God Bless Google Street View. I say this because they haven't gotten to the street I live on yet. I also say this because they DO have my childhood home on there.

And, in looking at it, WHAT THE HELL DID THEY DO TO OUR YARD??? They seem to have put some stucco on the outside too, or at least painted it an ugly stucco color. And the rocks! The entire front yard is ROCKS! Please don't respond and tell me it's an acceptable alternative to a yard, I say it's just LAZY. It makes the yard look tiny. The orange tree is gone (I think we got three oranges the whole time we had it. The giant pine tree is gone. The Japanese plum tree is still standing but I guarantee you the new owners aren't enjoying them as much as we did. Oh, that remains the most delicious fruit I've ever tasted.

The house two over is STILL overgrown. I know the Chambers still live in the neighborhood. I wonder if the Moores still live in their old house and I wish I knew what Angie was up to; last I heard she had a baby as a teenager and was living at home (she was in her 20s). In 1999 we drove past her old house and saw an unsupervised child playing in the street--this apple did NOT fall far from the tree (I met Angie because her unsupervised four-year-old self walked right up to me shortly after we moved in).

My virtual bike ride also reminded me how ugly FL can be (sorry, Angi and Samantha).

I also looked up a certain hardware store in Cleveland, OH. Back when I worked for the seed co we were sent to Ohio. One of the stores was an old hardware store in a somewhat undesirable part of town. It was the kind of place you really don't see around much anymore. i remember the owner was very old, and they didn't sell the minimum amount of seed for the season. Our rules were that if the minimum wasn't met we'd leave enough seed to make up the minimum and they'd cut us a check for the amount. Well, he refused to pay the minimum and I just let it go. This man, the owner, was very old and I wasn't sure how much longer he'd run the store. According to google it still stands but the sign was taken down at some point (is there a way to see when the google maps folks took their street view pics?). It was likely one of the last reminders of what the neighborhood used to be.

Labels: past, youth

I may have talked about my summer job where I travelled the country counting seed packets at the end of planting season. I actually worked for the company for two seasons and while I didn't make a ton of money I did enjoy seeing the country at a young age.

I didn't make a ton of money because these people were cheap. While the company is fairly well known we were given insanely low maximums for hotel room and if you had to go over (which I did...I was without a travel partner for much of the time) it was deducted from your pay check. At one point I was in the same city as the Football Hall of Fame during induction week. I think I was at a Super 8 that cost close to $80, and that was about eleven years ago. We were assigned travel partners, but by mid-summer my first year of working for them I requested the San Francisco area and my travel partner opted to go straight home (presumably to do more "bump," a drug she'd raved about in the short time I knew her). This left twenty-year-old me alone, and without a travel partner my expenses increased but my hotel allowance stayed the same. I will save the rest of this story for later if you want to hear it. It's fun, and I look back on those two summers with much fondness. Don't tell them (they'll come back wanting me to reimburse them) but I would've done it for almost free since they covered gas, hotels, meals, and some incidentals. While I did have a cell phone (incredibly rare at the time, and it was parental issue, not company) I opted instead to stop at the various and sundry coin-op phones that you used to see. I ate at truck stops! I spent time in highwayside motels with vibrating beds and sweeping views of the coast and the mountains!

But I'm not going to talk about that today. Instead I'll talk about a small place outside of New Orleans called the Evergreen Plaza Inn in Metairie, LA.

My second summer I was paired with a good friend and we were sent South to Louisiana, the state I'd spent some time in my first year. I was newly 21 and ready to prove it in the French Quarter. After a weekend of such, L and I ended up in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. I'm not sure why we chose the Evergreen--I think it's probably because of the hotel coupon magazines you see at rest stops (those things were a lifesaver--we stayed smack in the middle of the Quarter for $29 a night).

The front desk clerk was an albino version of Richard Simmons who wore thick glasses and clear polish on his fingers. Our room was by the pool and we could see no problems with this. Upon check in we noticed that one of the channels seemed to always show free pornography; we couldn't believe this and left it on all the time because we COULD. There was nothing titillating about this, it was simply an oddity that we embraced. The source of this pornography was a VCR in the business office; I found this out when I went to pay for another several days and saw Albino Richard switching the cassettes. At the end of our stay we were completely desensitized to sex.

We later found out that this hotel was a preferred spot for thug teens to throw parties. We were awakened in the wee hours by the sounds of hardcore porn (this time NOT from our own television) and the terrible noises created by Master P 9I am loathe to call it "rap," let alone "music"). Apparently there was a pool party also. We called the hotel office and the music only got louder. The hotel office really treated us in a way that led us to believe that the Partiers' comfort superceded ours. Luckily our stay in that area was done and we moved on.

There was also a weird supernatural event that I won't go into here, but I would not be surprised to find out that the seediness of this place thinned the veil between our world and the Netherworld.

More information can be found:
The hotel's official site
TripAdvisor review from 2003. Little seems to have changed.
A very bare Yahoo travel page, worth linking only for the sole review (close to the bottom).
The Google Maps view. Take a look at satellite view, zoom in to see the pure class.

Labels: travel, youth