I’m moving to Los Angeles from Philadelphia today, beginning an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime two week roadtrip through America. I created this blog to chronicle my travels and keep in touch with family and friends at home. Since I’ve never been to Washington, D.C. (except for a Nationals baseball game at old RFK Stadium), my friend George and I are touring the nation’s capitol the first day and a half. We’re continuing on the southern route to the west coast, filming video and taking pictures at each state sign and landmark. Our itinerary is nailed down to the minute to reduce the instances in which we always say “Ok, what now…” and waste 20 minutes finding something fun to do or somewhere to eat. This way, we’ll be able to fit in each as much of the country as possible in the next 14 days.

I always appreciate when other roadtrippers post what’s in their bag. So, here’s what I’m bringing for my adventure through America:

Things to Bring
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The road to Washington, D.C. traverses three state borders: Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. In addition to posing at each “Welcome to…” state sign we pass, I’m also attempting to moonwalk in front of each sign and landmark from home to Los Angeles. George is doing something similar. Think of it as a combination of this guy’s photograph of himself in front of every state sign in America and Matt Harding’s dancing jig around the world.

I’ve mapped out where each state sign appears along the highways, the first being Delaware at about 1 hour and 2 minutes into the drive. To be even more precise, I noted on my itinerary that this particular sign is located right after a fork on I-95. Even with the approximate time and the knowledge of a unique road split, the sign came out of nowhere. We had to run through tall grass to backtrack a bit (you can’t go in reverse on a busy highway and turning around would take up too much time). On the plus side, photographing and videoing ourselves in front of the large blue sign only took eight minutes, two minutes less than the ten I had originally allotted for our brief stop along the shoulder of a busy/terrifying I-95.

We did the same for Maryland, where the tractor-trailers seemed bigger, but the shoulder was thankfully a bit wider. While Delaware’s enormous blue sign had the slogan “It’s good to be first,” noting it was the first state in the Union on December 7, 1787 (beating PA by a mere four days), Maryland’s yellow and white sign was smaller and simply asked you to enjoy your visit. I won’t be stopping in either of these states on my trip, but I’ve been to both before and am focusing on places I haven’t been to yet.
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There’s too much to do in Washington, D.C. in two weeks, never mind a day and a half. However, that’s all of the time I have on my first visit to the nation’s capital, so my self-made itinerary calls for exploring just one museum, quickly visiting all of the major monuments and having a late dinner at a non-chain D.C. restaurant. This’ll be a good preliminary tour of the area so that I’m familiar with the sights next time I’m in town—and that next time will most certainly be at a less humid time of the year.

The Newseum is an obvious choice, as it ties into the Journalism degree I received from Penn State (and deals with my minor in history in a big way). In addition to being about one of the most fascinating topics, it’s also the newest museum having opened in 2008 and the Freedom Forum prides itself on maintaining “The world’s most interactive museum.” As interactive as this seven-story building is on the inside, the outside stays old school with over 80 newspaper front pages from around the world. It’s already amazing and I haven’t even entered the front door yet.

Eight graffiti-filled sections of the Berlin Wall are displayed on the bottom floor of the Newseum along with an East German guard tower that rises two stories. Next to it is another Cold War relic: a toppled statue of Vladimir Lenin. This lower level also contains a bunch of historical artifacts in an adjacent “G-Men & Journalists” exhibit. There’s John Dillinger’s death mask and a cache of mobster machine guns, the back section of the D.C. sniper car where bullets were fired from a modified trunk, the electric chair in which Bruno Hauptmann (the Lindbergh baby kidnapper) was executed and the Unabomber’s wooden shack along with a dismantled mail bomb.

How the media played a role in the Waco siege is brutally honest, as it details how a cameraperson unintentionally tipped off a local who happened to be a David Koresh follower, or a Davidian, about the impending FBI siege. Next to this exhibit is one for the Oklahoma City Bombing, which I’ll be visiting in person on this lengthy roadtrip.

