A Skinflint's Journal

I have always been a bargain hunter traveler. Save me enough money, and even a mediocre journey begins to sound congenial! But I’m also a canny splurger. I make it a point that every night I spend on a moving vehicle (e.g. Greyhounding), or at a Youth Hostel earns me one star towards a four star stay, which I generally need in the bath department! Suddenly I become the Duke de Visa, that fiscally beleaguered duchy in the South of France.

But it was really curiosity rather than canniness which led me to my recently concluded fifteen day Ameripass, which as a senior I bought for $283. I have been living in Germany for the past five years writing a book on the social idealism of the Bauhaus. I wondered what the post election RED and BLUE states looked like up close. I had spent many days in my fifties and sixties studying American architecture in situ. So I was no Greyhound neophyte. I learned that you can send on your swelling luggage (say the magic words, SPECIAL HANDLING); and a ratpacker like me can guard against hernia by shipping parts or all of what he’s amassed ahead to an intermediate or final destination.

I learned this the hard way in Boston where my trolley broke and was fixing to put me down. It cost me $32. to ship that trolley back to Philly, my home town. I also learned that hard boiled eggs and boiled chicken legs (a week’s supply) can get rank and ultimately inedible if kept in the warm interior instead of outside in the “refrigerated” luggage compartment. I wouldn’t recommend saving money this way at all in tropical temperatures.

Let’s begin where I did—at the Nation’s Capital, where I had used the usual dodge of the pennypincher by crashing overnight with friends. I was in a state of elation, having just made my first visit to the new Smithsonian American Indian Museum, filling the last slot in Mall. (A new meaning for the Biblical bromide that the First shall be Last!) It is a glory, the second big museum (the other is the Canadian Museum of Civilisation in Hull, Ontario, after ten years the most visited building in Canada) of the part Blackfoot Indian Douglas Cardinal.

But my uplifting sentiments were brought roughly back to earth as I awaited an express bus to Philadelphia. A sudden commotion turned out to be two DC cops trying unsuccessfully (for almost a half hour) to cuff a PCP emboldened suspect. The taser doesn’t work on people using that drug, and as I saw the cops on the floor, instead of the suspect, I began to fear that gun play was imminent. To add to my anxiety was the fact that the mostly black work force and travelers began to cheer the felon in the deathly tussle! I quietly slipped out into the street where the only menace was hobos bugging you for small change. The cops finally cuffed and routine returned to DC Greyhound.

The next morning I was downtown at Greyhound bright and early to push off for Portland, Maine, where an old friend lives, and where there were a range of interesting sounding art shows to view. You got to get the hang of the gigantic Port of New York Authority Terminal to go, for example, from Gate 68 from Philly to Gate 89 to Boston and points north. The cops were more useful and succinct in their directions than the officially appointed info flow-ers of Greyhound, an anomaly, until you consider their different wage scales! I wanted to review the ART DECO show at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts so I had to time my visit there to the museum’s opening hours. So I decided to press on to Portland the first day. Arriving in darkness about six p.m. I was anxious about finding a hotel room nearby.

More and more Greyhound stations are located in marginal neighborhoods (and I majored in Yellow at the University of Detroit!) Luckily, in Portland, the old “Union Station” (now sadly demolished) spawned a perfectly lovely four strorey hotel kitty korner from the now Greyhound Union Station called the Inn at St.John’s. For $50 (no pokey tourism taxes to quietly escalate the price!) I had a commodious room, cable TV, and a bountiful breakfast. True, the john at St. Johns was detached so to speak. But it was soley mine, with a key to prove it.

I highly recommend it even though it will cost you more in the prime summer season, and it is not right by the seaside attractions. A cute little bonus is one free ride on the public transportation system which is cheap and will take you most anywhere. I relished the “Americana” exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art (the State Department’s collections for garnishing our embassies all across the world), and a surprisingly rich collection of German expressionism thrown in to whet my appetite. Next door is the discovery oriented Children’s Museum where they were just opening a display on the most popular children’s book illustrator in the region. I had walked up the street from the bus station, gawking for buildings (yes, Virginia, I’ve become an architecture critic in my senile years).

An astonishing one is the Richardsonian Romanesque former library that now houses the brass of the Maine College of Art as well as the design and architecture faculty. Anne Wadleigh, the president’s secretary, was particularly generous in stopping what looked like a harassed schedule to get me the details on the building’s history. The college’s main “campus” is the former Porteus department store, where they were running a splendid take on sustainability in the environment, with ten very diverse examples illustrating their main contentions. I climbed back on the two p.m. bus to Boston a very satisfied Greyhounder.

