Month: January 2016

My Travel Memories: Cincinnati, Ohio

Finally, we get to Cincinnati.  Cincinnati is not a perfect city by any stretch of the imagination.  It’s in the “rust belt,” which (for those not in the United States) is a reference to the region that used to rely heavily upon industrial jobs but where the industrial jobs have disappeared, sending the economy and population of the region into something of a tailspin.  Cincinnati also has, from what I have read, a great deal of racial tension.  Chicago is not free of racial tension, but I grew up in an area that had had been dragged kicking and screaming into racial diversity and now I live in San Antonio, which is more diverse than not (the 2010 census reports that the population of white non-Latino residents in the city proper is 26.6%).

So, Cincinnati is not exactly heaven on Earth or anything like that (despite being the place where a family friend had a conversion experience). What Cincinnati has that makes it worth the trip?  Is Cincinnati Union Terminal (now home to the Cincinnati Museum Center).

I have actually been to Cincinnati twice. The first time was in 1980, when Union Terminal was a shopping mall.  My mom and I visited the mall while my dad was working and we had a wonderful time.  The mall was, well, a mall.  But the building?  Is beautiful. The rotunda, the tiny details. Even the pay phones were gorgeous.  This was, of course, back in the days before everyone had a cell phone and we had to call my dad to arrange where he was going to pick us up, so we had to find a pay phone and the phone booths were very Art Deco.  I half-expected Superman to emerge from one.

Speaking of Superman, Cincinnati Union Terminal is also the inspiration for the Hall of Justice from the old 1970s Super Friends cartoon show.  So if train stations aren’t your thing, and neither is Art Deco architecture or museums, perhaps it would be worth the visit for the comics/Saturday-morning-cartoon fan in your traveling group.

When my folks and I returned to Cincinnati in 1987, Union Terminal sat empty.  This was distressing for both my mom and me, since it’s such a lovely building and we’d had such a good time there.  Little did we know (since the Internet wasn’t widely available yet) that plans were under way to turn Union Terminal into the Cincinnati Museum Center.

I only discovered this information around three or four years ago, when a friend was planning a trip to Cincinnati and asked what there was to do there.  I was sad that the station had been empty and looked it up, dreading to find that the building was razed.  Lo and behold, the building had been given new life.  Since 1990, the Museum Center has been home to the Cincinnati History Museum, the Duke Energy Children’s Museum, the Museum of Natural History and Science, and an Omnimax theater.

Of course, I have not returned to Cincinnati since the opening of the Museum Center, but I am planning another trip to Cincinnati in 2017.  My hope is that when Alex and I go to Kentucky for the eclipse we will drive there (stopping in Nashville to see the Parthenon on the way).  Perhaps we will visit Graceland as well; I don’t know what kind of time we’ll have available.  But Hopkinsville, Kentucky, the town closest to the point of greatest eclipse, is only four hours from Cincinnati.  I’ve been in Texas for nearly 23 years now.  A four-hour drive really is “only” to me. So I figure that we’ll start a day earlier, overshoot Hopkinsville by four hours, visit Union Terminal (and take lots of pictures!), spend the night in Cincinnati or in Louisville, and then get up extra early to make it back to Hopkinsville in time for the eclipse.  At least, that’s the plan.  Let’s see how it works out in practice.

South Texas Destinations: La Villita Historic Arts Village, San Antonio, Texas

The area where La Villita Historic Arts Village (“La Villita”) stands today has been occupied by humans for centuries.  Prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, that are on the shore of the San Antonio River had been home to a community of Coahuiltecan Native Americans.  Around 1722, the soldiers from the Presidio (the Presidio was where Military Plaza and the San Antonio City Hall are today) lived in huts on that site with their families.  That community was later destroyed by a flood.

Then, in the early 19th Century, a group of immigrants from Germany built more permanent structures on the site.  The Germans were followed by immigrants from Switzerland, France, and Italy.  These are the buildings that are there today.  As with so much of the historical sites of San Antonio, the buildings of La Villita fell into disrepair.  During the Great Depression, the buildings were restored to their original condition, and La Villita began its current life as an arts center.

