find any diamonds; the best we did was the jasper that Kimberly unearthed. On the average, 2 to 3 diamonds per day are discovered here, but with a thousand or so people doing the prospecting, the odds are not exactly on your side. (yesterday, however, the unusually high total of 12 turned up; and the total for the year, which is not even half over, is about three-fourths the total for all of last year.) What the heck, we had a great time playing in the mud!

We started driving north, and decided to stop at the Hot Springs YMCA again. We hoped to pick up Zephyr's new card, but apparently it's already been mailed to us. How ironic!

June 19

After shopping at Wild Oats in Little Rock, we continued north to Searcy, where we did our laundry and camped out on the Internet at Midnight Oil coffeehouse, a slightly hip and quasi-bohemian hangout that almost appears as if it belongs somewhere in California rather than in Searcy, AR. (It's adjacent to Harding University, which no doubt accounts for its viability.) And yes, it really is open until midnight -- which is almost how long we stayed, even though we have a morning show tomorrow.

June 20

Repeat engagements at the libraries in Augusta and Wynne (third or fourth time each). At the latter, we were pleased to see that the program room has been renamed after the recently retired librarian who normally books us at these two gigs. And we were also happy that she even dropped in and said howdy, and is looking healthy and happy.

Northward ho, and we finally ended our summer in Arkansas, and left behind, hopefully that infamous southern summer heat that feels as if you're wearing a wool blanket around your entire body -- but which in fact wasn't all that bad this year.

June 21

First day of summer, officially. But as far as we're concerned, it's been going on for three weeks.

Spent part of the day at the Panera in Carbondale, then drove on to Mattoon for the night. Just a few miles from the town of Arcola, where a hostage crisis has been taking place in a bank -- fortunately it turned out well.

Tonight an extremely heavy thunderstorm blew in very quickly, just as we were going to bed about midnight. We even heard a warning siren blaring, which we'd never heard before during a storm. But there was apparently no real damage, and after an hour or so of monitoring the situation with our emergency radio, we went to sleep with no emergency.

June 22

Did a slight detour to the town of Charleston, so we could take care of business at the nearest available branch of our bank -- this is, by the way, the same branch where Dennis left his I.D. two years ago. (It caught up with us in Massachusetts more than a month later.) But this time he managed to walk out with it.

On to Terre Haute, Indiana, where we stopped at another Panera for a few hours. We also hit the nearby Guitar Center, where we picked up a new recording studio, replacing the old one under warranty.

Then we went to the YMCA, which according to its web site was open until 10:00. But when we arrived shortly before 8:00, it was already closing, thanks to its "summer hours".

So then we headed on to Crawfordsville, site of tomorrow's show.

No more time-hopping for a while; we're going to be on the East Coast for the next 6 months or so. Well no, we are going to California twice later this summer. But since we'll be flying, it doesn't really count.

June 23

Performed at the library in Crawfordsville, IN. Our second time in this town, with the previous appearance being at a school 2 or 3 years ago. The librarian who booked us had requested our production of "Shakespeare Shazam", which we thought odd for a summer reading program, given that many kids attending are very young. When we arrived, we found that there was a new librarian, and she agreed with us that "Quizzical Quests" (multicultural folktales) would be a much better choice, so we switched it. In the library were posted a painting by, and autographed photo of, Indiana native Red Skelton, who in addition to being a prominent comedian was also a talented painter and composer.

On to Indianapolis, where we were able to attend a preview screening of the new Michael Moore film "Sicko", which opens nationally next week -- Kimberly had been able to snag tickets online before it quickly sold out. What can we say? Another cinematic masterpiece, a mixture of gasps, groans, tears and side-splitting humor, like his previous films; but this one should be appreciated by just about anyone, even if they don't like Michael Moore. It's always amazed us, though, how much hatred and venom has been directed toward the guy, particularly given that he's very mellow and conciliatory himself. (How many other people would anonymously -- or even overtly -- donate $12,000 toward medical expenses for someone who's been operating a web site viciously attacking them?) He's often portrayed as merely the liberal equivalent of Ann Coulter, but in fact he's quite rational, thought-provoking, civil, courteous and even-handed. (Though you rarely hear it mentioned, he criticizes Democrats as well as Republicans.) Rather than spitting out cutesy sound bites posing as answers, he just asks all the right questions -- questions the media should have been asking all along. As far as we're concerned, even if all the criticism of him were 200 percent accurate, he'd still be doing us all (regardless of political inclinations) a tremendous service by shining a spotlight on matters hitherto neglected: e.g., the impact of corporate downsizing, the American obsession with guns and violence, the dismal failures of intelligence leading up to 9-11, and now the shameful state of health care in the most prosperous nation on earth. Don't these issues deserve at least half as much scrutiny as Paris Hilton's jail term and John Edwards' haircut?

