Author Archives: Denny

Festless in Cincinnati

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In last week’s post, I told of becoming a big fan and semi-regular attendee of the annual Bockfest parade. At the time, I had every intention of attending this year’s event but it didn’t work out that way. Despite predicted near-freezing temperatures, those intentions survived until the afternoon of the parade but no further. Predictions of partly cloudy and low chance of precipitation became completely cloud covered with light snow. Recalling my 2013 “I’m too old for this” decision, I gave the parade a miss.

I had, of course, planned on the parade being the subject of this week’s post. Fortunately, there had been an event earlier in the week which makes a very suitable substitute. Narrow Path Brewing, in nearby Loveland, held their own mini-Bockfest on Tuesday. There was no parade but there were genuine goats, imposing monks who may or may not have been genuine, and a genuine ceremonial tapping of a keg of bock beer.

I didn’t make it to Bock Hall or the adjacent tent of many breweries in Cincinnati, but I did get to sample three of the area’s bock offerings. The first was the Sonder Brewing‘s William Goat featured in last week’s post, and the second was Narrow Path Brewing’s Pathinator that I enjoyed on Tuesday. The third was Common Denominator at  The Common Beer Company on Saturday. I met fellow road and beer enthuiast Perry Huntoon there, and his son snapped our picture when there was still a little Common Denominator left in my glass.

Scenes from when I actually made it to the big downtown bash can be found here: 2010, 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019.

Royal Competition

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I attended my first Bockfest Parade in 2010 and immediately regretted missing the preceding seventeen. My attendance hasn’t been perfect since then but it’s on the plus side: 6 of 10. My attendance at other Bockfest events has been perfect. I haven’t attended a single one and that includes the multiple Sausage Queen competitions that take place each year. One reason was the expectation of crowded spaces which I don’t enjoy nearly as much as I once did but location has also been a factor. To be honest, location could be problematic for a couple of reasons. One, of course, was distance. Most events happen downtown which means a bit of a drive plus dealing with parking. Secondly, many were in places I was unfamiliar with. I presumed that most of the attendees were folks who frequented the various places and the fact that I did not sort of added to the “crowded spaces” aspect. But this year the last of seven qualifying events took place just up the road in a place I’m fairly familiar with.

Sonder Brewing is the brewery closest to my home. It’s less than two crow-miles from my door and about two and a half if I stick to the roads. I arrived more than an hour ahead of the scheduled start of competition and the place was packed. I got a beer and hovered near the bar until a seat miraculously opened. My first beer was a porter. The second was the more appropriate William Goat bock pictured above. I can’t say whether or not the flouting of the “‑ator” bock naming convention was intentional but I can say it was quite good. I happily sipped my brew to the sounds of 99 Luftballon and Beer Barrel Polka — both in German. Then it was La Bamba and Livin’ On A Prayer in Spanish and English respectively.

The competition took place in the far corner. The acoustics were horrible so I had almost no idea of what was going on and the lighting and distance helped me make photos that matched the acoustics. I got no pictures of one of the three entrants and didn’t even learn her name. I was rooting for Ashli, who was assisted by an energetic dance team, only because I’d met her and some of her team before things got rolling. Rhonda also had a little help and both had sizable cheering sections.

Rhonda was the ultimate winner although I don’t know why or how. She will represent Sonder Brewing in the final competition for the 2020 Sausage Queen at Bockfest Hall next Saturday.

 

Trip Peek #91
Trip #87
Route 66 Festival 2010

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This picture is from my 2010 trip to the Route 66 Festival. It was promoted as a Joplin, Missouri, event since that was the nearest city but the main organizers lived in Kansas and most activities took place at the Downstream Casino in Oklahoma. It’s quite fitting that the featured photo is of the point where all three states meet. The first day of the festival was the sixth day of the trip. On the way there I visited Saint Louis, Missouri, and a few towns in Kansas and Oklahoma. The homeward portion of the trip is documented in a separate journal since I headed directly to my first ever Lincoln Highway conference after the three day Route 66 festival.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full-sized photo and the associated trip journal.

