My wife and I are going to San Antonio this weekend, and we’re looking for fun things to do while we’re down there. When traveling, we love food, art, old buildings, and people-watching. We know about the River Walk and the Alamo. Stuff off the beaten path. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments below or drop me an e-mail!
GREENVILLE, TEXAS
It’s 11 o’clock Texas time, and we’re chilling at the LaQuinta Inn in Greenville, Texas, 45 minutes east of Dallas. In Greenville, they used to have BLACKEST LAND, WHITEST PEOPLE, painted on the water tower. Luckily, that isn’t the case anymore.
We swam in the pool, grabbed warm chocolate chip cookies at the front desk, now we’re watching some cable. Today we drove to Memphis and did something I never thought we’d do.
We went to Graceland.
Fun facts about Elvis that I did not know, and did not learn from the Graceland tour, but from my mother-in-law: that Priscilla was 14 when she met Elvis, and that “the king died on the throne.”
Here’s a fun sign on Vernon Presley’s (Elvis’s dad) office door:
I couldn’t get a good picture of Elvis’s office, but there were books about football, karate, World War II, and, oddly enough, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha.
We drove out of Memphis, through Little Rock, and ate at the Whataburger in Texarkana:
The drive from Texarkana to Greenville was gorgeous. Meg saw her first armadillo by the side of the road.
Tomorrow, we’ll be Austin, in our new apartment. Unbelievable.
NASHVILLE
CHAUTAUQUA NEW YEAR
For New Year’s, our friends were nice enough to invite us up to their place on Lake Chautauqua in western New York.
“You can stay in the boathouse,” they said.
After two hours on the highway, they drove us to this boarded-up shanty.
“Here’s the boathouse!” they said.
Then they laughed at our horrified faces and drove us to the real boathouse.
On the way, they told us “Chautauqua” means “gunny-sack-tied-in-the-middle” in Indian.
Stupid Indians, I thought. Who knows what a gunny sack looks like?
It occured to me over breakfast that this would be a great place to write a book. I could sit at my desk and stare at the lake, white as a virgin sheet of paper, just waiting to be defiled with ink.
Here, some ice fisherman are defiling the lake with drills.
What a pretty scene for a defiling!
The Famous Fish Platter at GUPPY’S is outstanding. There’s a reason it’s famous: the fish is flavorful, and the french fries are crispy, with just the right amount of seasoning.
The decor was tartar sauce on top of the fish: above our table was a Christmas wreath decorated with a golden Budweiser sign.
It was my kind of restaurant.
No New Year is complete without a game of Drunk Scrabble. Drunk Scrabble is played after at least four glasses of wine. Proper nouns, abbreviations, and acronyms are all welcome and encouraged. Proper verbs, are included, too, like Google, even though it’s damned near impossible to end up with two Gs and two Os.
I am pleased to note that I came up with the evening’s top score: a whopping 33 points for “feat.” (The F was on a double-letter score, and the T ended up on a triple-word score.)
Happy New Year!
THE KLEON GUIDE TO EUROPEAN TRAVEL, PART 2
LONDON, PARIS, & ANY PLACE THEY DON’T SPEAK ITALIAN
London is my least favorite city on the other side of the pond. Everything is expensive, the food isn’t all that great–it’s basically a big American city with a funny accent. Paris is beautiful, and despite people who claim otherwise, Parisians are friendly and smell just fine. But I haven’t seen nearly enough of either of them to claim any kind of authority. In Paris, I remember loving the Left Bank, near Notre Dame. Read Let’s Go, or Lonely Planet, or Rick Steves, and figure out what you want to see. For hotels, you can’t go wrong in any city using TripAdvisor.com. My heart, and my good advice, lies in a magical country called Italia.
ROME
Rome can be done in two days. Start out by checking into a place called the HOTEL DIPLOMATIC. Good price, huge bathtubs and clean rooms. Then spend the rest of the day and the evening walking the main strip of Roma, seeing the Colosseum (I never went in), the Pantheon (glorious), the Spanish Steps (good place to sketch), and the Trevi Fountain (watch your camera). Drink some wine, eat some gelato, and get a good night’s rest. In the morning, you’re within walking distance of the Vatican. Hit St. Peter’s at 7:30 in the morning, when the nuns are still out. Say hello to the Pieta for me, and then head over to the Vatican. Now, what follows is controversial: it’s totally acceptable to race straight through the huge Vatican museum to get to Michelangelo’s Last Judgement and the Sistine Chapel at the end. Afterwards, there’s a lovely little cafe run by a family nearby, but I’d have to close my eyes and let my subconcious take me there. Walk down any street and when you find a small, bald man smoking a cigar, with black socks and sandals, you’ve arrived.
FLORENCE
I want to die in a cottage built in the hilly suburbs of Florence. Florence can be done in one day, but it would be criminal. Give it at least two, and I highly suggest three. Meghan and I cut a day off Venice just to spend a fourth in Florence. The city is small enough that you can walk anywhere, so stay at a place called the Gould Institute (Instituto Gould), south of the Arno. Ask for a room away from the street, preferably off the courtyard, where you can sometimes see small children playing. The magic room is #249. Do the art-seeing and the touristy stuff north of the river, sleep, loiter, stroll, and eat south of the river. See as much Renaissance art as you can–hit the Uffizi and all the churches–but be ready to pay for it. You absolutely must walk the Boboli Gardens, take a hike up in the hills past the Fort Belvedere over to the Church at San Miniato al Monte to the Piazza Michelangelo (with the David replica statue) just in time for sunset. Breathtaking.
VENICE
The thing about Venice is…it’s sinking. I personally think Venice is max-ed out after a full day. My advice is to stay one night and splurge on a fancy hotel room: everything in Venice is expensive, so even the dumps cost 90 euros a night. An overlooked part of Venice is the Jewish Ghetto. This is where I like to eat. There’s no real hope of navigating Venice by map, memorize a few landmarks, and then use the signs around the city to navigate the labyrinth streets. Hold hands and get lost: it’s the best way to do it. Watch out for gondoliers: when I was there the first time I ended up getting drunk with three of them. Also: if three drunk gondoliers offer you a free gondola ride, go against your better judgment and TAKE IT!
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