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    It’s (Not) Just a House

    Let’s agree to disagree today (one of my favorite catchphrases). You see things one way while I see them another. Perspective, angle, viewpoint – choose your word – we all come to our conclusions on different roads. Which is ironic, because four of us came to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater on the same road three weeks ago.

    I blogged about Fallingwater in Perfect Harmony a couple of years ago.  The post was meant to be a primer on what makes the house an iconic work of American architecture.  At the time I was also building LEGO’s version, which is as close as I thought I’d ever get to the real thing.  Today I can say I’ve checked an up close and personal visit off my bucket list.

    Fair warning: there’s no convenient route to travel to Fallingwater, which shouldn’t surprise you about a house hidden in the forest.  You’ll drive ninety minutes southeast of Pittsburgh on two-lane roads, some in desperate need of repair. And watch carefully for the driveway entry; it kind of pops up out of nowhere.

    You won’t get to see Fallingwater without booking a reservation beforehand.  Despite my dismay in last week’s post about required reservations in Rome they make a ton of sense with Fallingwater.  It’s a small house after all, so it’d be overwhelming if visitors just showed up and walked in.  We took the final tour on a Saturday and our guide said 600 others had already been through the house earlier in the day.

    Fallingwater’s Visitors Center

    Thanks to the resources of the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy (which is still buying up property around Fallingwater), the experience begins before you ever see the house itself.  The driveway wanders past a guard house to a modest parking lot.  From there you walk to a beautiful Visitors Center nestled in the trees.  A central outdoor seating area is surrounded by a small museum of Wright’s work, a cafe, and a gift shop that offers much more than shirts and postcards.  Frankly, the Visitors Center is a nice little work of architecture all by itself.

    The walk to the house begins down a kind of woodsy nature trail, so you can see the rocks, trees, and other materials used to construct Fallingwater in their native forms.  What impressed me most about the tour is how you never see the house until you’re practically at its front door, making for a dramatic reveal.  Your walk descends through the canyon of Bear Run (the river over which Fallingwater is perched) until the house’s signature cantilevered forms emerge from the dense forest.

    As I described it in Perfect Harmony, Fallingwater looks like it was “constructed entirely offsite and dropped gently within the forest by pushing aside a few tree branches”.  After seeing the house in person, I wouldn’t change a word of that statement.  The design is a marvel, not only in how the indoor/outdoor spaces integrate with their natural surroundings, but also in how it was built as if floating over the waterfall below.

    Enough with the fawning over Fallingwater, am I right?  After the four of us took the tour we had a chance to process what we’d seen, and my wife’s and brother’s reactions were clear: it’s just a house.  It’s not even a nice house, with its low ceilings, dark spaces, and anything-but-cozy use of rock, concrete, and glass.  Fallingwater is hard to get to, and it’s in the middle of nowhere.  And with its hundredth birthday not far off, everything about the house has a decidedly dated feel.

    I did my best to explain why I love Fallingwater.  My sister-in-law, who appreciates everything about the arts, understood the significance of the house.  She “got” what Frank Lloyd Wright was conveying in the design, and allowed the sacrifice of comfortable living for the sake of the indoor-outdoor interplay.  She probably took in the house the way she would a painting at the Louvre.  My wife and my brother, not so much.  For them the ninety minute tour was probably sixty minutes too long.

    Fallingwater promotes the thought: “one person’s junk is another’s treasure”.  My treasure is architecture (so much so I studied it in college).  Yours is probably something entirely different.  It fascinates me how my brother spent years and years of research, consulting, and money to restore a 1960s vintage Ferrari in his back garage.  To me, cars get you from Point A to Point B; a mere convenience.  My brother could spend hours explaining why his Ferrari goes worlds beyond that statement.

    Still lingering on my bucket list is a visit to Paris, where among the city’s many wonders stands the Eiffel Tower.  I want to see this engineering/architectural masterpiece from far and near, and of course, ascend it’s many levels to fully experience the structure itself.  For now however, I’ll have to settle for building LEGO’s version.  As with Fallingwater, we can all agree to disagree. The Eiffel is (not) just a tower.

    Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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    Too Many Roads Lead to Rome

    I’ve wanted to take my wife to Italy pretty much since the day we met. After a memorable college year in Rome in the 1980s I knew I’d go back one day, especially since I tossed a few coins into the famous Trevi Fountain before I left. Today however, I sit wondering if I really will set foot in the Eternal City again. Thanks to overwhelming numbers of tourists, Rome might as well put a “sold out” sign on its city gates. Blame it on the Catholics?

    Trevi Fountain, Rome

    2025, less than four months from now, is a Jubilee Year for the Catholic Church.  Maybe your idea of a jubilee is a celebration, much like Britain’s in 2022 when they honored Queen Elizabeth’s unprecedented seventy years of service to the Crown.  Not so the Catholics.  They define a jubilee – every 25 or 50 years – as a “marked opportunity for the remission of sins, debts, and of universal pardon”.

    Catholic jubilees traditionally include a pilgrimage to Rome.  I’d love to know who runs the calculations (and how) but the forecast for next year in Rome has Catholic pilgrims at around 32 million… in addition to the 50 million tourists who normally pass through.  To put that total in perspective, the population of Rome is only 3 million.  That’s a whole lot of extra pepperoni on the pizza (or piazza, if you will).

    [Side note: 1983, the year I lived in Rome, was an out-of-cycle Catholic jubilee known as the Holy Year of the Redemption.  Do I remember millions of Catholics “roaming” through the city streets?  I do not.  Then again I’m a Methodist, so maybe I have an excuse for missing the obvious…]

    You call this a crowd? Just wait ’til 2025.

    Thanks to next year’s jubilee, officials are clamping down on a visitor’s ability to see or tour the city’s most famous attractions.  The Fontana di Trevi is a good example of how things will change.  In the 1980s I could stand in front of the Baroque fountain to my heart’s content.  In 2025 I will need a ticket through a reservation system.  That ticket gets me entry through one side of the piazza and exit through the other, at a specific time and for a specific (amount of) time.  Hired “stewards and hostesses” make sure I don’t linger, and collect a 2-euro fee for the experience.

    If I really wanted to be herded like sheep I’d join a flock on the green, green grass of Ireland, instead of paying for the privilege in Rome.  And speaking of paying, the Trevi already collects over $1.5M in coins voluntary thrown into its waters (the money then donated to local charities).  Add in the new 2-euro fee, and even if just 10% of next year’s visitors make it to the Trevi, Rome will nab an additional $18M.  Jubilee indeed.

    St. Peter’s Square, Rome

    If I sound jaded about Rome’s forced hand, it’s only because I have the perspective of a time when everything seemed so much easier.  In the 1980s I could wander through St. Peter’s Square without photo-bombing dozens of iPhones.  I could also wander without encountering a random protest about a religious war or climate change.  I still remember plunking down on the cobblestones of that grand piazza to paint a watercolor of the Basilica, and nobody bothered me.  I also remember Frisbee with a fellow student in another piazza, while the local Italians watched the spinning disc in wonder.  Innocent times indeed.

    Roman Forum

    In 2024, a guided tour of the Vatican (the only way to see it) – including the sublime Sistine Chapel – will set you back $50.  A tour of the Colosseum and Roman Forum will cost you twice that much.  I’m sure next year’s pilgrims will pay these fees without blinking a sin-forgiven eye.  I just can’t get past my free-and-easy days as an architecture student, when each of the city’s wonders was as wide open and come-on-in accessible as you can imagine.

    The truth is I’d go back to Rome in a heartbeat, even if I knew untold millions of pilgrims would be standing alongside me.  The Eternal City is worth the look even if you never step inside any of its buildings.  On the other hand, if I’m patient and wait until 2032, it’ll be the 50th anniversary of my college year.  That calls for a jubilee!  I’ll be the only pilgrim of course (er, two of us counting my wife) but at least we’ll have no hassles dropping coins into the Trevi.