Free? Advertising on the Dixie

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Seeing things like signs, banners, and menus for local businesses bearing the logo of some large corporation is quite common. Details vary but the basic model is that the big corporation shoulders some or all of the cost and the small business gets some advertising for little or nothing. The idea is hardly new and the concept has never been restricted to purely commercial enterprises. During the last half of the 1920s, a pairing of this sort existed between a major highway and an American hereditary association. The major highway was, of course, the Dixie Highway. The hereditary association was the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).

The UDC was the “advertiser” in this instance. Between 1926 and 1935 the organization was responsible for at least ten plaques being erected beside the highway. It’s unclear whether or not the Dixie Highway Association was an active participant in this arrangement. Because the 1926 creation of the United States Numbered Highway System brought an end to all of the named auto trails, the DHA was not very active at this point.

Combined, the previous picture and the one at right show the ten plaques in north to south sequence. The northernmost marker is in Ohio, the southernmost is in Florida, the one preceding it is in South Carolina, and the others are in North Carolina. Except for the date erected, eight of the plaques are identical. The one in Florida contains the same text as those eight but has a different image of Lee. The one in South Carolina contains different text but has the same image as the bulk of the plaques.

The South Carolina plaque is the bigger oddity. All the others were erected in 1926, ’27, or ’28. It was erected in 1935. One of the differences in its text is its specific identification of the Greenville and Fort Sumter Chapters of the UDC as being responsible for erecting the marker. All others simply identify the overall UDC. The Florida marker was erected in 1927 ahead of at least three others. None of the other nine markers uses this image of General Lee.

Eight of the plaques essentially look just like this one which happens to be in Ohio. All plaques follow this general format even when some details vary. Approximately the top one-third is occupied by an image of General Lee on horseback. His name appears below the image in large letters. A bit farther down is the name of the auto trail. The letters in DIXIE HIGHWAY are larger than the general text but smaller than the letters in Lee’s name.

Maybe what I’ve written so far will help explain how I’m currently thinking about these markers. My first contact with the markers was in 2008 when I stumbled upon the one in Marshall, NC. After I learned there were others, I made a point of visiting them all and accomplished that in early 2015. At the time I thought of them as something similar to the Madonna of the Trail markers on the National Old Trails Road. That’s pretty much how I saw them until the summer of 2017.

Streets, parks, and statues honoring military and civilian leaders of the Confederate States of America had been drawing more and more attention. In August of 2017, the death of a counterprotester at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, cranked that attention up several notches. There was now enough attention for some of it to fall on one of those UDC plaques less than twenty miles from my home. Within days of the events in Charlottesville, a group in Dayton, OH, announced plans for a protest at the plaque near Franklin, OH. Plans to protest the protesters formed almost as quickly. City officials made a preemptive strike by removing and hiding the marker in the middle of the night. It didn’t make anybody happy but it didn’t make anybody dead, either.

Some news crews and some of those not happy people made it to the site on the morning following the removal. I made it, too, in the role of curious bystander. I chatted casually with a couple of the reporters and tried to defend the Dixie Highway a bit. I’d been calling the plaques and their mountings Dixie-Lee markers. Everyone else was calling the Franklin marker a Robert E. Lee monument and occasionally mentioning that it was on the Dixie Highway. It slowly sunk in that, for the reasons above, they were right. The monuments were not primarily concerned with marking a road like the Madonnas of the Trail or the concrete posts along the Lincoln Highway. I found myself explaining that the Dixie Highway was not associated with the Confederacy and asking that they not tie it too closely to Lee. For the first time, I compared the markers to a big branded beer sign with “Bob’s Bar” at its bottom. Learning that the brand on the sign was run by crooks, doesn’t automatically mean that Bob is a crook.

The plaque has been pried from the stone at the NC-SC border. It is lost or possibly destroyed. The marker in downtown Asheville has been attacked and damaged twice. The Franklin, OH, marker is back at roadside but is now on private property. That’s it in the picture at left. It’s even been buffed up and polished a bit. I want all the markers to stay. I deplore the vandalism that has occurred in the Carolinas but I don’t consider it an attack on the Dixie Highway. I now see that those markers really are what others have called them, Robert E. Lee monuments that happen to be on the Dixie Highway.

