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Part 3: From the Midwest to the West (Iowa to Idaho)

First thing in the morning I was back in the car with all of Chris’s stuff ready to head out on the road!

We would have gotten off to an early start, but it took Chris a long time to get his bike loaded up on his car. You have to admit — with all of those bungee cords that bike probably isn’t going anywhere.

Our first big stop along the way was in Mitchell, South Dakota. After seeing all of those signs along the way we couldn’t pass up visiting the world famous Corn Palace.

I’m glad we stopped, because in this town I got to meet my first Native American …

and I got to make the acquaintance of Zeke, an old prospector.

Inside the Corn Palace Summer and I pretended to be ears of corn, which was a lot of fun – we’re so silly!

Outside, though, Chris made me get my picture taken next to this grotesque monster. I was so terrified we had to go back to the car and get out of town.

Our next stop was in the Badlands. It reminded me a little of home, except I’ve never seen a rattlesnake in Qatar.

It was a little strange to see this landscape out in the middle of the plains, though. I mean, at one moment all we can see for miles around is:

and then suddenly we’re in the middle of this:

After seeing all the signs along the way, we couldn’t help but stop at Wall Drug. It was a little overwhelming (not like any drug store I’ve ever been to), but I really liked the cheap coffee.

While I was there I met a really sweet girl. I think she liked me and we were starting to get pretty friendly before Chris and Summer made me leave – I wonder if I’ll ever see her again ….

Next we drove to Mt. Rushmore, but Chris was too cheap to spend $8 on parking so instead we drove around to the side view. If you look closely you can see somebody’s head carved into the rock in the background.

We drove around the Black Hills and visited Wild Bill Hickok’s grave in Deadwood, but we were pretty tired so we only took one picture.

After that we didn’t take any more pictures until we got to the 10,000 Silver $ Bar-Giftshop-Restaurant-RV Park-Casino-Motel in Montana.

Look at those huge hills in the background! This is the first time I’ve seen hills that big. Inside the gift shop I saw these really awesome petrified-poop cowboy souvenirs, but Chris wouldn’t let me get one . The next few hours of the drive along I-90 from Montana into Northern Idaho were among the prettiest of the whole trip so far, but that beauty didn’t carry over very well in pictures (Summer was driving and Chris isn’t very good behind the camera). We’re pretty tired after all that driving, so we’re going to rest for a few days in Summer’s home town of Post Falls.

Until our next adventure, this is Orry waving goodbye!

Part 2: The Middle West

In my life back in Doha, when I wasn’t running on the Corniche or displaying my athletic skills for the public to behold, I spent a lot of time eating the cheap and delicious food. Summer didn’t seem crazy about it, but all of Chris’s favorite things to do near his home somehow involved eating delicious food – good thing I was on Chris’s team so we could out-vote Summer!

Our first food adventure was at the Hamburg Inn in Iowa City.

Chris kept going on and on and on about the sweet potato pancakes. They were a little off this time according to him, but the omelet was top-notch.

After we recovered from that meal, we headed over to Hiawatha’s Hog Wild Days. There were a few people milling about drinking beer and eating cotton candy, but it was this ultra-patriotic stand that piqued my interest in something called the pork tenderloin.

Chris, however, wouldn’t let me get one here. Instead he insisted that the next day we take a 12-mile (one-way) bike ride out to Center Point to eat at Joensy’s.

We don’t ever eat any pork in Qatar, so it was quite a treat to get to feast on Iowa’s Biggest and Best pork tenderloin! Summer wasn’t quite sure what to make of it …

… but Chris showed her how to really eat it right.

Chris and Summer didn’t look too comfortable on the bike ride home (they must have been really full, and I guess it being midday on a hot and humid summer day and the first bike ride either had taken in well over a year had something to do with it) but I had a nice quiet ride in the comfort of Chris’s backpack.

After recovering from that meal we visited Chris’s friend Dan in Madison, WI. On the way out we stopped in Chris’s dad’s hometown of Bellevue, Iowa, right on the Mississippi River. We were lucky enough to see a barge go through the lock!

Watching the barge slowly pass by, Chris reminisced about his high school dreams of riding down the old Mississip as a barge hand. Summer and I tried not to laugh too hard lest it hurt his feelings, but that’s probably the last thing either of us could ever see him doing. This seems much more his speed:

It was great to meet Dan and Drie and to play the Wii for the first time. Madison was pretty and all, and we had a good time getting soaked on a local mini-golf course …

… but the highlight of this trip was definitely the deep-fried cheese curds. Even now I dream about them at night, only to wake up in a puddle of my own drool in need of a long cold shower.

The next day we drove to Chicago to visit some of Chris’s favorite places. First we went to the Baha’i House of Worship which lent itself well to some nice, quiet reflection.

