Wining and Dining

On day two of our Nashville trip, we spent hardly any time in Nashville -- instead heading out to see other parts of Tennessee. We drove south to Lynchburg: home of Jack Daniel's Distillery, where we'd heard the tour was a fun experience.

Indeed it was. The tour kicks off with a Jack and Coke slushie. They take you around their sprawling grounds, showing you everything from the place they burn their own charcoal for filtering to their giant stills, vats, and bottling lines. You see the water source they use for every drop they make, where a statue of Jack Daniel himself stands nearby: "Jack on the Rocks."

There's a bit of quirky theater to it all. You're not allowed to take pictures of any of the indoor spaces -- even though they aren't doing much that any other distillery isn't also doing. Then there's the fact that Lynchburg itself is in a dry county that bans alcohol sales -- a fact you're constantly reminded of even as they tell you with a wide smile all the ways they get around that. The tastings you get on the tour are officially for "educational purposes." The bottles you can buy at the gift shop are souvenir collectable bottles that happen not to be empty. Moore County is more of a "damp" county.

You could almost (but no, not really) appreciate how the charade of it all might piss some people off. By the time we were leaving, a pair of protesters had taken up across the street, screaming into a microphone about the evils of alcohol (with heaping sides of sexism and homophobia). Needless to say, no hearts and minds were won that day. I'll bet they'll be back next Saturday to try again.

After the tour it was time for lunch, which we had at Miss Mary Bobo's Restaurant. We'd chosen the place ahead of time because it was close to the distillery and it served the sort of "home cooking" that seemed like something you should have at least once while vacationing in Tennessee. We didn't realize the atypical dining experience we'd opted into with this choice.

The restaurant was in a large two-story home that, going back many decades, was previously a boarding house. Meals in the boarding house were included, and so every day, total strangers that happened to be there would all gather around one large table to eat together. Today, every bedroom has been converted into its own dining hall, and every two hours, a new dining experience kicks off for around 100 people -- each taken to their own grand table for 10 where dishes are already set out with chicken, meat loaf, side dishes, and pitchers of sweet tea. A guide fills you in on the history of the house and its tradition, as you're able to order as much as you want of any food at the table. But save room for the brownie pie dessert!

We are certainly too introverted to have opted into a "dining with strangers" meal, had we known that was the format. Still, the experience wasn't bad at all. The food was terrific, the history interesting, and the forced social interaction not nearly as intense as we might have feared. Above all, it was a novel experience -- not like any other meal we'd ever had.

Since we were outside of Nashville already, we looked for something outdoorsy to do. We found our way to Short Springs State Natural Area, and specifically a short hike to Machine Falls. After half a mile strolling through flat woods, we began to wonder how there could really be a waterfall just a quarter mile ahead. But then the terrain quickly dipped, and we came upon a ravine where water trickled down perhaps a 20-foot high, mossy rock wall -- so picturesque it was almost like someone had installed it there. The hike back and uphill was a little more challenging, but in all it was a nice little diversion for some exercise and a pretty view.

We had a bit of time yet before a dinner reservation back in Nashville, so we made another stop in the nearby town of Arrington at Arrington Vineyards. Tennessee isn't exactly known for wine, and what this place had was, as expected, "fine." But the real draw was its broad hillside, where every Saturday through the warm months, performers take to the stage for the afternoon. People bring picnics (hmm... we could have done that if we hadn't made the dinner reservation). They grab some wine, then settle down to listen and enjoy. This particular band was playing some light instrumental jazz, a nice accompaniment to the sample flight we tried.

Finally, it was back to Nashville -- and dinner at Giovanni's Ristorante. That turned out to be a fancier dinner than perhaps we should have gone in for. But the appetizer of prosciutto and canteloupe was a delightful taste combination that we may now put into the rotation at home. And the crushed walnuts sprinkled over my ravioli dinner was another nice touch I might have to do on occasion for myself.

We had one more full day in Nashville ahead; in fact, our most jam-packed day of the trip. 

From Athens to Barad-dûr

This past weekend, my husband and I headed out on a long weekend to Nashville. Are we country music fans? No, not particularly. But neither of us had been to Tennessee before, and we thought heading out on a Friday for an extended weekend would be a nice way to cross that state of our list.

We hadn't even left airport property when one of the trip's running gags began to take shape. The turn signal in our rental car (a Chevy Equinox) sounded exactly like the Monty Python bit of using coconuts to imitate a horse's gait. I thought it would never fail to make me smile... until a few hours into the trip, when I discovered (at a rather long traffic light) that it wasn't a horse with an even gait. Every few steps, it would rush for a split second and "clomp clomp" just a touch too early. Maddening. At least the car helpfully reminded you to check the backseat at the end of every drive. "Don't forget our babies" became a mantra of the trip.

