Dancing Down through War Torn Memories

My sincere apologies for taking so long to get this next post up. It probably would have been another week wait if it had not been for the fact that my baby, Ophelia (that's my Honda CR-V), broke down and we have to wait for her to get fixed. More on that later though, for now let's pick up where we left off.

We left the home at the north of Detroit and booked it down towards Indianapolis. (Whenever we move between cities I feel a little strange because usually we prefer to stick to the forest where we can be filthy without being self-conscious, but every once and a while something comes up that makes two city days in a row happen.) The reason for the rush on this particular day was that down in Indianapolis that night was a blues dance, and I was hungry for some blues. The last time I got a chance to dance was all the way back in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and that was much too long ago. Thankfully Tweedy and Eric are understanding of my addiction and are willing to make some concessions for it as long as it doesn’t mess with the path of travel too greatly. Just so happens we needed to get to Indiana.

In Minneapolis I was amazed that the weekly dance was held in conjunction with a weekly blues jam at a local blues bar. Indianapolis was more of what I am used to seeing as far as dance venues go, though the entrance to the location was tucked away rather discreetly. Eric, Tweedy, and I wandered around the building twice before we caught sight of the door that we were supposed to go through (it also happened to be the only door on the building that was still unlocked). After hiking up the two stories of stairs—which admittedly isn’t that great a number of stairs anyway, especially compared to another staircase we would be going up a couple days later—we arrived at a fantastic dance hall. I was going to call it a “little” dance hall, but that would be an inaccurate description. In all honesty it was medium sized, but the lack of attendants made it appear as if it were giant. A feeling that was augmented by having a wall of mirrors directly across from a wall of windows. It felt like infinite dancing space. There were only a total of eleven attendees in this infinite space, and that count includes Eric, Tweedy, and I. Turns out the scene had just sprouted up within the past couple months. Blues dancing is a young dance as far as being steps that are taught—though it’s history is one of the oldest American dance forms. Being a young dance the young people have more of a thing for it, so the people who had started the scene there in Indianapolis had been introduced to blues dancing where they had gone to college in usually much smaller towns. Strangely enough, when they came into the capital of Indiana they could no longer find the blues dancing that they had found in the smaller towns where they had gone to college. In fact no one had even heard of blues before. They decided it was time to take matters into their own hands and started putting these weekly dances together. The scene is definitely still at toddler level, but I had a fantastic time and met some great dancers and people in general. My only complaint was the fact that once again all the dancers were ready to pack up and leave by 11:00 p.m. There are so many more hours that are good for dancing after 11:00! Sure it was a Tuesday, but back in Denver I’m up past 2:00 a.m. on a Tuesday.

The good part about the dance ending early is that we were able to do our late night self-guided city tour. I think we have done a tour like that with nearly every single big city we have gone through so far on the trip, and it is always the best possible city tour a person could ever get. In this case we managed to find our way down to a river walk first where we passed by several other late night ramblers enjoying a quiet stroll. So for those taking notes, Indianapolis is yet another large city that any individual can feel perfectly safe wandering down the streets in the middle of the night. Along the river walk were several murals as well as some of the most fantastic little architectural flourishes. I was especially a fan of all of the little bridges crisscrossing the river.

As we reached the end of the river walk we started in towards the center of downtown. On our way we passed what has to be the friendliest police officer I have ever met in my entire life. He was a young guy, probably younger than me, but his youth did not show in the least. He gave us a short history lesson on Indianapolis and Indiana in general and told us that there were two FREE museums in the city that were attached to monuments. The monuments we could see still during that night, but the museums we would have to come back for. Not like we minded retracing our steps—anything free is worth doing some backtracking for. Still we went to check out the monuments by the illumination of the city lights. These monuments were the Indianapolis Civil War Monument/Museum

And the Indianapolis War Monument/Museum.

More information about these later. During our ramblings we bumped into a group of well-dressed young individuals sitting on the steps of the Civil War Monument. Turns out they were students at a local Christian university who were there in downtown for a conference of some sort. Indianapolis may not be as busy as bigger cities late at night, but it doesn’t seem to fall asleep entirely either. It just gets a heavy drowsiness. The drowsiness was starting to hit us as well and we still had several miles to go to reach Tweedy’s grandpa, who had offered a place to stay for the night. Thankfully so too, there was a chance of rain that night and rain is our one foe when it comes to tent camping.

