gateway city getaway.

photo by reverend aitor

yesterday was spent with important missions into saint louis (we are actually staying just outside of the city in southern illinois). the observant among you will notice that we not driving our trusty station wagon, boris. this is because our gracious hosts felt that break-ins were imminent with our stuffed vehicle so shannah was kind enough to lend us her car for the day. air conditioning and a reclining seats! we felt our own ages for a moment. okay, we are easily impressed but also, madly grateful for a day's escape from our own greasy lives.

the wax museum that melissa keeps emphatically touting was "closed for renovations" and slated to "reopen the first week of july." when i pointed out that it was the first week of july, the fellow on the other end of the phone got cagey. maybe next time. this narrowed down our decisions, anyway, and we ended up going to the equally touted (but for other reasons) city museum.

the museum houses an impressive display of interactive sculpture and hidden curiosities. i particularly liked the collection of things found in old saint louis latrines and the display of architectural adornments.

i was less enthusiastic about the kiosks trying to sell trinkets or food at every turn and the employees' lack of desire to be of any help. even the keen lady at the info desk told me that the museum is exploratory and that they don't have any exhibits. she did this in front of a sign for the architectural exhibit. i get the idea that this is a place for adults to feel like kids but we are not as small as kids and i don't feel like 'discovering' what size tube i will get stuck in. maybe i was just hungry. aitor was getting annoyed at my lack of whimsical zeal. what can i say? when the clock is ticking, i want more scrimshaw and less slides. call me a jerk.

...not that slides aren't fun in their own gross ways.

improbabilities on the highways of wisconsin.

who knew as we awoke in our luxurious madison side-of-the-highway motel room what a string of unlikely events lay between us and our destination of minneapolis. not us. and, probably, not you.

we took some time getting organized, finishing some little jobs and piecing the car contents back together like a tetris game. then we hit the road - a new scenic byway i had never taken before. on faythe's advice, we had planned out some roadside programming on the way to minneapolis (i am performing there, but that is another story/life of mine). wisconsin, it would seem, is full of roadside extravagances that we have never experienced. this, in spite of the fact that i have been through this whole corridor numerous times. but i used to be younger and i would drive endlessly without stopping. now, in my advancing years, i bother to look at things if only to give my aching back a break from the car.

sadly, the house on the rock did not figure into our plans although it was on the route. the collections there sounds thrilling but it apparently merits an entire day's exploration. it is also slicker (read: pricier) than our current mothy purses can allow. we managed to find plenty of cheap/free roadside mania to partake in, nonetheless.

on faythe's suggestion, we hunted down dr. evermor's forevertron, an entire art park of massive metal sculputres centred around the forevertron, a guinness book record-holding scrap sculpture of immense size. we wandered around the opening to the park, snapping photos and marveling.

then things got weird. as walked towards the entrance to the park proper a couple of other visitors came out and told us to take as many pictures as we could as fast as we could because the entire park was being shut down by "the government." when we tried to enter to snap said hasty photos we were turned away by a lady who said she ran the place. she was flanked by police officers and seemed quite demanding about our departure. while leaving, the other tourists informed us that a live bomb had been discovered among either the sculptures or materials on site and that officials were scouring the place for contaminants of some kind. one of these visitors also told us that a ufo sculpture on site was made out of a flammable metal. weird.

we took a few more pictures around the front of the space before being shooed out by the lady who worked there. this lady confirmed some of the rumours. a live bomb had apparently been discovered there by some visitors a couple of weeks ago and all sorts of police, government and health officials had descended on the place since. it just so happens we had arrived at a critical moment when the decision to close the park had come down.

"dr. evermor's negligence with materials," she said. "i've got to go eat at the welfare...just kidding."

so we left.

onwards towards baraboo. we had seen signs for a circus museum but got distracted by a saint vincent depaul before we even got there. we have been going pretty nuts with thrifts over the past few days. there is a big list of things to pick up and even more things by which to be distracted. but my mind was entirely blown by this discovery:

no big deal, right? just some weird tacky wall thing, right? only, if you look carefully, you will note that is it a souvenir from bruno, saskatchewan! possibly, you might remember our visit there last year. as far as we know, there is little in bruno other than 500 people, all citizens, tyler, serena (sometimes), a religious school, a grain elevator and the usual trappings of a rural town (grocery, bar, pharmacy, bank, insurance, senior's centre...) i mean, it's not nothing. it's a fantastic place. but it's a tiny place, and one that we have a slim but tenacious connection to. and to find such a strange souvenir of it here, in wisconsin. and what are we even doing here, in this small off-the-freeway place? and why did we stop to go to this particular shop? we drank more water and hoped we weren't hallucinating.

we plan on passing through bruno later in this trip so we have to wrestle with the final home of this object until then. we both kind of want to cling to it as a reminder of the difference between impossibility and improbability (a clear difference when living out in the world as we are). but possibly it deserves to be brought back home. tyler and serena, will you cry if we don't leave this with you? let's work it out. we are troubled and dehydrated.

after all of this excitement and confusion, the circus museum seemed pointless. and our drive through the wisconsin dells was entirely too overwhelming to digest. my god, that place is incredible. this is about as much of it as we could actually absorb in our saturated states:

...and there is so much more where that came from. maybe on the way back (with any luck). i kind of want to sleep in an elephant's trunk, or under a water slide, or in an upside down house. why didn't i listen to dr. dave when he told me to go here years ago?

now onward into minnesota to find graham. wisconsin, you have more than piqued our curiosity; you have challenged its limits.

pitt stop.*

today we started early with a greasy breakfast near pat and al's. we got the morning bum's rush because pat had some kind of meeting and al had to go review a film.