At the Boston Transportation Center, a vast new metroplex where buses, subways and commerce cohabitate, I met my first defeat. You can check a bag (for a stiff $4 per item). BUT YOU MUST PICK IT UP BEFORE TEN P:M: THEIR CINDERELLA HOUR: NO OVERNIGHT LOCKERS: I swallowed the thirty two dollar charge to ship the broken trolley back to Philly while I sought the Youth Hostel. It’s actually duck soup getting to 10 Hemenway, Red line, Green line and you’re there. But the unhostile but under-informed man at the reception blew the directions and a good natured Irish cop put me back on the track.

The hostel is cheap ($28 with a International Hostel Card), clean, and full of interesting international travelers. I’ve never palavered so intensely for two days in my life, and believe me I’ve palavered hard since youth. The Museum of Fine Arts was a bracing fifteen minute walk right up Hemenway Street. And the ART DECO show is all that is promised. As a certified ART DECO-DENT(a very exclusive club, based on self-selection) I can assure you a brilliant gloss on a fascinating episode in Euro-American art history.

My next stop was Williams College in Williamstown, MA where they were highlighting another first, a show on the architectural photographer Ezra Stoller. At one point in early modenrist history, to get Stollerized was a sign you were considered a contender. It was the photographical Pritzker Prize. It was worth the effort—which meant pit stops at the Peter Pan HQ in Springfield, another uselessly long connection in Pittsfield where an underinformed driver forced me to buy a $9.55 ticket to Williamstown! (Peter Pan just merged with Greyhound.)

The next day that meant I couldn’t stop in Stockbridge to see a David Macaulay graphics exhibition. Grrrr. Pan has the highest tech gear in the business, the creation of a recently deceased Italian immigrant who also wanted his company to excel. (It began in the 1930’s as a simple charter company and gradually dominated the North of Boston region.)

The Stoller show had a curious incident: the 89 year old photographer who lived in Williamstown died shortly after the show opened! The curator Deborah Rothschild deployed six major architectural talents to show the Ezra’s range: Louis Kahn’s Salk Center and Dacca complex, Wright’s Falling Water, Eero Saarinen’s TWA and Dulles Terminals, and so on. A great tribute to a great eye.

I bypassed New York City (more about the new MOMA later) as I hurried back to Philly for a pit stop—and to collect the broken trolley! Bright and Early the next day I was on the express bus to St. Louis, where I arrived, somewhat hassled, but content. I had arranged at the Philly Greyhound to get permission to sit in the right front jump seat to facilitate better photos and talk/talk with the drivers. For some time those have been reserved for the driver and/or crippled, handicapped customers. I salute the Philly brass for making my ride more instructive.

Alas, one must face some depressing truths about the company’s aging and under-serviced fleet. We took no fewer than five buses to Little Rock—one abandoned from an excess of cockroaches and the others from diverse mechanical problems. But we got as promised to Little Rock late in the afternoon before Clinton’s Library was to be dedicated. There is no Youth Hostel in Little Rock. (As in so many Southern cities they were abandoned during the integration crisis.) And there was no room for me at any Inn! Ouch.

I went to the Chamber of Commerce office in the dazzling new Convention Center, and, lo and be held, a compassionate conservative got me a last minute cancellation at the Radisson several blocks away. The spirits were jovial and high. There were shuttles to the Library.

Snarlo, since the Secret Service insists on 24 hours for clearance I could only stand on the periphery. But I first walked across the Arkansas bridge from Greyhound in North Little Rock and returned with their cute newly revived 25cent streetcar shuttle. And I went to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette to pay my respects to their internationally regarded editorial page editor, Paul Greenberg (he’s the satirical voice that concocted the devastating sobriquet, SLICK WILLIE) and to get obits and features on the greatest architect Arkansas has so far had, Fay Jones who had just died.

That ‘s when I learned how to take it easy on the luggage. A great bus driver who regaled me through the night with interesting Greyhound stories told me to play weak at the ticket counter and use the magic words SPECIAL HANDLING: I’m a pro at playing weak, to get preboarding on aircraft. The older I get the more Pre I board. I claim it’s only fair since I’m clearly entering my Second Childhood! Amazing. $5 for a cartoon and WHOOSH off went what the Roman legions called impedimenta (literally in the way of your feet!).

