Kentucky bound

There is this to say for Kentucky: what it loses in having a crappy, torn-up stretch of 65 at the Tennessee line, it makes up for in scenery. The middle section of the state rolls on in trees and wide swaths of grassland, including the famous bluegrass, which struck me more as a teal than a proper blue. Heading north, driving by flowering redbuds and dogwoods, I felt as if the Interstate were showing me a sort of bizarre backward time-lapse movie of April, culminating in yellow-green foliage and those damn oak pollen squigglies. (Surely there exists a scientific term for "oak squiggly", but I've never heard it.) The real payoff comes once you leave 65 for the Bluegrass Parkway: mountains, conifers, and long expanses of farms and forest. It's not nearly as dramatic as, say, West Virginia, but Kentucky offers a tamer version of the wilderness without the ridiculous number of tunnels.

Today...what can I say but one big string of "Well, that wasn't quite what I had planned" moments? I left almost 20 minutes late - not a big deal, but enough to annoy me - but my TomTom knew where I was going, and all seemed to be right with the world. The only real concern was whether we would be able to sign for our apartment today, and so, just to be safe, I pulled my phone from my purse so I wouldn't miss the call.

Quick: when one is desperately waiting for a phone call, which will be the one appliance one will forget to charge the night before?

Seeing the battery meter turn red did nothing to quell my nerves, but I pushed on, hopeful of an electronic miracle. Around Athens, however, the LOW BATTERY notice appeared, and so I pulled into the Shell station and ran inside, hoping they would sell chargers. They didn't, but the clerk pointed me to the Wal-Mart a mile up the road, which did carry chargers, and so, having thought to have my clamshell pre-opened, I plugged my phone into the lighter and sighed with relief as the juice started flowing.

Then I turned the TomTom back on and got nothing. Nada. It stayed stuck on its welcome screen all the way to Nashville, and then I turned it off in disgust. Thankfully, my printed Google Maps got me pointed in the right direction, and I headed off down the Bluegrass Parkway toward Frankfort.

As mentioned, the Parkway is gorgeous, sparsely developed, pleasantly winding, and - unfortunately - littered with the inevitable squashed raccoons and possums. By the time I hit it, lunch had come and gone, especially on Eastern Time. I began looking for a place to pull off, but saw few options amongst the prettiness. Finally, a sign came into view:

New Haven
Boston
2 Miles

Oh man, I thought, I've got to stop there, but alas, it was not to be; New Haven and Boston appeared to have a distinct lack of eateries near the Parkway, so I forced myself to push on to Bardstown, which at least had a cute historical district and a coffee shop-cum-café with a decent ham sandwich.

Now, I'm no stranger to odd roadside attractions - as my writing seminar knows too well, I spent a good deal of time looking them up for my dissertation novel last year. What got me today was the serendipitous juxtaposition of two signs along a stretch of Kentucky highway. On the left side of the road, a large billboard proclaimed:

HELL IS REAL

Just across the road, next to the tourist information center, an even larger billboard offered this to visitors:

ADULT

No need to specify - I had been seeing signs for this particular video and novelty store for a few miles. It's not the messages, but rather this mixture of roadside virtue and vice that gets me - it's so quintessentially American, and so much a part of the Southern Interstate experience.

Finally, after seven hours behind the wheel, I pulled into Frankfort, a capital city of roughly 30,000, and dropped my bags, including my busted TomTom, in my hotel room so I could take a quick walk. An hour later, we determined that the apartment was not to be, and then I determined that the TomTom was in inexplicably bad shape. Still, Frankfort has some cute shops, I had a lovely dinner (though the redneck next to me, who refused to take of his baseball cap during dinner, couldn't quite understand gnocchi), and then I stumbled onto the find of the evening - the local wine bar.

I need more quality wine bars in my life, and not those of the overpriced The Grape variety. These folks offered a variety of wines - including a large selection of Kentucky wines - and bourbons by the pour, plus cheese trays and other goodies. I'll need to pop back by tomorrow night, I think; it's two blocks from my hotel, and it's probably the most exciting thing happening in Frankfort after 6 p.m.