July 19, 2006: Brooksville

Still more signs of the South:

• Quaker Instant Grits, American cheese flavor, in the breakfast room at our hotel

• Big cemeteries

• A motorcycle with a "Terrorist Hunting Permit" on the rear

• Pecan shops

• A pretty white crane flying overhead

• A pickup truck with a Confederate flag decal entirely covering its rear window

There's not much but farmland and "Florida Visitor Centers" between Macon, Georgia, and Brooksville, Florida, so today's drive on Interstate 75 was simple and direct. The boys played on the computer and watched Finding Nemo while their parents continued listening to Huckleberry Finn. We're about two-thirds of the way through.

We enjoyed the novel's lovely descriptions of the Mississippi River, the growing trust between Huck and Jim, the gripping tale of the feuding Grangerfords and Shepherdsons (parallelling that of the Montagues and Capulets), and the richly comic palaver of the grifters who call themselves the Duke of Bilgewater and the King of France. Their performances at the camp meeting, in their Shakespearean travesties, and during the Wilks funeral are priceless, a hilariously cynical cross between a catalog and a textbook for the confidence game. This portion of the book, moreover, presents a brilliant study in the behavior of crowds and mobs, from a circus to an attempted lynching. This is Twain at his absolute best. Look no further to find the Great American Novel.

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," wrote Ernest Hemingway. "There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

We arrived in Brooksville, north of Tampa, at about 5 p.m. to find Debbie's Aunt Claudia and Uncle Jim waiting for us on their front porch. The house, as charming as it is, is actually a temporary one that they have been living in until their new house was finished and furnished, which it now is. Since they were actually looking for an excuse to move, they turned their old house over to us for a few days and spent their first night in the new one.

Claudia and Jim have built and sold several houses over the years, and Claudia has done all of the interior decorating in a style one might call "rustic Americana." She also very much enjoys collecting antiques and playing bridge.

Before we went to dinner, we talked about the deterioration of Saginaw, Michigan, part of the rust belt, where automobile manufacturing has declined, factories have closed, and unemployment is chronically high. It's the city where Claudia grew up with her brother Bob, Debbie's dad. Bob is a retired professor of physiological psychology; he got his doctorate and met his wife Dorothy at the University of Michigan and spent most of his career at the University of Washington. He recently published a book about the Saginaw of his youth. (Debbie is in the midst of reading Animals in Translation by the autistic author Temple Grandin, an acquaintance of Bob's.)

Jim is an engineer who made his mark on history in Saginaw in 1946, when he invented the first modern plastic injection molding machine. If it's made of plastic, you well may have him to thank for it. Jim holds patents in use by many different companies, and after more than 60 years in the field, he still consults for car part manufacturers in Michigan, England, and Japan. Over dinner, he talked about the four days of testimony he recently gave during a patent lawsuit in London before three white-wigged judges.

The boys had more than a bit of trouble going to sleep tonight. Danny was especially excited because tomorrow is his birthday.

July 18, 2006: Nashville & Atlanta

More signs of the South:

• Shoney’s, a chain of all-you-can-eat buffet restaurants where we had lunch

• White prison buses with screened windows and work details of orange-clad prisoners picking up trash along the road

• Piggly Wiggly supermarkets, founded in 1916, the nation's first self-service grocery stores

• White colonnades in front of Macon's stately antebellum homes

• Fried Bar-B-Q Pork Rinds in our hotel's vending machines

• Huge billboards in fantastic numbers before each roadside attraction

Crazy cousin Trent woke up at five o'clock this morning and ran for 11.2 miles. After a shower, he made sourdough pancakes for everyone. We thanked him and Ellie and bid them farewell, heading south toward Chattanooga and Atlanta.

We had hoped to visit Debbie's great aunt Janice in Jackson, Tennessee, where Debbie's mother Dorothy grew up, but Janice was unavailable. At one time, their families owned two department stores in Jackson.

Dorothy's parents, known as Bubbe and Zeyda, formerly lived in Nashville just a few blocks from Trent and Ellie's present home. Zeyda received his medical degree from Vanderbilt and practiced in Jackson. He and Bubbe later lived in Detroit, Debbie's birthplace, before they returned to Nashville. After Zeyda's death, Bubbe moved to Albuquerque, where she died a few years later. Her son-in-law Michael's parents, Betty and Joe, now live in her former house.

On our way south, we resisted the urge to stop at heavily-advertised Lookout Mountain, since it wasn't but a hill by Northwest standards and since the thick haze meant that we wouldn't be able to look out very far. Ruby Falls fell similarly flat. As inviting as it sounded on a muggy day, we wanted to reach our destination at a reasonable hour for once, and we have many striking waterfalls in Washington and Oregon - Snoqualmie and Multnomah, to name just two.

Chattanooga is nestled in thickly-forested hills along the picturesque Tennessee River. It's in the Eastern Time Zone, so we set our clocks forward an hour. Singing "Chattanooga Choo Choo" as we approached the city, I stopped for gas ($2.78 a gallon), and then drove just a couple of miles out of the way so that we could cross the Alabama state line. As soon as we were in the state, we turned around and left. Why? Only to add another state to our roster. Entering Georgia brought the total to 17. We will double that number by the end of this trip.

Towering towers and traffic jams and busy cranes and construction sites told us that, like Seattle, downtown Atlanta is booming. Another sign was the luxury Loft and Condo Monthly, a yuppie advertising insert in one of the local weeklies.

We gave thought to visiting the new Georgia Aquarium, which trumpets the size of its biggest fish tank: 6.2 million gallons, by far the largest in the world. Holding several whale sharks, it allows visitors to pass through it in an acrylic plastic tunnel (much like the fine Maui Ocean Center in Hawaii, which we visited twice last year). But according to reports on the web, Atlanta's aquarium is so popular that it's been regularly swamped with visitors since it opened in November. Annual passes for 2006 were sold out by January.

The building was closed when we got there, but security staff corroborated the reports: the lines in the morning would be very long. And despite a $200 million donation from Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus, admission prices are $22.75 per adult, making it the priciest aquarium in the US. And it would require a night's stay in an expensive Atlanta hotel - assuming we could find a room, as two major conventions are going on. And we'd have significantly farther to travel tomorrow. And finally, Debbie's sister already visited the aquarium and reported that she found it disappointingly uninformative.

We decided to skip the whole thing and content ourselves with letting the boys play in water of a different kind: the fountain in Centennial Park, the green space created for the 1996 Summer Olympics. That's Peachtree Center in the background.
It was an excellent alternative, and free, and just across the street from the aquarium. The boys put on their swimsuits and, after a brief, choreographed, musical performance by the fountain, they ran and romped and squealed and stomped through the spurting jets for two hours.

We concluded the boys had more fun in the fountain than they would have had at the aquarium.

We left Atlanta at about 8 p.m. and an hour later arrived in Macon, where we spent the night at the Best Western.