That freed me to psych out a cheap way to get the Love Field so I could fly Southwest to LAX via El Paso. Easy. Behind the Hampton Inn on the square is a bus terminal with a direct link to Love for a measly fifty cents. Aboard the El Paso-Lax leg I sat kitty korner from an Okinawa Marine, one Richardo Suarez, a seventy nine year old shot to smithereens, lost one eye from shrapnel, got a rotten back from a shoot out there. Not a whimper of complaint from this elegant human being. In pain all his life, he blessed being alive. WOW. My routine service as a radar tech in the Navy looked playpennish by comparison.

When the flight attendant offered him free drinks, he passed them on to me! He’s too shot up (and shot from decades injury-induced alcoholism) to drink any more. I amused him by my story of my first drunk ever in the French Quarter as a lad of seventeen. Before you could say Jean LaFitte I was off mine, in a gutter. The Shore Patrol threw such near cadavers into a Paddy Wagon and drove them to the City Morgue in the basement of Huey Long’s Charity Hospital. I awakened Sunday morning on a stone slab—and needless to say never had a drinking problem. (Both my father and brother were alcoholics.)

LAX had a problem in store for me. I had been using Best Western hotels all summer when I showed my German wife New Orleans and North Texas and surroundings, gunning for a freebie. So I called their 800 number at LAX and gave them my Visa to guarantee the reservation. And ten waited, and waited, and waited—for an hour, half asleep from accumulated Greyhound sleeplessness. Finally, after the fifth Hilton shuttle started to pass me.

I opted for Hilton, where I always used to stay anyway as a Honors gold card holder. I called Best Western to complain about their defective shuttle schedule and got boilerplate platitudes for my pains. It’s in Visa contention right now. Best prides itself on being the biggest chain in the world. Based on such experiences this summer it may be the worst organized on earth as well. I recently got a form letter acknowledging one stay—when there have been five!! Oh well, Ameripassing is no sport for the weak and irresolute.

LAX: Frank Lloyd Wright used to sneer that LA was formed (or deformed) when someone titled the country and all the debris ran into the San Fernando Valley! Still I never leave under-satisfied. Not this time either although there was one big frustration. Which I’ll get into later. I shot a roll of film of the new Gehry designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, took in lunch at MOCA and reviewed two mediocre hot shot shows at the Geffen. But the peak experience of the entire Ameripassing was the George Nakashima furniture show at the new Japan American Museum. He is superb.

One big pain: I spent over two hours on the 61 bus which services Greyhound yet never got to Long Beach where there was a major exhibition on African American painters Later I learned I could have avoided this snarl by taking the new Light Rail to Long Beach. Damn.. I did find out that the 117 bus took you back to LAX where I collected my luggage and retraced my frustrated steps to Greyhound where I took the overnight bus to San Francisco, where my best friend had just been reelected as a County Supervisor.

(There was another cache of my luggage there from the month of October when I had helped him get reelected!)I had booked a Southwest flight to Oakland, but canceled it because of the luggage problem. Greyhound in San Fran is at the TransBay Terminal outside of which is the 38 Geary bus which leads directly to my friend’s home in the Richmond District. Portages are the biggest problem with my kind of traveling. And the young man at Greyhound/San Fran responded to my special pleading for SPECIAL HANDLING and sent most of my gear to Philly free. (There was a little anxiety about whether it would get there in time for my flight back to Europe the day after Thanksgiving, but it did. The carton ($4 this time) broke open and somehow I ended up with a back pack from Bangor, Maine, which I had to deliver back to Greyhound early Friday morning. Incidentally, I flew back to Philly Sunday night on the red eye, a freebie ticket from frequently flying USAirways, Frankfurt to Philly.

So Ameripassing through is a kick. Sometimes it’s little tacky, with too many squalling overnight kids. And sometimes the person behind you gets to kicking the back of your seat. But most folks realize that’s not acceptable behavior. And if things really get rough, just take it up with the driver. They’re a great bunch of hard workers. Leaving the driving to them for ten hours a day is no joke. If you’re an art/architecture nut like I am, there’s no cheaper way to cover a Big Country. Don’t let a few cockroaches (and the occasional cocky kid) keep you from your appointed fifteen day rounds. And leave the palavering to them.