This topic came to me as I was writing last week’s post about the name of the Dixie Highway. I initially thought of it as a paragraph or two tacked onto that post. The length of the Dixie name post left no room to tack on anything and it is now quite obvious that a paragraph or two wouldn’t have been nearly enough. But it’s also pretty obvious that the two belong together. Again, I want all the markers to stay. But I don’t want them to stay at the expense of the Dixie Highway. Controversy will continue to swirl around statues, flags, and other items legitimately tied to the Confederacy. The Dixie Highway should not be part of that. Saying, as I have, that neither the word Dixie nor the Dixie Highway is inherently racist loses some sincerity if defending the road includes defending these markers.

A Dixie by Any Other Name

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If something called a dixie existed, I have little doubt that we could refer to it differently without changing its aroma, but the word “dixie” doesn’t really identify anything. It is not, in other words, a common noun. As a proper noun — with a capital ‘D’ — it is used as both a surname and a given name and to identify a wide variety of things including a region of our country. People with a first, last, or nickname of Dixie surely outnumber things bearing the name but there are certainly plenty of those. It has been used to identify buildings, songs, currency, music groups, towns, counties, movies, beer, boats, ships, taverns, race tracks, waterways, restaurants, mountain ranges, athletic conferences, grocery stores, airports, schools, universities, and much more. With an ‘X’ made of a stylized flower, Dixie is a registered trademark of Georgia-Pacific for a brand of paper products.

In the 1960s, an all-girl singing group borrowed the name — without the flowery ‘X’ — of those familiar disposable cups and topped the charts with hits like “Chapel of Love” and “Iko Iko”. Near the end of the twentieth century, another all-girl group hit the charts with a name containing the word “dixie”. That group, the Dixie Chicks, generated some controversy, but it came from political statements and not from their name. I’m not aware of any controversy at all associated with the Dixie Cups, and I’m guessing that they didn’t consider the word “dixie” to be racist.

But recently the word has been associated with racism by some. The Dixie Highway has been included in some of these claims which naturally caused me to take notice. It is an outgrowth of the rise of controversy and confrontation over Confederate monuments and streets named after Confederate generals. If the move to change a roughly six-mile-long street from Hood to Hope was complicated, renaming a piece of the nearly 6,000-mile-long Dixie Highway must be at least three orders of magnitude more so.

The aforementioned Hood Street was in Hollywood, FL, where three streets (Hood, Lee, and Forest) were renamed (Hope, Liberty, and Freedom) in November 2017. In Riviera Beach, FL, a couple of miles of Old Dixie Highway were renamed President Barack Obama Highway in 2015. The picture at left was taken between the two, near Boyton Beach. Of course, the word “dixie” had nothing to do with the renamings in Hollywood. The generals after which the streets were named had clearly been chosen because of their roles in the Confederacy. The word didn’t have much to do with the name change in Riviera Beach, either. Residents cited the role of the street as a dividing line between black and white and the site of KKK cross burnings.

Although I’d have preferred it hadn’t happened, I have no serious objection to the Riviera Beach action. It was based on specific and painful memories. That doesn’t always appear to be the case when replacing the Dixie Highway name is proposed. Published reports of these proposals have occasionally prompted me to send emails to people connected with them. It is not done to protest but to inform. We road fans often comment — and sometimes laugh or cry — about people being completely oblivious to a major historic highway running right by their door. Knowing how common that is with “celebrities” like the Lincoln Highway and Route 66, we shouldn’t be surprised that it is even more often the case with the lesser known and more complex Dixie Highway. Not knowing just how important or far-reaching all the roads in your neighborhood once were is a pretty natural situation.

It seems that even we fans don’t always consider that “far-reaching” bit. It’s OK to be saddened by a name change, but there is no reason to verbally abuse, as I’ve seen too many times, those backing a change. Removing the name Dixie Highway from a few miles of Florida — or other — roadway is not going to affect all those other miles any more than Cheyenne, WY, (The first town to do so.) changing its Main Street to Lincoln Way impacted the rest of the continent crossing highway. The Dixie Highway, as well as every other named auto trail, was never labeled with its name in every jurisdiction it passed through. Numbered US and state highways utilize streets and roads with all sorts of names. Not one inch of US-66 officially exists at present yet people follow it every day. The Adairsville, GA, pavement in the picture at left is officially named and signed Main Street but that doesn’t change its past as a part of the Dixie Highway or prevent it being unofficially marked as such.

