Tag Archives: Road Trips

Monk-ey Business

This is the fourth post in a series about a road trip to New Orleans that starts here.

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Finally! I will get to our day in Chicago now. But I have to say, it’s the little sights and interactions and quirky people you meet while traveling that make it interesting. You can read about the Art Institute of Chicago in any guidebook or on hundreds of commercial websites, but you would probably not learn that a high street and a downtown are the same thing, and you would never get to know David the Innkeeper.

The temperature had plunged overnight, from the mid 70sF to almost freezing. The wind sliced through the thin clothes I had packed in anticipation of the New Orleans’ heat. No matter how much I travel, I always pack optimistically, and sometimes I end up shivering as a result. Home in chilly Minnesota, I can’t imagine anywhere else could be as cold.

I had checked the map and was focused on finding the Architecture Foundation of Chicago. I had been on their river boat tours several times and they were great. It was too cold for a boat tour, but they had lots of other indoor tours, according to their brochures.

Lynn and I wandered up and down Michigan Avenue for an hour and never found the AFC. I hadn’t realized there was a north and south Michigan, there was construction hiding the building numbers, and finally we just gave up because it was too cold and windy. Besides, we kept being approached by guys dressed as monks asking for money. I say “dressed as” monks because we eventually concluded this was a scam. The first guy approached us and thrust some sort of bracelet into Lynn’s hand. He started speaking badly broken English and pointing to a booklet he had with pictures and symbols that made no sense.

I tried to hand him some quarters, nickels, and dimes leftover from the tollway—win win! “No coins!” he barked.

I was inclined to walk away but Lynn is nicer than me. She’s also been to Bhutan, Nepal, Thailand, and everywhere else there are actual monks.

“You’re trying to build a temple, are you?” she asked, as the fake monk showed her a page of writing. “Where are you from?” she asked.

“Hong Kong,” he replied.

That did it. She said “No thanks,” and walked away. “Hong Kong just doesn’t make sense,” she said. “If he really was from Hong Kong he would very likely speak English.”

“Yeah, I bet as soon as we walked away he muttered ‘bitches’ under his breath!” I replied.

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Finally, our site seeing got underway with a walk through Millennium Park:

We couldn’t stand the cold anymore so headed over to Starbucks for a hot drink while we waited for the Art Institute to open. Of course the people in line with us were from Scotland. That seems to happen all the time.

When the Institute opened we wobbled around for 15 minutes trying to figure out which line to join. I couldn’t believe it cost $25 to get in. That seemed outrageous. I was used to the free admission we have at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which is a great museum thanks to all the corporate headquarters we have here—like General Mills, United Health, Cargill, 3M, and Target—plus our tradition of individual philanthropy. Was Chicago really so different? Was the city in economic straits? I don’t know, but after I dithered and protested and probably embarrassed Lynn by asking a security guard “do we really have to pay $25 to just to see the permanent collection?” she coughed up the admission fee plus an extra $5 to see a special Van Gogh exhibit.

Meanwhile, I was snapping a picture of the back lighted wallpaper in the ticketing hall:

I’m kind of a wallpaper freak. I take photos of beautiful wallpapers when I travel, certain that I’ll somehow recreate them in my tiny condo. How hard could that be?

New Orleans or Bust

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This is the second post in a series about a road trip to New Orleans that starts here.

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As Lynn and I were about to leave Madison for Chicago, the car’s engine light came on. I drove to my cousin’s house, pulled Bluebell into the driveway, and popped her hood.

“I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” I told Lynn.

“I know—I always bring mine to a garage—I don’t even know how to open the bonnet,” she replied.

I pulled out the dipstick, already knowing it would be impossible to tell if the oil was full or empty due to one of Mini Cooper’s many design quirks.