“Our World at War: Photojournalism Beyond the Front Lines” is the third and final display on the bottom floor. While there are no artifacts associated with this exhibit, the oftentimes-gory images are the most striking in the entire museum. You feel for the people involved in these war-torn situations, but also find a new appreciation for the photojournalists, armed with only a camera, doing their jobs by covering the world’s overlooked hotspots. It makes you wonder how they can fearlessly hold a camera straight in the presence of either so much anger or so much anguish.

More awe-inspiring images hang from the Pulitzer Prize Photographs room on the second floor (confusingly labeled Level 1). Here, recognizable moments captured in time include Eddie Adams’ 1969 photograph of Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner and Robert H. Jackson’s 1964 photograph of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald two days after Oswald assassinated JFK. Many award-winning photos are less famous, but depict equally harrowing situations, so all of the images in this room are worth examining for a solid half hour.
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The Washington Monument tour is free, but I decided to purchase advanced tickets from nps.gov for the first available time slot at 9 AM. Ingenious! These $3 tickets were worth every penny because I received them in the mail two weeks before the trip, while everyone else had to line up at the base of the monument and hope for a workable time slot… if any! That’s right, the early morning queue was so massive that they were going to run out of today’s tickets, even though tours last until 5 PM and run every 15 minutes. And when they run out, they run out. Best $3 spent on the trip so far.

Although we arrived at 8:45 AM, we didn’t get into the monument until 9:15. Having walked the Mall twice the day before, I was glad there was absolutely no climbing the hundreds of steps, as is the case in the Statue of Liberty. Instead, there’s a tourist-crammed elevator that rises to the top is less than two minutes. That’s significantly faster than the original steam-powered service elevator, which took 20 minutes to ascend all 500 feet.

I learned that the Washington Monument is the world’s tallest freestanding stone structure and doesn’t contain metal beams in its walls. In fact, the only metal found within this record-setting obelisk is the elevator shaft. What I already knew about the outside was that the marble at the top is a slightly different shade of white than the marble at the base since construction was halted around Civil War time and the marble used in the 1880s was from a different quarry. What I didn’t know, however, was that the inside contains unique commemorative stones donated by each state. They’re visible on the return elevator ride to the bottom.

The view is spectacular from 500-feet up and it’s so close to the 555-foot apex where those blinking anti-collision red lights are located and viewable from the inside. In addition to being able to see as far as the distant Pentagon across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, we got a chance to view photographs of the four sides from the turn of the century and 1930s as a comparison to the landscape today. There was a photograph from 1885 of sailboats anchored in the Tidal Basin, which had a built up harbor. Today, there’s no one on the water and the closest people are all in their cars on the 395 freeway surrounding the Jefferson Memorial.
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The Blue Ridge Mountains run along I-81 through the western part of Virginia. Seeing them in the distance is breathtaking, but it’s really difficult to capture a mountain range in a single photograph. It’s something that’s better suited for video, which I’ll have to post once we arrive in Los Angeles in two weeks.

Conveniently placed between Washington, D.C. and Knoxville is the small town of Lexington, Virginia. Here, Washington & Lee University is located along with the graves of Civil War generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, both Confederates. Jackson owned a single home in his lifetime while he taught at the local Virginia Military Institute and it’s now a museum. Lee became the president of Washington College (later renamed Washington & Lee University) following his defeat in the Civil War and remained in that position until his death. He’s buried at the adjacent Lee Chapel, which contains a museum in the basement.

Since we arrived at 5 PM on a Sunday, the Lee Chapel & Museum was just closing. However, we were able to photograph the outsides of the small chapel and campus and stopped by Stonewall Jackson’s grave site. Before leaving this quaint little town, we grabbed a snack from the local Wendy’s and continued to drive to Knoxville.
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On the way to Memphis, we intended to eat lunch at Noshville, a normal deli in Nashville with a funny name. However, we found out that the Memphis Riverboat ride that we wanted to take at 5:00 PM was only available Saturdays and Sundays and that the weekday time was limited to 2:30 PM. We weren’t going to even bother trying to get to Memphis by 2:30 PM and even drove through Nashville to stop for lunch. At the last second, we decided to skip lunch in an effort to maybe, hopefully, possibly make it to the boat before it pulled out onto the Mississippi.