Anyway... we started things off on-theme with a lunch at Edley's Bar-B-Que, before heading to a location that you might see as rather "off-theme." Do you know where the "Athens of the South" is? If you're like me, you might well have guessed... well, Athens, in Georgia. But no, Nashville seized that moniker at some point, apparently with its multiple universities and support for higher education reaching back to the 1800s. Near the end of that century, the city cemented their reputation by bringing Greece to Tennessee in the form of a full-size replica of the Parthenon.

I don't have the most impressive picture of Nashville's Parthenon, because on this occasion it was flanked with catering trucks, setting up a banquet space on the steps for a wedding reception being held there the next day. What that cost, I can't even imagine -- but at least it didn't stop us from going inside. Because, you see, the Parthenon is also a small museum, cyclically dedicated to the construction of the building itself and its centerpiece, a recreation of the giant statue of Athena that once stood in the original Parthenon. Built throughout the 1980s, then painted and gilded in gold in 2002 to represent what ancient Greek statues actually looked like in their time (not how we think of them today), this Athena and the explanation of how it was built is pretty much the only thing to see in the museum. But it was still an impressive, if quirky, novelty to start off the trip.

Speaking of gold, our next stop was to pick up the "gold pin" for the trip. If you've followed my trip blogs before, you may recall that we have in our house a large map of every craft brewery in the United States. We mark one with a silver pin if we taste one of their beers, and a gold pin if we go to the place in person. Whenever we visit a new state, we aim to pick up a gold pin -- a task somewhat harder these days, since the map dates to 2016 and many small breweries have closed. But New Heights Brewing Company in Nashville was still there, with a rather large and varied menu that made for a nice tasting flight.

From there, we headed to the downtown area, where we had a little over an hour before a riverboat dinner cruise we'd booked ahead of time. We used that time to first walk onto the John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge. It crosses the Cumberland River, giving both lovely views of the downtown area and access to the stadium across the river where the Tennessee Titans play.

Then? Well, we had to see "Honky Tonk Highway," the stretch of downtown Broadway where bar after bar features live music until well after midnight every day of the week. Like New Orleans, where bars like this didn't necessary feature jazz, not every bar in Nashville was blasting country music. With enough time, we could have found any number of places that would have been fine to settle at for a bit. Still, it would have been a kind of sensory overload we weren't up for just then. (If ever?) And we did have somewhere to be.

River cruises have somehow become a bit of thing for us when traveling -- a nice way to see the sights without doing too much walking right on day one. This cruise was a bit different; besides being on a setting-appropriate paddleboat, it was a dinner cruise. The food was pretty good, though we'd practically finished the meal by the time the boat pulled away from the dock (a bit behind schedule). So we soon wandered up to the top deck, where we spent the rest of the cruise sightseeing and listening to the live musician work her way through a set of tourist-friendly country hits.

We realized that a daytime cruise probably would have been better; once the sun went down, there wasn't much to see but the glittery skyline of downtown. (I'm not the first to notice that its prominent AT&T building may have been inspiration for Peter Jackson in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Apparently, it's also known as the "Batman building.")

Still, it was a relaxing evening with a few really golden photo opportunities.

We had two full days in Tennessee ahead of us, and I think we made the most of it. You can be the judge as I share the memories in upcoming posts.

Enterprise Flashback: Bound

Hot on the heels of a really bad classic Star Trek episode, let me talk about a pretty bad episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, "Bound."

When Captain Archer inadvertently purchases a trio of Orion slave women, he tries to impress upon them that they are free to do as they wish. But they're exactly where they want to be, and what they wish is to take over the Enterprise. The only chance at stopping them may be Trip and T'Pol, whose intense, unreconciled feelings for each other render them immune to the powerful Orion pheromones.

The fourth and final season of Enterprise dumped out the Star Trek toy box to play. Anything from the original series that might be worth re-visiting and expanding in a prequel was fair game. Here, the target was the "Orion slave women" of the original Star Trek pilot. And you can see what the idea was: to recontextualize the blatant sexism of the 1960s by showing us that Orion women are actually running the show, not the men. But this version of Star Trek "feminism" has aged only marginally better than the original. "Bound" is an episode full of men stopping just short of cartoonishly yelling "aa-oooooooga!" at beautiful women. That the women are "making" the men do it doesn't really make it any better.

