Blue Highways: Ida and Bug, Kentucky

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapLeaving southern Kentucky, we are about to go into Tennessee, but not without checking out a little bit of Clinton County first.  Click on the map to locate Ida and Bug.

Book Quote

"At Ida, a sign in front of a church announced the Easter sermon: 'Welcome All God's Children: Thieves, Liars, Gossips, Bigots, Adulterers, Children.'  I felt welcome.  Also in Ida was one of those hitching posts in the form of a crouching livery boy reaching up to take the master's reins; but the face of this iron Negro had been painted white and his eyes Nordic blue.  Ida, on the southern edge of Appalachia, a place (they said) where change comes slowly or not at all, had a church welcoming everyone and a family displaying integrated lawn decorations.

"I lost the light at Bug, Kentucky, and two miles later, at a fork in the road with three rickety taverns in the crotch, I crossed into Tennessee."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 13

Clinton County, where Bug and Ida are located

Ida, Kentucky and Bug, Kentucky

I really enjoy the picture William Least-Heat Moon (LHM) presents of the lawn jockey in Ida painted white with blue eyes.  It stands in stark contrast to the South that many of us (me included) in the North read and were taught about.  In truth, the South is much more complicated than some of my friends, who argue that we should let the South secede from the Union if they really want to, truly understand.

In 1995, I moved from Milwaukee to San Antonio with my wife.  Texas is on the far west side of what would be considered the old South, though Arizona seems to want to become part of the South as well in the last few years.  I'd grown up in California, then lived in Milwaukee for 8 years.  Milwaukee was about as Northern a city as you could have.  With Germans mainly controlling the power structure, it was a leftist stronghold for years.  While the rest of Wisconsin was giving America Joseph McCarthy and his fear-mongering about communists, Milwaukee was electing socialist mayors up through the 1960s.  We actually got to know the last socialist mayor of Milwaukee, who by the time we met him was a pretty old guy.

We moved to Texas, and we were convinced we would hate it.  In truth, our first year there, we really did hate it.  Everything seemed to be about Texas.  Not only is Texas part of the South, but it has a HUGE ego about itself.  The Austin Lounge Lizards make fun of Texas' attitude in their Stupid Texas Song:

"By God we're so darn proud to be from Texas - yahoo!
Even of our pride we're proud and we're proud of that pride, too
Our pride about our home state is the proudest pride indeed
And we're proud to be Americans, until we can secede"

Tortilla chips in the shape of Texas, pasta in the shape of Texas.  The Texas flag flown everywhere.  In the first store we went into, the yams had a sign with a yam in a hat with the Texas colors shooting guns in the air.  The Alamo was considered a shrine to Texas liberty - men must remove their hats entering it.  Jim Lehrer, distinguished newsman, told a story about how he was taken to task by the Daughters of the Texas Republic for some statements he had made.  We don't understand how a person born in Texas could say such things about the state, they wrote him.  He wrote back explaining that while he grew up in Texas, he was actually born elsewhere and didn't come to Texas until he was six months old.  Now we understand, they wrote back to him.

Despite all that hubris, we grew to love Texas.  The huge open spaces.  The varied people and landscapes.  The little weird places we discovered, like the art scene in Marfa, way out in the wilds of West Texas, to the Orange Show in Houston.  Sure, you'd find some crazy thing that would make you pause, like the time we rented a room in a Fort Davis B&B and the brochure had hand-written on it "no fornicating."  But seeing the bats fly out from under the Congress Street bridge in Austin, or taking a dip in Barton Springs, or catching Terri Hendrix or the Asylum Street Spankers at old dance halls like Gruene Hall or Cibolo Creek Country Club was fantastic and captivated us.  The music scene was like nowhere else, and introduced us to the Texas singer-songwriter.

While we were there, California passed a proposition denying most services to illegal immigrants.  Arizona recently passed a law allowing police to stop anyone they suspect to be illegal immigrants (in other words, people who look brown).  But in Texas, where the Mexican border is quite fluid and really starts at San Antonio, even under George W. Bush as governor, the state would have never passed such a law because of the ties between Mexico and Texas.  Republicans are now in control of the state but the state is still full of Texas Democrats, who are blunt, pointed and direct.  As I said, it's complicated.

