Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 10:02:40 -0700
Subject: Nine days, 3129 miles

Dear friends,

Boston is the finest city in America. There you have it. I will brook no argument with this assertion. The only city which can even dream of competing with it is Cambridge, its brainy conjoined twin across the Charles, and that is why we chose a Cantabrigian home base for our Beantown excursion.

(You know, of course, that the preceding paragraph was nothing more than the flimsiest pretext to employ that C-adjective.)

Sunday night the big brown bus rolled up at the Charles Hotel, a once-reliable choice which we were dismayed to find had recently undergone an expensive yet crummifying "renovation." However, even if they turned each room into a roiling lake of fire, it would still be across the street from Twisted Village, the only record store in the country devoted solely to psychedelia and garage rock, so who cares if the new carpet was kinda ugly?

A particular highlight of our time in Boston was Monday night's Red Sox/Yankees game. The setup couldn't have been better: My dauntless assistant had somehow exploited an NBC connection to get us VIP tickets, including an invitation to batting practice. Sox and Yanks, historically bitter rivals, were improbably tied for first in their division. And Fenway Park is the finest ballpark in America. (Those who might quarrel with this, I refer you to the above.) So the stage was set for high drama and plenty of Fenway franks.

Batting practice was great fun -- we had a perfect view of Jason Giambi pretending not to notice all the attention he was getting. And then, the seats...! Second row, right on the third base line, in what they call a "field box." Meaning that 1) an usher follows you down and WIPES OFF your seats before you sit in them, then shoos away any South Boston yobbos who would dare stand in front of you, and 2) occasionally during the game, a guy with a pad comes by TO TAKE YOUR ORDER, PLEASE.

Unfortunately, in spite of all these amenities, the game was pretty lackluster. Let me hand it over to sports commentator Henry: "Well, basically, there were only scores in the first and ninth innings. At the end of the first inning, it was 5-1, and then there was no score for eight innings. We left in the 8th, then we got back to the hotel, it was 7-2."

The next day we went to the Boston Children's Museum, which also happens to be the finest in America, and -- Well, I could go on, but now that I've invited him into the process, Henry is urging me to move on to our next stop, Washington, D.C.

Wednesday night, after a wearisome nine-hour drive, we pulled up at the Hotel George, a mod, elegant establishment right on Capitol Hill. (By this point, tired of lugging our three huge bags plus a bag of audiovisual gear PLUS the laptop in and out of hotels, we'd begun tossing one night's change of clothes into a large paper shopping bag from the North Face outlet in Berkeley. Very snazzy way to check into a hotel. You could see the puzzled looks from hotel personnel as they tried to reconcile our hillbilly luggage with the superluxe conveyance from which we'd just disembarked.)

Once checked in, we yearned for room service, but the menu offered little comfort for the vegetarians among us. A referral from the front desk led to a hasty call to Pizza Mart -- too hasty, for we'd unwittingly violated one of life's essential rules: Never eat at a restaurant with "Mart" in the title. Sure enough, when our order arrived, it was terrifying: Spaghetti marinara with a thick layer of burnt cheddar cheese on top? Orange garlic bread? Pizza fries -- who ordered those?

We ate almost all of it.

Next morning, we were up bright and early to explore Washington. Now, I lived in Wheaton, Maryland for a few years as a child, and my visits to the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum were signal moments in my young, nerdy life. However, after the disappointments of New York City, I tried to moderate my expectations about what Henry might think of it. And there was always the danger than Air & Space might have somehow been tragically Rock-'n'-Roll-Hall-of-Fame-ified.

Well, those fears turned out to be unfounded. Amazingly, from the Wright Flyer to the Spirit of St. Louis, Air & Space is essentially unchanged from the place I wandered through thirty years ago. Aside from the addition of the Gossamer Condor (first human-powered flight) and a glancing mention of the Space Shuttle, in this museum, history pretty much ends with Apollo. AND I DON'T CARE. Henry really liked it too, and practically had to be torn from the "How Things Fly" gallery.

Our too-short day in Washington was followed by an overnight drive to Louisville, Kentucky. Which, it turns out, is another one of those Southern cities that's so much nicer than you think it's going to be. We visited a couple (Oklahoma City, San Antonio) on last year's bus trip -- they invariably feature lovely, hospitable people, a newly revitalized downtown, and at least five good bars featuring locally brewed beer and 75 varieties of potato skins. These are all good things.

Louisville, though, has one thing the others don't: The Louisville Slugger Museum. Boy, was this great. It starts with a brief tour through the Slugger factory itself -- see the Northern white pine come in from Wisconsin (I'm making up these details -- I can't for the life of me remember what kind of wood it is, or where the hell they get it), see a craftsman painstakingly hand-turn it on a lathe, see another burn the trademark on the side of the bat parallel to the grain (hence "keep the trademark up and you won't crack the bat" -- I always wondered about that). Our tour guide was an old guy (old-guy tour guides are the best), there's a sweet little museum attached, showing the contracts Hillerich & Bradsby has had with all of the great hitters, and at the end of your tour, they give you a little replica Slugger for you to take home. Perfect. I bought a T-shirt, that's how much I liked it.

After that, we grabbed a quick lunch, and then we were goin' to Kansas City, Kansas City here we come. I'd been looking forward to this, because when Strauss and I drove cross-country back in May of '85, the biggest surprise of the trip was the greatness of Kansas City. (The biggest disappointment? Denver, mythic city of Kerouac's On the Road, is a big fat dump.) Now, more than fifteen years later, K.C. is still terrific. Maybe I just love it because it reminds me of Atlanta -- wide avenues, houses with yards, black people and white people actually talking to one another -- but it is a really nice town, and our visit there was too brief.

We stopped in at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, which I quite liked, although it was a tad low on multimedia content for Henry's tastes. Also, in spite of the impressively stocked museum store, I failed in my quest to secure more Cuban X Giants gear to go with my beloved "X" baseball cap. Too bad. (Hey, did you know that Hank Aaron started out in the Negro Leagues in 1952? His nickname was "Pork Chop" 'cause that's all he ever ate.)

And then, as if that weren't enough, my wife and child made the supreme sacrifice: These two vegetarians actually sat across a table from me and waited patiently while I devoured a plate of Gates Barbecue, so that I wouldn't have to leave Kansas City without sampling some of its legendary cuisine. (They got theirs, though -- half an hour later, we were at a fondue restaurant on Country Club Plaza, where the two of them enjoyed an entire meal of bread dipped in molten cheese.)

After dinner came ANOTHER overnight drive, and at this point, the cities start to blur into one another: Sunday morning, we woke up in Manitou Springs, Colorado and spent two hours at a wondrous penny arcade where you can still get two plays for a dime on the old pinball machines... that afternoon, we drove to Moab, Utah, where Lisa and I downed the better part of a pitcher of local microbrew while Henry crushed saltines under a toy VW he'd won earlier that day playing Skee-Ball... the next morning -- was that THIS morning?? -- we drove to the Grand Canyon, where we took a sunset tour of the South Rim, narrated by another fantastic old-guy tour guide...

I think we're going home tomorrow, along with a ton of dirty laundry and 30 rolls of exposed film. If you don't get another one of these e-mails, that means we did. What day is it? Where are we? What time zone are we in? WHERE'S THE BUS??

-- Jeff
for Jeff, Lisa and Henry
in a hotel room just off the South Rim of the Grand Canyon