June 24

On to Columbus, where Kimberly spent much of the day chatting with her old high school chum Colleen. An art fair was being held in the streets of Easton, the community where we met up with her at a Barnes & Noble, and the event seemed to have her name written all over it -- she was wearing several pieces of artistic jewelry fashioned from silver and amber, among other materials. And sure enough, ere the day was done, she enriched the coffers of several artists displaying their wares.

Incidentally, we also noted that the parking meters in Easton operate under a "Change for Charity" program, under which the proceeds are donated to worthy causes. What a nifty idea!

The destination for tonight was Cambridge, Ohio, where we saw a sight that left us a bit puzzled. Close to midnight, in the parking lot of a shopping center, a tour bus pulled in and picked up several teenagers who appeared to be part of a high school band -- they were carrying instruments, and were seen off by their waiting parents. What's odd about this? Well, we can imagine a band ARRIVING from somewhere at that hour, but why on earth would they be LEAVNG at such a time?

June 25

Holed up at the campground in Cambridge taking care of business, though we did take time out late in the evening to watch a DVD of "Ocean's Eleven", which was rather refreshing with its labrynthine plot.

June 26

Drove to Connellsville, PA, site of our next show. Found a very rural campground right by the river. No Internet service, and not even any cell phone service at our campsite, though we could obtain both by moving close to the office. (Think Robin Williams in "RV".) There was a compelling bike path nearby, so D & K were compelled to explore it, taking off in opposite directions.

June 27

Performances in Connellsville and Monssen, PA. Both were in older buildings (the former in the library itself and the latter in a civic center gym) without air conditioning and it was a very hot day. We felt as if we'd lost a few pounds by day's end.

June 28

The monster day of the summer, with four performances in different locations. Had to deal with heat and humidity again most of the day, though the weather cooled off and we even had rain by evening -- just in time for the last show, the one at a location with air conditioning. We're performing in Pittsburgh for the first time ever.

June 29

Three more performances to round out our first tour of Pittsburgh. The first was at the grand old Carnegie Library in Homestead, a building that is about a century old, and in which we performed in a huge theatre with a raked stage, and with ornate auditorium seats that featured a metal rack underneath in which gents could stash their top hats. The last show of the day, we had to compete with a fireworks display (And it's not even July yet!) but we still had a decent sized audience.

After tonight, we get 9 days "off" (i.e. no performances, due largely to the holiday), so Zephyr is flying to North Carolina for a week to work with his band. The parents have decided that tomorrow we're going to begin our marathon bicycle tour. We'd been planning for some time to bike the length of the c & O Canal, 184 miles. But we've just discovered that the Youghiogheny River Trail (We can spell it even if we can't pronounce it), which begins in Pittsburgh, connects with the C & O path. So we're going to begin the tour tomorrow instead of next week. We'll be alternating days, with one person biking and the other driving to a rendezvous point, covering a total of over 330 miles in 7 days.

June 30

Kimberly left on the first leg of the bike tour -- she as so eager that she was on the trail shortly after 7:00 a.m., and she is not typically an early riser. Her 51 miles took her back to Connellsville, past the same campground where we stayed a few nights ago.

Meanwhile, Dennis and Zephyr ferreted out Trader Joe's, which finally has opened an outlet in Pittsburgh, and shopped at our favorite grocery store for only the second time this summer -- the first was in Indianapolis on Sunday. Then Dennis drove Zephyr to the airport and headed south to pick up Kimberly. Because of the hilly terrain, he took the long way around, following I-79 down past Washington (PA, not DC) and Meadowlands racetrack, then I-70 across.

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