Then we moved to New Orleans.  Again, things were not always as they seemed.  New Orleans is a majority black city in white Louisiana.  New Orleans history had both slaves and free men (and women) of color.  It had Creoles, mixed race people who made their own society to rival the white society, and some of whom owned slaves while others worked to end slavery.  Pre-Katrina New Orleans, when we lived there, was a mix, a gumbo if you will, of all kinds of different people living all kinds of different lives and doing all kinds of different things.  In one city, you could get your South fix by visiting a plantation, or eating at Galatoires or Antoines, or cruise the stately mansions along St. Charles Avenue.  Then you could visit Vaughns, where Kermit Ruffins plays trumpet and serves up red beans and rice, or catch the Mardi Gras Indians on Mardi Gras or St. Joseph's Day.  You might read Nell Nolan in the Times-Picayune as she lists the kings and queens of Mardi Gras and announces the various coming outs of debutantes, all white and beautiful, while outside a second line turns onto your street sending a member of the black community home.  A city where (until recently thanks to Katrina) African Americans dominated the political landscape, while the old white families dominated the economic landscape.  Again, it's complicated.

Now we live in New Mexico, where being Hispanic means that you are not Latino, and vice versa.  Here, being Hispanic means that you are descended from the Spanish conquistadors.  Being Latino means you are not.  Once again, ethnicity and race become very complicated.  An unsuspecting person might offend someone with a Spanish last name if they call them "Mexican."  Just like in the South, you can't take everything for granted and things that you think you know about people and ethnicities can be very different from reality.

There isn't much on the Internet about Ida or Bug, but there is quite a bit on Clinton County, where they are located.  The links I include, therefore, will be for Clinton County.

If you want to know more about Ida, Bug or Clinton County

Albany/Clinton County Chamber of Commerce
Clinton County News (newspaper)
Clinton County website
Political Graveyard: Clinton County
Wikipedia: Clinton County

Next stop: Livingston, Tennessee

Blue Highways: Danville, Kentucky

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapMoving away from the Shakers, and toward the Appalachians we go.  It's amazing how far we've traveled in only 25 pages of the book.  To see where Danville is located, click on the map!

Book Quote

"The highway took me through Danville, where I saw a pillared antebellum mansion with a trailer court on the front lawn.  Route 127 ran down a long valley of pastures and fields edged by low, rocky bluffs and split by a stream the color of muskmelon.  In the distance rose the foothills of the Appalachians, old mountains that once separated the Atlantic from the shallow inland sea now the middle of America.  The licks came out of the hills, the fields got smaller, and there were little sawmills cutting hardwood into pallets, crates, fenceposts.  The houses shrank, and their colors changed from white to pastels to iridescents to no paint at all.  The lawns went from Vertagreen bluegrass to thin fescue to hard-packed dirt glinting with fragments of glass, and the lawn ornaments changed from birdbaths to plastic flamingoes and donkeys to broken-down automobiles with raised hoods like tombstones.  On the porches stood long-legged wringer washers and ruined sofas, and, by the front doors, washtubs hung like coats of arms."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 13

Danville, Kentucky at dusk

Danville, Kentucky

When I was in my early 20s, a young idealistic volunteer in inner-city Milwaukee who had done two years of service and had no idea what he was going to do for a career, I considered doing a third year of service in Appalachia.  The program that I volunteered for was going to open a volunteer community in Hazard, Kentucky.  Yes, this was the same Hazard, Kentucky that inspired the the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, and later the movie of the same name.  True fact: in Hazard, Kentucky I was told there was even a Hogg family that inspired the infamous Boss Hogg on the TV show.

