Tale of Three States

Rohan suggested that we should go to the Smokies over Christmas. It had three great things to recommend it—the most visited national park in the US, part of the “American South”, and a range of the Appalachians, which had been giving me siren calls for a long time.

I was thrilled. My “am going to visit all the honky tonk bars I can,” made headline news at work, as it was discussed in a staff meeting with great amusement.

But two days before Christmas, Rohan gave me the bad news. “I need to work on the 26th, so Smokies is off,” he said.

I was bitterly disappointed.

“Come over, we’ll find something else to do,” he tried to be reasonable.

“I’d rather go somewhere warm!” I huffed. The month had been unseasonably cold.

“But wouldn’t you lose money on your tickets?” he asked, forever the practical man.

“Doesn’t matter—what would I do in Cincinnati?” I said with ill grace. But 24 hours of trawling the net and bugging my cousin in Santa Clara made it abundantly clear that the travel Gods didn’t want me to go westwards. I ate humble pie and told Rohan that I am coming over to Cinci after all. He laughed.

On the 24th, the day of my travel, disaster struck. Snow and ice at the Peoria airport made a landing flight slide, so they canceled the entire day’s flights. Clever airline people automatically booked me on a flight the next day.

One would’ve thought people would stay home on Christmas day—but foul weather and messed-up airline schedules across the country resulted in a mad rush.

But that was not the main problem. I realized that for the lure of discount tickets, I was conned by the airline people. Cincinnati was 290 miles to my southeast. To get there, they first took me 350 miles northwest to Minneapolis, made me miss my connecting flight, and left me stranded at the airport for six hours!

I finally reached Cinci at 10:30 pm, traveling for more than 12 hours to an alien-invaded airport. My footsteps echoed eerily as I walked and walked along garishly lit albeit deserted corridors of the airport. Where were my co-passengers and the crew? How could they disappear in the five minutes it took for my bio-break?

I finally made it to the exit—gosh, what kind of airport had u-turn signs for pedestrians navigating the labyrinth of its corridors and escalators?

“Look out for a bright yellow car,” Rohan said. Indeed, his Chevy Aveo looked like a big moth as it came cruising along the deserted driveway. Boy, was I glad to see him and his cheerful little car—the airport gave me the heebie jeebies!

It took us 30 minutes to reach our accommodation. Rohan, bless his soul, stays in a motel called Econolodge run by an Indian family in a seriously blue-collar neighborhood called Sharonville (Est. 1799) and had organized a room for me there. Visions from every American road movie, from Thelma and Louise to No Country for Old Men flashed before my eyes as I entered its cramped portals. It was a slice of America that I had always wanted to experience but would’ve never dared, if not for mon ami.

The next day, Rohan took me to the nearby McDonalds for breakfast. I didn’t know it then, but it was the beginning of our McD mania. We breakfasted under the beloved golden arches every single day of our holiday, both of us ordering the same things: breakfast platter for him and southern-style chicken biscuit for me. Oh how we love thee, Ray Kroc!

That evening, in lieu of the honky tonk bars that I missed, my host took me to an all-American restaurant called Sleepy Hollow Inn. While chain saw/axe murderers were conspicuous by their absence, there was much else that made it a great adventure—an all white crowd (we were the only persons of color that evening there), a shabby, hastily thrown together décor that made it look like someone’s garage rather than a restaurant, country music on the pipe, and a menu inspired by the great south and Baja peninsula.

I naively ordered the Iceberg Wedge salad. People, it is really just a big wedge of iceberg lettuce. Sprinkled with a pinch of bleu cheese, a smattering of onions, and accompanied by a dressing of your choice. And it is a specialty of the southern cuisine. Really.

Rohan looked at it and balked. “Send it back!” he urged me.

I smiled tremulously. “I need the fiber,” I said bravely and cut into the mountainous wedge.

“You are not going to eat all of it, are you?” Rohan asked me with horrid fascination, as if I was that guy on Travel channel who ate the ickiest food on earth. Luckily his fish basket arrived to distract him.

From thence, we headed towards the festival of lights at Sharon Woods. We paid 20 dollars for a truly unimaginative and uninspired display of Christmas lights.

