Well, The Girlfriend are off on another adventure in the morning… we’re going to Cleveland!
Seriously, we’re flying to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where we’ll rent a car and then drive for a week through southwestern PA and into Ohio, finishing up in Cleveland and flying home from there. It seems like a strange vacation itinerary, I’ll admit, but maybe it will make more sense if I explain how it came about.
One of the gifts I received for Christmas last year was a DVD compilation of performances from the induction ceremonies for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 25 years of awesome jam sessions in which all the greats of the genre — The Rolling Stones, U2, Tina Turner, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Roy Orbison, and on and on and on — play each other’s music together. It’s a great set if you like classic rock music, just insanely entertaining. Anyway, the DVD includes a brief featurette about the actual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the museum itself, which is located in Cleveland, OH. One night, after watching this little five-minute feature, I turned to Anne and remarked that we ought to pick a weekend and go see that place. She wasn’t opposed to the idea, but thought it was a little silly to spend two days on airplanes just for a single afternoon at a museum, so we started looking into what else was in the area.
At some point during our research, Anne mentioned how she’d envied me seeing Gettysburg with my buddy Robert a couple years ago, and I remembered from that trip that the Lincoln Highway, the precursor to Route 66 and very first nationwide highway, ran through the area, so now our museum weekend was a road trip with Gettysburg on one end and the Rock Hall on the other. In short order, we learned that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater was nearby, and most of the sites where one of our favorite movies, The Shawshank Redemption, was filmed, and there was a lot of nifty stuff in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. And suddenly it all came together, the Great Pennsylvania-Ohio Lincoln Highway Road Trip of 2010. And, as an added bonus, we’re going to be there right in the middle of the fall colors. We didn’t plan it that way, but we’re really looking forward to seeing it, especially as fall can be sort of a mixed bag here in Utah. Some years are gorgeous, others rather drab. This year is trending toward drab, unless you’re up at the top of one of the canyons.
Anyhow, we have an early flight tomorrow morning so I’d better wrap this up and get to bed. One quick administrative note: I’ve recently been deleting something on the order of 20 pages of spam comments per day, so rather than deal with an entire week’s worth of accumulated garbage, I’m just going to shut off the commenting feature while we’re gone. If you have something really important to tell me that can’t wait until after the 16th, feel free to send an email to jason(at)jasonbennion.com.
Finally, credit where credit is due: that excellent graphic up there at the top comes from a t-shirt I ran across a while back; you can view and purchase it here, if you’ve a mind to. I thought seriously about getting myself one for this trip, but Anne and several other people discouraged it, and I reluctantly agreed it was probably just borrowing trouble to wear something like that to the airport. Man, would I love to do it, though! All the intrusive, inconvenient, and ultimately pointless nonsense we have to go through now just to go to fly to Cleveland, and the fact that we’re all so thoroughly cowed by a bunch of minimum-wage-earning TSA rent-a-cops that we self-censor our t-shirts, utterly disgusts me. In a very real sense, the terrorists have won, and I don’t say that to be a smart-ass or a self-loathing, America-hatin’ liberal. I really mean it. We’ve changed our behavior, as a society, because of them. We’re less free because of them. And isn’t that what they were after all along?
I’ll see you all in a week. Be excellent to each other while I’m gone…