Afterwards we headed downtown to the Chicago Art Institute. We saw all sorts of great famous paintings like Picasso’s Guitarist and the American Gothic. Our trip to Chicago would have been incomplete without another big yummy meal, so we topped our trip off with Gino’s East deep dish pizza. Chris and I of course agreed that the pizza was fabulous …

… and the graffitied decor was quite charming.

Even Summer admitted it was all-around amazing!

After visiting Chicago we returned to Iowa where we’ll soon be departing to continue our road trip across the country. I can’t wait to see what the rest of America has to offer! I must admit I’ve been stuffed ever since Chris started showing us around the Midwest. Tomorrow we’re heading out West – now that we’ll be nearing Summer’s home turf I hope we get to take a break from eating and take in some of the spectacular American landscape I’ve heard so much about.

What?! New content? On this blog? Well, “new” is a bit of a stretch, but this post does include some content. On the cusp of yet another summer road trip, the time is finally right to start posting photos from last year’s road trip with Summer, her dad Buddy, and of course Orry the Oryx. In fact, the real reason this blog hasn’t been updated in over a year is because Orry requested to write the trip report and, well, he’s a slow writer. Anyway, his first entry is finally ready to go, so without further ado here’s what Orry had to say about the whole ordeal (at least part 1):

An Arabian Tail: Orry Goes West

Part 1: Ithaca to Iowa

This was my first trip to the United States, and boy did I get to see a lot! Arriving fresh from Doha after a week long stopover in Spain, our US roadtrip started in Ithaca, New York where Summer and Chris packed all of his belongings into a rented minivan for a full day drive back to Iowa.

Chris was worried he wouldn’t be able to fit all of his things into the van, but with Summer’s help he was able to condense 30 half-full boxes into 12 full boxes and a bunch of garbage (I don’t know why he kept boxes half-full of change, paper clips, highlighters and steel wool, but he did).

Don’t I look cozy looking after Chris’s stuff here in the van?

I spent most of the trip through the Northeast in the backseat so I didn’t see much of anything except Summer’s stylish socks as she relaxed in the passenger seat. Still, even amongst the construction and the wide-open road stretched in front of us it’s clear we’re not in Qatar anymore!

Thankfully they let me ride up front sometimes so I could enjoy the scenery as we entered the Midwest. I felt right at home riding on Chris’s lap in the driver’s seat.

The whole drive was relaxing, but the highlight of this leg of the trip was definitely the amazing I-80 “world’s largest” truckstop.

In fact, if I had to choose one picture to represent today’s journey down interstate 80 it would have to be this picture of Chris and me inside the truckstop:

I’m looking forward to the rest of our trip. After today’s long drive we get to relax for a week and a half in the Midwest before continuing our western adventure.

I will in fact post something to this blog sometime this Summer, I swear.

Until then, though, I’ve uploaded several pictures from our recent trip to Costa Rica.  You can find the pictures here.

Tomorrow my year in Doha comes to an end.  It’s surprising how quickly time passes and how much life continues to proceed the way it always does, even when in a foreign land that one expects to be different from one’s home.  Perhaps during my next few weeks in Spain I’ll find a way to bundle my time in Qatar into a few clever paragraphs that communicate the essence of what this year has been for me.  But I probably won’t be able to.  There are about a dozen posts that I’ve started to write and haven’t finished, and if I can’t complete individual stories it will probably be even more difficult to bring them all together.

In the previews before Pirates of the Caribbean III today I saw the most amusingly wonderful McDonald’s commercial that I really must share.  You can find it at the following website:  McDonald’s commercials in Qatar.  The ad that led me to making this post is the first one listed under “Quality.”  I’m bad at linking, so hopefully you’ll be able to find it.

In my opinion, this is one of the finest examples of how large multinational businesses tailor their advertisements to specific regions.  Also, for those of us living in the United States it’s a nice twist to see a man in a thobe on the screen enjoying a delicious Big Mac made from nature’s finest ingredients.

I don’t want everything on this regularly updated blog to be about driving or analogies to driving, so with this post I’d like to branch out and talk about parking. In physics there’s a topic called static equilibrium — the physics of systems that do nothing but stand still. It sounds pretty dull, but it can be surprisingly interesting when you really look into it. I believe the same to be true about parking here. Although driving is a more dynamic topic, cars can be arranged in novel ways even when they’re not moving.