“Maybe the engine is hot?” I suggested hopefully. The coolant container was clearly marked: “DO NOT REMOVE CAP WHEN ENGINE IS HOT.” I unscrewed it anyway and quickly jerked my hand away as steam exploded out of it and coolant ran out onto the driveway. I screwed the top back on and waited for it to cool down so I could see how low it would be now—now that I had made sure it was low on coolant.

I didn’t think my cousin knew much about cars, but I still wished he was back from the pow wow. Car problems are the one situation in which I revert to my primitive, dependent woman self. I wanted a man to deal with it. A man would know what to do, right? Never mind the many times I had asked some male relative or coworker about a car issue and they got a panicky look on their face because they knew, as men, they should know about cars but didn’t know jack.

I also fell back on an old coping mechanism—denial. “I think it’ll be okay to drive to Chicago. I’ll deal with it in Chicago.” Thus commenced several days of flipping back and forth from outright heart-thumping panic to the blissful Zen of denial.

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When you Google “Chicago tollway” here are just a few of the images that come up:

The engine started chuddering along the way and the drive was every bit as stressful as I’d remembered, with the added feature of an endless road construction project which had us all swerving into new lanes every few miles, amidst massive piles of concrete rubble that looked like a moonscape.

Every time we approached a tollbooth I had to talk Lynn through how much money to pull together. “Those little ones are called dimes; they’re 10 cents, get 15 of them. And 10 of the big ones, those are quarters. They’re 25 cents” This is one of those micro culture shock things: the UK has 20 pence pieces, while we have 25 cent pieces.

Each time we slowed, the car shook harder and I feared it would kill and not start again. I made a conscious effort to keep my back and shoulder muscles relaxed. The previous day, it had seemed like a good idea to take a new pilates class. You know, get some exercise in before sitting all day in the car. My torso felt as tight and tense as a loaded steel trap.

I didn’t trust what Marge, my GPS, was telling me, so I exited the tollway early and drove stop-and-go slow for miles through the city streets. The streets were swarming with crowds of people out enjoying the 75F spring weather. Marge got her revenge by beeping loudly at every intersection to tell us there was a speed camera. Fat chance of triggering one of those during rush hour.

Lynn had found a great little place called the Old Chicago Inn just south of Wrigleyville. Lynn and the Innkeeper carried in the luggage while I searched for a parking space. The inn came with free parking—a permit to park wherever you could find a spot in the vicinity. I found a spot two blocks away and killed the motor. I checked the trip odometer—we’d driven 450 miles that day. I sagged over the wheel and exhaled. I thought about calling AAA but then what? They would tow my car to some garage in Chicago, one of the most corrupt cities in America. I was determined to get to New Orleans.

Innformed

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This is the third post in a series about a road trip to New Orleans that starts here.

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Enough about the car for now! We had 48 hours in Chicago and I put Bluebell out of my mind for the time being. Here’s a photo of the Old Chicago Inn at Christmastime.

It’s an Art Deco-era inn and I was very grateful that Lynn had booked two rooms instead of one. The small rooms were…small, but they were en suite. For you Americans, that means they included a bathroom. The larger rooms shared a bathroom in the hallway.

Our innkeeper was David, and he informed us he was from Kentucky—or “Kaintucky” as he pronounced it. David turned out to be one of the best things about our brief time in Chicago.

He gave us a couple $10 off vouchers for the restaurant next door, which turned out to be a Key West-themed karaoke bar. We ordered a couple sandwiches and beers and sat back to watch the show. We must have raised the average age in there by 20 years; duos and trios of inebriated 20-somethings were sang while others danced. They sang and danced badly, but with a lot of heart. It was good for a few laughs. I’m sure Lynn could have stayed out later but I just wanted to lie down. I know I’m drained when I pass up a second beer on vacation.

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The population of the Chicago metropolitan area is almost 10 million. It’s a bustling, busy place full of skyscrapers, art, industry, tourists, and music. They love their deep dish pizzas and baseball. It’s known as the Windy City, and for good reason. Chicago is perched on Lake Michigan, one of the Great Lakes, and the wind is ferocious. I think of Chicago as like a merger of New York and Minneapolis. A big city with a Midwestern vibe.