“Why so many tents?” I asked, pointing to the profusion of the triangular arrangements.

“It’s the Christmas tree, you silly!” Rohan the interpreter of arts said.

“Oh! But isn’t that a tent?” I asked pointing to the bigger, unmistakably tenty displays with stars on top.

“Must be the nativity scene!” Rohan the optimist suggested.

“But wasn’t Jesus born in a barn?” I asked, ever literal.

“Bah!” he replied.

Later that night, we decided that we would make a road trip to the obscure Falls of Ohio State Park in Indiana the next day, which boasted Devonian era fossils. Rohan was dubious, but was sporting.

It was a serendipitously salubrious day, with temperatures in the 60s. We were bright and early. The GPS, in its dulcet voice, informed us that our destination was 90 minutes away. “Not bad,” we agreed, jammed the gas pedal, and set out.

On the 60th minute, we missed an exit.

Apparently in Indiana, it is a serious offence. We were sentenced to 90 minutes of drive along flat, frigid backcountry roads, where we occasionally came upon villages that zipped past us by the blinking of the eye. Our eyes glazed over, our spirits sagged, and our bottoms went to sleep.

Our GPS came to life suddenly after being silent for a long time and gave a flurry of directions. Following its confident commands, we turned left and right, as the flat countryside gave way to more vegetated, decidedly wilder terrain. We could hear the Ohio River roaring near us. “After 0.5 miles, you would have reached your destination,” the GPS informed us with great precision.

Only the destination was a rundown trailer park house.

“What the—!” Rohan exclaimed.

We exchanged stupefied glances and looked around us. It was a rather small trailer park on the banks of the river and seemed pretty much a dead end. Rohan finally overcame his manly resistance to ask directions and checked with a nice couple there. “Oh boy!” the man said. “You’re way off!” Like we didn’t know. We had to drive for 30-minutes more to reach our actual destination.

The Falls of Ohio State Park is a really beautiful little park, at the point of the Ohio River where it forms many rapids, caused by the limestone formations at its bed. Apparently, 400 million years ago, during the Devonian era (before the Jurassic), the area that is currently known as the Grand Prairies was the bed of a tropical ocean. And in its coral reeves, there lived generations of sea creatures, from trilobites to corals to fish. As the continent moved and the sea receded to make way for deciduous forests, the remains of these organisms were caught in the limestone, becoming fossilized.

Now, for a stretch of a few miles at this point of the river, there are fossils everywhere, right under one’s feet. Rohan and I walked along the river, feeling the spray from the rapids that rendered the silhouette of Louisville, Kentucky across the river misty, and being in the exact place where Lewis and Clark visited on their historic expedition 200 years ago.

I was enthralled by it all. “You know, we are disturbing the ecological balance of this place by just visiting it,” I commented, a little sanctimoniously.

Rohan stopped in his tracks. “After making me drive for three fucking hours, you are saying we shouldn’t have been here?” he asked, his voice brimming with injury.

Our drive back was relatively uneventful. Emboldened by this success, we set out for Dayton, the birthplace of the Wright brothers, the next day. It is hard to believe that it was in this sleepy little city that one of the most important innovations of human race happened, crafted by two men who were bicycle shop owners, not trained engineers. The museum is a must see.

Rohan insisted that I should get a taste of Cincinnati as well. Good thing that he did—Cinci, far from being a boring midwestern city, is full of interesting texture. It is a city built on Paleolithic Indian burial mounds and the first all-American boomtown. It has many colors and interesting old residential buildings of all denominations.

But it is a bitch to get on to one of those bridges across the river that are tantalizingly close from downtown if you don’t know your exits—ask us. We circled the city at least four times before figuring out a way. But it was worth it, because we had an excellent seafood meal at Mitchell’s Fish Market (“a wide variety of fresh fish is flown in daily”) at the Newport on the Levee mall, Kentucky.

For all the drama that happened on my way out, my way back to Peoria was disappointingly smooth. I landed on a bright, sunny afternoon, with no trace of the snow and ice from a week before—a fitting finale indeed.