I needed some light reading to get me through a time stretch when I wouldn’t have much time to read.  Back in August when I was in Seattle with my family my brother mentioned he read some books by Bill Bryson when he couldn’t figure out anything else to read.  He said they were funny.  Bryson has written many books, some about travels, others about the English language, and at least one about science.  The book both my brother and my mom recommended by Bryson is about his hike up the Appalachian Trail entitled A Walk through the Woods or something like that.  That book is available at the Covina Library.  However, at the time I needed a longer borrowing period and the Cal State L.A. Library would allow me to borrow until the end of March with the option to renew it to mid-June assuming no one else put a hold on it.  The catch is that Cal State L.A. does not have as many popular books as Covina Library.  Most of their shelf space is used for academic books and journals.  They do not have A Walk through the Woods.  However, they do have The Lost Continent by Bryson about his driving trip around the contiguous U.S. (CONUS) in 1987.  The book had generally good reviews so I decided to check it out.

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America has on its cover a drawing of a road sign that’s in the shape of a cow that has the words “YOU ARE LEAVING IOWA. COME AGAIN!”  Bryson’s trip begins in Des Moines, Iowa where he’s originally from.  He begins the book with a brief and hilarious recount of his childhood with his late father driving only cruddy cars and his mother asking always asking if she can make someone a sandwich.  Bryson spent his childhood and youth in Des Moines but has lived most of his adult life in England.  He was around my current age when he made this trip in ’87 in his mother’s aging Chevrolet Chevette.  His plans for the trip seem to be to always take the route on his maps labeled as “the scenic route” and to find the perfect American small town.

Bryson’s journey takes him through many small towns along with some college towns, big cities, historical sites, and national parks.  He has a plan of where he wants to go but he usually hasn’t yet arranged where he’s going to stay or eat.  Sometimes his plans don’t work out due to weather or to him getting lost.  Occasionally he gives a bit of historical background of a place.  He always has amusing comments about places that are sometimes very funny and other times seem like a dis.  Not everything is all nice and rosy on a road trip through America.  He gets tired of some towns consisting of fast food restaurants and shopping malls.  Driving through Georgia, he laments at the depressing, big, concrete “f*** you school of architecture” of big American Hotel Chains.  He writes, “Every few blocks you come up against some discordant slab—the De Soto Hilton, the Ramada Inn, the Best Western Riverfront, all as appealing as spittle on a johnnycake.” (Bryson p. 81)  Other than Charleston, he doesn’t have much nice to say about South Carolina.  He writes, “At the North Carolina border, the dull landscape ended abruptly.” (P. 86)  He enjoys places such as Tupelo, Mississippi, the birthplace of Elvis Presley; and the coast of Massachusetts near Fort Adams state park where, between 1890 and 1905, America’s richest families “tried to outdo each other building magnificent homes.” (Bryson p. 150)

Bryson visits some interesting places and many were new to me.  Though it has a steep admission price ($15 in 1987), the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI has a wide assortment of historic and vintage stuff including a village of homes of famous people such as Thomas Edison and Henry Firestone.  In rural Pennsylvania he goes to a barnlike family-style Pennsylvania Dutch restaurant.  He and his party have to take a number and wait in a large waiting area for a long time to be called.  After they are called they are seated at a big trestle table with nine strangers.  They are then served a barrage of food: “thick slabs of ham, mountains of fried chicken, buckets of mashed potatoes, . . .”  Sounds great.  I’ll have to remember these restaurants if I ever go to rural Pennsylvania.  It reminds me a little bit of Boccali’s, this Italian restaurant near Ojai.  In the spring and fall they have these parties for which we’ve purchased tickets.  We sat at long tables outdoors and they serve pizza, pasta, delicious smoked tri tip, and fresh vegetables buffet style.  They also had live entertainment from the owner himself or his daughter’s band.  The place is also a farm and they have their tomato harvest festival in the fall.

Another interesting thing Bryson finds is that they sell Cornish pasties (pronounced pass-tees) all over the upper northwest peninsula of Michigan.  They were brought by Cornishmen from England who worked in the mines there in the nineteenth century.  They’re basically pastries stuffed with meat.  Bryson pulls over and buys one but finds that they taste so bland compared to all the American junk food he’s been eating on the trip.  My wife had a pasty while she was in Newport, Isle of Wight, UK many years ago and she enjoyed it.  Speaking of food, Bryson later acknowledges that “everyone in America goes out for Sunday breakfast.” (p. 287)  My wife and I are usually an exception to that rule, but we do see many people waiting outside the Millie’s in Covina when we drive by there on Sunday mornings.  Bryson also travels to the geographic center of the United States just outside Lebanon, Kansas.  He writes, “If America were invaded, I would be the last person standing.  As I returned to my car I felt an uneasy sense of guilt for leaving the place undefended.” (p. 212)

The parts of the book I really enjoyed were Bryson’s reminisces about the road trips he took as a child with his family in his dad’s cruddy cars.  The billboards were cornier and more fun such as the ones for Burma Shave.  They would get lost because his dad didn’t like to ask for directions.  