Once again, it was late—I would say 2 o’clock in the morning—when we showed up on Tweedy’s grandpa’s doorstep. Thankfully we had given him a significant forewarning that we would be showing up during the young hours of the morning, still I felt a little guilty, not enough though that I would have given up my little night of dancing. He offered us a little bite of food before we descended to the basement where there were actual beds waiting to carry us off into the land of dreams.

The next day we woke up late. So late that I would consider myself a fiend if I were to refer to it as morning. This meant that it was already past the time for breakfast and we were beginning to encroach on lunchtime. Tweedy’s grandpa was kind enough to take us out for our late breakfast/lunch at a local Chinese buffet. Seeing as we had skipped about two meals before that buffet we were able to get the full money’s worth. I think I filled four plates worth, plus two or three other small plates to cleanse the pallet. We rolled out of that restaurant, had a little trouble fitting through the front door, but nothing that a little butter and some elbow grease from the wait staff couldn’t fix.

Tweedy’s father continued to spoil us by giving us a tour of Madison, Indiana (the town where he lived and where we were staying) after the lunch. We got to cross south to Kentucky even and even went into Clifty State Park where we saw a couple of waterfalls. Unfortunately I did not have my camera on me for that little excursion, so you'll have to take my word for it that it was beautiful.

Once we got back to home base Tweedy’s grandfather headed out to take care of his responsibilities as a minister and we walked down the street to a set of old railroad tracks that we began to walk up and along. Eventually we stumbled upon a set of seemingly random old concrete stairs that just ended abruptly just before the ravine that was to the side of the railroad tracks. What would you do if you randomly stumbled across cement stairs in a location where they had no right being? You have to follow them, right? That’s what we thought, and follow them we did. Ultimately they popped up at the edge of a road that ran in front of a hospital. It seemed like such a strange location for a hospital, so we decided that we better case the joint and figure out if there was a big residential development just behind it that would legitimize the hospital’s location, but instead of finding a residential community we found a different sort of community—a women’s prison was just sitting there, pretty much sharing property with the hospital. Things quickly grew awkward at this point as we just continued to walk right on by the prison. It must have been meal time or something because once we were almost past it all the sudden all of the “tenants” came pouring out of the buildings. We just continued to walk, but our presence drew some attention that eventually led to a random warden yelling at us to just keep moving. Strangely enough she yelled that while we were in the process of walking.

Eventually we completed the loop around the campus and descended the cement stairs/dirt trail in the dark and stayed another night with Tweedy’s grandpa. We couldn’t stay there forever though, so the next day we had to leave those wonderful loving people and return to Indianapolis for the FREE war museums.

First stop in Indianapolis was the Salvation Army where we parked our cars before hiking into downtown. The Civil War Museum was a fairly small set-up (especially now that I can consider it in comparison to the Civil War Museum in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania), but it was free, and provided a bit of educational review, plus we were able to walk up a giant winding staircase to the top of the Civil War Monument, which was pretty cool as well as being a great workout for the thighs. The museum really worth talking about though is the Indianapolis War Museum. This museum was constructed after World War I with the resources and money from all of the countries involved in the signing of the treaty. Why Indianapolis, Indiana of all places? You might ask. Well it turns out that Indiana has always had the greatest percentage of volunteers for all of the wars in the history of the US that Indiana was around for. In recognition of the sacrifice made by this state it was the one that got to have the multi-million-dollar monument and museum to The War that was supposed to have been the end of all wars. Unfortunately, that was not the case as the museum inside it can attest to. It chronicles the involvement of the US in all of the wars that it has ever been involved in, including the Revolutionary War on through the “War on Terror.” It is quite the monument though. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

After completing our tour of the museums we decided that we were satisfied with our time in Indiana and that it was time to move on once again. Ohio was a-calling. 

Blues Bars and Mega Malls

First and foremost I must apologize for my severe lack of updates over the past couple of weeks, I'll try to remedy that over the next few days, but for now here is the tale of our wanderings through Minnesota (and a bit of lower Wisconsin).