Time was going to be tight, even though we gained an hour upon entering the Central Time Zone on the way to Nashville. It was almost 11 AM Central when we got to Nashville and lying between us at the 2:30 PM boat was a 3-hour drive to Memphis, checking into the hotel, unpacking our luggage from the car (we weren’t sure is this was necessary, but then the hotel gave us a not-so-reassuring pamphlet that said “Stow it. Don’t show it.”) and, finally, running in the hot Memphis sun to the riverboat, which, with a little luck, wouldn’t be pulling away when we arrived.

We made to the dock with just six minutes to spare at 2:24 PM. Out of breath and hungry, we boarded the ship, stood in front of a giant oscillating fan and ordered some hotdogs and a cold drink. The 90-minute cruise aboard an old-time riverboat was worth it for the scenery, the breeze and the monotone narrator who had the soothing voice of a tired southern storyteller. Although I could’ve sworn it was a recording and told George that it must be when said that he thought the same thing, we discovered that it was really a man on the second deck of this three-deck boat. Toward the end of the ride, he humorously remarked, “Some people think I’m a CD, but nope. I’m a real person.”
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The plan was to go to Graceland this morning, cross the border to Arkansas by noon and have two solid hours at the Bill Clinton Presidential Library. That’s not going to happen. Not today, at least. We walked to our hotel from Sun Studio yesterday and asked the front desk:

Me: “Do we need reservations for dinner at Rendezvous tonight?”

Front Desk: “Normally you would…”

[At this point, I thought the clerk might say, “But since you’re staying at the hotel right next to the restaurant, it won’t be a problem,” or something of that nature.]

Front Desk: “…But it’s closed on Mondays.”

The entire reason that we took the slightly-longer southern route to Los Angeles was because my new roommates raved about Rendezvous’ ribs on their way out to L.A. in February. Six months later, we were finally at the door of this much-talked-about restaurant and discovered that it wouldn’t open until 4:30 PM Tuesday when we had originally planned to be out of the city by noon. Sorry, Bill Clinton, but we have to reschedule today because we didn’t have ribs last night.

Well, we did have ribs last night, but it was at the Blues City Café and it didn’t live up to the hype of “Memphis ribs.” Afterwards, we walked around the neon-lit shops of Beale Street, bought Blue Moons from one of the many beer patios that line this pedestrian-only street and listened to live music at a blues club. The bright lights and loud music couldn’t cure our own ribs blues. So, we decided to push back going to the Clinton Library until tomorrow, Wednesday morning, and spend almost all of Tuesday in Memphis before checking into our Little Rock hotel as late as possible.

Tuesday morning was entirely about Elvis. We pre-booked Graceland’s 9:15 AM tour for the AAA discounted price of $29.70 (normally $33). This oddly priced Platinum Tour ticket, at just $4 more than the Mansion-only Tour, included five extra exhibits.

We started off with the conventional audio-guided tour of the mansion, which looks untouched with dated shag carpets and 60s TVs that are far from high-definition. From the pool table in the basement to the swimming pool outside, everything is in pristine condition and explains why they don’t allow flash photography. There’s so much cultural history here that even if you don’t like Elvis’ music or despise celebrity, the fact that so much memorabilia of just one person is amassed in a single location is still an admirable accomplishment. I just don’t know what we passed more: gold records or gold suits.

The Platinum Tour ticket allowed us to walk through Elvis’ two custom airplanes, check out his extensive automobile collection, get a glimpse of his parallel career in 31 movies, learn about his brief military service and see all of the fan memorabilia, from the cool to the cheesy. For an extra $4, all of these extras were worth it and amounted to two hours of additional insight into the life of The King.

During the course of the tour, I learned that meatloaf was Elvis’ favorite meal. With meatloaf on the brain, that’s exactly what I ordered for lunch from the Chrome Grill. This on-sight café put it on a bun for me to make a sandwich, and with veggies and mashed potatoes, it was a delicious combination. The only thing that could be better is tonight’s planned dinner at Rendezvous.

