Road Trip: Nashville Nights with Lady Antebellum

I suppose it's only right to give Illinois and Kentucky their due, we did drive through these states en route to Nashville. However, I feel more compelled to break with the naming convention of previous entries (which dryly recited the states encountered on a given day) to focus on the meaty parts of the experience starting and ending with Nashville, Tennessee where tough dudes like me and my boys like to straight chill.

We met up with my brother Pete around lunchtime and convinced him to call it a day at the office and went straight to drinks and cajun food a

t the Mojo Grille in Midtown. From there ambition trickled off into a mighty relaxing afternoon at Pete's pad with his roommate, a bongo circle with all the trappings, fireworks and a Southern grill featuring pork chops, more wine than you could shake a stick at and finished off ever so perfectly with homemade peach cobbler. (Word, Katrina.)

Around, 10:30, just when it looked like red wine had sapped our motivation for good, a second wind arrived and the group somehow managed to pile into a cab bound for the Honky Tonks on Broadway.

This is another world as far as I'm concerned. One block of pure neon and rhinestone where every bar (at least on a Thursday night) features a

skilled but nameless country band singing Keith Urban cover tunes to a positive legion of mostly female fans in varying states of undress and drunk signing along to every single word. In other words, it's overwhelming and irresistible. If you bring someone here and they can't get manage to have a good time, you have cause to be deeply suspicious of either their motives or their authenticity.

So there we were witnessing crisp line dancing and quaffing pobre-chic beer like Old Style from patriotic metal cans. Life was good and things were g

etting groovier by the minute, as we worked up the line from The Stage to Tootsie's, where a curious thing happened.

Now, I'm not a disciple of country music. I enjoy it on occasion and even follow a limited range of artists, but am generally vegetarian when it comes to the rare, bleeding meat of the movement. So it came as some surprise to me when a woman at Tootsie's accused me of being 'that guy from Lady Antebellum.' This was literally the first I'd heard of such nonsense, but my accuser would not be convinced otherwise and even after I showed her my driver's license persisted with the idea that I was a famous country musician on the DL and playing coy.

'That guy from Lady Antebellum' is Charles Kelley, convincingly photoshopped in with me and Blake for comparison, and I appreciate that the sweet beards we both rock may evoke a similarity, but I'm still not totally seeing it. He may have the twangy pipes and million dollar record deals, but I'm way better looking and more fun at a party too.

My brush with a celebrity death crush was enough to convince the group that we'd better get away from the CMA celebrity-obssessed Fatal Attraction types that frequent the Honky Tonks and retire to the more laid-back environs of Midtown, more Old Style and a competitive shuffleboard table.

By 3am we were back at Pete's where we slept through breakfast and roused just before noon and took our wrecked bodies over to Fat Mo's for excellent, grease-bomb burger nourishment - heavy fuel for another day on the road.

Road Trip: Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and Kansas

At this point, after five days thoroughly recreating in Sun Valley, the Special Lady had appointments back East with her new job and I was saddled with the responsibility of the car and our stuff, packed into the car with all the organization of a mash of sundried tomatoes, and getting said collective out to the East Coast.

Originally a daunting prospect, some 2,800 miles of solo, man-on-freeway action, was fortuitously thwarted by the welcomed (and uncoerced) intervention of Blake - my voluntary wingman who flew in from California for the chance to hit the road and man up the Interstate system one more time.

We struck out from Boise at 6am, because suddenly we had a goal - get to St. Louis, Missouri in time to catch the San Francisco Giants at the Cardinals the next evening. We were looking at almost 1,700 miles to cover in less than two days and a heroic first day was simply a requirement.

Idaho and Utah slipped by easily, under the heady fuel of enthusiasm for the opening hours on the road and nostalgic delight at the forgotten tracks on Blake's battered, old CD collection. Somehow, amid the emergent weirdness of two guys talking nonsense in the car for hours on end, the R. Kelly/Notorious B.I.G. collabo 'I'm Fucking You Tonight' from the album 'Life After Death,' became the anthem of the roadtrip. As amusing as we found this to be, it was tough to convey to people we ran into along the way. It's hard to share the sacred space of a road trip.

Wyoming was an entirely different proposition. I-80 soars over the high plains in a mostly straight line for nearly 500 miles. We stopped in Evanston on the southwestern edge of the state and made our first gastronomic mistake of the campaign - an eight taco lunchtime pigfest at Taco Time - a place which surely occupies the second to lowest rung on the fast food taco ladder, just barely outclassing Taco John's.

From there it was a gassy, malaodorous, 85mph slog over vast, open spaces, among herds of antelope, high winds, and mile after mile of the proverbial 'Big Sky.'

By the time we turned south, the sun was getting low in the sky and the scarp of the Rocky Mountain front near Fort Collins, Colorado was backlit. We arrived in Denver a little after 8pm with the express intent of dining at Illegal Pete's, where the concept of the enormous burrito is further advanced by the so-simple-it-should-have-been-obvious step of stirring your filling ingredients together before wrapping in tortilla. This way you capture the full flavor experience in each bit and avoid the unfortunate (and now former?) inevitably of the odd biteful of sour cream or lettuce.

By 8:30 we were headed east again, but on I-70 blazing out into the Great Plains and noticed that Colorado doesn't end just outside of Denver after the nose of dogfood from the Purina plant has left the air. In fact, it goes a long fucking way east and I was starting to think, that we'd made a big mistake housing enormous burritos before needing to drive another 350 miles into the night.