I went with a director of the program down to Hazard to scope out the possibilities for a volunteer community there.  I remember driving south, through Cincinnati, Ohio into Covington, Kentucky and then past Lexington and on down Highway 402 through the mountains and into Hazard.  As we got farther from Lexington, the scene fit perfectly with what William Least-Heat Moon (LHM) describes above in his quote.  I remember vividly passing seamlessly from bluegrass and nice dwellings into mountains and poverty, but not all at once.  It sort of snuck up on you until suddenly, you were in it.  The poverty was very apparent: trailer houses and shacks with rusting automobiles or other machinery in the yards.  At the same time, modern convenience also sprung out at me, at least at the dwellings along the roads.  There were satellite dishes on many of the trailer homes, and the newest model pickup trucks parked alongside rusting heaps on the front lawn.  Clearly, like in many of our inner-cities, people picked what to do without and what to do with.  I thought it was selective poverty, in the sense that perhaps foregoing the truck or not having satellite TV might make other things possible for these poorer families, but the truck and satellite TV was too important to pass up.

Though I was drawn to the area, I decided not to continue to volunteer.  But I got to know some of the people who went to volunteer in that newly opened community, and my girlfriend (now my wife) and another friend and I drove down to Hazard to visit them.  What struck me was the disconnect with what people believed and how they acted.  I was pretty lefty in my politics at the time (really, I still am), and most people I met were pretty conservative.  They were active gun enthusiasts and voted Republican.  I was probably treated pretty well by them because I was white, and even my longer hair that I wore at the time fit in with some of the styling and grooming of the people who lived in the hollers.  If I had gotten into political discussions or discussions about social mores, I would have probably disagreed with them 99 percent of the time.  Yet, they were very nice to us.  We stopped at an outdoor flea market where you could buy everything, even guns.  I was invited to come hunting and fishing by a guy I didn't know, who told me that "those Northern girls don't treat you good...you come down here and we'll fix you up with a nice Southern girl who'll cook for you and treat you right."  My girlfriend was somewhat amused...probably because I didn't take the guy up on his offer.  When we were invited to people's houses, even those that were poorer, they never failed to have something for us.  As LHM moves later in the book into Tennessee, he marvels that the people who have the least are usually the ones to invite you to dinner.  That's my experience of Appalachian Kentucky.

This all hits home to me now in another way, because being adopted, I recently learned that my biological mother came from similar roots in West Virginia.  Plain, hardworking, and often exploited people that would still give the shirts off their backs for friends, relatives and even strangers.  In the Appalachians, coal was king and people were often in thrall to the coal companies for work and a livelihood, but the dangerous work and the poverty brought them together.  In a way, I'm proud that I come from such stock.  Certainly with poverty comes pain and suffering, but also a connectedness to community, work and family because they are precious to survival.

What this all has to do with Danville, I'm not sure.  Wikipedia says that Danville is known as the "City of Firsts" because of all the things that first happened there.  First courthouse in Kentucky, first post office west of the Alleghenies, first state supported school for the deaf, first physician to successfully remove an ovarian tumor, oldest college campus west of the Alleghenies.  However, as LHM seems to indicate, Danville and Lexington are gateways to this most rural, most poverty ridden, in some ways most backward part of the country.  We tend to forget these areas because white Americans don't like to see poverty, especially white poverty, so the gateways are usually closed, keeping white poor folks back in the shadows of the mountains and the hollers.  But if you take the paths that the Danvilles and the Lexingtons open to these areas, you may find amidst the poverty shining moments, adventures and deep discovery and meaning.  So visit Danville and think of it as a doorway to the Appalachians.  If it is too rural for you, you can always take in a festival and then go back to the cities.  But if you want to see a unique slice of America, use Danville as a way point to see rural, Appalachian Kentucky.  Perhaps you'll be entranced by its beauty and fascinated by its contradictions, like I was.

If you want to know more about Danville

Danville Advocate-Messenger (newspaper)
Centre College
Festivals in Danville
It's Better in Danville
Wikipedia: Danville

Next up: Ida and Bug, Kentucky

Blue Highways: Pleasant Hill, Kentucky

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

In this post, we visit a Shaker community in Pleasant Hill, and I will muse on 19th century utopian cults and communities, some of which were pretty darn interesting and even a little strange!  To learn where Pleasant Hill is located, why not click on the map?

