People, places, and irreverent opinions through the naked eye of Ivan Ruchkin
Saturday, February 8, 2014
New Year's Roadtrip Through the Southeast
What can be a better Christmas gift than breaking away from the daily reality?
For the vacation of Christmas-New Years +Michelle Corkum and I did a roadtrip to the south of Pittsburgh and back. Intense, dark, nasty, and, most importantly, completely unplanned. 6 days, 6 hotels, 7 cities, 1800 miles, 1 new year, and tons of fast food.
The counterclockwise direction is stuck deeply in every runner's mind.
Highlights of our experiences:
"The day is ending, but we haven't done much."
Who said that vacations should be less time-deprived?
"This is a cute place to run, too bad we have to keep moving."
Running every day as we moved was a huge ordeal.
Nevertheless, we logged 46 miles for the roadtrip week.
"Oh look at all this trash in the car."
Seriously, my car survived more trash than it does in a year.
"$50 per night? No, that's too expensive!"
Priceline's Name Your Own Price was a fun way to save on hotels:
it gives you hotel's prices and brief descriptions, but not their names, at extremely cheap prices.
"Let me read this tourbook while you're driving."
AAA's city guides were very useful to find out about local attractions.
The only complaint: too mainstream.
"So who is drinking or who is driving?"
In fact, we were constantly moving and drank only once or twice.
+Michelle Corkum: "The roadtrip was noisy, I was pretty sick of Ivan by the end of it."
Now, to each city we stopped by.
Charleston, WV
When were leaving on December 26 afternoon, Charleston looked big enough and within day's reach.
Since Charleston is a capital of West Virginia, it has to have a capitol.
Here it is.
This is when we first faced the reality of this roadtrip: driving somewhere far means you arrive there too late and most places are closed. We arrived late at night and still had to run.
We stopped at the University of Charleston to run.
It turned out that Charleston, WV has a riverwalk along the Kanawha river (means literally "gutter" in Russian) that is great for running.
The university from the other side of the river.
+Michelle Corkum: "That was my favorite run of the whole trip. The sidewalks were clear."
On that our brief visit to Charleston ended as we moved on to...
Lexington, KY
The city's architecture is dominated by boxy and repetitive red brick buildings. Nothing too surprising.
Driving through the downtown.
Thankfully, there's only one glass giant in Lexington.
Residential buildings.
The city's outskirts were impressive though: lots of well-maintained fields and groves surround Lexington.
Coupled with good weather, they made for a nice break in the middle of winter.
We drove to the Raven Run nature sanctuary only to find out that it's good for anything but running.
We saw only one raven there. I guess they were out of season.
Nature trails were dirty, smooshy, and hilly. Which brings me to a conclusion: nature is fun, but too much nature is too much. Go technology!
+Michelle Corkum: "I didn't like it because I don't like nature."
Nature is pleasant to look at, but first-hand experience may be meh.
The level of horse obsession in Lexington here was higher than I had expected. In particular, Kentucky goes nuts about the Thoroughbred.
At the Thoroughbred Park.
Nuts enough to have the International Museum of the Horse.
This park has horse museums and some live horses. We spent half of our day there.
The museum had many examples of horse-related punishment.
A horse is punishing a goose.
A man is punishing a horse.
Was this horse punished by the painter?
Looks like a dog to me anyway.
They cut off this horse's tail to punish it.
And fed it a lot.
This is how they punished horses during their transportation across the Atlantic.
I've seen cars covered this way. I guess the same reasons apply to horses.
...or it is a punishment.
+Michelle Corkum: "I didn't like it. There were too many horses, and I hate horses."
This horse wants to punish YOU.
Ok, ok, no more horses, I promise. Moving on.
A water tower at the University of Kentucky.
One thing this trip made me believe is that universities are the best friends of running: large pedestrian and relatively safe areas, well-maintained sidewalks, and quasi-free parking.
An awesome 2-mile paved loop through a park around the water tower.
The name of this town lends itself well to singing, which I did plenty of on our way there.
The Tennessee River
It started raining when we got there, and it never stopped.
The downtown was scenic.
The town stands on a big river and has a large aquarium. All I'm saying is that Chattanooga = water for me now.
The Tennessee aquarium, full of marine nastiness.
In the aquarum there was a special exhibit about... seahorses. I take it that nobody escapes horses in Kentucky and Tennessee.
All seahorses do is chilling out.
A yellow seahorse chills out.
Several seahorses chill out.
A couple of dragon seahorses chill out on top of a star fish.
A great multitude of fish exhibits were boring. We decided that fish need to be punished and ate a lot of seafood in the next few days.
So much seafood!
A moss frog is one of few things from the aquarium that I wouldn't like to eat.
+Michelle Corkum:"The aquarium was laid out very well, and I wanted to eat all the fish in the world!"
If Kentucky was nuts about horses, Tennessee was nuts about rock'n'roll, to which I am completely impartial.
How are guitars related to an aquarium?
Yeah, I wonder why they are there.
Another noteworthy place in Chattanooga is Ruby Falls -- a long cavern with a tall waterfall in the end.
A donkey-ass shaped stalactite.
An underground lake.
Our tour guide was the nerd of the month in my own ranking. He beat most CS PhD students hands down.
Humanity's contribution to the cavern.
This is what the waterfall is like:
They installed colored lights for the waterfall.
+Michelle Corkum:"The whole underground thing was very gimmicky."
We saw a UFO-shaped house on the way to Ruby Falls.
What is the relation between caverns and aliens?