Before Rendezvous opens, we have several hours to burn in downtown Memphis. The original plan called for visiting the National Civil Rights Museum, located at the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. The actual museum is closed on Tuesdays, but we still walked a good 25 minutes each way to observe the historical outside of the motel.

During yesterday’s riverboat ride, we spotted a man kayaking the Mississippi River. With more than two hours to before heading to Rendezvous, we decided to travel to Mud Island, which is really a peninsula that juts out into the Mississippi. While we had hoped to kayak the river too, having kayaked before in Pennsylvania, the rental office was closed because there was a storm advisory. Even though the skies have been clear since we arrived in Memphis, the advisory has been in effect for the past two days; apparently that kayaking man from yesterday used his own. Not deterred, we still managed to navigate America’s longest river… on two kiddy paddleboats. One shaped like a white swan and the other a green dragon.

We were the only two people on the shallow river inlet, and after twenty minutes of peddling the boats furiously and attempting to steer them in the correct direction, I realized why that was. The intense Memphis sun was beating down on us so hard that our sunscreen began to run into our eyes along with the immense sweat. It cost us $2 to ride these kiddy boats and we probably spent more on bottled waters in the adjacent shop after we abandoned ship. In the end, I think a weather advisory was warranted, but for the powerful heat, rather than the absent storms.

Memphis was almost in the history books. We cruised the mighty Mississippi as they did in the days of Mark Twain in what looked like a turn-of-the-century riverboat. We toured music landmarks Sun Studio and Graceland. We walked to the National Civil Rights Museum where MLK, Jr. was assassinated and walked down the electric avenue of Beale Street. The only thing left to conquer in Memphis was the city’s best ribs at a little place called Rendezvous.

Rendezvous isn’t located on Beale Street and it isn’t lit up in neon like most of the downtown restaurants. It’s down a shady-looking alley with no other businesses in the vicinity. But, for what it lacks in décor on the outside, it makes up with delicious food on the inside. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush seem to agree, as both former presidents have been customers in the past. Even President Obama has tried the ribs via FedEx and loved them so much that he wrote a letter of thanks to the owner. Rendezvous doesn’t require you to be the PotUS to receive these ribs through the mail. They actually ship them overnight through their web site. That’s how good they are.

To give you some background, I’m not a big eater. Nine times out of ten, I’m taking home to-go boxes from restaurants. I also don’t like beans and I’m not a big fan of coleslaw. At Rendezvous, however, I ordered a full rack of ribs and the seasoning on them was so mouth-wateringly perfect that I split a second full rack with George. Again, I usually want less food, not more.

It was astonishing for me to have a full rack and a half of these dry-rub ribs, and the mild and hot sauce only brought out the exceptional baked-in seasoning out more. Then, I tried the barbeque-baked beans. They were so warm and flavorsome that I didn’t realize that I was eating something I usually hate. The same goes for the mustard-based coleslaw, which had a yellow-orange color and unique zing to them.

Kevin and Kenny, my new roommates in L.A., talked about this place more than a normal person should. Now I know why. Too bad this place 1,800 miles away from where I’m going to be living and their ribs start at $99 for overnighting two slabs. Good thing we put off going to Little Rock for a couple of hours. We’re going to the Clinton Library tomorrow morning, anyway.

Wednesday has been a long day and there’s still six hours to go and four of them involve driving from Oklahoma City to Amarillo, Texas. The morning began with an hour-and-a-half tour of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, conveniently next to the Little Rock, Arkansas hotel that I booked. In fact, our Comfort Inn was so close that it was renovated and renamed the “Comfort Inn & Suits Downtown at the Clinton Library” for the library’s 2004 dedication. It’s also the only non-business-related hotel that I’ve stayed in that had an HDTV in the room.

The first room of the Clinton Library had the White House cabinet table and chairs and, to my surprise, I was allowed to sit in the President’s chair. Little Known Fact: It’s actually two-inches taller than all of the other chairs in the cabinet room. Upon prying myself out of the seat of power, I followed the subsequent timeline exhibit where I came across a photo of President Clinton signing NAFTA, something Hillary Clinton campaigned against in 2008. Oops.