Book Quote

"From a window on the third floor, where grim watchers had assured Shaker celibacy, I saw far to the east a yellow smear from a power generating plant smokestack.  Some historians attribute the decline of the United Believers to their unnatural views on procreation and cite the Shaker song:

Come life Shaker life,
Come life eternal;
Shake, shake out of me
All that is carnal.

But, since the Kentucky Shakers disappeared at the time of widespread electrification, maybe the lure of a 110/220 way of life kept new blood away from Pleasant Hill.  After all, even the inventive people themselves (circular saw and washing machine) had to check a love of ingeniously useful mechanical gadgets and to guard against (as Howells said) 'the impulse of the age toward a scientific, a sensuous, an aesthetic life.'  The yellowed sky gave me the sense the Shakers were right and that I was standing in the future in that hundred-thirty-nine-year-old building.  Because they cared more about adapting to the cosmos than to a society bereft of restraint, the Shakers - like the red man - could love craft and yet never become materialists."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 12

Shaker village in the mist at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky

Pleasant Hill, Kentucky

In the last couple of years, I have read a few things about utopian communities.  Some might call them cults, others religious nuts, and some might find them to be refreshing alternatives to society.  One thing is certain: America has seen the establishment and decline of many of these communities centered around utopian dreams.

The Shakers were one group that fit into this type of  classification.  Structured heirarchically, they nevertheless practiced equality of the genders based on the belief that God manifested in both sexes.  Given that, they also practiced celibacy, believing it to be the purest form of spiritual expression.  They didn't forbid marriage, but they saw the root of evil in the fall of Man brought about by carnal desire, and believed that marriage was less pure than celibacy.  Men and women were separated into gender-based living quarters.  They also believed in the purity of hard work, and out of their industriousness they fashioned simple and functional furniture that was prized for its usefulness in the 1800s, and prized as collectors' items today.  They pioneered agricultural techniques, and were not adverse to creating and implementing mechanical solutions to problems such as water distribution.  Shakers also practiced communalism, sharing the resources of the community and limiting personal possessions.  It was a kind of religious communism of its day.

It all sounds nice and pastoral, and perhaps even pleasant if you can get past the part of no sex for the rest of your life.  But that was the tricky part.  The only way that the Shakers could replenish their population was through new converts and through adoptions.  After the Civil War, more people began moving to cities and less people were interested in such a lifestyle.  Even adoptions began to be regulated through private groups and the government and restricting the ability of the Shakers to bring in new children.  Evidently, by 2009, only three Shakers were left in the entire world.

There were utopian societies that were even more strange.  I'm talking really "out there."  Sarah Vowell, in her book Assassination Vacation, describes the Oneida community, another of the American utopian communities, as a community of "sex fiends" who believed in sex without male ejaculation, or what they called "Male Continence."  This practice was born out of the desire of the group's founder, John Humphrey Noyes, to never again subject his wife to the suffering of childbirth, especially that of involuntary impregnation.  This belief bred a whole set of practices that included older, post-menopausal women having sex with young men who hadn't learned how to control their ejaculations.  Girls, according to Vowell, were "annoyingly prone to falling in love," and "were ushered into womanhood by an older male, usually by an experienced boater like Noyes himself."  Thus everyone, under the group's adherence to a concept called Group Marriage, could have sex with whomever they wanted, as long as it was consensual and the practice of Male Continence was observed.  Paradoxically, any type of extreme passion for anything, including the arts was discouraged.  Mediocrity was the norm. The community even developed its own eugenics program.

Oneida community in action

While visiting my wife's parents in Florida, we made a special trip down to visit the site of the Koreshan Unity.  The Koreshan Unity, founded in the 1870s in New York, was another utopian community that believed that the earth is hollow, and that we actually lived on the inside.  They made a number of scientific experiments that they said proved that we inhabited the inside of a hollow sphere.  The community also practiced a religious communism, and women occupied the all decision-making positions that formed the Planetary Court, the only exception being the founder, Cyrus Teed (or Koresh).  There were three levels of membership in the group: non-believers willing to work for the Koreshan Unity who were allowed to marry and to participate in the secular activities of the group; believers who were allowed to marry but could have sexual relations only for reproduction purposes; and believers who made up the core group that did not believe in marriage and practiced celibacy.  The Unity moved from New York to swampland near Estero, Florida and laid out their New Jerusalem.  Unfortunately, after the death of their founder, who predicted that he would live forever, the group dwindled, and the last member died in 1981.  She was able to see the pictures of the earth beamed back from the space missions, and had to conclude after a life of being a devout member of the Koreshan Unity that the founder was wrong.  You have to think that might suck a little.

