Things got pretty hectic over the past few days so I have missed a couple of posts. I guess I got close to the end of my planned trip and was anxious to move it along, driving straight through to my friend’s home in Maryland. Once there we of course had to talk late into the night, and start again in the morning – I just ran out of time to write.
My last night on the road was in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. I got in late because of yet another adventure on the back roads, but I finally figured out the reason. It was my error, not the error of the GPS. When I entered Florida a couple of weeks ago I found the GPS insisting on the “fastest route” – which were always the toll roads. I had no desire to either travel on a big new multi-lane highway, or to pay tolls for the use of the roads. I therefore went into the setup screen and unchecked the “toll roads” option. It turns out that I also unchecked the “highway” option. Since Florida is one of those states that depends upon large highways to get from place-to-place my GPS was forced to go far out into the “country” to find routes that did not include multi-lane highways. This achieved my goal of taking the “less traveled” paths, it also added hours on to my travel times. It wasn’t a problem with the GPS, it did exactly what I told it to do. I changed this before heading into Maryland, which gave me a much more direct (and boring) route to my friends.
Being located on the Albemarle Sound, Elizabeth City is surrounded by many potentially interesting and engaging things. It would have been an interesting place to spend a few days – but I had turned the corner and was headed home. I got in late in the afternoon, left early in the morning, and missed all that would have been interesting.
There was a Ruby Tuesday restaurant located very near my hotel, so I decided that it wouldn’t be great, but would be dependable and I was too hungry and tired to go out searching for something more interesting. Besides; the clouds had turned very black, threatening a big and wet storm. I decided against venturing far from my hotel. The restaurant was indeed “dependable” – it could have been a Ruby Tuesday in anywhere USA. There was nothing to indicate that it was located in a specific community, specific State, or near a special place. It was dependably cookie-cutter bland.
It had been awhile since I had eaten a steak, so I decided on that. I was offered a “side” to go with the steak -and selected mashed potatoes. The steak and potato dinner was around $28 dollars – the same as I would have expected anywhere in America. Prices of daily necessities aren’t noticeably lower in the East or in the South, with the exception of gasoline which seems to average around $3.20 a gallon in most States compared to current California prices of around $5.00 a gallon. Other than that most things are about the same price everywhere.
My steak and mashed potatoes arrived, taking my breath away at my surprise. Admittedly, I ordered steak and mashed potatoes – and got them. But I wasn’t prepared at the stark presentation of just being a scoop of potatoes next to a chunk of meat with nothing else. Not even a sprig of parsley.
The meat was OK, the potatoes what they looked like. I just sat there thinking how bizarre it looked – thre had been zero effort at anything other than the absolute minimum basics – two boring things sitting in the middle of a white plate. I realized that in some way this plate was an example of what I had been experiencing for the past month and a half – everything seemed to have been drained of interest, beauty – humanity. With a few notable exceptions, the rooms at the hotels were all just concrete boxes sized and outfitted with an eye toward “minimally acceptable functionality” and a minimum of cost. I slept in dozens of identical boxes stacked together with no intent of providing anything “extra,” even if the extra in the form of color, art, interest or anything else could be provided at little or no expense. It wasn’t so much a process of saving money, it was a process of making everything uniform, noncontroversial – “dependable.” It had come to feel something like; “Slop, plop, there is your gruel and there is your corner of the room.”
Even places that had been eclectic and vibrant just a few years ago, such as Key West, have been turned into shop after shop selling identical trinkets and clothes, boring bars and “cute” restaurants – the eclectic and vibrant are no where to be seen. Places such as the South Miami beaches are all fenced off and protected, nothing to see or do there – except be amazed at the billions of dollars represented by gigantic homes facing the ocean with their “butts” facing the hoi polloi. “We got ours, now go home.”
It feels like America has lost its soul. It is just hunkered down, either waiting for the end times or drifting like the lounge chair vacationers in the 2008 animation “Wall-E” produced by Pixar Animation Studios. Most of the “action” has bypassed the biggest swaths of America. Entertainment and adventure have been reduced to things that are “dependable” – and boring.