+Michelle Corkum: "That house was cool! It looked like the Jetsons house:"
Atlanta, GA
We arrived late in the night, ate at McD, and the first thing we saw in the morning was this pond:
As if there wasn't enough fish at the aquarium.
In Georgia, I expected everyone to be nuts about peaches, but it didn't happen. The only peach we saw:
Moving further down to Georgia also meant there would be more green around.
Green!
But it also meant that we'd meet the attributes of a big city: large buildings and heavy traffic.
Downtown Atlanta A.
Downtown Atlanta B.
Downtown Atlanta C. As you can see, pretty boilerplate.
Some buildings haven't been finished yet.
My main reason to go to Atlanta is to check out the African and African-American cultures. Thankfully, there isn't a shortage of Ethiopian restaurants with authentic designs:
This is supposed to tell some story, but I was unable to decode it.
Atlanta is rich in slavery heritage too. Among many good options we picked a former plantation family house.
Without simplifying too much, it's a house where a white family chilled out (much like seahorses), while black people worked outside.
The house is very white.
The house was renovated several times, but retained the general look and feel of that epoch.
All this land used to be a cotton plantation.
Luckily for black people, communism democracy saved them from this burden of growing cotton.
The inner yard.
A side effect was that the region's economy was ruined, and the South is catching up to this day.
Cotton plants, which made a lot of fuss in mid-19th century.
Black people didn't feel like moving out, and now comprise half of Atlanta's population.
White people's living room.
White people's another living room.
Apparently they didn't mind having two.
+Michelle Corkum:"It was good and educational. I was disappointed, though, because I wanted to hear more about black people's lives, and they didn't talk much about that."
Atlanta happens to be both a capital and the largest city of the state -- a rare exception.
Atlanta's Capitol
Or is this Atlanta's capitol?
Another notable place is Georgia Institute of Technology - GaTech. I had to come see those who are too good to admit me.
Overall, GaTech's campus is good old red brick + some glass + open spaces.
Institute of Technology has to have some technology.
Reminds me of UCLA.
Abstract art always often finds its way to campuses.
The central area of the campus.
Brick + glass.
Brick.
Glass glass brick.
Brick brick brick.
Now we come to the dirtiest part of our Atlanta visit -- the World of Coke. As a coke addict, +Michelle Corkum was pretty pumped to go there.
More red brick, who'd be surprised.
A half-mile radius is contaminated with Coke brands.
Voluntary indoctrination, year 2013.
I still don't know why we did this.
View on downtown from the World of Coke.
The inside of the building is filled with all things Coke.
Why would people pay money to see this? It's a trap.
A room filled with older version of Coke brandings.
But the worst part waits in the end: a room with 200-something varieties of Coke drinks from various parts of the world.
Europe.
This is the worst stuff I ever drank in my life! So artificial and acidic.
South America.
Another bad part of the experience is that a lot of tourists in the World of Coke don't know how to move around politely, so it's a mess. Reminded me of Manhattan.
+Michelle Corkum:"It was magical, mystical, and rather disgusting."
Coke coke coke.
Atlanta hosted the 1996 Olympics, and there's a little inconsequential park left from it.
Charlotte, NC
Now, Charlotte is a huge financial and transportation center. Also everyone's nuts about racing there, but thankfully we avoided that aspect.
All trees have leaves.
Some trees have leaves.
No trees have leaves. Magic!
Since we explored the white side of slavery in Atlanta, it was time to look at the black side.
The Levine Museum of the New South was our destination. It was devoted to the evolution of the South from the slave-based economy to industrial and post-industrial stages.
If you were a slave, this is what your dinner table looked like.
I've seen worse in modern Russia.
The museum had a lot of material on the history of racial struggle. It was amazing how much there was to it.
The Negro Rule Vampire.
A textile machine that made stuff from cotton collected by slaves.
Separate water fountains. Somehow the white one is fat.
The museum had several "discussion board" where anyone could post a note with an answer to some question. Someone wrote a note for the question, "How are human rights observed better today?"
Agreed.
+Michelle Corkum:"It was eye-opening to see the historical perspective from African-Americans and revisiting my prior knowledge on this issue."
I pressed a button, and this psychedelic butterfly scared Corkum.
Chapel Hill, NC
I wouldn't forgive myself for being in NC and not visiting University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Honestly, this campus was not very impressive.
Again, glass and brick, brick and glass.
Not bad.
A blue track is unusual.
On the other hands, the trees on UNC campus were thick and mighty.
If not for winter, these trees would make for beautiful photos.
Cary, NC
By the time we arrived to Cary, we were exhausted from the hardships of the roadtrip. This was the first time in my life I saw a good intuitive interface for a shower.
This is what it should look like.
We had a 5k race that started in the first second 2014. Finally, I'm spending New Year's the way I prefer.
The 5k went around a mall, Cary Town Center.
The finish line.
Michelle and I won 1st and 3rd places respectively and cooled down inside a mall.
Champaign glasses as prizes?
The morning of January 1st it was time to go back to Pittsburgh.
An empty parking lot around our hotel.
A peculiarly shaped mountain on the way north.
We stopped in a scenic New River Trail park in Virginia to get our run in. This was the first time since Lexington that we ran during daylight.
One last piece of nature in our roadtrip.
Oh no, a horse again!
The trails were scenic as hell. It's a shame we didn't have much time to run there.
We got the run in, and zoomed back home.
Plates
Here's car plates of some states we visited.
Religion
As you move south, Jesus becomes a popular addressees on billboards.
I have not yet forgiven myself for not taking a picture of a sign, "Happy Birthday, Jesus."
--
That's it for the roadtrip. After 30+ hours of driving:
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