Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
about-brand-new shopping mall with a full complement of upper-middle franchises, in-
cluding a twenty-two-screen multiplex and a parking lot the size of some counties.
I chose the hotel because the trailhead of the GAP is within half a mile or so, and
strange as it is to be ensconced in Comfy Consumer-land, I'm enjoying it. For one thing,
there's almost nobody here, acres of places in which to spend money and very few people
spending it. The lobby of the theater was entirely empty when I checked on the movie
times before dinner last night. Parents were using the vacant expanses of the parking lot
to give driving lessons to their teenagers.
I ate a mammoth early dinner at the bar in an overpriced seafood restaurant and then
went shopping for a sweater (Hmmm, the Gap, J.Crew, or Banana Republic?) because the
one I've been carrying with me has grown, at last, unwearably gamy. I wore the new one
(the Gap) to the theater, where I watched a political thriller,
The Ides of March
, directed
by and starring George Clooney. It wasn't bad; halfway through I realized I knew the
story. I'd seen the play it was based on,
Farragut North
by Beau Willimon, in New York.
That was in 2008—I looked it up later—only three years ago, but I didn't recognize it as
familiar until it was half over. I worry about my memory sometimes, but once the recol-
lection hit me, it seemed vivid and close by. I remembered how the play ended, where
the theater was, where I sat, who I was with.
Only three years ago and I didn't recall it right away? Or wow, three years ago and
I recalled all that? The way we process the passing of time—it's profoundly perplexing
(not to mention perplexingly profound).
A long bike ride delivers you from one set of conditions to another. For almost a
year—well, okay, ten days, but it felt like a year—I was riding in the damp and cold as
a crummy weather front arrived over lower Michigan and Ohio and sat there. More than
once I played the alternate universe game with myself: Would I trade a steady rain and
a chilling wind for the heat and rolling hills of the Palouse in eastern Washington? How
about for the endless prairie of Montana? A cyclist can appreciate all those challenges
and enjoy meeting them, including the rain, but after a week or so of being soggy to the
bone, the answer to every trade possibility was yes.
When the sun finally came out late on Tuesday afternoon, I was entering the northern
panhandle of West Virginia, a toothpick of territory wedged between Ohio and
Pennsylvania. (I never noticed it before, but Ohio is shaped sort of like a molar.)
I'd passed through the Mennonite settlements of eastern Ohio, where the pleasant
clip-clop of horses drawing covered wagons was a welcome change from the grind and
whir of automobile engines (though the droppings on the road made for a unique cyc-