Koreshan Unity members at graveyard

Such cults and communities are around us and may even touch us all.  My wife grew up in Iowa, home of the Amana Colonies, religious communities known for their dairy products (my wife loves their cottage cheese) and the Amana appliances.  A friend of ours was raised in the Bruderhof, a Hutterite religious group somewhat related to the Mennonites and the Amish, that was founded in Germany and then moved to South America to escape the Nazis.  They now run successful businesses in the United States, and manufacture play equipment and classroom furniture for children, and equipment for disabled children and adults.  Our friend has a complicated relationship with his past in the group, but still maintains his connections with both current and former members of the community.

When I was in junior high school, the Jonestown cult's mass suicide was in the news for months.  The cult started out as the People's Temple less than an hour from where I grew up.  Even I, as a young man just out of college, joined a communal organization, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, where I lived in a Catholic community, shared possessions with my community members and worked out in the wider community doing social service work.  The program shared certain characteristics, particularly communal lifestyle, with some of these more controversial and strange groups.  Lest one think that such communal living is easy, it isn't, and after two years of it I had my fill.

It all goes to show that humans seek out various degrees of communal living.  We consider those who want to be alone misanthropes and slightly off.  We cluster in towns and cities, while maintaining more or less independence.  We all share together somewhere on the spectrum, from lighting and power to, like Oneida, sexual relations in a group marriage.  But the extreme forms of communal living are hard to maintain.  All that's left of the Shaker community at Pleasant Hill now are silent buildings that stand as a testament to a belief system that once was vital and is now gone.  In the 1800s, with Shaker communities at their strongest, nobody living in them would have believed that their communities would disappear without the divine reappearance of the Lord or His Messengers.  Yet now they stand empty, tourist curiosities.  Their art of woodworking, elegantly simple, is prized by materialists the world over.  Their songs are sung by others.  Is it a sad ending?  Or is it just the way of things?

If you want to know more about Pleasant Hill or the Shakers

Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer: Pleasant Hill History
Ott's World: Shakin' it Up in Kentucky (blog)
PBS: Ken Burns' The Shakers
Prose and Photos: Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill
Simple Gifts: An excerpt from Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring (Simple Gifts is a Shaker hymn)
Wikipedia: Pleasant Hill
Wikipedia: Shakers

Next up: Danville, Kentucky

Blue Highways: Brooklyn Bridge/Kentucky River Palisades, Kentucky

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

This post does not center around a city or town, but William Least-Heat Moon (LHM) stopped here along the Kentucky River to talk to a man about a boat.  I wonder if they ever finished it (this was 1978 after all).  Click on the map to discover where you can find the oddly named Brooklyn Bridge and the Kentucky River Palisades.

Book Quote

"The highway, without warning, rolled off the plateau of green pastures and enterred a wooded and rocky gorge; down, down, precipitously down to the Kentucky River.  Along the north slope, man-high columns of ice clung to the limestone.  The road dropped deeper until it crossed the river at Brooklyn Bridge.  The gorge, hidden in the tableland and wholly unexpected, was the Palisades.  At the bottom lay only enough ground for the river and a narrow strip of willow-rimmed floodplain."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 10

Kentucky River Palisades reflected in water. Photo by Lizette Fitzpatrick: Blog N Kentucky

Brooklyn Bridge/Kentucky River Palisades

Nowhere, as I researched why the Brooklyn Bridge over the Kentucky River is so named, could I find an answer.  I've been presented with a mystery.  Perhaps some reader who stumbles across Littourati can leave a comment and enlighten me.  Of course, we have the world famous Brooklyn Bridge across the East River that connects Manhattan with the bridge's namesake borough across the river.  Interestingly enough, a bridge that connects Cincinnati with Kentucky, known as the High Bridge, was designed by John Roebling, the designer of New York's Brooklyn Bridge.  When the High Bridge (now known as the John A Roebling Suspension Bridge) was completed in 1866 it was the longest suspension bridge in the world.