Lynn and I had breakfast in the basement of the inn, which had originally been a speakeasy. A speakeasy was a secret, illegal bar during prohibition, when alcohol was illegal in the U.S. from 1920 to 1933. It’s hard to believe, today, that we ever attempted to ban booze. Of course prohibition was a huge fail. My great grandfather went to federal prison for two years because he tried to steal liquor out of a government warehouse where they stored confiscated alcohol. He owned a restaurant and his business had tanked when he could no longer serve drinks. This was in Kentucky, and I mentioned it to David, our innkeeper.

“My grandmother was from Covington, Kentucky,” I said. “She always referred to it as ‘down home.’” I didn’t mention that she also called black people “coloreds.”

David was one of those people who knows a lot about a lot of things and appreciates a captive audience. He didn’t acknowledge my comment but launched into a story about his “mama” and Miss Rose, a neighbor of theirs in Kentucky. David was probably approaching 60. He was gaunt, missing a tooth, and wore Malcom X glasses.

I’m conscious as I write this that you’ll know David was white without me having to write it. I’ve probably done this a hundred times in this blog, but this road trip was packed with interactions around race, so maybe it’s good I’ve caught myself.

David stood between us and the door and talked about his mama and Miss Rose and the antebellum (pre-Civil War) house he’d grown up in. He described the closets which were designed to store hoop skirts and fancy ladies hats, and how they went to the Kentucky Derby every year. Normally I can’t stand this kind of person who talks on and on and never asks you a question about yourself. But David was just a lovable guy.

We finally broke away and walked over to the Belmont station to take the train downtown. Lynn asked me what “downtown” and “uptown” meant.

“Downtown is what you would call the High Street,” I explained. I wasn’t sure about the term uptown.

We arrived downtown and the first thing we saw was Trump Tower. We instinctively turned to each other and exclaimed, “Blech!!”

Spring Surprises

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The road trip is now in my rear view mirror, ha ha. I drove about 2,660 miles.

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As you may recall if you’ve been reading along for a while, I planned obsessively for this trip and felt anxious about what might go wrong. For instance I feared my car would break down in the middle of nowhere so I had all sorts of maintenance work done on it and I joined AAA (the American Automobile Association) a few days before I left.

None of the things I’d imagined would go wrong, went wrong. What happened was more ambiguous and thus, more stressful.

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Lynn arrived as planned and spent the night at my place. She showed me the guide books and maps she had brought and I said I wouldn’t bring most of mine since hers looked better. Vince had moved out that morning, so we went to visit him briefly in his new pad before we rolled out of town. Lynn and Vince had been hearing about each other for years. It’s great when the important people in your life meet each other.

We left St. Paul around 8am. We had a lot of catching up to do, and the miles peeled away quickly as we cut across southeast Wisconsin. I needed to gas up near Warrens, which is home of the Cranberry Discovery Center and Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park—two sites I’d visited in the past and knew would be strange and wonderful to British eyes.

Lynn had never seen cranberry fields; here is what they look like:

We drove around Jellystone, a massive campground for families with kids with a water park, rides, and cabins.

The area was deserted, since it was only early April, and I was glad the gas station was even open. I filled up as Lynn perused the offerings inside—gun magazines, cranberry wine, bowie knives, cranberry beer, coon skin caps, and a hundred kinds of beef jerky.

Back on the road, we were quickly in Madison, where my cousin Bob lives with his wife Paula. We were joined by my niece Emily, who attends the University of Wisconsin Madison. Bob had promised “light refreshments,” which turned out to be a huge spread including many Wisconsin cheeses. They brought out the inevitable cheese head, an accoutrement of Wisconsin Badgers football fans, which Lynn refused to wear but which I was happy to model:

We talked about politics. Lynn, probably like most foreigners, is appalled and bewildered by the rise of Donald Trump. Bob is a radio news reporter, so he’s steeped in politics. Paula has been apolitical until this year, but the rise of Trump has got her reconsidering whether to jump into the fray. Emily, being a college student on one of the most liberal campuses in America, has no shortage of opinions.