Today, La Villita is home to shops, galleries, and restaurants.  Several festivals are held there, including the Fiesta event, A Night in Old San Antonio (popularly called by the acronym “NIOSA”). My family and I also attended the India Association of San Antonio’s annual Festival of India at La Villita in the early 2000s.  Even though this information will be outdated in a couple of months, the 2016 festival will be held on March 26.  I do not know if it will be held in La Villita again, though.

The Arneson River Theatre abuts La Villita on the San Antonio River side.  The theater is set up in an unusual but picturesque way, with the audience seating on the La Villita side and the stage on the other side of the river.

Arneson River Theatre, San Antonio
The stage of the Arneson River Theatre, San Antonio, Texas

The streets of La Villita are level, but not all of the shops are wheelchair accessible. The Arneson River Theatre has steps leading down to (or up from, depending on your perspective) the river, but I am pretty sure that there is wheelchair accessible seating at street level.

National Geographic October 2013, Part 1

The Power of Photography, by Robert Draper

This isn’t so much of an article as just the text to go along with the fold-out pages of photographs for the cover story.  It’s mostly praise for the hard work that National Geographic photographers do, but there’s a side-order of “hey you kids get out of my yard” that makes this slightly uncomfortable reading for me.  Then there’s the line “global cacophony of freeze-frames” that me wonder what my high school sophomore year English teacher would say about it.

The Price of Precious, by Jeffrey Gettleman, photographs by Marcus Bleasdale

The Price of Precious chronicles the travel of Gettleman and Bleasdale into the Congo, where they investigated the ongoing war and the way that trafficking in precious metals has been supporting that war. It is likely that some of the precious metals in my computer, and in whatever device you are reading this on is, and probably the server that will host this file once I finish writing it, came from the Congo.

Thanks to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, some manufacturers of electronics are weeding the conflict out of their precious metals.  At the time this went to print (over two years ago now) some of the groups that were funding violence with precious metals had seen their profits drop 65% and the Congolese government were starting to inspect mines to ensure that they were not funding violence.

Meltdown, by Robert Kunzig, photographs by James Balog

This is another short page-length bit of text to accompany photographs, this time Balog’s photographs of glaciers of Alaska and Iceland.  Kunzig discusses glaciers in Montana, Switzerland.  And in the years since this was published, the glacier in Switzerland, the Rhône, has retreated so far that the Belvedere Hotel, which used to be open to house visitors to the glacier has closed.

My Travel Memories, Lexington (and probably Louisville), Kentucky

This is going to be a short one, because I don’t remember much.  I’m not even sure that Lexington was our next stop after Springfield.  At this point in our 1980 vacation, we took one of my dad’s road trips with him.  The cities he needed to visit and thus we covered were Lexington, Louisville, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Detroit.  Lexington might have been the day that my mom and I sat in the car outside the building where my dad was working.  Or was that Louisville?  Literally all I remember of those two cities was dinner.  In Louisville, we went to an Italian restaurant, I think.

And then there was dinner in Lexington.  We had dinner at a dinner theater in Lexington.  I was a young teenager and had been to the theater, by my count, around four times before, but this may have been my first dinner theater experience. As we left the theater, I saw a sort of receiving line for the actors and, figuring that this was the thing to do, I got in line.  I told them that I had had a good time and that they had done a good job.  My mom was pretty surprised by this, since I was kind of a shy kid.  But I figured “when in Rome,” and the Romans seemed to be doing this, so why not?

Since I don’t remember the order we actually visited the cities in, I threw them into Google Maps and will be doing them in that order.  So, next up (January 12?) will be Cincinnati, followed by Columbus and then Detroit.

ETA: I had the worst time scheduling this post.  First I forgot to schedule it at all, so it appeared for a minute as a new post, and then I accidentally scheduled it for January 4, 2015.  It should be okay now.

I’m Still Working on National Geographic Issues

Keeping with my established schedule, I should have made a National Geographic post today, but my current issue is October 2013, which is the one with the words “The Photo Issue” in big letters on the cover.  And there are a lot of photographs in the issue — several fold-out pages of them.  This means that I spend about a quarter of my reading time wrestling with the magazine, and since the fold-out pages are the thickness of several individual pages, it also took me a while to find my place, until I figured out that I should probably use a bookmark.

I worked on the introductory pages for several days and have just finished the first actual article, which is not to article-y.  Well, you’ll see what it is when I make my post, which should be right on schedule for my next National Geographic post, on January 6.