But the Kentucky River Brooklyn Bridge is a mystery.  Was it so named because, in that part of the country in 1871, it looked like a monumental achievement and on a par with the New York Brooklyn Bridge, then under construction?  Did locals simply refer to it as their Brooklyn Bridge, and the name stuck?  Considering that it crosses at a place where there aren't any major metropolitan areas, the siting of the bridge itself seems to me to be a mystery.

The Palisades, however, are no mystery.  Having not been to this part of Kentucky, I have never seen them, but the photos look beautiful.  I have seen similar rock formations in different parts of the country, but evidently the river and these formations stand out, especially in the fall when the leaves are changing.

LHM spends little time talking about the Palisades, however.  He's more interested in a boat he sees being built down along river.  He seeks out the builder, and finds an older, retired man and his wife who have invested their time, energy and sweat into building a boat that they hope will one day allow them to cruise the rivers down to the gulf.

Not being a seafaring type myself, partly because I seem to get seasick any time I am on choppy ocean water, I can still understand this call.  Both of my uncles were commercial fisherman (one is now deceased but the other is still fishing in his 80s), as was my grandfather, and the ocean was in their blood.  There is something between a captain and his boat.  The captain loves his boat as if it were a spouse.  LHM describes it well in talking with the builder, a man named Bill Hammond, and his wife Rosemary.  He sees a sign above the kitchen table which reads "A boat is a hole in the water surrounded by wood into which one pours money."  Rosemary adds "....And your life."

I remember my Aunt Betty, when my Uncle Elwin was out on the water up in Alaska, waiting for the radio to crackle so that she could make sure that he was all right.  It's every fisherman's wife's fear that she will learn that something happened to her husband in rough seas, that the boat went down.  Fortunately, that never happened because my uncle was a careful captain who made sure he and his crew were safe.  My other uncle, Bob, still takes his wife fishing with him.  If you're the spouse of a person who lives and loves boats, you have to indulge them, if not buy into their dreams.

I wonder if Bill Hammond ever completed his boat, Bluebill, and if he and Rosemary sailed away down the Kentucky River, below the geological columns of the Palisades silently standing and watching as they have for eons, to the Mississippi, the Gulf and beyond?  I hope they achieved their quest.

If you want to know more about the Kentucky River Brooklyn Bridge or the Palisades

Bridges and Tunnels: Brooklyn Bridge
Get Out! Kentucky River Palisades
Jessamine County: Kentucky River Palisades
Nature Conservancy: Kentucky River Palisades
Panoramio: View of Kentucky River from Brooklyn Bridge
Wikipedia: Kentucky River Palisades

Next up:  Pleasant Hill, Kentucky

Blue Highways: Lexington, Kentucky

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

Meandering around Kentucky, we accompany William Least-Heat Moon (LHM) on his drive around America in his van, Ghost Dancing.  Check out the map for our current locale.

Book Quote

"Along the Leestown Road, near an old whitewashed springhouse made useless by a water-district pipeline, I stopped to eat lunch.  Downstream from the spring where butter once got cooled, under peeling sycamores, the clear rill washed around clumps of new watercress....

"Had I gone looking for some particular place rather than any place, I'd never have found this spring under the sycamores.  Since leaving home, I felt for the first time at rest.  Sitting full in the moment, I practiced on the god-awful difficulty of just paying attention.  It's a contention of Heat Moon's - believing as he does any traveler who misses the journey misses about all he's going to get - that a man becomes his attentions.  His observations and curiousity, they make and remake him...

"....Maybe the road could provide a therapy through observation of the ordinary and obvious, a means whereby the outer eye opens an inner one.  STOP, LOOK, LISTEN, the old railroad crossing signs warned.  Whitman calls it 'the profound lesson of reception.'