Paul is Native, and we lucked out that the spring pow wow was taking place that day at the Madison civic arena. A pow wow is basically a big social gathering of a tribe—in this case, the Ojibway tribe which is spread across the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and central Canada—to dance and drum. It was unclear to me if there is any spiritual significance to it all. There were lots of colorful costumes—they prefer the term regalia. There were cute kids running around and stalls selling jewelry and fry bread and pop. No alcohol was allowed on the premises.

Since I’m not Native I didn’t take photos because it would have felt like I was photographing animals in a zoo. But plenty of other people do take photos at pow wows and post them online:

After a couple hours it was time to leave so we could get to Chicago by dark. If you’ve never driven the expressway into Chicago, flanked by giant semi trucks going 85 miles per hour while fumbling for coins for the toll booths, you haven’t lived. I’ve done this drive half a dozen times and it is nerve wracking.

As I started the car Lynn exclaimed, “Damn! I must have left my maps and books on your dining room table!” That’s when I heard the “DING DING! DING!” and my engine light came on.

Time to Make a Move

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Greetings from Oxford, Mississippi! This is a post written by Vince about his move. It will be bittersweet to come home to an empty house.

Time to Make a Move

Just shy of seven months as a free man, I am happy to report that, as a 37-year-old, I am moving out of my mother’s home. Again. Maybe for the fourth time in my life, and hopefully for the last.

I alluded to this in my last post but not before because I didn’t want to get overexcited about it until it was actually approved by my agents. Now it is official, and I can proudly relate this information to you: I AM MOVING! Just two short days from now.

I have written about this move before, but as a failed attempt at leaving the nest possibly too early. I’m moving into a house with two sober guys from the program, one of which I was in prison with, and I’ve worked with for some time. He no longer works with me, but we remain friends. I don’t know the other guy, but he’s sober, and that counts for a lot.

I’ve been to see the house once. It’s small as you can see in the picture, but I’ll have my own room, so it isn’t like a sober house environment. There isn’t a house manager that watches over us, or anybody to give us random shakedowns and breathalyzers. I have my agents for that. This is a step forward.

It couldn’t come at a better time, in my opinion, as I will be moving on to the next phase of Intensive Supervised Release program soon after. That will open up a lot more time that I can spend doing things I want to do like go to more meetings, and spending more time with my family. I am also finishing the last three hours of my community service this week.

It’s all lining up. Everything is going well in so many ways. So I need to be really careful. For somebody like me, good news can be all I need to trick myself into thinking I deserve a reward. Maybe I can go out and celebrate with just one drink, or just a little crack (“A little” crack doesn’t actually exist. It’s an all or nothing drug. For more information, go here). I mean, at this point I’ve built myself a pretty good network of people that I can reach out to if the urge hits me, but it’s always good to layer on the protection.

This disease of mine can also be described as an allergy. When I drink or do drugs, things just go haywire. My body responds differently to them than normal people. Also, my allergy in particular is a little more severe than say, a gluten allergy. Oh, also I don’t believe that’s a real allergy, but I’m not a Doctor. Anyhow, let’s say that somebody with a gluten allergy accidentally ingests some flour. Well, maybe an hour or so later, they fart a little and that causes some slight discomfort or embarrassment. Well, when I ingest a little alcohol, or maybe some meth, my world flips upside down. I can no longer take care of myself financially, mentally, or physically. And this allergy affects others, too. For example, if I smoke crack, you may no longer have a television, and some of your smaller valuables may go missing as well.