We have a knack for showing up on doorsteps late at night, and the night we rolled into lower Wisconsin was no different. It was around ten o’ clock when we knocked on the door of Tweedy’s uncle's home (getting in as many apostrophes in a single go as I can manage). I don't know how, but Tweedy seems to have family scattered all over the country. They had been there for us in previous states and we have stayed with other family members of his since. All of my family lives out West, so you probably won’t hear any mention of the three of us staying with my extended family until we end up on the other side of the country. Just had to get that out there because it will sound like I’m riding the coattails of the other two for the next couple months, but don’t worry, my family will eventually make an appearance.

Tweedy’s uncle lived in lower Wisconsin—Mt Horeb to be exact. He and Tweedy’s grandfather were kind enough to share with us the leftovers from the dinner that was prepared earlier that day while we sat around and chatted for a while before setting up our beds in the basement. The amount of driving that we had done that day left our legs a little restless, so after we set up our beds we got back up and went outside to go on a late night walk. It’s funny how a person can feel so tired and yet remain awake for several more hours just in order to take advantage of the chance to stretch out the body. And stretch we did. In all honesty we took stretching to the next level by doing a little bit of a workout routine/set of childish challenges on a playground that was built by the side of a little lake. (I don’t know if it was technically a lake, but it was one of those bodies of water that is much bigger than a Coloradan is used to seeing, in other words to me it was a lake even if the locals thought of it more like a pond.) These little challenges involved muscle-ups on the cross bar holding the swings and creating new and difficult ways to cross the playground equipment. It took nearly two hours but then the wiggles were out and we were able to fall asleep with no difficulty.

  

The next morning we awoke and were treated to a breakfast by Tweedy’s uncle. On top of the breakfast his uncle also sent us off with some more food to hold us over until we encountered another gracious family or we broke down and bought some food ourselves (as it is we’ve only had to purchase food very rarely, in fact the only food we ever “have to” buy are fresh loaves of bread—people are pretty awesome and giving). After a little bit of conversation we were back on the road.

I had heard from one of my good friends and dance partners from back in Denver that there was a good blues dancing scene in Minneapolis that had weekly blues dancing every Tuesday night, and it just so happened that it was a Tuesday and it was time for us to head into Minnesota, but not until we enjoyed a little bit of what lower Wisconsin has to offer. This meant stopping off at a little state park on our way up to Minneapolis. We found a beautiful hike at this park that culminated in a picturesque view of the Mississippi from atop a bluff that bordered it.

It was a beautiful view, but we did not linger for very long. The mosquitoes were out and were waging a war against us. I rolled down my sleeves, popped my collar, and pulled my hat down as far as I could and still they found ways in and just kept feasting on me. Tweedy and Eric also collected quite a few battle wounds. I launched an offensive against them as well, but it was not enough, even when I got over 20 swatted. Their numbers were just too great, so we retreated to the cars and drove from the swarm, next stop was Minneapolis.

There needs to be a little insert here. See I am just going to call all the city activities that we engaged in during the next couple of days as happening in Minneapolis. The truth is that Minneapolis is just one of two cities that make up a rather large and sprawling metro area. The other city is St Paul and together with Minneapolis they make up the Twin Cities area. Still I’m just going to call it Minneapolis. Hopefully the mentioning of St Paul will keep locals from getting too angry at me though. Not like everyone reading this will be able to tell that some of the places I mention are actually in the St Paul area, but I thought I would tread on the safe side just in case.

Another little note I need to make before I go into the details of the rest of the night though, otherwise the night won’t seem as incredible as it was to me. I mentioned in earlier posts that I’m a blues dancer. There is this funny thing that happens among blues dancing communities—most of the time the dancers have no idea about the local blues music scene and the local blues music scene has no idea that there is a blues dancing scene. Denver does its best to remedy this by inviting blues bands (often locals) to perform at the weekly blues dance at least once a month, but most blues dancing scenes aren't quite so lucky. I rolled up to the location where the local blues dancers meet to dance in Minneapolis expecting this scene to be separate from the blues music scene as well, but almost immediately I began to question my original assumption.

