Judging Distances

Driving to Tennessee at the end of the summer.  Really part of more varied vacation options.  I am so ready for a vacation with hotels, sights to see, and recreation.  Only places I've not been to before considered.  And spousal consent and cooperation essential.  I came up with three options.  She selected Tennessee, a mixture of musical Nashville with my fondness for National Parks and Jack Daniel's.

Sometimes the final outcome lies subordinate to the process of getting there.  My also-rans included The Badlands and Canada's Maritime Provinces.  Transportation needs to each place, particularly driving obligations, determined the final selection. 

South Dakota has no big cities.  It will take a plane to get to one.  I found it gratifying to discover that flights from my home airport to major hubs have very economical fares.  Flights to places not in a hub, whether Rapid City near Mt. Rushmore or Halifax, Nova Scotia, come with a significant markup for convenience.  Long obsolete are the days, and pleasures, of road trip planning with AAA TripTiks.  Anyone with a search engine can find optimal and scenic routes in minutes.

Badlands National Park sits roughly equidistant between Minneapolis and Denver Airports but Mt. Rushmore is far closer to Denver.  And there are two reasonable routes from Denver to South Dakota, either north through Wyoming or an eastern path through the Nebraska panhandle.  The Nebraska route takes less than five hours, the Wyoming route a bit more but offers Devils Tower and a few other unique places en route, while western Nebraska largely traverses ranching land.  Five or six hours doesn't sound like much, considering my concept of where Denver and Minneapolis are generates a much different mental image from where The Badlands are.  Six hours of driving will get me from my home to Boston.  It will allow me to drive significantly beyond Pittsburgh or heading north to about the Thousand Islands Bridge into Canada.  I've done all these, never regretting the effort.  I could go from Denver to Mt. Rushmore easily, one route in each direction, with an extension eastward to the National Park.  Minneapolis to the National Park takes slightly longer, maybe the equivalent drive from home to Ottawa, but returning to Minneapolis from Mt. Rushmore would entail some more serious driving.  Or I could have gone from Denver to South Dakota to Minnesota, but there seems a lot more to see between Denver and Wyoming than in eastern South Dakota and western Minnesota.  It is not just a matter of distance or car time but what opportunities arise to package the tedium of hours on an interstate.

Canada posed more of a challenge to my concept of distance.  I've driven to Niagara Falls, Toronto and Ottawa from my home, each taking most of a day.  I've not driven to Montreal, which seems closer than Ottawa, but really takes an additional hour to drive there.  Getting to Halifax takes about fifteen hours, two days of driving.  My longest personal route has been to St. Louis where I once lived.  Home to Halifax adds two hours to that.  No way am I going to drive that.  Even Boston to Halifax leaves ten hours of driving, still far more than any of my previous driving vacations to Ontario.  And there is a ferry.  Quite a lot of driving to get to Maine, enormous expense, still nearly four hours on the ferry each way.  This is not realistic.  As much as I've fancied every visit I've made to Canada, whether Ontario, Montreal, or Vancouver, Nova Scotia just isn't my best option this summer.  No more than I would be willing to drive a round trip to my old home in St. Louis in one week.

That leaves us with the chosen option, Nashville and Great Smokies National Park, with a few detours to the Biltmore Mansion and other nearby attractions.  It does not require a plane but the drive will span two days in each direction.  Maps estimate twelve hours of driving to Nashville.  The return trip gets fragmented.  Four hours to the park, another two en route home to Asheville, then an additional nine hours home.  Where is Nashville?  It's within five hours of either Atlanta or St. Louis, about an hour and a half from Mammoth Cave.  Yet my mind registers those distances much differently.  St. Louis to Kansas City, a common trip by classmates during my time there is similar, yet one is in-state and the other more foreign in concept.    I have driven from home to Mammoth Cave, which is about the same highway distance as Nashville.  I have driven to Charleston and to Hilton Head.  Each of these lie just a tad closer than Nashville.  Both required an overnight motel stay in each direction.  Figure I can handle about seven hours driving, or roughly home to Niagara Falls, Portland ME, or Columbus OH in different directions.  My sense of distance is not how many miles, but how much time I need to devote the full measure of my attention to traffic safety.  The GPS and online driving calculators correct many of my own misconceptions.  My reasonable ability to cover maybe eight daily hours on the road safely has not changed in a significant way in fifty years of periodic long distance driving.

I've never been to Tennessee.  Much unique experience awaits.  Getting there and back has come into some perspective when compared to other experiences.  My concept of what lies in proximity to what else is often faulty, though now corrected by retrievable information.  Long drive, but worthy destinations and no doubt a few wineries to sample without much diversion from the planned route.

Underrepresented

I went to a terrific concert at a huge Presbyterian Church just outside our flagship State University.  Immense sanctuary, filled with a blend of concert lovers who wouldn't miss it and relatives of the volunteer musicians, including a high school contribution of singers who support their household members, if not fine music.  My wife loves choral music, currently serving as President of a local ensemble.  I always enjoy her concerts, though only go to hers.

My own fondness, though never developing into an expensive passion, are our National Parks and my state parks.  As a senior, I purchased lifetime passes to each.  On visit to Florida a year ago I reserved an afternoon to tour the Everglades.  In the past I've allotted vacation time for Zion, Bryce, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Volcanoes National Parks, all quite crowded with fellow tourists on each of my visits.  My regional Osher Institute has offered a course on the National Parks predating my own post-retirement enrollment.  Friday morning is reserved for the current National Parks presentation by one of the finest lecturers in the program, now an octogenarian.