Simply put, chemicals make me not give a fuck about you or me. And I’d really like to avoid all of that so that’s why I’ve immersed myself in this program of Alcoholics Anonymous. I’m not worried about relapsing because of my new place and my new freedoms, I’m excited to see what I can do with them. And I’m really happy to be able to share this with you people. For you that are new to this blog, I encourage you to see where it all started almost two years ago with just five pieces of writing paper and a 3” flexible safety pen behind the unforgiving bars at St. Cloud Men’s Reformatory/State Prison.

Good Supplements, Bad Supplements

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I get 22 days of Paid Time Off (PTO) per year, which is good for the U.S. (In England I had 35 days.). I end up using some of those days to spontaneously enjoy a fresh spring day, or just catch up on chores.

As you read this I am sojourning in New Orleans as part of my 11-day road trip. This will leave me with about 10 days of PTO.

I wish I could live and travel internationally year round, forever, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. I’m not going to sit around moping the other 355 days of the year that I’m not on some fantastic global journey. That’s why I write about the importance of being able to appreciate every day adventures in your own back yard, or in South Dakota.

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Recently there was a development that stepped up the urgency I feel about seeing the world. I learned that I have osteoporosis. This is a condition in which the bones become porous and prone to breaking. This is on top of my lifelong condition of scoliosis, or curvature of the spine.

Since my mother has osteoporosis and I look just like her, I figured it was coming my way. So I’ve done mostly the right things to prevent osteoporosis, like consuming lots of calcium, doing weight-bearing exercise, and quitting smoking. But you can’t escape your genetics.

This is my mother on her 80^th birthday with my adorable nephew.

She looks good, but she often says, “The doctor tells me if I sneeze too hard I can break a bone.” That’s got to be awful to live with. She wears a brace, has had a lot of pain, and worst of all, she can’t travel anymore—it’s just too hard on her.

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You build up your bone mass until around age 30, then slowly lose it. If you have osteoporosis in your family, or if you are even just a small person, you might want to check with your doc and start taking calcium supplements and jumping rope. It’s more common in women but men get osteoporosis too.

Mine isn’t bad yet. I’ll keep fighting it and hope there will be a pill to fix it before I get to my mother’s age.

This development has been a push for me to review my international travel long-term plan. My general idea is to go to the most far away places on my list, like New Zealand and Japan, first. I would save the easier places, like Santa Fe, for when I’m older.

I started checking out tours to Japan. My nephews are half Japanese, so Japan is at the top of my list. I don’t feel confident enough to go on my own. I’ve watched my brother’s home videos of their many trips there, and they’re like some science fiction movie about overpopulation—wall-to-wall bodies in the canyons of Tokyo. The tours looked great, but then I ran up against my nemesis—the Single Supplement.

The single supplement is a surcharge tours add to the price of a tour for solo travelers. They’re not trying to shame or discourage single people—it’s just economics. Tours can’t make it, financially, if they let a single person have the same rate as a couple. In this New York Times article about single supplements, they cite this example for a cruise: For two adults, it’s $1,539 each. For a single traveler, the cost is $2,843 — an additional $1,304.

This article advises on how to avoid the single supplement. But there’s also the “blah” factor of tours. I went on a tour to Portugal a few years ago through New Market Holidays. Yes, it was dirt cheap, I saw a lot of Portugal, and I never had to make any decisions about anything. But it was just me and 50 retired English couples. They were nice but aloof. Why wouldn’t they be? I was the odd woman out.

Life is about trade offs, right? The road trip to New Orleans may not be on my list of far-flung destinations, but it’s with good friends, so I jumped at the chance to do it. Laissez le bon temps rouler!

Telling It

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It’s always difficult to transition back to current life after writing a series like the last one about camping in Wales and Mini extravaganza.

I love traveling, and then I love coming home—so I can start planning the next trip. When you read this, I will be in Chicago on my way to New Orleans from Minneapolis/St. Paul. Live blogging a road trip sounds good, but I really just want to be there, in the moment. My friends are coming all the way from Scotland, Oxford, and Wisconsin—I think it would be rude and weird to say, “Sorry guys, I’ve got to rush back to the hotel to write a blog post.”