Part of the problem is that the episode is so clearly trying to have its cake and eat it too. It wants credit for saying Orions are a female-dominated society, but it also wants to tantalize the viewing audience with a lengthy, sexualized dance. It makes the women smart by making the men exceptionally dumb, from Kelby's macho conflict with Trip, to Phlox abandoning his enlightened sense of sexuality to be bamboozled, to Mayweather and Reed working out together to get women off their mind. You have to wonder what a gay male character would have done for this story. It can't help but feel like it would boost the attempt to be feminist if the whole episode weren't so aggressively heteronormative.

For once, the Trip/T'Pol romantic subplot of this episode feels like the likable diversion in the episode, rather than the stretching of the melodramatic "will they / won't they" taffy. For one thing, the answer finally seems to be "they will"; the two actually reconcile in this episode, with Trip revealing he's transferred back to Enterprise permanently. And the subplot suits the story well too, with the mutual attraction between the two rendering them immune to the influence of the Orion women. 

Other observations:

• The viewscreen has dramatic sensibilities in this episode. Within the same communication, it switches between closeups and wide shots of the Orion bridge.

• It probably shouldn't even merit a mention anymore, but boy does Reed look stupid in this episode. Even allowing for "Orion pheromones" as an excuse, he easily gives up a bunch of sensitive information. 

• This "classic Trek"-inspired episode has a very "classic Trek"-inspired ending. T'Pol notes of the Orions that even the most disagreeable species have positive attributes -- their matriarchal society. All that's missing is the classic Star Trek playful music just before the end credits roll.

Because "Trip and T'Pol" really works here, I can't judge the entire episode too harshly. But for sure, that subplot is the only thing I found watchable here. I give "Bound" a C.

Star Trek Flashback: The Alternative Factor

With Strange New Worlds again between seasons, it's time to pick back up where I left off with other Star Trek. Unfortunately, the next classic episode in the queue is a rough one, "The Alternative Factor."

Enterprise is hit with a powerful "non-existence" distortion. It seems to have emanated from a strange spacecraft alone on a barren planet... but the ship's lone occupant, Lazarus, is oddly evasive about what he knows. And is he the ship's lone occupant? It seems a twin Lazarus from an anti-matter universe is periodically trading places with his double, while at other times the two become locked in personal combat. Will their conflict destroy the galaxy?

If you can somehow put yourself in a 60-year-old mindset, remembering that this was Star Trek's first "alternate universe" episode, you can perhaps appreciate the fact that a science fiction show from the 1960s was taking on such a bold, complicated story. But that's pretty much where my appreciation for this episode ends.

The story's ambitions far exceed the production's grasp. The alternate universe is represented in overly literal fashion, in "photo negative" footage shot on an empty, smoky sound stage. The location filming is back at the Vasquez Rocks yet again, and making no effort to hide the familiar formations that were already featured in earlier episodes. Lazarus' spaceship is a Jetsons-style flying saucer, and his beard looks too fake even for a Spirit Halloween costume.

The pacing is glacially slow. Characters stop by the mess hall for a coffee break in the middle of a red alert. They make dumb decisions to prolong the "mystery": again and again, no guards are put on Lazarus or his ship, even though our heroes say they don't trust him. And yet it's clear that even as slow as things are, some scenes have been trimmed for run time. (People know Lazarus' name before he tells anyone.)

When it's finally time to unravel the mystery, the leaps in logic have even less foundation than the earlier lack of suspicion. If one Lazarus was "good" the whole time, why did he never share any information? We're told that the two Lazaruses meeting physically would annihilate both universes... despite the fact that we've seen the two of them physically grappling with each other again and again throughout the episode. And why does Kirk tell two security guards to just stand back, leaving them to stupidly watch Kirk try to physically restrain Lazarus?

The ultimate resolution is meant to be poignant: "good" Lazarus is making the ultimate sacrifice to be locked in conflict with his doppelganger for all eternity. But why is this the answer, as opposed to consigning each each version to his own reality? Why can neither kill the other while they're in this liminal corridor between realities?

Why do we get this engineer "Masters" in this episode instead of our beloved Scotty? And why does Masters get a first name when neither Sulu nor Uhura got one for the entire run of the original series?

I just don't find much to like here. I give "The Alternative Factor" a D-. It's clearly the worst episode of Star Trek's first season.

Strange New Worlds: Tomorrow's Enterprise

With my stories of vacationing in France all wrapped up, I can now also wrap up my recaps of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds with the season 4 finale, "Tomorrow's Enterprise."