Even though Bryson took the trip over 20 years ago, the book does not seem dated.  Most of the big chains he mentions such as Pizza Hut, Ramada Inns, and J.C. Penny are still big chains today.  Of course, he doesn’t have a cell phone or use the internet.  Perhaps he could have planned his trip better with the internet, or perhaps not.  The only part of the book that seems very dated is when he’s in Las Vegas.  He writes, “The names on the hotels and casinos were eerily familiar: Caesar’s Palace, the Dunes, the Sands, the Desert Inn.  What most surprised me—what surprises most people—is how many vacant lots there were.  Here are there were quarter-mile squares of silent desert, little pockets of dark calm just waiting to be developed.” (p. 245) Well, that was 1987 before the Mirage, Treasure Island, Excalibur, Luxor, and all the others to follow.  Apart from Caesar’s Palace the hotels he mentions have been either torn down, renamed, or greatly overshadowed.  I’m surprised he doesn’t mention others I thought were that old such as the Stratosphere, Circus Circus, Stardust, and Harrah’s.  Well, those vacant lots, at least the ones on Las Vegas Boulevard (A.K.A. the Strip) are not longer “waiting to be developed”.

In total, Bryson visits 38 states.   He doesn’t go to L.A. because he believes it’s too congested and polluted.  He drives West on I-15 but veers north to Sequoia National Park.  He also doesn’t visit the other two states of CONUS where I’ve lived: Washington and Oregon.  It seems like he devotes more pages to areas east of Des Moines: the Deep South, the East Coast, and parts of the Midwest.  That’s fine with me because I’m not as familiar with those parts of the country.  He never finds the perfect small town, though he comes close.  By the end I felt like I had made the journey with him and like I knew the country a bit better.

Friday, February 20, 2009 was the last Friday before Lent.  It was also 2-1/2 years to the day that we moved to our current home in Azusa near Covina.  Our goal is to live here for five years, longer if possible.  We had reached the halfway point and, to celebrate, we decided to try the new restaurant in downtown Covina.  It had just opened within the past couple of weeks in the same building and the Covina Center for the Performing Arts theater.  They ran ads for Olamendi’s Zona Rosa on the theater’s marquee.  Driving by it, we also noticed a sign outside the restaurant stated it had a recording studio.  This sounded interesting.

On the Friday we went there we parked in the parking garage in downtown Covina that was constructed sometime during the past couple of years.  It’s a fairly small garage that has rather narrow turns.  It’s free, though different levels allow for different amounts of time in parking spots, the higher the level, the longer time allowed.  I believe we entered the parking garage from College Street.  From there, it was just a short walk to Citrus Street and the restaurant.

Olamendi’s is a small restaurant with high ceilings.  It has just a few tables, a couple of them elevated.  There’s also a long bar with stools for customers to sit.  The restaurant has many festive decorations such as loteria card posters on the far wall along with a picture of Frida Kahlo.  Marionettes hang from the ceiling above the bar.  High shelves also hold various colorful knickknacks.  The walls are painted a shiny purple.  When we got there most of the tables were taken so we sat down at the bar.  On the wall behind the bar they had mounted a medium-sized flatscreen TV.  It looked like it was showing the menu screen for a DVD.  It showed a picture of a newspaper with the headline “Sigue Jurado el Tomo Asesino”.  It looked like the title of the DVD was “Cantifla” and it also said, “Ahi es el Detalle” on the screen.

We sat down at the far end of the bar and they gave us menus that were only a couple of pages long.  They had sections for appetizers, specialties, steaks, seafood, build-your-own tacos, and bowls that were similar to burrito bowls.  Under beverages they had several specialty sodas.  The choices seem a bit more elegant and specialized that what’s found at a regular Mexican restaurant, though the prices are also higher.  It’s similar to Adoro Mexican Restaurant, though much less fancy.  They brought us chips to snack on while we waited.  We placed our orders and had to wait a while.  Still, the chips were good; they tasted homemade and the salsa was also good.  They refilled them after we finished the basket.  It seemed like they were either understaffed or the staff they had wasn’t very experienced.  They reassured us that our food was coming soon.

The menu said they had been around since 1973.  They’re a chain and their first location opened in San Clemente.

Eventually they brought us our orders.  My carne asada steak was smaller and thinner than I expected for a steak.  But with the rice and grilled green peppers and onions it was an adequate amount of food and everything tasted good.  The steak was cooked but not overcooked, juicy and not greasy.  My wife enjoyed her build-your-own bowl with carnitas, lettuce, tomatoes, beans and cheese.

Most tables were full the entire time were there.  At the beginning people were there on their way to the theater but the place stayed busy.  Perhaps this is another reason service was slow.  On our way out we saw that they sold their chips pre-packaged along with their salsa and enchilada sauce.  Overall, it was a good 30-month commemoration that will hopefully be at least halfway through our goal of living in the area for five or more years.  We can’t remember where we went to dinner back on August 20, 2006.  But if/when we reach five years, we’ll remember where we were at the midpoint.