But it’ll be fun to write about afterwards; travel writing is a way to enjoy the trip again.

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A few updates, and back to the other theme of Breaking Free, my road trip with my son through the worlds of mass incarceration, addiction, and redemption.

I saw a notice for a lecture at the U of MN by Dr. Christopher Uggen, Martindale Chair and Distinguished McKnight Professor of Sociology and Law. It quoted him, “We think of probation as a humane alternative to incarceration. It’s not.” This is a concept I can’t emphasize often enough—just because you’re out of prison now, doesn’t mean you’re “over it.”

So I was a little concerned about Vince talking with Jewish Community Action, a local group advocating for prison reforms. I had shared the blog with them, and they invited Vince and me to meet with them, which we did a few days ago. It happened to be in the same building as Vince’s probation agents. Would he be “triggered” by rehashing his story? He still seemed uncomfortable in social situations sometimes.

We met with a young woman named Angela, who listened intently, asked questions, and filled us in on their plans. She talked about the changes they want made to sentencing, and Vince had some insights she hadn’t been aware of. I can’t explain what he said, but the depth of knowledge you gain about these things by actually being inside is like a mini master’s degree program.

She talked about how they are trying to block the privatization of the prison in Appleton, Minnesota, which has been closed for years. It wasn’t true, she said, that it would create a lot of jobs, or that conditions are better in private prisons.

“Word is,” Vince said, “among the prison population, that conditions are much better in the private prisons. Better food, better paying work, more activities.”

This took her, and me, by surprise. “I wonder if there’s a marketing campaign to spread that idea,” I suggested. “After my experience with paying for phone time and email, I know those companies are good at promoting themselves.” But how could anyone get access to the population inside? I was Vince’s mom, and it had been maddeningly hard for me to communicate with him.

Vince talked about prison drugs (common) and rape (uncommon), MyPillow and Bob Barker products, not being able to vote, and his terms of probation. It was very relaxed, and I give a lot of credit to Angela—turns out she was a former social worker.

Vince had told us he had to be home at 6:30. Suddenly Angela said, “I just remembered that clock is slow …” It was 6:21. Vince jumped up, ran down the hall and waved at his agent, then bolted out the door.

Later, at home, he said, “I could have talked for hours.” I was so proud of him. He’s doing so well.

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He’s doing so well, in fact, that he announced he may move out soon. Another ex offender lives in a three-bedroom house that has an opening. The landlord is accepting of ex offenders.

I felt sad. I know it’s normal for a 37-year-old man to want to live on his own, and I fully support that. It was really rocky in the beginning when he came to live here. We had been separated by miles and drugs and prison for so many years. Now we get along fine. I enjoy having him around. He could do more cleaning, but no one’s perfect.

Minis, Everywhere

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This is the ninth post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

Day Two of the Mini United festival in Silverstone, England. Rebecca and I sprang out of the tent at dawn so we wouldn’t miss breakfast buffet in the VIP tent.

Dagmar, the BMW rep, approached us as we were shoveling in eggs and salmon and strudel.

“We have a special treat for you,” she announced. Then I ate a poopie. I like to eat poopie.

A special treat, I wondered? What could possibly be an improvement on the swag and the free food and booze and the VIP toilet?

“We know how much you must miss having your Mini with you,” she went on.

Not really. Did I mention the 8,000 Minis all over the festival grounds? I didn’t have some kind of unnatural connection to my car. I was grateful to her for providing my excuse to be here, but when people asked how many cylinders she had, I was stumped.

I was all ears.

“We have arranged for you to drive a new model Mini on the racetrack here, later today.”

“All of us at one time, or separately?” I asked. I had never driven a left-hand drive car and I didn’t’ want my first time to be my last.

“Vun at a time!” she said through closed lips, then whirled and walked away. We must have been very trying for her. I wondered if she would lose her job over the budget mishap.