    Some content sourced from the Skift Newsletter article, “Rome Tourism Chief Says There’s ‘Total Chaos’ at Trevi Fountain…”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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    For Whom the Road Tolls

    Because we raised our kids in Colorado, vacations to visit our extended families were often by airplane, since my relatives were in California and my wife’s were in Florida. It was the rare trip where we could see any of them by taking the car. So when my wife and I drove from South Carolina to Pennsylvania recently to visit my brother and his wife, we were reminded of what makes travel by car different than by plane. Toll roads, for instance.

    Take your pick of payment

    I have memories of toll roads my kids will never have. They’re old enough to remember passing through the booths and handing coins or bills to the collector. But they won’t remember the unmanned alternative, which was to toss exact change into a big plastic basket, listen to the coins process through the mechanics below, and hope/pray the gate to the toll road would raise. That automated approach seems almost quaint compared to today’s electronic alternatives.

    I say alternatives (plural) because yes, that’s what we have with today’s toll roads. It confounds me. Why in heaven’s name haven’t we developed a painless, seamless, and most importantly, nationally coordinated approach to toll road payments? To some extent (nineteen states) we have a solution – E-ZPass, which by subscription and sticker allows convenient passage.  But even E-ZPass is not a perfect system.

    Not so E-Z

    For the rest of the country’s tolls – and for most of our round-trip drive between South Carolina and Pennsylvania – we have the clunky alternative. You pass through a now-unmanned (“un-personned?”) toll booth, where a camera grabs your license plate with a noticeable flash. Then, somewhere down the road (ha) a paper bill arrives in your mailbox. By my count I have four or five of these bills coming my way. It’s been ten days since we’ve returned home and I have yet to receive even one.

    The cookie recipe is still on the back of the package

    [Trivia detour:  Nestlé’s famous Toll House chocolate chip cookies aren’t named after toll booths but rather for an inn in Massachusetts where baker Ruth Wakefield came up with the recipe.  Wakefield and Nestlé struck a deal in the 1940s: her recipe printed on their bags in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate.  How very “Willy Wonka”, eh?]

    Here is my unequivocally efficient approach to paying tolls across our many-highway’d nation. When you first get a driver’s license, you also sign up for a bank account-linked program which allows seamless paying of ALL tolls across the land – roads, bridges, tunnels, whatever – through a single readable sticker on your windshield. If you somehow don’t pay the tolls because of say, “insufficient funds”? Well sorry, your driver’s license doesn’t get renewed until you settle up at the DMV.

    A $3 toll gets you through Baltimore’s Harbor Tunnel

    My system is so logical it’s probably the reason I’ve never been pegged for a government job. In Colorado and elsewhere they almost have it right with the E-ZPass system – a sticker linked to a bank account. The problem is, they hold a minimum balance in a middleman (middle person?) account to guarantee payment of tolls.  I object, your honor. Why should Colorado have forty-odd dollars of my hard-earned money at all times when they can just settle up unpaid tolls whenever I renew my license?

    Warning: cash-cow crossing

    Then again, I have a beef with the tolls themselves, and that is, they pay for far more than the maintenance of the roads. You can’t tell me $10 per vehicle per crossing of the Golden Gate Bridge (GGB) is needed just to maintain the bridge. Here’s the jaw-dropping math for you.  112,000 cars cross the GGB every day.  That’s over forty million cars per year.  That puts the annual toll-taking at over four hundred million dollars.  $400M for bridge maintenance?  Sorry, fair traveler, you’re voluntarily lining the coffers of California (and San Francisco) every time you cross. “If I’m elected” (as we’ll hear countless times in the next two months), I’ll limit toll-taking to whatever it costs to maintain the bridge, road, or tunnel.  Not a dollar more.

    On our return trip from Pennsylvania, I was amused to pass through one toll both with an actual human toll-taker. Those cordial people are still out there, collecting cash one car at a time. The woman in our instance happily returned us $19.25 on a $20.00 bill (and who’s happy to do that anymore?).

    Time to bake cookies!

    I was also amused… no, “gratified” is the better word; to pull into the parking lot of a South Carolina “rest area” shortly before we got home, for the use of a perfectly safe, clean, toll-free restroom on a toll-free highway. Maybe rest areas and their restrooms are the reason tolls cost more than the maintenance of the roads? Probably not. That would equate to a logical explanation for a government expenditure, which is an oxymoron.

    Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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    Following the Leader

    Technology birthed the self-guided tour. More and more often, an admission ticket to sights worth seeing grants you a pair of headphones and a wearable device instead of a name-tagged human to show-and-tell you the way.  Self-guided touring allows for a more convenient and less distracted experience.  But it also removes the storyteller, and that, my friends, makes all the difference between a memorable tour and a forgettable one.

    Budapest, Hungary

    Viking River Cruises, one of which we completed on the Danube River in early June (see Going With the Flow), provide a plethora of tour guide experiences.  On any given day of the cruise, you disembark to one or two “land-based” locales, in the (sometimes) capable hands of a personal tour guide.  Viking contracts with local agencies to provide these guides for small groups of its travelers.  For example, having a Hungarian show you the sights of downtown Budapest is so much more satisfying than hearing someone drone on about it on a headset.  Sharing a beer with a German on a tasting tour is almost like being invited into his house.

    Nuremberg, Germany

    If I ask you to share one of your own memories involving a tour guide, you’ll probably recall a particularly good one.  Maybe you’ll even remember a bad one.  Regardless, your stories would support my theory: a top-notch guide can make the what or the where of the tour almost irrelevant.  The guide himself or herself can make the difference between a memorable experience and a forgettable one.

    Consider, I still remember a tour of a southern plantation with my family from almost fifty years ago.  Why?  Because the tour guide presented herself in a way that made me think we were being welcomed into her own house.  She also had this soft, syrupy unforgettable Southern accent that had me hanging on her every word.  Do I remember anything about the plantation?  No, but I sure remember the tour guide.

    Szentendre, Hungary

    So it was on the Viking cruise.  We had good guides and we had outstanding ones.  The very best of the dozen or so – ironically – was a young woman working on contract with Viking for the first time, as a stand-in for our scheduled guide in Munich.  She was, in every respect, delightful.  She started our tour with a greeting and a smile, then a little conversation and questions to break the ice.  As she led us from one sight to another, she spoke with an energy and pride in her city that can only be described as vivacious.  By the end of the tour, as the saying goes, she had us feeding out of her hand.  I was so enthralled I forgot to take a picture of her.

    But we also had a lesser guide a few days earlier in Vienna, who I’d describe as a speed-walking encyclopedia.  He led us on a many-thousand-steps rush through the sights, filling our heads with facts and figure as he went, in a pretty thick Austrian accent.  He never smiled and I don’t think we ever stopped walking.  Can’t remember much about that tour (or him for that matter) because it was a rush-rush blurry overload of the senses.  I need to go back to Vienna again someday so I can (literally) stop and smell their famous roses.

    Vienna, Austra

    Courtesy of Viking and those many tours near the Danube, I present to you, therefore, the attributes of the consummate tour guide:

    1. A local, familiar with the city or sight at hand through regular exposure.
    2. A personality; warm, friendly, energetic, and engaging.
    3. An overflowing font of knowledge on his/her subject, able to answer just about any question thrown their way.
    4. A storyteller, able to weave anecdotes at will into the facts and figures to keep it interesting.
    5. In tune with his/her audience, making adjustments to the tour as necessary (ex. “Am I going too fast for you?”)

    If you take enough sightseeing tours, you’ll know whether your guide is missing one or more of the above within the first five minutes.  You’ll also know whether the next hour or two will fly by or drag on for all eternity.  If your guide checks all five boxes, consider yourself lucky.  Most of us aren’t cut out for the job (myself included), whether we like to think we are or not.  It takes a special set of skills to be the leader everybody wants to follow.

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    Dave meets “Evy”

    Renting a car at the airport used to be so hassle-free. You’d book the vehicle online, walk or bus to the parking lot, and bypass the counter by signing up for the company’s free membership program. All of that still happens, so what’s the difference today? You never know what vehicle you’re going to get, even if you choose the make/model ahead of time. And if you’ve never driven an electric vehicle (“Evy”) before, renting one is a real adventure.

