Last Sunday night, as we were packing to come down to Kentucky, I was channel-surfing. I discovered that the movie “Elizabethtown” had just started, so we stopped packing and watched it. I’d seen it before, but I’m a fan of writer-director Cameron Crowe’s work, and, besides, who likes packing?
If you haven’t seen it, the film tells the story of Drew Baylor, played by Orland Bloom. When his father dies suddenly, he must return to his ancestral home of Elizabethtown, Kentucky. He meets and falls in love with a flight attendant, played by Kirsten Dunst, unsullen and doing her best work.
Elizabethtown, as it happens, is only about 40 km from where we were staying.
Taking the movie and the town’s proximity as a bit of a sign, we made a short road trip there. It’s pretty unremarkable, and as far as I could tell the town has resisted the urge to exploit any connection with the movie. We did have a nice dinner at the Back Home Restaurant, which is everything the name promises. I had potato-wrapped cod, and homemade coconut cream pie for dessert.
On our way to Elizabethtown, I was scanning the local radio stations (the radio mix here was much better than in Texas) and happened upon U2′s “Pride (In the Name of Love)”. That song is featured on the “Elizabethtown” soundtrack when, in the midst of his own road trip, Drew visits the scene of Martin Luther King’s assasination.
We decided to spend our last night in Kentucky in Louisville. We used Hotwire to pick a hotel. As you may know, Hotwire shows you pricing and details for hotels that match your search without disclosing the actual name of the hotel. You book (often at a robust discount) and then get notified of where you’re staying.
We got a very favourable rate at a downtown historic hotel. It’s turns out to be the Brown Hotel, where Drew stays and where much of the second act of “Elizabethtown” takes place.
Is Cameron Crowe trying to tell us something? I don’t think so, but the coincidences were too numerous not to remark upon.
While I’m uploading some new photos to my Kentucky photo set, here are a couple of favourites:
This dog was awaiting its owner outside of the monastery. It came over to confer with us, and paused only momentarily to check out this box turtle. The turtle, as you might imagine, was non-plussed:
Even in rural Kentucky, you can’t avoid the social media:
This sign is pretty self-explanatory:
I’m pretty happy with this mushroom photo, taken at dusk. Here’s a slight variation:
This week, Julie and I are in rural Kentucky, about an hour south of Louisville. Julie’s mom is Chair of the English Department at Trinity Western University, and a prominent authority on Thomas Merton. Merton was, by apparent consensus, the most significant American spiritual writer of the twentieth century. He was also a monk, and spent the latter half of his life at the Abbey at Gethsemani, a Cistercian monastery here in Kentucky. Julie’s mom spends time down here most summers, and this year we decided to join her.
We’re staying in a house near the Abbey that’s operated as a retreat centre. It’s commonly called ‘the Solar House’, as it was a kind of early green architecture effort. It used to have a translucent roof, to let in the heat. It’s built right into the hillside, on a gravel bed, which I gather helps moderate temperatures throughout the year. It’s got a peculiar, pyramid shape (here’s a photo), though it sits very pleasantly at one end of a huge meadow.
The surrounding countryside brims with life. I’ve seen deer, box turtles, snakes (larger than we grow them back in Canada) and all sorts of birds–blue jays, cardinals, herons, owls, turkey vultures, turtle doves and dozens of other species I don’t recognize.
Of all the places I’ve been, Kentucky reminds me most of Ireland. It’s extraordinarily green–it has rained here every afternoon, like it does in the tropics–and has charming rolling hills. Of course, in Ireland the fences are made of rock, not barbed wire, and there are very few pickup trucks, but there’s a lot of similarity. For no reason other than my own naivete, I expected Kentucky to be more like the country around Austin, Texas. Where Texas was dry and brown, Kentucky is humid and verdant.
I’ve posted a few photos from our trip to Flickr. Tomorrow, time permitting, I’ll tell you about the monks.
It includes a rented movie, three video and audio podcasts, two thousand songs, five Amazon Kindle ebooks, 10 games, 125 unread RSS items in NetNewswire plus dozens of cached articles in Instapaper, the New York Times and WSJ apps. It would literally take me months to go through it all. Plus once I landed my magical pocket computer filled up with even more – emails, tweets, feeds, etc.
Travis, likewise, itemizes what’s on his devices while taking a train to Denali National Park in Alask:
Instead, here’s what I had to content myself with: On my computer: hours of video: movies and TV shows and Web documentaries. Entire books, downloaded from Amazon. Computer games with shifting maps and dozens of levels. Yes, my battery would run out; there was undoubtedly an outlet on the train for me to recharge. But I wouldn’t bother Why would I, when I also had….