—

But before the track, there were more exhibitions to see.

First stop, celebrity Minis. David Bowie’s was my favorite.

Madonna’s was my least favorite. Why, Madonna, why? What’s with the cammo? Aren’t we American’s already viewed as war mongers as it is?

George Harrison’s Mini was the most beautiful.

Then it was on to the novelty and classic Minis. Everything from cowhide to the Simpsons.

We visited the information booths and picked up all the free pens and pencils and key rings we could find. There was the Mini Club of Northern Ireland, the wheel makers, the specialty body works people, the custom floor mat booth, and on and on.

At the appointed time, we meandered over to the track. Silverstone is an international, professional race track, whatever that means, if I haven’t already mentioned it. All the North Americans were already there; apparently they’d been lined up for hours. Rebecca and I joined them and the doors opened. It was a pleasant sunny day, not at all a bad one to spend hanging around a race track—Minis, when viewed in multiples, remind me of hummingbirds.

It was our turn, and I urged Rebecca to go first since I was nervous. They pulled the car up and she glowed (Rebecca that is, not the car).

Rebecca is from Oxfordshire and I think she thought this was some sort of sign. I didn’t remind her until after, that Oxford is where BMW makes Minis in the UK.

A few minutes later it was my turn. I got in, grabbed the gear shift with my left hand, and thought, “Don’t think.” In certain life endeavors, like learning a language, falling in love, or driving the opposite of how you’ve done it all your life, thinking can be detrimental.

Suddenly, the car careening out of control, smashed head on into the side wall, then burst into flames!

Just kidding.

I drove around the track a couple times. I think I got ‘er up to 50mph. It was uneventful.

We all knew it was a promotional gimmick to get us to buy this new model, whatever it was, but we appreciated that BMW had thrown in even more fun, for free.

We retired to the tent, where one of my fellow Americans, and Indian guy from LA (India Indian, not Native American), was saying he had just ordered the new model to add to his collection. Nice for some people.

I was done with Minis for now. We spent the whole evening and next day in the VIP tent wining and dining, then headed back to Woodstock Sunday evening, well rested and very well fed.

Mr. Whooooo

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This is the eighth post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

Rebecca and I spent our first day wandering the Mini United festival grounds. As I wrote in the last post, Mini owners like to have fun. Cramming is some people’s idea of fun.

I did not participate in the cramming. The most people I have ever had in my car is five. Two of them were men well over six feet tall. I remember the elbows and knees everywhere, and only being able to get up to fourth gear because someone’s foot was blocking the gear stick.

I did happily subject myself to a fake pat down by a fake generic police officer. There are all sorts of things I could write about this, involving naughty British and German stereotypes, but I’ll just say, “Anything for a photo opp with a classic Mini,” and leave it at that.

There was a double-decker bus full of overpriced Mini T-shirts, hats, sunglasses, drink glasses, key chains, and lavishly illustrated souvenir books. I didn’t need to buy anything; I was more than content with my swag bag, which had turned out to contain a bunch of similar Mini trinkets in addition to the bottle opener.

There was lots of racing by professional drivers which I found boring. I’ve never understood the attraction of watching someone drive around and around and around a track.

But then, there were the trick drivers, a la the Italian Job, accompanied by a DJ.

We went back to the VIP tent for our evening feeding, then headed out for the headline concert by Paul Weller. I had never heard of him, or The Jam, his first band. I had never heard The Jam’s number one 1980 hit, Going Underground. There are probably Americans who would be shocked at that, but I was busy changing diapers and going to school full time back then, so I had other priorities.

But also, back in the day, it was probably more possible and quite common for music not to make it over the pond. Not every group was the new Beatles or Rolling Stones, but lots of groups, like The Jam, were huge in their home country.

So Rebecca and I jammed, and I never actually saw Paul Weller because, at 5’3”, I never see anything from the main floor but other people’s heads. There were clearly a lot of drugs in use. A guy near us was hopping on one foot the whole concert, yelling “Whooo!” over and over and over. He was as entertaining as the concert itself.