    Blame it on my laptop keyboard.  As I pecked my way through a recent Avis reservation, I inadvertently chose “Mystery Car” instead of “full-size sedan”.  Mystery car?  What the heck does that mean?  It means more flexibility for the rental car agency.  “Mystery car” means Avis gives you whatever it feels like giving you from its leftover inventory.  Maybe you get what you wanted.  Maybe you get a luxury vehicle for even less.  Or maybe you get Evy like I did.

    I admit, I am not with the times of the latest vehicle technology.  I couldn’t tell you the first thing about operating Evy, let alone how she works under the hood.  So there I stood in the Avis parking lot, faced with the prospect of my first miles behind her wheel.  The rental companies should put a beginner’s guide on the driver’s seat for people like me.  I mean, imagine my hesitation (panic?) when I pushed Evy’s start button and nothing happened?  Something happened, of course.  The engine “started”; it just didn’t make any noise.  Yep, this was going to be a different kind of ride.

    My first issue with Evy (or at least, the Genesis I rented) is the inexplicable need to make the dashboard wildly different than a conventional vehicle.  You don’t find the basic needs (ex. headlights, windshield wipers) where you expect to.  I actually considered talking to the vehicle instead of pushing random buttons, especially after my seat suddenly firmed up and vibrated when my I let my posture slip a little (“driver safety feature!”)  Seriously, all I’m asking for is dashboard buttons and levers where I expect them to be.

    Once I found a modicum of comfort with Evy, the real challenge dawned on me: I have to recharge her before I go back to the airport.  And this, my friends, proved to be a challenge worthy of reality TV.  Those who already know Evy are welcome to say, “Oh c’mon Dave, it’s not that hard!” but truth be told, my charging station experience was just as daunting as the first time I pulled up to a gas pump as a teenager.

    Credit Genesis, you can look up the nearest charging station right there on the dashboard.  The search gave me a choice of three.  The first station was in an Urgent Care clinic parking lot… and wasn’t working.  I’ve read that 15% of EV charging stations don’t work so now I’m a believer (EV Charging Flaw #1).

    The next charging station option was in a McDonald’s parking lot.  When I arrived, both slots were occupied (EV Charging Flaw #2 – not enough to go around).  I have no problem waiting in line at gas stations but charging Evy takes a lot longer.  So I chose to drive another mile to the third option, a charger in a bank parking lot.  Nope.  No station to be found from one end of the lot to the other.  Genesis needs to update its locator software.

    So back to McDonald’s I steamed went (and not for a Happy Meal, mind you).  The charging stations were still occupied, which begs the question, where do you form a line?  If I parked behind either car I’d be blocking their exit.  I’d also be blocking the McDonald’s drive-thru lane.  The only option was the parking space adjacent to the charging stations, with hopes of quickly maneuvering into an available charger before the next person pulls up (EV Charging Flaw #3).

    This story only gets worse from here, so let’s keep it brief.  Once a station was finally available, I pulled in only to realize I had to face the car the other way for the charging cable to reach (EV Charging Flaw #4).  Then I tapped my credit card on the charger, only to find you have to download an app to make the station work; no cash or credit accepted (EV Charging Flaw #5).

    Fifteen minutes later (because that’s what it takes when you only have one bar of wireless service – grrrrr) I got the app installed, the charging cable connected without electrocution (in pouring rain), and ta-dah… NOTHING!  Nada!  Zilch!  No “PRESS HERE TO CHARGE” or some other obvious way to get things started.  Instead, by the good graces of my EV-knowledgeable brother over the phone, I learned I had to zoom in on the tiny app map, identify the McDonald’s location of my charging station, and tap it (EV Charging Flaw #6).  Suddenly Evy’s gods smiled down on me through the thunderstorm and declared “Charge”.

    To say I was giddy to make it back to the airport a day later without a dead Evy is an understatement.  To say I was the target of a sick joke when my very next Avis rental – same day, different airport – was a hybrid is undeniable.  But hey, at least a hybrid gives you the option of gasoline, so you get to fuel up the “old-fashioned way”.  Which brings me, humbly, to declare Dave Flaw #1:  Get to know Evy very, very well before your life – or at least your transportation – depends on her.

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The sky is not completely dark at night. Were the sky absolutely dark, one would not be able to see the silhouette of an object against the sky.

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