I got the idea for this post three weeks ago when I went to the finals match of the Qatar Total Tennis Tournament. It was my first experience watching live professional tennis, and I have to say it was pretty exciting. I have pictures of the free-admission tournament and the half-filled stands that I will upload shortly, so check back soon for them. Anyway, when I got there at the start of the match I parked in half-empty parking lot in a clearly marked spot. When I left two hours later, not only were the clearly marked spots full, but so were the not-so clearly marked spots and the clearly marked not-spots. There were also lines of cars in the middle of the usual driving lanes, forming their own clearly marked median. After working my way out of my spot and then driving down a narrow alley with 6 inches of clearance on either side between my car and the cars double and triple-parked beside me, then reversing down that same narrow alley when I ran into a car-blocked dead end a mere 3 meters from the exit, then waiting for one of the cars in the median to do a 15-point turn to work itself free, then standing my ground while other cars trying to enter reversed to let me out (do you like this run-on sentence yet?), I thought too late to myself “Oooh! Why am I taking pictures of tennis matches when I could be taking pictures of parking lots?”
I haven’t found a good parking lot since then, but I found the next best thing: outside of a mosque during Friday prayer. I’m including some representative pictures below. You can find a few more in my photobucket album.

In the picture below, all of these cars are parked on what is usually a 4-lane road.

Here’s an action shot as we drive through what is now a single-lane road in front of the mosque shown above.

The cars below are actually in the center of a T-intersection (as in, they form an island in the middle of the intersection of the two roads).

Cars parking on the median are my personal favorite.

Note the wealth of available designated parking spots well within walking distance of this mosque.

About 50 meters up the road …

I just found this post that I started writing about 6 months ago. It’s incomplete and lacks pictures, but it seemed a shame to delete it.
On the other side of town, near the Mall (not to be confused with City Centre mall or Landmark mall — this is just the Mall) is a large building with a bright neon green sign that reads “Lulu Hypermarket.” The Lulu complex contains a variety of fast food restaurants, a gift store, a jewelry store, a full grocery store and a department store on the second floor. I’ve been there a few times now, and it’s always been frantic and crowded (well, crowded everywhere but in front of the Qatar charity booth). As much as I hate frantic, crowded places, I find Lulu to be strangely charming.

Friday mornings are typically quiet in Doha. Most stores are closed until late afternoon, and absolutely everything is closed for the Friday morning prayer. When store re-open Friday afternoon, though, everything gets crazy.

Two weeks ago I contemplated this as I sat alone at McDonald’s in the Mall sipping my medium soda and waited for my ride to pick me up from the deserted, 99% closed building so we could go grocery shopping at Lulu. We did not plan the trip particularly well — starting with me being dropped off at the closed Mall for the early afternoon while she ran other errands, and finishing with a shopping trip to the city’s busiest grocery store complex at the busiest time of the day on the busiest day of the week the day that Ramadan was to begin.

There are some real gems to be found around Lulu. The children’s section of the department store was great and included a number of cheap bootleg versions of games I know and love, including an 8QR copy of Risk with a paper board and tens of plastic pieces. Summer and I got ripped off when we spent 10QR for our copy at City Centre a few weeks before. My favorite product was the Fun Station, a Playstation knock-off. As advertised, “It just not a game anyhore!”

The downstairs grocery store was arguably the most crowded shopping space I have ever been in. There were “lines” (i.e., masses of people with carts in formations that were longer than were wide) down every aisle. For a person such as myself who gets overwhelmed in Wegman’s on a weeknight in Ithaca, NY, it is a nightmare, but it may be a credit to our adaptability that I met it by shrugging my shoulders and muttering “when in Rome …” as I pushed my way into an empty square foot of space near the Rice Krispies.
Driving in Doha has improved my ability to navigate chaotic traffic situations of all kinds. There is a certain beauty and grace that lies behind the terror and danger of driving here. It is amazing how well things seem to work when everybody looks out for their own interests with no regard to fairness or the well-being of others. As our shopping trip neared its end Summer and I forced our way to the hour-long checkout lanes. There were two lanes in view in the frozen foods aisle, with the left being one person shorter than the one on the right. I started down the aisle in the right lane, with an aggressive woman in an abayyah closely behind on my left. I sped up. She sped up. I sped up some more. I couldn’t see her, but I felt her presence bearing down on me and I knew what I had to do. As we neared the line, the front of her cart about 1 foot behind the front of mine, i veered the front of my cart and nosed in to the left lane — she had no choice but to yield! It was glorious. For the next hour every time the carts in front of us inched forward and I felt the pressure of a recently cut-off woman’s cart pressing firmly into my back I smiled proudly and congratulated myself for assimilating so well.

I’m desperately behind on keeping this up, but to tide you over for a bit, I’ve added a bunch of photos to my photobucket album from December’s trip to Egypt!  Alright, so maybe adding 2 1/2 month old photographs isn’t much of an update, but I’ll have another post coming soon

If you’re looking for another perspective on some of my travel experiences you should check out Summer’s blog.