Day 14 and 15: The End

Well, it’s a week later, and I should probably write up how the trip ended. Hopefully no one was too worried that I was lying in a ditch in Arkansas, though if you were, your concern was awfully muted.

So! Last Sunday morning I left Russellville and headed toward Little Rock. I don’t know if anyone can see this coming, based on sightseeing completed earlier in the trip, but there was a presidential library in Little Rock that I wanted to see. Unfortunately, it was Sunday, and nothing in Little Rock opens before noon, if it opens at all, so I had some time to kill. I sat in a Wendy’s and read Time Magazine.

Then it was over to the main attraction, the William J. Clinton Presidential Library. I had high hopes for our nation’s newest presidential library, which actually had been dashed by my father, who coincidentally visited the library about a week before I did.

But to explain my high hopes, I have to take a little side note here on presidential libraries. The best library, to my mind, is the George Bush I library in College Station, Texas. Texas is a state truly gifted with presidential libraries, with LBJ’s in Austin and Bush at A&M. Johnson’s is pretty good as well…it was actually my new favorite for exactly one day, until I went to Bush’s, so if you’re planning a trip, do LBJ, then Bush, so you’re not disappointed by LBJ.

Anyways, the reason I identified for liking Bush’s so much are these:
1. He was still alive and could be pretty involved in the collection, displays, process, etc.
2. He built his library at a time when he could use cooler technology than say, Hoover .

So, since these conditions were in place for Clinton, I thought Clinton’s would be awesome. But it’s just okay. The main attraction is a display hall with each year of the Clinton presidency, with timelines tracking what Clinton was doing and what else was going on in the world. And that part is a pretty good document of how crazy the world has gotten, and maybe one day I’ll take my kids there and explain the world events that occurred when I was young, but for now, I’m not incredibly nostalgic for pictures of Kerri Strug or OJ. There’s some interesting commentary on partisanship and how bitter things got. There’s also some replicas of rooms in the White House and an exhibit on what goes into putting on a big dinner there. Plus, comedy by Hillary!

After the library, I started driving to Tennessee. If it had not been Day 14, I likely would have stopped and bummed around Memphis for a little bit, but I was really, really tired, so I went to Nashville . For those of you reading the blog who are not aware, Nashville is one of the places I am considering for the next stage of my life, and the point of stopping there was to evaluate its livability.

But who really knows how to do that? I don’t. I lived in Georgia for four years because there was a school I wanted to go to there, and I picked up and just moved to Seattle sight unseen because it seemed cool. So this is the first time that I’ve visited a place and tried to evaluate it. That’s what I did on Day 15 for a few hours, just by driving around and looking for stuff. I did find a good used bookstore and bought some books. But as I mentioned before, I was tired. It was time to get back to Candler, NC. That’s just outside of Asheville. I got there and my parents were watching Dancing with the Stars, which I had never seen, but they got me fully up to speed and it seems like a decent show, though it must force me to re-evaluate my definition of “star”, because I had never heard of a lot of those people.

And thus ended the road trip. I still have a music report from the trip to type up, and some pictures to get off the camera, and maybe later I will think of something profound to wrap it all up, but for now, that’s what I got.