Enterprise is investigating a white hole when the ship is damaged by the intense distortions. Uhura is convinced she's overheard Scotty's death, but soon finds she's heard a snippet from the near future. She also begins communicating with a farther future one year from now, where the Enterprise is investigating a black hole that may somehow be connected to the present. Two Uhuras must work together across time to save Scotty's life and guide their ships from danger... all without risking the timeline by revealing their connection.

There have been dozens and dozens of time travel episodes across six decades of Star Trek. Credit must be given to the writers for coming up with one here that doesn't feel derivative of one made before. (Even if the episode title suggests a connection that isn't there.) A character working with their future self to avert disaster is an angle I simply don't recall before; either Star Trek hasn't done it, or this take was sufficiently novel to trick my memory.

Still, the strongest aspect of the episode isn't the story or script, but rather is the tour de force performance by Celia Rose Gooding. She plays two utterly distinct Uhuras and carries the entire episode on her shoulders. She has wonderful scenes with nearly every main cast member -- the standout scenes being with Scotty and with Pike. She even sells a payoff that starts to get a little hokey; donning a spacesuit to mime delivering a giant space baby.

Not every aspect of the episode works perfectly. I don't think that "future Uhura can lie" is the best basis for differentiating the two characters -- at least, not after the notable subplot of an episode earlier this season, about M'Benga teaching Uhura to lie. I'm not sure setting this only one year in the future feels right; I guess that's either the facts of the franchise timeline or necessitated by next season being this series' last, but it doesn't feel quite enough time for the sorts of changes we see. And again, that space baby delivery borders on cheesy.

I love the way the hair, makeup, and costuming departments all went so hard to make the future versions of the characters look consistent with their 1960s season one Star Trek counterparts. I also enjoy playing with the idea of Uhura and Scotty as a couple, building a sort of continuity out of the strange, one-off flirtation between the characters from Star Trek V. Basically, there was plenty of dessert here for the fans to enjoy.

Overall, I give "Tomorrow's Enterprise" a B+. Now that season four is complete, though, I'll join pretty much the entire fan base in saying: I don't understand what the deal was with all the genre episodes. I'm coming at it from the opposite side, though. When seasons four served up episode after episode, zigging and zagging between homages to other things, it felt like a purposeful decision, like a box of Cap'n Crunch's Oops All Berries. In the end, when 8 episodes were huge genre swings and 2 weren't? It feels like they lacked the imagination or courage to complete their thought.

But "finishing their thought" is indeed what we're in for some time next year. Sadly, there's just one more season left of the series -- and it's an abbreviated one with fewer episodes. Indeed, Strange New Worlds was reportedly cancelled after season four, but the producers argued to the studio that the agreement had always been to connect things directly to the original series in the end... so they were given a handful of episodes to do that.

I'd wager that even the Trekkers who weren't into season four the way I generally was still wouldn't choose to have no Star Trek on television. But that's exactly where we're going to be some time next year once season five airs. I'm both looking forward to the episodes and very much not looking forward to that state of things.

All's Well That Ends Well

For our full day back in Paris (and final day of the trip), we started with a visit to Musée d'Orsay. This turned out to be more the experience we'd been expecting earlier at the Louvre; this museum is more dedicated to paintings and sculptures. There were works by Degas, Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, and many other famous artists.

We saw Van Gogh's earlier version of The Starry Night -- similar in many ways to the one in New York, but its own unique work.

We saw paintings by Monet of some of the very places we'd just visited ourselves in our road trip out of Paris.

We walked through an exhibit about the Statue of Liberty, showcasing the earlier designs leading up to France's gift to the United States.

And we saw another messed-up cat.

We had to fit in one more picnic lunch before the trip was over, again picking up meats, cheeses, fresh bread, and wine from a small store, then taking it to the banks of the Seine. Then we did a bit of wandering. We'd heard of a few picturesque shopping spots, Gallerie Vivienne and Passage de Panoramas. They were indeed picturesque, but were a limited and upscale form of shopping we weren't really in for. In between those, we stopped in another photo-worthy spot, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a public library with an impressive reading room.

We lazily passed the afternoon until it was time to visit the Arc de Triomphe. The timing was particular, as we wanted to be there at 6:30 pm, when the nightly flame ceremony takes place to honor fallen soldiers.