I was fading fast, eyelids leaden, and beginning to hallucinate in that way particular to the weary driver. Shadows of animals and obstacles flashed on the side of the road. My reaction time and decision making were slowed by the dearth of blood in my head as Illegal Pete's product ground slowly through the GI machinery. The Classic Rock, even, wasn't having any effect.

Things were looking grim, and the decision was made to get a tin of dip at the next gas station in Goodland, Kansas. Thereafter the little wad of tobacco and fiberglass sped the nicotine to my brain and I perked right up for the long cruise into Hays, Kansas. We arrived 1am local time, thanks to the timezone crossing and settled down for 5 hours of sleep at the Best Western.

Road Trip: Road Dog

Woodstock enjoying the breeze on Trail Creek road, Idaho.

Road Trip: Idaho

Even though central Idaho's not really on the direct road to anywhere, I've broken up all of my preceding 6 cross-country roadtrips with a deliberate and prolonged pit stop in my native land. Since I left just over 10 years ago, I have found that nothing really recharges my batteries better than a visit to the central-Idaho Rockies in and around Sun Valley.

We pulled in late the day of the drive across Nevada and were treated to a lasting day in the Northern Rockies . Idaho, by dint of being in the northwest corner of the Mountain Time Zone, has extremely late evenings in the summertime, with ample light available until well after 10pm around the solstice.

Being before the 4th of July, the tourist seas

on hadn't quite kicked in and we basically had the place to oursleves. Plus which, the spring had been kind to the land with mild temperatures and more rain than the area typically sees. June, it would later turn out, was a record-setting month for Sun Valley with over 5.5 inches of rain, and we caught the margin between the bad and the good weather. The land was lush and green and the streams flowed fully.

Daily hikes from mellow (Adam's Gulch) to grueling (Pioneer Cabin via Corral Creek) were the order of the day and provided the full range of nature experiences, including the death defying when a surprise thunderstorm chased us down

hill from a 9000' ridge with uncomfortably close lighting strikes, crashing thunder, cold wind and pelting hail stones the size of grapes.

Summit Creek was perhaps the ideal blend of wild, high scenery and good weather. We got a late start, leaving Sun Valley around 4pm, which is insane if you know anything about mountain weather. But we got lucky and enjoyed blue-bird skies into the mid-evening and were the only people exploring a lush alpine valley with extensive beaver dams and excellent views of the northern end of the Pioneer range. The terrain was a little muddy in places, after the wet spring, and we were surprised by a lot of snow still clinging in the shadier parts of the trail. But all in all this is a great hike, with a gentle uphill and a great payoff for the effort.

On the way back down we surprised a cow moose who'd been grazing in the willows. She crashed out of the creek bottom like a freight train and headed up the opposite side of the ravine, stopping after about 50 yards and looking back to check us out.

Road Trip: The Beard Has Power

I grew a beard for the road trip and am justifiably proud of the results of my first concerted attempt at a manly coat of facial hair.

In my view starting a new life must always begin with a transformative journey, and what better way to set out on that journey than with a fresh new look that let's everyone know you're fucking tough and ready for anything. A man is just more estimable with a beard.

Road Trip: Nevada

The first night out from California took me and the Special Lady to Reno, Nevada -- a fitting place for a buzzkill, if you're in the market. The depressive-phase Liberace decor of the Grand Sierra provided no additional comfort, as the scent of stale tobacco and unanswered calls of slot machine music only served to amplify the sour whiff of despair. Not to mention the insanity of such a place in the current economic situation.

Needless to say, I wasn't in the mood to press my luck, though I have to admit I was intrigued by my view from the 30th floor of the reservoir/driving range, whose island pins net huge prizes for those sinking holes-in-one.

Tempted as I was, we had a big drive charted to Sun Valley the next day and wanted to make time to offset the loss of an hour in the crossing into the Mountain timezone.

We were on the road early, blazing Northeast up I-80 with the T-Mobile G1 playing tour guide.

Here are some interesting notes about Nevada:

-Lovelock Correctional Center is pretty much the visual highlight of I-80 between Reno and Winnemucca and is also famous for being the current and future home of inmate #1027820 - O.J. Simpson.

-A battle never occurred in Battle Mountain, Nevada, but their artifacted fame is no less colorful for that little inconsistency. Consider that GQ Magazine labelled Battle Mountain the official 'armpit of America' and the town quickly capitalized by spinning it into a sponsorship deal with Old Spice. Then also consider that the town was inhabited in a state of postbellum disgrace by the Civil War's "greatest coward," James H. Ledlie (whose spectacular cowardice flipped the brilliant script of the 'Battle of the Crater' into a a Confederate victory.

-Elko, Nevada is the home of the annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering as well as the Fire Sciences Academy, where I, and any red-blooded American boy, would dearly love to study. Approaching from the West, that day's plume of smoke was visible from at least 25 miles away, and as we passed by their movie-set town was mucho en fuego as students ostensibly studied the awesome effects of fire while others readied their marshmallows, or prepared to get down to dousing with flame-retardant chemicals.

-The Ruby Mountains (pictured above) are refreshingly beautiful amid the starkness of surrounding parts of Nevada and likely merit further exploration if I ever get the chance.