Monday, February 21, 2011

Cadiz

 (My suggestion is that you should listen to the Eagles' Hotel California while reading this blog. To do so, just clic on this link, Hotel California. The youtube video will appear in a new window, so you can come back, unlike in the song.)



Day three or four, I am not sure for one loses track of time and place on the road.

My overall impression of traveling is a slide show of people and places. The look and the speech of the people varies from state to state, as does the landscape. One sees in Tennessee and North Carolina mountains, then the hollows (pronounced hollars in the south) where weather beaten shacks share space with mobile homes and even newer homes. Judging from the rusted out wrecks of old automobiles parked in so many front lawns that, yes, NASCAR,  is the number one sport in the south. There are also wide open spaces, devoid of people, where the oak trees shorn of their leaves in winter stand tall and straight on the hills like so many whiskers on on an unshaven face. Perhaps the better analogy is one of fingers pointing to heaven as a sublime message of  "He is there." Finally, one comes across the towns and cities whose location often owes itself to the chance that once upon a time someone was too weary to go on.

I too was tired of traveling and so I chose to stop on I-24, just over the border from Tennessee and into Kentucky at Cadiz. The weather finally turned rainy and so it is a good time to pull into port. The name of the town also has a certain appeal to me. Cadiz - it is the Spanish port from which Columbas made his several journeys to the New World. Interestingly, he didn't know that the discoveries he made were "new" and clung desperately to the belief that he had found a short cut to the fabled kingdom of Kublai Khan.

Lost in history is the reason for naming a town in Kentucky after Spain's most famous port.Cadiz is not a port city and only sports s population of little more than 2000 souls. But, by giving it an exotic name perhaps it has enticed a traveler to spend a day and a night or two.


Welcome to Cadiz. What a lovely place to stay. Welcome to the Hotel California. On a dark and rainy highway somewhere on I-24 in Kentucky.

1 comment:

  1. I love when you compared a road trip to a photo slide show.I'm surprised I haven't seen some hotshot director portray a road trip with a cool slide show. And have we've already got the sound track picked out, hotel california! If you've taken pictures along the way I can help you make one. You also need a digital audio recorder so we can add interviews to the images.

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