The view from the top is arguably one of the better ones in Paris, and a good deal less crowded than the Eiffel Tower. Or at least, we'd imagine. You may recall that we hadn't been able to go to the top of the Tower when we'd tried earlier in the trip. But we didn't have anything else planned for that final evening. So... why not try one more time? I mean, you get tickets in advance so you don't have to wait in any line, but why not wait in line now and see if we get lucky?

And we did! We made it to the second floor observation deck of the Eiffel Tower just in time to witness a beautiful sunset.

And then headed on up to the top for a spectacular night time view of Paris.

Come on... what better way to conclude a trip to Paris than a visit to the Eiffel Tower?  

Barely Making It Out of the Valley

It was our last morning in the Loire Valley. We enjoyed breakfast at our château (including some of that strawberry jam made personally by the swanky concierge). Then it was time to work our way back toward Paris, with stops along the way. The first of those was at Château de Chenonceau -- except then immediately, we turned back to the château where we'd stayed. We'd discovered the day's "travel misfortune" when we went to start taking photos: we were short one phone. (A quick "Find My" on the other confirmed that yes, it was still back at our hotel.)

Alright, circle back, grab the phone, then Château de Chenonceau. It juts out over the River Cher, and is known colloquially as the "ladies' castle," thanks to the influential women responsible for building and protecting it over the centuries.

 

As we toured the lovely interior, we were hyper aware of how loudly our sneakers were squeaking on the floors (though we weren't the only visitors with that issue). When we toured the beautiful exterior, we snapped many more pictures of the gardens and grounds.

...and another whimsical bit of English scrambled in with the French:

Next, we decided to visit one more winery on our way out of the valley. Caves Monmousseau was in some ways similar to Ambacia from the day before, a winery using a quarried-out cave system to age its product. But the scale was wildly different. This cave system was huge -- a sprawling space they could not possibly fill with wine. So they'd opted for another novel use for it: they'd invited an artist to come in and set up an exhibit inside. With old school overhead projectors and paintings carefully made on transparencies, beautiful images were actually projected into the halls and alcoves of the caves.

You could walk through it all, alternately taking in the art, information about the nearby castles that had been built with the stone from this place, videos about the making of their wine, and huge caches of the wine itself..

And it being early afternoon on a Monday, we had the place entirely to ourselves! We walked through what had to approach a mile of tunnels and didn't see a single other person. The wine we tasted at the end was also good -- but that hardly came as a surprise by this stage of the trip.

There were other famous castles in the area, but we decided that we'd probably seen enough "rich people's houses" for the trip. There were more wineries nearby too -- even some open on a Monday, a day that much of rural France closes entirely -- but we decided we'd had two winery experiences in two days that would be tough to match. The best thing would be just to get back to Paris, drop off the rental car, and have a slow-paced evening back in the city.

We just needed to fill up on gas again before taking the car in. And that's how we hit another "travel misfortune." Days earlier, when were leaving Avranches and were at our farthest point from Paris, we'd needed to refill the gas tank. The first gas station we visited had no person working there, and the pump didn't take any American credit card. We'd been a bit surprised... but everything had worked out easily enough; the second gas station we tried took a card at the pump and everything went fine.

Now, days later, we learned that we might have lucked into the one gas station in all of France that takes American credit cards. I was searching on my phone as my husband drove, looking for a gas station that was specifically not the chain that wouldn't take our cards a few days earlier. This is when I discovered that automated pumps in France rarely will -- a difference in how the PIN is encoded onto the card causes the pumps to reject the card outright. It's a problem you can encounter in several European countries, and the main workarounds seem to be: 1) pay cash, which we didn't have; or 2) go directly to an attendant who can process a pre-payment, though one is rarely on duty.

We tried a Shell station. A familiar brand available in America, so that'll work, right? Wrong. So then we just did the math... we should have a little less than 100 kilometers' distance left in the tank when we rolled into Paris. It would be cutting things closer than we'd like, but let's just drop it off empty. As we watched the fuel gauge, thought about the extra stops we fortunately did not make, and lamented a wrong turn at one point... we were right at the edge of sweating it a little. But we made it back. At least this didn't happen to us when we were nearly out of gas days earlier. (And at least the rental car agency's price for gas really wasn't any more than we were trying to pay outside the city.)

So finally, that relaxing evening back in Paris that we'd been hoping for. We wandered and did a little shopping. We got dinner at a cafe restaurant with a varied collection of absinthe, and they served us some with the full production: a sugar cube over the glass, and a slow water drip dissolving that into the spirit. It was a lovely evening... but not our final evening in France. We'd scheduled the trip to put one more full day back in Paris before we returned home. That'll be next up, in my final blog about the trip.