"....In Lexington, I passed row after row of tobacco warehouses and auction barns on my way into the thousand square miles of bluegrass wold once called "God's footstool," a fertile land where pumpkin vines grow so fast they wear out the melons dragging them along.  So they say."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 10

Downtown Lexington, Kentucky

Lexington, Kentucky

How do you travel?  Do you travel with the idea that you must see as much as possible in places that you go?  Or do you travel with minimal goals, rest and relaxation in mind?

My wife and I are often of two minds about our vacations.  When we go someplace, she wants to do as many things that are available and which we have time to do.  If she plans our days, then we are usually going from one place to another - breakfast at a nice restaurant, then the morning looking at an outdoor public art exhibit, lunch, afternoon at a museum, dinner, then perhaps a play or some other activity for the evening.  She is very active, outgoing and wants to see as much as a place has to offer.

I frustrate her a lot, because I am less of a planner.  In truth, I tend to let her plan things and go along, but at times I find myself getting tired keeping up with her boundless energy for sights and activities.  An afternoon sitting at an outdoor cafe and watching people go by would be something that I would schedule, but doing so might mean we miss something.

There's nothing wrong with either way of traveling.  Some travel for rest and relaxation, and some travel for sights and activities.  It depends on what we want.  But the quote by LHM that I pick above is a good reminder of keeping our perspectives no matter how we travel.  Sometimes there is beauty in the ordinary and obvious.  Sometimes the quiet and mundane hold secrets.  Does it matter if we are spending two hours examining a painting in a museum - just sitting there and letting the color and technique and image wash over us - or sitting in a living artwork of a wooded spring and hearing the sounds of the birds and the buzzing of the insects?

My own experience of this beauty in the ordinary came under most extraordinary circumstances.  In Big Bend National Park, on the west side of the Chisos Mountains, the road heads straight for the Rio Grande until you descend off a mesa down into the river valley.  At the top of the mesa, you can look over many square miles of desert where the vegetation is very sparse.  But in the middle of it, seen from probably twenty miles away, is a huge cottonwood tree.  It stands out in the desert like a beacon.  I promised myself I would hike to it someday.

My chance came with a friend.  I told him about my goal, and he was willing.  We set off down the Chimneys Trail and at the Chimneys, a set of rocks that poke out of the desert, we went off trail and headed toward the tree rising in the distance.  In the desert, the distances are not what we seemed.  We hiked for probably 2 hours, crossing five arroyos each deeper than the last.  At the edge of the last arroyo, we reached the tree, but it was surrounded by impenetrable brush on each side, until we went to the west side where there was a way in.  The tree had its own amazing little ecosystem.  Clearly it drew from an underground spring, and it was so lush it literally dripped water on us.  We rested and slept under the tree for probably two hours, completely refreshed after our ordeal through the desert to get there.  Insects buzzed, birds twittered.  In the midst of the sun-blasted silence of the desert it teemed with life that anywhere else would have seemed ordinary, but there seemed like an amazing miracle.

STOP, LOOK, LISTEN is what we had to do in that extraordinary place in Big Bend.  I think perhaps all of us should do more of that.  And speaking of stopping, looking and listening, Lexington is an excellent place to try it.  I've been there twice, though the second time was the time I got a more in-depth view of the city.  My wife finds her stop, look and listen moments at farmers markets, and Lexington has some nice architecture downtown.  And, if you like rolling hills with lots of horse farms and beautiful horse, Lexington will please.  Finally, the Keeneland Horse Racing Facility holds a horse sale and at those times, you might see Lexington locals mingling with famous American horse-racing aficionados, Arabian princes and European royalty.

If you want to know more about Lexington

Ace Weekly (alternative newspaper)
City Guide (alternative newspaper)
Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau
Lexington Farmers Market
Lexington Herald-Leader (newspaper)
The Lexington Project (blog)
Life in Lexington, Kentucky (blog)
Now Eat This! (blog posts about Lexington restaurants)
Transylvania University
University of Kentucky
Urban Spoon Lexington (food)
Wikipedia: Lexington

Next up: Brooklyn Bridge/Kentucky River Palisades