[From travelogue email sent at 9:55 p.m.]

Thursday, March 24: Arrival

Behold, the fabled Barbara! The storied, the celebrated, the legend, the widely beloved whether she chooses to recognize it or not, one of the three best friends I have ever had—one of three I initially dubbed "The Untouchables"! There was Danielle, the friend I have known since we were both 11 years old; there was Gabriel, the friend I met in college; and then there was Barbara, who I met sitting next to her in my horrid summer job in 1996 between my Sophomore and Junior years of college, cold calling people to do surveys from a call center in Spokane, WA. I was 22 and she was 43 (she was born the same year as both my mother and my stepmother, incidentally), and we met only about five days before my last day. But we were sitting in neighboring work stations and laughed a lot together, so when I finished my very last shift and she was in the middle of a call, I set a little note on her desk that read, I would like your address. She nodded, wrote it out for me, and thereafter began a penpal relationship that lasted the next four years, with my visiting her in Spokane several times and, after I graduated and moved from Pullman to Seattle in 1998, she visited me in Seattle a few times as well.

Then, when I helped a friend start a new gay newspaper in Seattle in 2000 (which lasted all of 14 months, which is a whole other story), I convinced Barbara to move to Seattle to be our copy editor—something we were hell bent on having since it was a glaring omission at the awful place that was the Seattle Gay News. Plus, she'd already done that exact job for UPI in the seventies. She lived with me in my studio apartment for three weeks before finding her own place in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood; she worked as our copy editor for the Seattle Gay Standar's full 14-month history, and then she continued to live in Seattle for the next decade. She finally moved back to her original home state of Virginia, Arlington to be specific, to be closer to her daughter and grandchildren.

We largely fell out of touch after that, though never completely. During one of my visits to New York while Shobhit lived there in 2010, we took a day trip to Washington, D.C. and she took the subway into the city to spend the day with us. The next year, Shobhit and I flew her out to Spokane to spend one last Easter holiday with us and my family, and for her to see some of her Spokane friends, as my dad and Sherri went to Spokane that year to spend Easter with my brother and his kids.

Before this past weekend, that was the last time I saw her, save for occasional holiday video chats with Dad and Sherri from Olympia. It had literally been 11 years—one more year, even, than she had lived in Seattle. But, she rather surprised a lot of us a year ago by suddenly moving to Louisville, Kentucky, of all places. We were like, whaaa?? Once I discovered Barbara had iChat and we could text a lot more easily, I got the scoop: she had decided it was finally time to move; she needed to live by herself again after living with various people in Arlington; she needed to find a place with a rent she could afford on her severely limited Social Security income. She did a nationwide web search and Louisville was the single place she found with rent that fit within her budget. So, Louisville it was.

She moved near the end of March, 2021. I told her then that I would never have placed Louisville high on my list of places to visit but I always take any opportunity to visit someplace new, so I would come and visit as soon as I could. Shobhit is in India visiting his mother this entire month—something he usually does every two years but due to the pandemic this time it had been three—and I decided this was a perfect trip of my own to take while he was out of town.

By sheer chance, not in the slightest bit deliberate or planned on my part, I wound up visiting with her on the exact one-year anniversary of her move to Louisville.

After all that, I guess I'll acknowledge this: many of you receiving these emails don't know Barbara at all, so might not be as interested in all of this. Too bad! I mean, you can choose not to read this if you're bored. I'm telling you though, Barbara is not boring! She's bright and kind and hilarious and has the most infectious laugh you've ever heard. Plus, I kept thinking about when people talk about friends they can see after an eternity and it's like they were never apart—because that was very much what this visit was like. Good friends: five stars, would recommend!

Anyway. Let's talk about my travel day to Louisville, which I did by way of Charlotte, North Carolina. First of all, there are no nonstop flights from Seattle to Louisville, which sucks. I suppose it kind of makes sense, given the far greater proximity of the far greater number of major cities within the Eastern Time Zone (which Louisville is, somewhat barely), and it's not cost effective to have nonstop flights to all of them. There actually is one, solitary nonstop flight every day to Cincinnati, which is only a ninety minute drive from Louisville—and that's indeed what I now think I will do the next time I go visit Barbara. But for this visit, I wanted to take day trips to the two closest major cities to Louisville, and I wanted to take Barbara with me. It thus made more sense for my final flight destination to be Louisville itself, so that I would have Barbara with me before I went to Cincinnati. However, this also meant that, if I wanted to arrive at my Louisville hotel at a decent local time not too late in the evening, I had to take the 7:18 a.m. flight to Charlotte first. This meant I had to take the earliest Light Rail train from Capitol Hill to SeaTac Airport that even runs, which leaves at 4:51 a.m. And because my vanity is more important than any consideration of sleep deprivation, and I take an hour to get ready every morning plus more time needed for breakfast and final packing, that meant I had to set my alarm on Thursday morning for 2:45 a.m.