The name of the joint was Wilebski’s Blues Saloon. People standing outside the bar looked more like bar regulars than dancers (not to say bar regulars have a certain look, but dancers are usually pretty easy to make out, they usually move in groups or—after some dancing—pairs, and they have this happy glow and tendency to be laughing/singing/moving almost constantly). Inside there was a live blues band playing, people gathered around the bar in an adjacent room to the music, and then an empty floor in front of the band. I looked around with a bit of confusion. I was expecting there to be nothing but dancers inside, but instead there was no dancing even happening at the moment, and a live band playing some killer music. Turns out it was the weekly blues jam night. A jam is when visiting artists can sign up to play together with other locals. They don’t have to bring a band, just their own instrument, and then most of the songs are just improvised. For about thirty minutes we just sat and listened while I waited for the dancers to reveal themselves, and soon enough they did so. It started with them conglomerating at a booth and then after some chatting they started to take to the floor.

After getting a decent idea as to who were the dancers I began to ask different girls to dance and continued to dance until about 10:45, at which point most of the dancers left. This was a much shorter period of dancing than I am used to. Back in Colorado the shortest dance was three hours, and usually I personally try to get in four hours of dancing if I'm going out dancing for the night. But this was just a small group, and so once they had all danced with each other a couple times they would just head out and get some sleep so they could function at their jobs the next day. (Why one needs sleep more than dancing is something I will never understand) Since I was dancing I didn’t get any pictures, but Eric has already posted a video that contains a short clip of me dancing.

That night we didn’t have a place to stay. This being the case we had to do some improvising, which began with making dinner on our camping stove in the parking lot back behind the blues bar. To this day that was still the most unique situation in which I have ever prepared a dinner. After eating we headed to a nearby state park that had a campground and snuck into a campsite that one usually needs to pay for. Thankfully no one would ever think someone would roll in to a campsite at 1:00 in the morning on a Wednesday, so we managed to get away with a free night of sleep before breaking camp and driving back into town to check out The Mall of America the next day. We figured you can’t be in Minneapolis and not see The Mall of America. It lives up to the legend of being a giant mall. Though it is just a mall and none of us were in the mood to spend money since we have such a tight budget. We did spring to pay for riding one of the roller coasters though. That’s a rare enough experience that it could legitimize spending seven dollars.

After the mall it was time to get out of the city and back into nature, so we drove up to northern Minnesota to camp for the night in a national forest. We then woke up and drove into Voyageurs National Park. I have a feeling that most people have not heard of this park because I had never heard of it and it is free to get into, and only the not-so-well-known parks have free admission. Here's a brief history of the park based on the short video that we watched in the visitor's center. It is part of a water system that runs through lakes both in Canada and the United States and was part of a trade route run by French fur traders in the 16-1700’s. These fur traders were known as Voyageurs, hence the name of the park. It is best accessed by boat—the same way the Voyageurs accessed the area—most of it is either islands or the water surrounding the islands and they build no roads between the islands for land lubbers like ourselves. We had to be satisfied with hiking around on the coast while admiring the islands from afar.

Almost more remarkable than all the islands were all the mushrooms. There were so many that it would take a slideshow to show all of them rather than just post four pages worth of mushroom pictures. Thankfully Eric already has a slideshow of all the mushrooms up on his Youtube channel so I can focus on the writing. (If you clicked on the earlier link you've already seen them)

There in Voyageurs National Park was also the first time we tried foraging for food, and what we found the most of was a lichen known as rock tripe. This lichen is quite dry during the fall season, but after being boiled in water it takes on a texture like a mushroom and doesn’t have much taste, so nothing to complain about or write home about (just enough to make a mention of in a blog). We also tried out the roots of lily pads and roots and stalks of cattails. Those were not near as satisfying or easy to prepare so we didn’t use them any more afterwards, but that rock tripe we feasted on and included it in the next few editions of our dinner beans. We also came across a random trove of old buried bottles and what appeared to be charcoal based bars of soap. I’ll let you be the judge of what you think those strange black squares wrapped in red and white plastic are.

That night we went back to the same place we camped the night before. The next day we woke up and drove into another national forest where we spent the majority of the evening. We did a little bushwhacking and stumbled across some random animal skulls. One of which we are fairly certain was a beaver skull and the other most likely was a white tail deer skull. We made a strong fire that night and put on some pine needles that filled the surrounding forest with the aroma of rosemary. The next morning we made one of the more ridiculous meals we’ve made on the trip—fried pickles. After the pickles it was back on the road and on into upper Wisconsin.