Most of the talk about renaming sections of the Dixie Highway has originated in Florida. In some sense, that’s ironic since the Dixie Highway was a major factor in the development of the state. On the other hand, development is rarely 100% beneficial to all and I’ve no doubt that many were negatively impacted by the development and the road that helped it along. Plus, as those Riviera Beach memories show, experiences generate stronger feelings than a name or a physical path ever could. About two weeks ago, the New York Times published an article based on discussions in Florida’s Miami-Dade County. Its audience was almost certainly wider than that of similar articles publishes by Florida based news organizations. One indication of that was a small but obvious two-day blip in visits to an eight-year-old Dixie Highway related post on this blog. Maybe that’s somehow fitting since I’ve often quoted the Times when trying to convey that the Dixie Highway is not inherently evil. In 1915, the paper referred to the route as “The Dixie Peaceway” when it reported the formation of the Dixie Highway Association. It described the road as “a monument to celebrate the half-century of peace within the Union”. Maybe that was hyperbole or maybe it really reflected the feelings of the time. If so, it seems extra sad that so many see it as something entirely different today.

Those people who found this site after reading the New York Times article didn’t learn a whole lot during their visit but they were obviously curious. They were brought by search engines which may have also taken them to other sites where they learned much more. Whether curiosity was their only reason for visiting or they were decision-makers gathering background, I’ll never know. Regardless, I suspect we will see a few more miles of Dixie Highway get renamed before it’s all over. That’s unfortunate but hardly a disaster. No matter the name, it will still smell like a rose — or maybe an orange blossom — with strong undertones of asphalt and Model T brake bands.

ADDENDUM 9-Feb-2020: Some thoughts on the markers placed along the Dixie Highway by the United Daughters of the Confederacy were considered for this post but have been given their own post instead. Free? Advertising on the Dixie

So It’s a Little Fishy

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It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Groundhog Day. I don’t mean the movie, although I like that well enough. No, I mean Groundhog Day the day. I’ve seen Punxsutawney Phil, Buckeye Chuck, and Rosie the Groundhog perform predictions regarding the nearness of spring. I once had plans to observe Woodstock Willy at work but those got knocked off by a blizzard. I have eaten some sort of pork sausage on the second day of February for several decades. I’m quite taken with the holiday and may get out to see one of the furry forecasters next week, but yesterday I checked in with a popular predictor of a very different sort.

Several years ago, some folks in Buckeye Lake, Ohio, hatched a plan to give their community a little mid-winter boost. Winterfest involves many of the town’s eating and drinking establishments. Special food and drink offers combine with assorted entertainment to make it a fun day and fuel sales. A blatantly groundhog day like event anchors and opens the festival.

By 6:00 AM, a crowd had begun to gather in the park near the lake. Around 6:30 Benny the Bass arrived in his hundred-gallon aquarium. Music, dancing, and some lighthearted speeches helped build the excitement until 7:00 when a bucket of minnows was emptied into the tank. According to the six-year-old legend, if Benny downs a minnow in a minute or less, an early spring is on the way. If not, winter will drag on for another six weeks. I’d read that the official chant was “Take the bait. Spring can’t wait”, but chants of “Eat it Benny” were all I heard today as time ticked away. The thirty-second warning was reached then a countdown of the final seconds and a loud moan of disappointment from the crowd. I wonder if the old “Take the bait” chant would have made a difference. 

It was a short moan that got quickly covered by the boom of fireworks and a blast of Springsteen. “Glory Days”, rockets’ red and white glare, “Born in the USA”, and for many, it was time to go get a beer.

The crowd thinned quickly so I was able to see the whole tank for the first time. I walked around it to photograph the bad news that someone had written on the glass on the opposite side, but before long, the same sad prediction was written on the other side as well.

The opening photo was taken yesterday when I first came into town and stopped by the Buckeye Lake Brewery. That’s where Benny will be displayed for the rest of the weekend. The bartender had suggested parking near the brewery and walking to the park. That’s what I did which gave me an opportunity to stop by Our Lakeside Diner for breakfast on the way back. A Groundhog Day breakfast always includes pork sausage. Today was a lot like Groundhog Day but sausage didn’t seem all that appropriate for the occasion. My problem was solved when I saw perch & eggs on the menu. Walleye was also offered but perch seemed just right.