That flight touched down just before 3 p.m. Eastern Time (so, roughly noon Pacific) in Charlotte, where I had a three-hour layover before taking a 6:09 p.m. flight back west (more like northwest) to Louisville, that flight lasting about an hour and a half. The first thing I saw when getting off the plane, in the Louisville Muhammad Ali International Aiport, was a statue of Colonel Sanders.

To save me just a bit of time, Barbara walked the mile or so from her apartment to meet me at my hotel, which I drove to in the rental car I got for the weekend. We saw the pretty standard hotel room I had, on the top floor at my request—just the sixth floor but I'll take what I can get—and then we found a nearby place downtown to have dinner. I ordered a "bourbon mule" and it was fucking disgusting.

I offered to drive Barbara home after dinner, which she was happy to accept, and I finally got to see her apartment—as well as her apartment building, which is much more massive than I ever throught to imagine: six floors, 45 units per floor with the exception of the ground floor which must have 23 units, as the total number of units is 247. It was originally built in 1917, with two "major additions" in 1925 and 1957, those presumably being the odd wings jutting back from the building's massively wide front facade. Barbara gave me a tour of the many very cool, spacious common areas on the ground floor and even a bit of the basement where there is a small convenience store! She commented on how much she loves the chandeliers hanging in the front lobby area, seen in the photo above (far above this ridiculous mass of text). I also got to see her actual apartment, a studio but with plenty of room for her, on the third floor.

The building is called The Puritan. What irony!

Friday, March 25: Indianapolis

I reserved two full days for day trips to the two closest other major cities: Friday was Indianapolis, which I chose to get out of the way first just because the drive there was the longest: about two hours one way. Had I made this decision based on weather forecasts and switched the days around, Cincinnati might have been more pleasant, weather-wise, but what's done is done I guess.

I have had many people hear that I was going to visit Louisville, Indianapolis and Cincinnati, an their response was basically: "Uh. Why?" Because I have never been! Duh. Gabriel told me the one time he drove through Indianapolis, all he ever remembered about it was how gray it was. So, he was pretty amused to see photos of that day trip revealing dreary, drizzly weather pretty much the whole day. On the upside, that made our first stop, Crown Hill Cemetery, seem pretty appropriate.

Barbara actually took the above shot with her phone. She was getting her shot of the beautiful entry gate, and I happened to be in the shot—so I deliberately shot and posed for her. I really think I augmented the structural beauty here nicely.

So, here's what I did with all three of these cities. Because I am me, and I am a nerd about skyscrapers and skylines, before the trip I spent a lot of time googling where the best views of the city were. (I did also find web pages for both Indianapolis and Cincinnati with recommendations for "things to do in one day," and selectively chose the most interesting to me.) In the case of Indianapolis, Crown Hill Cemetery was high on the list of vantage points for city views. I figured Barbara would be interested in an old cemetery on its own merits and I was correct.

The thing was though, of course, it was a gray and dreary day. Mist and low clouds and fog seriously obscured the city view from the cemetery. In the above shot, you can see the Indianapolis skyline in the distance at the right.

I still very much enjoyed exploring the cemetery though. I got to see President Benamin Harrison's grave! I mean, whoever the hell he was.

Another thing I did with both Indianapolis and Cincinnati, was order the points of interest I had on my list from north to south, so that when we were done we would be closest to getting back to Louisville when we were done.

Second on the Indianapolis list: Canal Walk, a very nice and well manicured canal promenade adjacent to Downtown and stretches about three miles and connects to different parts of the White River at both ends. Barbara and I walked maybe a quarter mile down it and back, from the entry point my phone's Maps app directed us to. We had other shit to do!

Third stop in Indianapolis: Monument Circle, a pretty awesome centerpiece in the heart of Downtown Indianapolis, its signature feature being the pretty awesome Soliders & Sailors Monument, which stands 284 feet high—the equivalent of about twenty stories—and memorializes Indianans who "served in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Frontier Wars and the Spanish-American War."

The tower seen to the right, which I fit into this shot using the wide angle lens feature, is Salesforce Tower, tallest building in Indiana. It was built in 1990, has 48 floors, and a rooftop height of 701 feet, but uses those things I like to call "cheater spires" to reach an official height of 811 feet. Typical!