so we did some wandering, some puttering and visited our favorite catholic supply store, sacred heart of jesus. the reverend and i are by no means denominationally religious, but that does not mean that our interest in the artifacts of faith are purely ironic (our aesthetic whims must dip into ironic territory but i enjoy reverence just as much). we always pick up amazing little handmade icons, medallions and other objects made with care, hope and supplication. and the nuns who run the shop are very nice, too. i found out on this trip that they "live by providence" - a way of life that i feel half-immersed in myself most of the time. we also talked about adventure on the roads of america. apparently these ladies used to travel the countryside breaking down in every state only to "meet the nicest people and see the nicest things" during their car's collapse. kindreds for sure, in spite of other unshared ground.

speaking of the road, it had come time to hit it again. smell ya later, yinzers.

the jumbled city gave way to countryside as we decided to take our time and save our tolls for a while on the lincoln highway. we passed some familiar sights (the nudie bar was about to open but the sky was turning and we felt chicken) and one who's geography i had forgotten. why are our trips through pennsylvania always full of such contradictions?

i had seen that sign for the memorial before but had never followed it. the flight 93 memorial is an interesting example of collectivism in practice. a display of feelings that are personal, political, nationalist, self-indulgent, small, empassioned and/or confusing.

what could the significance of a hair elastic be? or a penny? or an elvis wallet? are these offerings motivated by actual connections with the event or object? or did the donor just feel the need to leave something? was it due to a swell of emotion or perceived social pressure? who knew the dead and who did not? the visual display is striking, important, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. maybe that's appropriate.

we moved on, headed for our adoptive family in philadelphia - two pals, three kids (also pals), and five dogs were there to greet us with open arms, warm dinner and plenty of yapping. this was not a confusing experience by any stretch. tomorrow we make things, saturday we sell things and the rest is still falling into place. it's good to be home.

*title pun by aitor.

the south in the north?

i have to admit some general confusions about west virginia. even though the little slice that we drove through today must almost extend northwards to lake erie, the tourist shop flotsam seem to suggest that we are in the south. so do some billboards. and everyone has different accents than ohio cities that are only and hour and a half away. it's perplexing. but then, i was embarassingly old when i figured out that the mason-dixon is right under ohio.

we took advantage of today's brief trip through the south to stop at the cherokee trading post in triadelphia, west virginia. it's a roadside tourist shop akin to stuckey's and the like (minus the ubiquitous alligator heads). i was hoping to score some good post cards (done - see above) and browse some discount cowboy boots and moccasins (also accomplished - too bad that discount cowboy boots and moccasins are still too expensive for me). but i was extra elated to also stumble upon my best craft score of the trip. with all apologies to the indie craft community i know, this blew my mind:

if i were a worse person, i would steal this idea. i desperately want to. or, rather, i desperately wish that this combination of hill billy illustrative style and novelty had occurred to me first. this was never going to happen.

photo by rev. aitor

we arrived in pittsburgh with enough time to do a bit of wandering around on liberty street before meeting up with our friend al at the tail end of her handmade arcade planning meeting. we stumbled upon some classic pittsbugh window displays:

you should visit around easter when the easter bunny, little chicks and the city's strong catholic leanings blend into some very impressive mish mashes of bleeding saints and snuggly fauna.

the signage here is also amazing.

i got really into this barber shop as a whole complicated piece of arrangement of thoughts and colours:

after some food and drink from the church, we got to retire to our luxe digs-for-the-night chez pat and al. aside from other craft undertakings she makes for public consumption, al also quilts out of her impressive vintage fabric collection. i am in awe of her collection. plus, we get to sleep under part of it!

good night, yinz. sweet dreams.

reunions in the dairy air.

today i was finally reunited with aitor. oh, did i not mention that he and a small contingent of the toronto pipe club had come down to a resort just outside of chicago to attend the annual chicagoland international pipe and tobacciana show? with over three hundred vendors, i really wish i had been able to go, take pictures, see the sites and report back to you, dear reader. but other obligations kept my nose to the grindstone in chicago and, given that the terrible directions i got to the convention ballooned my trip out there from one hour to three, it probably just was not meant to be. aitor surely has all kinds of stories of this cultish subsection of the handicraft world - slow smoking, the attire of the pipe nerd, overheard pipey gossip. maybe this secrets will come to light if he and his collective ever get behind the routine of writing their ideas and experiences down. we'll see.

in spite of time spent lost and confused on suburban illinois highways, the bulk today's travel was supposed to be spent going on a pilgrimage to milwaukee, to visit our friend faythe. faythe does one million things so coordinating a social visit with her has taken three years. of course, no trip from chicago to milwaukee is complete with a visit to the mars cheese castle (pictured above and below). yes, that is saturn on their logo.

we got to milwaukee with squeaky cheese curds in our tummies and warm hugs from faythe all around. we got to look around her shop, paper boat, which was a bittersweet experience given that after four years of operation, the recession finally tipped the scales and forced them to close at the end of this month. but more on that later; i am working a piece about faythe for the toronto craft alert that should go deeper into some of that information. for now, though, the shop is still open, it's perfectly curated and we felt very lucky to get to finally visit it. the final show in the gallery is a collection of mixed media drawings by handmade nation camera woman, micaela o'herlihy. it is exquisite and entirely worth a visit if you are in the area.

it is a real treat to visit with faythe in her incredibly inviting home (which did not make us feel itchy at all, as suggested by some weirdo comments here). sunshine everywhere, the largest collection of our community's art that i have ever seen in one place, open space, and fresh paint. faythe's home also boasts the holy grail of itinerant wayfarers, the spare bedroom. a dream wrapped in soft natural light!

tonight we partake in the pride of milwaukee. it could be a punishing night. i'm not sure that we have the intestinal fortitude (literally) to keep pace with 'america's drinking hole.' only time will tell.

shlemiel, shlemazel, y'all!