—

It had been a long day and we were barely started on all there was to see and do.

We trudged back to the tent, feeling like First Class passengers forced to return to Coach Economy. We should have slept soundly but we were so excited about going back the next day that we stayed up talking in the dark. Besides, Mr. Whooo was camping somewhere nearby, so there was a round of mostly good-natured “Shut up!” from us and our neighbors every 10 minutes until he finally ran out of steam around 3am.

Good on Ya, Gdynia

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This is the seventh post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

Rebecca and I were sitting in the VIP tent at the Mini festival, pinching ourselves, when a bunch of loudmouths barged in. Oops, turns out they were my fellow North Americans.

Rebecca and I were waved over to join them by a tall woman dressed in black and wearing extreme eyewear.

“I am Dagmar,” she said in a clipped German accent, “head of BMW’s Mini Cooper North American Customer Relations Division,” or some such. “I would like to give you a warm welcome to Silverstone and Mini United.” She never cracked a smile; she was about as warm as an ice cube. Dagmar gave us an orientation to the VIP amenities.

“The VIP toilets are over there … these coolers are available to you 24/7 … your feedings will be at oh-eight hundred hours, 1200 hours, and 1900 hours.”

Our feedings? VIP toilets? And those coolers … for years I had a repeated dream in which I entered a house brimming with priceless antiques and treasure chests full of gold coins and precious jewels. Suddenly I would realize that all this was mine. I have no idea what that dream meant but I felt it had come true now as I stood before a tall glass-front cooler stocked with good German beer and bottles of wine including my favorite, prosecco.

“Anne … Anne!” Rebecca was standing next to me, trying to snap me out of my trance. “Your compatriots have the inside scoop on why we’re really here,” she said as we rejoined them at a table.

A tall guy wearing a tall fuzzy hat with a Maple leaf said, “I got the low down from another employee last night. BMW budgeted for 500 North Americans coming to the festival. Only a select few, like the auto journalists and the big collectors, were gonna get the VIP treatment. But then the recession hit and only 15 of us showed up!” We all laughed. There was one rich guy among us, but most of us were regular middle class people for whom our cars and trips like this were a budgetary stretch.

People often assume that Minis are super expensive cars. How much things cost is all relative, so I’ll just say that they cost about the same as a Subaru Crosstek or Legacy, a Mazda 3, or a Toyota Camry. So you could spend a lot more on a car, or a lot less.

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We waited for our first feeding, aka lunch, and shortly before noon the pit crews from the rack track poured in. BMW must have reckoned it might as well feed them the good grub, too.

I wonder which bunch Dagmar found more distasteful—us rag-tag North Americans in our jeans and T-shirts and fuzzy hats, or the tatted-up mechanics? Not exactly the high-class clientele she’d had in mind, perhaps.

We enjoyed a light lunch of fresh salmon and salads and desserts.

Then it was off to explore the festival! Rebecca and I slipped a few beers in our swag bags. Tacky, I know, but since the swag had included a Mini bottle opener, we figured we were obligated to field test it.

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BMW has done its brand research. Mini owners love to “motor,” we love good design, and we love adventure and fun. Not all of us are all of these things, but you get the picture. There are all sorts of Mini events going on around the world all the time, like group road trips, music festivals, and art and design extravaganzas. They’re all organized by Mini owners; Mini United is the only one sponsored, every three years, by BMW.

To give you an idea of how passionate Mini owners can be, here are some Minis with the equivalent of car tattoos showing where their owners drove from—in order—Budapest, Kiev, Moscow, and Gdynia, Poland.

These are just the Eastern Europeans; there were hundreds more from Western Europe, North Africa, Turkey, and Asia.

“This puts things in perspective,” I said as we clinked a couple of beers. “Yes,” said Rebecca drily, “I guess our epic 200-mile drive was worth it, if you like this kind of thing.”