My iPhone: thousands of photos, hundreds of songs and a few audiobooks. And of course, offline email, SMS and a phone. Even if you hobble it: no Internet, no phone access, no GPS, there’s still plenty there to amuse and distract and fill your time.
I’ve been on six flights in the past week, and, like Travis and Steve, I’ve got a box of anti-boredom tools. I previously wrote about FORLORM: fear of lack of reading material. I used to carry an armload of books and magazines to combat the tedium of flights. Now my tools are a mix of the analog and the digital.
My usual regimen is, in order from boarding lounge to landing: read newspaper, complete crossword, read half a magazine, watch an hour of TV on my laptop, review notes (as I’m often flying to or from a speaking event), play games on the iPhone (mostly RSoccer09, a remarkably deep soccer game) then read the other half of the magazine. That’s usually more than enough for any domestic flight.
We are witnessing the death of boredom. On the other hand, we’re in an age of distraction. I don’t necessarily want to get all contemplative on an airplane. But we do need to be aware of the habits we’re forming, and how they might discourage healthy introspection.
For reasons I can’t quite grasp, I enjoy watching the FIFA World Cup more than any other sporting event. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s the most-watched sporting event (and, quite, possibly, any event) in the world. The final is as close as I’ll probably ever get to the shared experience of the Moon landing. Or maybe it’s just that the football/soccer is terrific, and the stakes are as high as they get.
It’s got nothing to do with national pride, because Canada’s men’s team has only ever qualified once, in 1986. They were knocked out in the earliest ‘group phase’, and in fact never scored a goal. I live in hope that they’ll at least make it back to the World Cup in my lifetime.
For those unfamiliar with the tournament, 32 national teams qualify. This time around, those 32 are whittled down through regional competitions from 204 member nations over a year and a half leading up to the World Cup finals. Here’s where they come from:
Europe: 13 places
Africa: 5 places (and South Africa, the host nation)
South America: 4 or 5 places
Asia: 4 or 5 places
North, Central American and Caribbean: 3 or 4 places
Oceania: 0 or 1 place
The selection process is incredibly baroque–it’s worthy of a Common Craft video. However, this Wikipedia article does an exquisite job of laying out all the permutations, and staying up to date with the ongoing matches. If you’re supporting a particular nation, or are remotely interested in the competition, this (combined, perhaps, with the newly-revamped FootyTube) is a terrific way to keep abreast of each nation’s shifting fortunes.
To answer my own question, as of today, only five teams have qualified for the tournament: Australia, Japan, South Korea, Netherlands and the hosts, South Africa.
A quick OCD aside: there are actually 208 FIFA members–Brunei, Laos, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines failed to register for the tournament. Wikipedia lists 203 sovereign states, so now I’m curious about the members on the FIFA list who aren’t on the list of sovereign states (and vice versa). A few examples of non-countries on FIFA’s list include the Faroe Islands, Palestine and Bermuda. I’d be curious to find an exhaustive comparison of the two lists.
I flew to Toronto this week. One flight out, two flights (hello, bizarre sculpture in Calgary airport!) on the way back. While checking in at a terminal, uh, in the terminal, I glanced at the seat selection screen. There were plenty of other seats from which to choose. The seat next to me was empty on all three flights.
Julie was down at Granville Island today. It was a gorgeous day, and that place is usually teaming with tourists in the summer months. She was surprised how uncrowded the island was. She easily found parking.
We recently used Hotwire to book a four-star hotel in downtown Seattle for Gnomedex. The conference occurs over a weekend in August, surely a popular time of year for tourists visiting the city. We’re paying US $99 a night.
I know these are all isolated anecdotes, but they confirm what I’ve been reading over the past few months: fewer people are traveling shorter distances. Here’s some empirical evidence. Between March, 2008 and March, 2009, the Canadian Tourism Council reports an 11.5% reduction in the number of trips to and within Canada. That probably represents the entire profit margin for a lot of hotels, travel agencies and related services.
As a matter of curiosity, I checked which countries were showing the greatest decline in trips to Canada. The percentages reflect how many fewer visitors came in March, 2009 compared to March, 2008:
United Kingdom – 24%
Japan – 24%
South Korea – 23%
Mexico – 21%
Of course, most foreign visitors to Canada are from the US, where travel is only off 5.9% between March, 2008 and 2009.
In any case, I guess it’s all good news for the consumer, and pretty bad news for anybody in the travel industry.