Clinton memorabilia highlights included two old Macs from the late 90s dotcom era, the President’s saxophone collection, his sax-wielding Muppet and a yellow shirt, helmet and bike from Lance Armstrong. Toward the end of the tour, there was a room dedicated to all of the space exploration that went on during his two terms and a replica of the Oval Office, which was roped off. I got in on a high-five picture of James Carville and Paul Begala and pulled out my iPhone to compare it to the old 90s clunkers used by a bearded Begala and others (both pictures below).

Finally, we took pictures in front of the Presidential Limousine and then hoped in my just-as-fancy 1997 Toyota Corolla.

Five hours after leaving the Clinton Library, we arrived in Oklahoma City and made our way to the Oklahoma City National Memorial. Now the largest memorial of its kind in the United States, it was where Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building stood until Timothy McVeigh, with the aid of Terry Nichols, destroyed it on April 19, 1995. I remember having just turned 11 six days before this occurred and watching the news coverage with shock and bewilderment.

Now 25 years old, I made sure that I took out a half hour to check out the memorial. Walking through the entrance, the first thing I noticed was the enormous eastern gate with 9:01 engraved at the top of the frame. This represents the last moments of peace, as the bombing occurred at 9:02 AM. Across the reflecting pool is the western gate with 9:03 at the top. That time represents the first moments of recovery. Continuing with the symbolism, a thin-and-clean-looking reflecting pool (unlike the one in D.C.) between the two gates is supposed to show a face changed by domestic terrorism, while the 168 empty chairs in the adjacent field symbolize those who lost their lives in the attack.

From downtown Oklahoma, we headed to The Wedge Pizzeria. While I was making the itinerary, I tried to vary up the restaurants and noticed we didn’t have one pizza place on the schedule. Lots of steak, sandwich and ribs restaurants. So, I used Yelp! to search for a quality pizza parlor in Oklahoma City and found The Wedge at 4709 N Western Ave, Oklahoma City, OK 73118.

Pizzas at The Wedge aren’t your ordinary Domino’s or Pizza Hut pies. They’re large slices with sizeable, whole ingredients like an authentic Italian pie. It’s a switch from the delivery and homemade pizza that I’m used to and took care of my hunger from the long drive. More than anything, I’m glad that we fit a pizzeria into this trip and a got a chance to stop in Oklahoma City, the geographical halfway point on our 14-day journey.

Last seating at The Big Texan Steak Ranch was 10:00 PM and we just made it to the famous Amarillo eatery. It’s known for having the 72 oz. challenge. Anyone who can eat the steak (plus sides) in an hour eats for free. Otherwise, it’s $72. We just went for a pair of 20 oz. T-bones and had a difficult time finishing them. We did see a small girl sit at the challenge table, but it seemed like her parents only wanted a photo-op and she had no intention of racing the rather large clock on the wall.

The T-bone was average at best and I noticed that almost souvenir and desirable photo op said “Home of the 72 oz. Steak Challenge” and immediately mentioned the restaurant’s web site. The marketing was better than the food. I can’t say whether or not the fried rattlesnake was any good, though. In a failed effort to try something completely different, I tried to order it, but they were out by the time we arrived. I did manage to get a glass boot and shot glass from the attached souvenir shop. I’ve seen people drink out of a large glass boot before, but doubt they bought it in Texas.

The neighboring Big Texan Motel looked like a bunch of stables and saloons on the outside and was filled with a similar ranch-style theme on the inside. Very Disneyesque. It was smaller than all of our previous hotels, but was the cheapest of the bunch, too. All of the walls and furniture were made of wood, the bedspreads had appropriate cow prints on them and the shower curtain a big Texas state flag. Even cooler, they had a hat rack for two cowboy hats. This was ideal because I just happened to bring a pair of cowboy hats for tomorrow’s horseback riding trip through Palo Duro Cayon. Let’s hope the rain clears up before then.

Update: Here’s a Panoramic photo of the Texas morning sky: