Urban Hike #3

Yesterday was one of those days when not much was going on around town, but we felt up for adventure. We decided to create our own. Les came up with the idea of walking from our house into downtown Nashville -– about a 6-mile walk. We knew we were capable of doing it, we just didn’t know how long it would take us or how walker-friendly the route would be. I’ve always felt that you are sure to see interesting things when you walk instead of drive, so we packed our camera into my little “Mr. Friendly” backpack (I bought it in Taiwan. It looks like this, but it’s yellow instead) and headed out.



We followed the same route that we usually drove when heading to the Predators hockey games. It was kind of a warm day and, 15 minutes into the hike, I had out my bandana and my persp-towel, and was sweating like crazy. I was sure that we were going to be completely dehydrated by the time we got to downtown and started wondering, “Why are we doing this again?” which is not really a good thing to be thinking 15 minutes into your multi-hour hike. We stopped and drank big bottles of water about an hour into our walk and used the extremely air conditioned restrooms at a gas station (I mean, it was COLD in there!), which much improved my mood and outlook. We passed some things we had wanted to check out up close and took photos -– a multi-nozzle fire hydrant spigot, a set of abandoned train cars on a bridge, a big cemetery with rolling hills and interesting monuments, a cute yellow building near the power station, construction projects along our route that we had been curious about, etc. I also looked over the edge of every bridge we walked over, just because that’s something I like to do.



We also noticed things we weren’t expecting to see. There’s a house on Spence Lane that has about 40 cement animals scattered around the yard. We had seen that before, but what we hadn’t noticed was that every single animal was wearing a small pair of sunglasses in honor of the summer season. This was probably the highlight of our trip. We also realized that many of the bridges on Hermitage Avenue have people living under them, way up high in the “rafters,” where you would never see them if you were just driving by (I’ve since tried).

It took us about three hours to get into downtown, but we did dawdle along the way. We were sweaty, dirty, smelly, and just overall unappealing by the time we got there. We walked down Broadway and all the tourists looked so clean and sweet-smelling by comparison. I felt like I had just come down from the mountains into civilization. We went into one of the little ice cream shops to get water and use the bathrooms and enjoy the air conditioning, and then we strategized our next steps.

We decided to walk across the pedestrian bridge into East Nashville and see how that went. We were able to find the “cool” part of town and got some snacks at The Turnip Truck (I just love that little place!). Les got directions to Rosepepper Cantina in East Nashville. One of our vegan friends had told us that they offered healthful, quality food with lots of vegetarian (and even vegan) options. Since we were “in the neighborhood” we decided to try it out.It took us another 45 minutes to walk to the Rosepepper. You kind of go out of the neighborhoody parts of East Nashville to get there, so we wondered if we were lost. Getting lost in a car can be frustrating and inconvenient, but getting lost on foot on a multi-hour hike can make you feel like you’re going to have to sleep out here on the streets because you’re expending the same energy you need to get home. Despite my moment of doubting, our good directions didn’t fail us and we soon were sitting down (ahhhh!) and eating some delicious Mexican food. It was some of the best food we ever had and walking four hours to get it might have had something to do with that.

After dinner, we were in a hurry to get home. We had about four hours of real daylight left and, unfortunately, the area closest to our house is the worst area for pedestrians (very little shoulder by the road, no sidewalks, and hills/curves that don’t give you or cars much visibility) so we were eager to get through there when we could be well-seen. It took us about 3.5 hours to make the trip back home from Rosepepper. We had a fast pace and lots of energy after fueling up our bodies. Nonetheless, the last 15 minutes were really hard. We were tired, and it seemed like the entire last part of our hike was uphill (you also don’t notice all the hills along your route until you’re walking), including the major hill into our apartment complex. I had to do some serious motivational lectures in my head to stop from throwing a temper tantrum and insisting that Les get the car and come back for me.

We did make it home before dark and it did feel great to have walked all the way from our house to East Nashville and back. What a sense of accomplishment! Today we went out and drove our route to see how many miles we walked. Although we were extremely tired yesterday and still tired today, we were still surprised by the total –- 20 miles! This is by far the furthest we’ve ever walked! Best of all, I got 45,058 steps yesterday. A new record!

10 Years

Today is our “first” 10 year anniversary! Wow! And hooray!

Aside: We had two wedding ceremonies so we celebrate two anniversaries each year. Our first wedding was in May in Michigan and was a pretty unusual “progressive party” style of wedding, ending with a ceremony on the beach. Our second wedding was in June in Pennsylvania and was a very lovely and traditional church wedding. The great thing about this (aside from everyone getting their “dream wedding”), is that if we forget our May anniversary, there’s always our June anniversary.

Time has really flown by and we can’t believe we’ve already been married 10 years. Les was so cute and was telling everyone all about it at work, even customers. What a romantic!

Here’s to another 40 years together!

Prunes, the REAL Musical Fruit

I know this is kind of weird, but I think I like prunes. I feel like I’m about 30 years too young for this emotion, but I’m openly admitting it nonetheless in case there’s a Youthful Prune-eaters Club out there that I can join.

One of my earliest experiences with prunes was not a particularly good one. It was at Lou Mitchell’s restaurant, in the shadow of the Sears Tower in Chicago. This is a diner of “extras” – you get piping-hot donut holes when you walk in the door, ladies get little boxes of Milk Duds as they wait in line, and yes, you even get a prune as part of every meal (maybe to balance the high-calorie diner food?). Because there’s always a line at Lou’s, we opted to sit at the counter for faster service. As soon as we sat down, the busboy put a dish of prunes in front of each of us. They were very fresh – sweet and wet, with the pits still inside. Quite hungry, and knowing that it might be a while before we got our food, I decided to see what this prune thing was all about, and ended up somewhat choking down the fleshy fruit, not at all sure that I liked the strong favor and the slippery texture.

The busboy, mistaking my desperate hunger for an enthusiasm for prunes, decided to hook me up with another prune, giving me a sweet wink as he took away my pit-dish and put another prune on the counter. I swallowed nervously and tried to smile enthusiastically, but did take my time getting around to prune #2, lest a prune #3 not be far behind.

So, it’s surprising that now I’m eating at least a serving of 7 prunes every day after dinner. I may have been roped in by the clever advertising on the package – they are not called “prunes” (except in very small print) but rather “dried plums,” which sounds much more appealing. The packaging also talks a lot about all the great nutritional elements of a prune (other than just the fiber that old people love them for) and it’s pretty convincing. In addition, the mini prunes I eat are more like big raisins than the wet, slimy lump I had at Lou Mitchell’s years ago, though the flavor is the same.

Try a prune out and see what you think. I’ll let you know when I start drinking any of those powered fiber mixers old folks are always advertising on TV. Then you can really start to worry about my premature aging.

A Saturday in Nashville / Urban Hike #2

Today was a pretty fun day of diverse activities. We swung by the Ryman to pick up tickets for the Erasure acoustic show tonight – something we had been meaning to do, but just hadn’t managed to actually accomplish. They still had tickets left in the balcony (they are only playing a few dates in the US and not any other dates close to us, so we weren’t sure), so we snagged those and then headed out to kill time before the show.

Les had read that there was a local art festival in Centennial Park, so we went to check it out. After many years of attending and fighting crowds at the huge Ann Arbor Art Festival, it was actually a breath of fresh air to not only have fewer artists to look at, but also to have fewer crowds to squeeze through. And the quality of art was just as good!

One of our favorite artists was the couple Lucius & Lenda DuBose. Lucius has some fabulous bird prints that we were immediately drawn to, but they are also wonderful people who we enjoyed just chatting to for 20 minutes about birding, art, and print-making. We hope to see them again in the fall at the bigger Nashville Art Festival. We want to buy one of their prints for Les’s mom, but we need her here to help pick it out.

We did buy a gorgeous wood cutting-board after our onion-flavored watermelon fiasco of a week ago (see Signs of Summer post), but managed to mostly just really enjoy walking around without consuming too much.

To further our urban hiking experiences, we decided to walk from Sitar Indian Restaurant in the Vandy area to the Ryman Auditorium downtown. It’s a little over a mile and half and probably about 20 blocks. It doesn’t sound very far when you say it that way, but it seems far when you’re driving it because you’re going from one side of town to the other. It definitely seems even further when you’re walking it because you get out of the city, over the highway, and you feel like you’re in a land between two lands. The walk there was fine and interesting and enjoyable, but the walk back after the concert was quite rainy and Les couldn’t see a thing through his splattered glasses. I kept saying, “Hey, we’re creating a memory here!” but I was seriously regretting our decision to walk to the show, especially as our clothes got wetter and wetter and heavier and heavier and it seemed like the entire return walk was uphill. We thought about taking a taxi, but we couldn’t remember whether the roof light was on or off if it was available (I now know that if the number light is lit up, the taxi is available; if the top light is off, the taxi is in use) so we just trudged on.

When we finally got to our car, we felt a great sense of accomplishment, but decided that next time we would definitely take an umbrella at least . . . or drive.

My Erasure “5 Things” are:

1. The songs translated surprisingly well into acoustic, countrified versions. I didn’t know many of the songs, but Les (who did know most of the songs) was impressed with how good they sounded as country songs.