By the time I finished breakfast and walked on to the brewery, Benny had been moved to an adjacent spot. The finned boat and wood-grained wagon make for a really classy ensemble. I don’t think there was an official minnow count so it’s unknown if any are missing but Benny and most — if not all — of the minnows seem to be getting along reasonably well.

Unlike many of the festival attendees, I wasn’t quite ready for a beer. I paused briefly at the brewery then moved on for a walkabout that let me peek at some of the other businesses in town. I eventually settled down in the tent in front of the brewery to listen to Paper Street Music Company while enjoying one of those multipurpose beers that fans had promoted at Benny’s side. Not every business in town was open but those that were seemed pretty busy. Apparently that wintertime boost Winterfest was created for is a reality and bennyfishal to all participants.

Book Review
The Other Trail of Tears
Mary Stockwell

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I read this book by accident and belatedly. The accident comes from a spontaneous purchase. The belated reading comes from me not realizing how good it is. I picked the book up back in June of 2018 when I went to hear Mary Stockwell talk on her just-published Unlikely General about my childhood hero, Anthony Wayne. I knew nothing about Stockwell or any other books she had written but bought a copy of The Other Trail of Tears because it sounded kind of interesting and, perhaps more importantly, I was there. Unlikely General worked its way through the stack in a fairly timely manner; It was read and reviewed by November 2018. I let other books move ahead of this one and even loaned it, along with Unlikely General, to a friend to read. When I eventually did start reading The Other Trail of Tears, I quickly put it aside to accommodate two new road-related books. The second attempt went much better and I quickly regretted not diving in sooner. As is too often the case, my preconceptions were wrong. This is another book that was much more than I expected.

Like most people, I am fairly familiar with the forced removal of Native Americans from the southern United States that caused inconceivable suffering and thousands of deaths during the trek west known as The Trail of Tears. Those were the most horrific of the relocations resulting from the Indian Removal Act of 1830 but there were others.

Several reservations once existed in northern Ohio occupied by Shawnee, Wyandot, Seneca, and others. As an Ohioan, I was somewhat aware of these reservations and even knew a little bit about the forced removal of these people. I assumed that Stockwell’s book was filled with details of that removal. Perhaps that assumption and the accompanying assumption that those details would be terribly depressing contributed to my delay in actually reading the book.

My assumptions were not wrong but neither were they complete. The stories of the actual treks to the west are properly told and they are indeed depressing. But they do not fill the book. More pages are used telling of what preceded the removals than on the actual journeys. Stockwell’s coverage of the treaties and trades that resulted in the removal and the people and policies involved is rather detailed and seems complete. There is a lot of history here that I was quite ignorant of.

Though extremely educational, the pre-removal history is also somewhat depressing, and the whole book can fuel that sense of guilt we descendants of European Americans often feel when contemplating the last few centuries of Native American history.

Stockwell doesn’t stoke the guilt or overly stress the sadder aspects of the treks. Although she doesn’t completely hide her sense that Native Americans got a really raw deal, for the most part she sticks to accurately reporting the facts about an undeniably sad period in U.S. history.

The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Indians, Mary Stockwell, Westholme Publishing, March 18, 2016, 9 x 6 inches, 300 pages, ISBN 978-1594162589
Available through Amazon.

My Wheels — Chapter 39
2018 Subaru Forester

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The closing sentence of the  My Wheels chapter for my previous practical car spoke of trading the recently battered 2011 Forester. The Subaru had been quite good to me and I’d had every intention of continuing to drive it for several more years. Instead, that battering caused me to move to an updated and differently colored version. Reminiscent of the move that replaced the red 1998 Corvette with a blue 2006 model, the red 2011 Forester was replaced with a blue 2018. However, not only is a 4-door SUV quite unlike a 2-door sports car, the two blues are worlds apart. The Corvette’s Daytona Blue was kind of exciting. The Forester’s Quartz Blue Pearl is kind of boring.

My first documented trip in the 2011 Subaru included a stop in Columbus, Ohio, where I had the clever (to me) idea of photographing the car under a Denny’s sign. So naturally (to me) I thought I should do the same thing with the 2018 car. That turned out to be much easier said than done. It seems the Denny’s restaurant chain has fallen on hard times and reduced their presence considerably. There are none left near Cincinnati and only one in Columbus and it lacks the big elevated sign I sought. The picture above was taken at a restaurant near Terre Haute, Indiana. Unlike the similar shot of the red Forester, it was not taken on the car’s first trip but on its second most recent, number eleven.

The red Subaru made its first documented trip just about a week after acquisition. The blue one was in my position for over four months before it was so honored and it would be another four months before it actually appeared in a trip journal. It was the middle of July 2017 when I stopped at the dealer with the scrunched and scratched red Forester thinking it might be close enough to the end of the model year to find a bargain. To my surprise, there wasn’t a single 2017 Forester left on the lot and only a few of other models. I didn’t get the close-out deal I’d hoped for but I did get a deal that was reasonable and put me in a 2018 vehicle when 2017 was barely half over.

I believe the new car stood at approximately the same point in Forester model ranking as the previous one had but it had seven years worth of new bells and whistles. Some, like the rearview camera and adaptive cruise control, I appreciated almost immediately, and it took just one road-crossing deer to convince me that the pre-collision braking was a good thing. The lane departure warning eventually won me over but I’m still not a fan of Lane Keep Assist which tries to keep you from departing a lane without signaling. Fortunately, in my opinion, this latter feature defaults off. 

My first trip after the swap was with an uncle and cousin and used the cousin’s Cadillac. The next trip journal involved the Society for Commercial Archeology in Cincinnati where most of the miles were covered in a tour bus. Then there was a trip in the Miata before the Subaru was put to use on a Thanksgiving trip to Tennessee. It also carried me on a Christmas trip that reached into Georgia and an early April trip to Pittsburgh, PA. It served to mark the “Prev” and “Next” links on the daily pages for those three trips but was otherwise out of sight. It finally broke cover on the late April end-to-end drive of the Jefferson Highway. There was a shot of it all clean and shiny at a car wash in Winnepeg, Canada, then the shot at left of the still clean car about to start down the first of many unpaved sections of the JH. A similar view of the car was incorporated into the cover of a book resulting from that trip, Jefferson Highway All the Way.

With the exception of a fly and drive trip that involved a rental car, The Forester has handled every trip since that 2017 Thanksgiving outing. It hasn’t appeared in a lot of pictures, though, and I suspect it has something to do with that “kind of boring” Quartz Blue Pearl paint. On the 2018 Christmas trip, I caught it in a nighttime shot at South 21 Drive In in Charlotte, NC. In April, it posed in Kentucky at the Cave City Motel as I headed to the Jefferson Highway Conference in Natchitoches, LA.

In June of 2019, on my way to the Lincoln Highway Association conference in Wyoming, I stopped by one of my favorite gas stations in Grand Island, NE. This was my first time at Kensinger Service since the 2016 passing of long-time owner Dick Grudzinski. I missed out on what is still a full-service operation by arriving after the day’s closing. That’s just one of the reasons this is not my favorite picture of the station. It might, however, be my favorite picture of the car.

To date, the blue Subby has carried me on an even dozen documented road trips and, as a very active member of my current two-car fleet, I expect it to carry me on many more. That’s assuming, of course, that I can avoid being stopped at the wrong light at the wrong time.

My Previous Wheels: Chapter 38 — 2003 Mazda Miata
My Next Wheels: Chapter 40 — 1997 Schwinn

Treasures of the Spanish World

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When the Cincinnati Art Museum announced this upcoming exhibit near summer’s end, I was interested but not overly so. In fact, I didn’t put it on my Gotta-See-That list but on my I’ll-See-That-If-It’s-Convenient list. That was a mistake and I’m sure glad there was a day when taking in Treasures of the Spanish World was convenient and it didn’t end up on my Sorry-I-Missed-That list.

First off, it’s big. Its more than 200 objects fill several of the galleries I associate with temporary exhibits. And it’s not just big in terms of space but in time as well. The oldest items in the exhibit are from the middle of the third millennium BCE; The newest are from the twentieth century CE. Most items, including intricately decorated fabrics and ceramics, call for some up-close study. The pictured “books” are letters patent of nobility (cartas ejecutorias de hidalguia) that attest to “the holder’s gentility” and social position. They are wonderfully decorated and often contain images of the holder and/or grantor.

Numerous paintings, including quite a few portraits, are on display. These, showing a wide range of scale, are the work of Domenikos Theotokopoulos (a.k.a, El Greco).

At the beginning of a section named “Golden Age“, visitors are reminded that “In the 1500s Spain was the most powerful country in the western world”. The western world was getting a whole lot bigger in those days and Spain played a huge role in that. The large map, from which the clip of the Americas was taken, was created by Giovanni Vespucci in 1526 as a royal wedding gift. Giovanni inherited the job of maintaining Spain’s master nautical chart from his uncle, Amerigo.

Of course, Christianity was really big in both Old and New Spain. The large wooden relief sculpture was once part of an even larger piece in a Mexican Church. It dates from around 1600.

The exhibit is organized chronologically and physically divided into two parts. The second section is certainly interesting enough  — there are a few Goyas among its several paintings — but I only have one photo from it. I seem to like my history with a side of art more than the other way round. “Advances of the Nineteenth Century” is a set of tiles recounting recent progress from the vantage point of 1903. The bicycle, locomotive, flush toilet, and sewing machine are clearly steps forward. Not so clear is whatever advance the bullfighting tile is touting.

This touring exhibit was made possible by a major renovation project at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York City. That’s where the items in the exhibit normally appear and many of them have never been displayed elsewhere. The exhibit initially appeared in Madrid, Spain, and appeared in Mexico City and Albuquerque before reaching Cincinnati. There’s still time to see it but not much. This is being published when just one week of the fourteen-week run remains. As I said in the opening paragraph, I’m glad Treasures of the Spanish World avoided going on my Sorry-I-Missed-That list. I recommend you keep it off of yours, too, if you can.

2019 in the Rear View

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The year in numbers with 2018 values in parentheses:

  • 5 (6) = Road trips reported
  • 69 (67) = Blog posts
  • 47 (66) = Days on the road
  • 1641 (1941) = Pictures posted — 543 (473) in the blog and 1098 (1468) in Road Trips

Trips, days on the road, and pictures posted are all down and I believe it can all be blamed on that July through September gap when a variety of life’s activities kept me off the road and close to home. The slight uptick in blog posts comes from me doing a couple more reviews this year than last. Two of those new-for-2019 blog posts join three oldies in the top five list. For the second year in a row, all of the top five trip journal entries were for major trips which is the way I always thought it should be. One was even a 2019 outing.

Top Blog Posts:

  1. Twenty Mile’s Last Stand
    This post takes the number one spot for the third time. It was published in 2012 and was the most popular post that year and again in 2013. It ranked fourth in 2014 then dropped out of this list until reappearing last year at number five. That was quite a mystery and it climbing back to number one this year even more so. A follow-up post, Roadhouse Down, also got a fair amount of attention. As I said last year, I’d like to think some of the visits are from people involved in the demolition of this historic building who are feeling a little remorse.
  2. An Awesome Travel Accomplishment
    There’s not much mystery in this post making the top five list. Hugh Donovan’s awesome accomplishment was reaching all 3142 United States counties in less — a lot less — than a year. Of course, Hugh had lots of followers as he racked up the counties, and visits from some of them helped make this my second most popular blog post of the year. By wonderful luck, the feat was completed about three miles from my home so I could attend the celebration, meet Hugh and his family and supporters, and snap the opening photo.
  3. My Wheels – Chapter 1 1960 J. C. Higgins Flightliner
    This post has been on the list since it first appeared in 2013. This is, in fact, its lowest ranking after three firsts and three seconds. Does that mean interest in the first brand new vehicle I ever owned is fading? I wouldn’t count on it.
  4. Much Miscellany 2, Sloopy at 50
    Just cracking the top five when it first appeared during Hang on Sloopy‘s fiftieth anniversary year of 2015, this post reappeared last year at number four and hangs on 😉 to the same spot this year.
  5. Portsmouth Road Meet
    Technically the fifth-ranked blog post of 2019 was the follow-up to the number one post mentioned above, but assuming that many of the visits to those two posts were connected allows me to slip another new-for-2019 post into the list. This post benefited from having a targeted audience in those who attended but probably even more from those who wanted to but couldn’t.