Fine music, often Sacred pieces inspired by a Deity but still mostly created by musical masters and presented by dedicated performers with more of a spectrum of talent, does not easily connect to the wonders of nature, themselves studied and packaged by experts. The link may be the mostly unconditional offer for the public to elevate their minds and spirits from we offered, whether by non-profits that promote music or government that preserves and manages land.  Each are for presentation. 

Some major symphonies, operas, and theatrical agencies charge a substantial sum to partake.  Their attendance would reflect that, an audience dominated by moguls and elite professionals, with a subset of maybe student discounts or people of ordinary means who saved up all year for this personal treat.  Not so with our local productions, from High School annual musicals to church or community sponsored musical concerts.  Tickets are within the means of most wage earners.  The performers mostly need and have cars to get to rehearsals, while working people, at least in my locale, need and have cars to get to work.  The availability of these concerts would seem nearly universal, though in competition with what each person might be doing instead.

The National Parks, while more spectacular, are not as universally accessible.  I always see tour buses, some directed to foreign countries where vacation time exceeds what American employers allot.  Parking lots have plates from all over America and parts of Canada and Mexico, suggesting that people planned their visits to capture multiple places and allow substantial travel time.  More typically, tourists fly to the nearest major airport, then rent a car.  And hotel accommodations, often tied to the pleasures of a resort, make this a considerable expense for most visitors, though working people customarily allot for travel during their vacation weeks.  One can go overseas on a tour, take a cruise, visit a National Park, explore the magic of Disney, all for comparable expense.  And vacation has become a priority for Americans.  I have actually done all of these things over many years.

At the concert, the paucity of African-Americans, countable on fingers amidst a few hundred people caught my attentions.  Asians were also under-represented.  Ages of those in attendance perhaps trended toward older people, though not dramatically so.  And this is with parents supporting their participating kids.  The performers had some people colors, but not the audience.  Has concert music, unlike Spirituals or popular music, become a haven of the elite?  Those people who played in the school orchestra or took courses from the Music Department in college?   Travel or expense would not be an impediment, interest and preferences might be.

I make a parallel observation about my National Park visits, though slightly different.  Asians, whether by Japanese tour buses or visitors to the Western Parks are rather common.  African-Americans seemed few, even in Florida where the only people of color seemed to be those on class trips.  The nearest airport to the Utah parks is Las Vegas which has among the most cosmopolitan collection of visitors as anyplace.  Hotels in the towns surrounding the parks are not extravagantly priced.  Nobody is turned away.  I assume the National Park Service keeps some visitor data so perhaps my visual impression is in error, but I don't think so.  And the Parks are as likely to attract people of all political persuasions, so I don't suspect their enjoyment is top-heavy with the wealthiest most educated Americans.  

We have DEI as a political flash point, as it focuses on employment and blending of students.  But there are other opportunities for having a broader representation of the population than we seem to have now.  Nobody is turned away from a cultural event.  Nobody is refused entry to our public lands to enjoy the best nature can create.  Nothing controversial about this.  Yet there seems to be ethnically, economically, or perhaps geographic preferences.  Or perhaps the desire to bring the kids to the Everglades in competition with Disney reflects a parental perspective.  The concert and the parks each seem to have diversity shortfalls.  And each unrelated to any sense of entitlement or preference.  I think it would be better to make an effort to attract some of the portions of the population not currently seeking out these public treasures, so some may think me an overeducated snob for thinking that way.  

National Park Maybe

I've been an enthusiast of America's National Parks since I first made Zion and Bryce a destination.  Once I became eligible, for $10 as an entry level Senior, I purchased my Park Pass which has gotten me to Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, and Rocky Mountain Parks.  All spectacular.  I've only been to one eastern park, Shenandoah which I visited as a side trip from Charlottesville.  I'm sure it was more spectacular than I realized, though travel limited to the Skyline Drive main road and few minor offshoots.  No mammals seen, don't even remember road kill.  It had been my intent to detour from St. Louis to Mammoth Cave last year, a project undermined by airline delays that made a long round trip unrealistic.

It's time to go again, so much so that I designated it a semi-annual initiative, even amid Covid-19 restrictions.  These parks are big.  Having the summer depleted, I can no longer head north to Isle Royale or Acadia.  There are some southeastern options.  Mammoth Cave is a little farther than I want to drive.  Great Smokies seems the closest beyond Shenandoah, about a 10 hour drive.  It is the most visited of the National Parks, but seems a lot like Shenandoah.  It was cobbled together by mass purchase of farmland or privately held forests.  There are hotels nearby and side trips to either Asheville or Knoxville, in different directions, that have a few attractions of their own.  This seemed the best option.

However, I looked at the Everglades, which I have seen from the air.  It's geography is less familiar to me, wildlife easier to find, Florida weather has an advantage over the Appalachians in December.  After checking on logistics, airfare and hotels are far less expensive than I would have predicted for Florida in their high season.  Being economically dependent on snowbirds and other tourism, they must have taken a very big hit from the virus.  The hotels are a bit farther from the park than those of Great Smokies.  Still there is a lot more to do in Florida than in North Carolina at the onset of winter.  I even know people who live within a drive of there, though I don't know about the willingness of old friends to have people stop by, even with precautions.  

Given the options, I'm leaning toward the Everglades, but will see if anyone else has experience with these two parks and their surroundings.