2. The crowd was wildly enthusiastic. For once, I felt like I could sit back and not clap at all and still be assured that there would be multiple encores.

3. The balcony is THE place to sit in the Ryman – great view, more elbow room, great sound.

4. Andy Bell said that he was so happy to be performing that he just had to lick the stage. He did, and told the crowd that it tasted just like strawberries. He’s darling!

5. They ended with Respect, which got everyone up and dancing and singing along very dramatically. This music just brings emotive singing-along right out of you!

TMBG

They Might Be Giants came to town! We just had to go! Les has never seen them live except for an in-store performance at Borders, and I haven’t seen them live since New Year’s Eve 1992 (I think – it’s so long ago, now).

They were originally going to be at City Hall, which is a venue we’ve wanted to go to for a while, but then they changed the venue at the last minute to Exit/In, a smaller club that we saw Sharon Jones at and like quite well.

We got to the club and queued up outside in a sizeable line of people who appeared to have never queued up before (there were two lines for apparently no reason). When we got to the door, we found out that I needed ID to get in, even though – I assure you – I definitely appear to be over 21 and our tickets said nothing about ID being required. We rushed back to our car, drove home, got my ID, searched for parking, and got back to the club in time to see the show, though we did miss the opening band and heard he was great. I am yet again SO thankful for living in such close proximity to the city! If that had happened in Michigan, when we lived an hour from everything, we would have either skipped the show, snuck in, or I would have gotten to wait in the car. Yay, Nashville!

The show was great! TMBG are so clever and energetic and wonderful! We had a fabulous time!
A few years ago, when Les and I were going to 2 to 4 shows a week, we devised a system to boil down our show experiences and document them so that we would walk away with specific memories from each show. It’s just called our “5 Things” list (obviously, it’s more about documenting things than selling our system to the public through clever naming and marketing!).

My They Might Be Giants 5 Things are:

1. A lot of their songs were faster, more upbeat, rockier takes on the album versions. At times I thought I was at a punk show. Rock on!


2. They had a confetti cannon for one song. How awesome is that?


3. The audience was “old” – for once I felt like a young person at 32.


4. I asked for and got the set list from the sound guy. It’s my first set list ever, and even though it’s not the band’s set list, it still had interesting drawing on it and was cool.


5. They played a song called “Fingertips,” which is just a bunch of short snippets from never-written songs. It’s a weird song and not exactly one that would be easy to play live, so I was thrilled to hear it.

Urban Hiking

As many of you who have read my blog know, I have a step-counter and am a little bit obsessed with “getting steps” (10,000 at least) every day. I usually get around 5,000 steps at work, leaving me with another 5,000 steps to get after I arrive at home. Usually, that’s not too much of a problem, but if I arrive home with fewer than 5,000 steps, it can be challenging to get all those steps just walking around our apartment complex.

Yesterday, I arrived home with about 2,800 steps -- a new low for me. Getting up to 10,000 required an intervention, not just a little additional effort. Les, who has become committed to getting me 10,000 steps every day (come hell or high water), suggested a small “urban hike” to make up my deficit. “Let’s walk to our Post Office and back,” he said. Because this is exactly the type of adventure that strikes my fancy, I was chomping at the bit to head out.

Our Post Office is probably about a mile and a half away from us. There are no sidewalks where we live. We have to walk through a construction area that doesn’t have much of a shoulder for a short part, but the rest of our route is either off of the main road or on a road that has a very generous shoulder. We kind of walk past my office on our route and, since I have often wondered if I could walk to work, I was interested to see how long it took us to walk to the Post Office and how dangerous it was to be a pedestrian in a non-pedestrian-friendly area.

It took us about 45 minutes to make the walk each way. This was because we kept stopping to check out things we had never noticed when driving this same route. It’s amazing how much you see when you’re moving at a slow pace: turtles swimming in a pond, baby geese and their parents, old computer monitors dumped in the bushes, a collection of beer bottles in the woods, a parking lot that is easy-in/how-do-I-get-out, unusual businesses you’ve never heard of, weird flowers and trees, and even interesting-looking people encapsulated in their cars driving by.

You also never notice the hills when you’re driving in your car. There’s one killer hill that is long and gradual and I was convinced that we would never make it to the top. But we did, and then there we were . . . at the Post Office.

I have to say that I felt a great sense of accomplishment after we did this walk. I told a lot of people about it and took pride in their looks of, “What on earth were you thinking? Who walks on streets?!” Although it’s obviously much more productive to drive from Point A to Point B, it’s interesting to find out what is within walking distance of your house and what it is like to walk somewhere instead of driving there, the world blurring by your car windows.

Save gas – try walking somewhere.