Top Non-Blog Posts:

  1. Kitty Hawk Holidays
    This was last year’s Christmas trip so it had a full year to accumulate visits. It was scheduled around the anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight and began just over a week before Christmas. The 115th anniversary of that historic flight was celebrated on December 17 and I’m sure some of the post’s visitors came for reporting on that event and the Kitty Hawk area. But there was also a lot of driving around the Outer Banks (It was my first visit.) then through North Carolina on US-64. I spent Christmas in Knoxville, Tennessee.
  2. Sixty-Six: E2E & F2F
    The third of my four full-length Route 66 drives returns for its second consecutive and overall fourth top-five appearance. It was number four last year, number five in 2015, and number one in 2012. I can’t explain why it has returned and moved up two places, but I can explain that E2E means End-to-End and F2F means Friend-to-Friend.
  3. JHA 2019 Conference
    The Jefferson Highway Association held its eighth annual conference in Natchitoches, Louisiana. That’s not only a great place for a conference but makes for a great drive to and from. It’s nice to see a trip journal in the top five during the year it was posted.
  4. Dirk and Lincoln
    I had never seen Dirk Hamilton perform with a band before and took this opportunity to see him in a place where he used to perform in a reunion with the band he used to perform with there. I rounded things out (and cobbled up the title) with some Lincoln Highway. Three recent and consecutive trips made the top five. This November 2018 trip was followed by the Kitty Hawk trip (#1) in December and the JHA conference (#3) in April.
  5. LHA Centennial Tour
    Like the #2 Route 66 trip, this one is back for the fourth time. It was also ranked fifth last year and in 2016 after debuting at number four in 2013 when it was new. The journal and a resulting book (By Mopar to the Golden Gate) cover a drive on the 100-year-old Lincoln Highway in a 50-year-old car.

Both website visits and blog views were again down. Website visits went from 100,878 to 96,512. Blog views dropped from 6,757 to 5135. A chart of blog views looks like a near-perfect arch with steady increases to a peak in 2015 and steady decreases each year since. Total visits to the website haven’t been quite as well behaved. A lack of support for small screens triggered a huge drop in search engine hits in 2015 when Google got serious about searches from mobile devices. Adding the support brought a partial recovery over the next couple of years but it looks like a steady decline similar to that seen with the blog has now set in. Visits are less than half of the 2014 peak. Curiously, page views have again increased to 726,399 from 2018’s 658,425. Fewer people are looking but they’re looking at more.

While I believe, and accept, that the popularity of this site is in decline, there is an actual explanation for some of this year’s drop. Sometime around the middle of the year, shared servers at my hosting company, Arvixe, were identified as spammers by Verizon and its Yahoo and AOL divisions. The result, without getting into technical details, is that some, most, or all messages sent from my journal and blog mailing lists to a yahoo.com, aol.com, or verizon.net address have been rejected. There has been some progress since I became aware of the problem but it is far from solved. I am considering changing providers but am reluctant to undertake the effort involved. I am otherwise fairly happy with my current provider and fear trading a known mess for an unknown one. I am, for the moment, undecided. The RSS feeds, incidentally, work just fine.

Last year’s summary spoke of two books nearing publication. There were actually three books published in 2019 and all were “reviewed” in the blog: A Canadian Connection, Jefferson Highway All the Way, and Six of Each. All those and a couple more are listed at Trip Mouse Publishing.

Even though the blog entries for them weren’t popular enough to make the top five, I think three events of 2019 deserve mention in this look back. In July I visited my 200th brewery (200 Breweries), August saw the twentieth anniversary of the first trip reported on this site (It Was Twenty Years Ago Today…), and I celebrated ten years of retirement in November (A Decade Driving and Such). The brewery count is now at 224, 158 trips have been reported on the site, and I’ve now been retired 10 years, 2 months, 3 weeks, and 1 day.