And then, the highlight of my entire trip. Like many of the observatories I looked up in all the cities, Soliders & Sailors Monument's observatory was listed online as "closed until further notice"—presumably due to covid. So, imagine my surprise and delight when I walked up to the door and found that they were open! Not only that, but online they say you can climb the stairs for free but the elevator has a $2 fee, and they were even allowing the elevator rides for free! What the hell? I mean, even $2 is practically nothing but whatever. It brought me sheer joy to discover it was not only open, but free. I thought I would have opted to take those stairs, but discovered later that the elevator was absolutely the much better option.

The above shot is one of many I took from the observatory. Seen in the mid-distance on the right is the City-County Building (1960, 372 ft, 28 floors), which I was only aware of because it had its own observation deck on the top floor—also, apparently, temporarily closed due to covid. I never did go to the building to double check, even though the Soldiers & Sailors Monument turned out to be open; that was enough of a delight and we decided to move on (my guess is it actually was closed anyway).

Fourth stop in Indianapolis: a brief walk into Highland Park, from which I knew there were great views of downtown. This is my favorite of the shots I took from there—standing atop a tree stump, at Barbara's suggestion.

Fifth and last stop (sixth if you count the City-County building, which I only drove up near and parked for a few seconds to get a good exterior shot of it): the Fountain Square neighborhood, which was on any "Indianapolis In One Day" web pages I found. I also learned about it via my views searches, as there's a Rooftop Garden Cocktail Lounge located there—unsheltered though, and thus closed for the season. I still decided to go check out the neighborhood, at which we decided to find a place to eat as it was midafternoon and we still hadn't had lunch.

So, after a brief stop for hot drinks at a local coffee shop, I did what Shobhit and I have learned to do ever since our 2014 trip to New Orleans: look for restaurants on Yelp with both a really large number of ratings and a high average rating. This approach has never failed us. I did this searching for vegetarian options, and found this vegan place called Three Carrots only a few blocks away. I had the Peanut Bowl (pictured, foreground) with tofu and rice and peanut sauce which was super tasty, and Barbara had the Roasted Veggie Quesadilla which she liked quite a lot more than she expected.

This was the first place we encountered, outside of public transit or airports, that still asked all patrons to wear their mask when not seated at their table. Not that we spent a lot of time at places indoors anyway. Still, it slightly amused me that this was the case at a hippie place like a vegan restaurant: very on brand, at least as a covid-aware oasis in the American Midwest.

We did find a literal fountain in Fountain Square, but it hardly seemed like the most prominent feature of the neighborhood. We walked around just a little, then decided we were ready to head back to Louisville.

Clarksville, Indiana

We stopped where I wanted to take advantage of my one chance to get a panoramic, nighttime view of the Louisville skyline from across the Ohio River on our way back: from Ashland Park in Clarksville, Indiana. We actually reached there about half an hour before sunset, and I parked the car and waited for it to get dark enough to get this very satisfactory shot.

Saturday, March 26: Morning in Louisville

And then, what happens on Saturday morning, just when I thought I was up and getting ready slightly ahead of schedule? The fire alarm goes off at my hotel! Like an idiot, I seriously considered just staying in my room. This must be why they make fire alarms so annoying—you won't stick around convinced it's a false alarm (as they usually are) because the noise is simply intolerable. There was also an automated voice that came on and said, Attention. There has been a report of an emergency. Please evacuate the building. Use stairwells where necessary. Handicapped people will follow the building's evacuation plan. Or something to that effect. I nearly got it memorized, it was repeated so many times.

At least it happened just before I had gotten into the shower, and not during. As I stood outside in the bitter cold, observing others who had brought out all their luggage (I only got dressed and put on my jacket), I finally discovered what appeared to be a burst water pipe, coming from the third floor of the SpringHill Suites side of the Marriott I was staying at—the other end from Fairfield Inn & Suites, the slightly shorter wing with its own lobby (always unstaffed) where I was staying.

The fire department was fairly impressive with how quickly they arrived. It probably wasn't even that long before they finally had the alarm turned off, and it just felt like an eternity because it was in the thirties out there.

The fire alarm probably delayed me close to an hour, but, the drive to Cincinnati was half an hour shorter, and I had already gotten up earlier on Saturday than I had on Friday, so we were set to get to Cincinnati not much later in the day than we had gotten to Indianapolis, so it basically worked out in the end. And first, a photo Barbara herself wanted: the Speed Art Museum, not far from Barbara's apartment, has a 24-foot wishbone on the lawn out front, and Barbara's idea was for us to be trying to break it so we could get our wish. I used my phone's self-timer, propped against my binoculars on the sidewalk, to get the shot.

We didn't break the wishbone, but Barbara said she got her wish anyway. Because her wish was to get this picture!

. . . Well. I've run out of time, and I have a whole second email planned to send. I'm tired! If you actually made it this far you're probably tired too. I'll just have to write up part two and send that one out tomorrow night!

[For part two click here]