L’ulville’s got the drinks, but California still gets my heart

We get in the car today, like we seem to be doing every other hour around here, already 20 minutes late in leaving.  We’ve now got ten minutes left to drive the half hour to Churchill Downs. “And there will be traffic,” they tell me. I’ve laughed before: Ha! Traffic in Albany? Traffic in Olympia? I often believe that small towns can’t have traffic. Nothing of course can compare to LA freeways, I like to say. We, of course, know the best and the worst of it.

Oh how I’ve been wrong. Traffic is horrific on two lane highways, no matter the city. Santa Cruz, upstate New York, Portland. LA in fact might have it better with five and six lanes. Now that I’ve driven in Louisville, where they never need to contend with more than three, and only have to deal with an offramp once every eight or so miles, I can see how someone would be overwhelmed in LA County.

We Californians are overwhelmed here. You get lost and you’re screwed, for instance, which is what happens today.  We get in the car, twenty minutes late to the rehearsal dinner, pack into the offensively blue PT Cruiser and, for some reason, follow my uncle, who has only been here for twelve hours. Inevitably, we go the wrong way. We get on the 64 East, when we want to go west. I’ve never seen everyone so confused by two itsy-bitsy directions. My mother is squeaking from the back seat again, “Are we going east or west?” and my father is saying, “West,” which is wrong, and she is saying something like, “I think we want to be going East,” and I cut in, “We are going East and it’s wrong,” and my father is yelling at me to call my cousin in the car in front of us.

My cousin whines something to this effect, “They don’t want my GPS. They don’t even know the address.” Now I screech. Specifically, I screech, “Who needs the address to Churchill Downs?!!! Every GPS system knows where Churchill Downs is. It’s like the most famous racetrack in this country!” He, however, can’t hear me, because his family is screaming about the lack of direction in the gene pool, and my brother and my mother are talking incessantly about “just letting go.” I swear never to be shunned from the rental car driver list again.

We finally pull off at the rest stop eight miles up the road. My father, for some reason, has driven beyond the first offramp in eight miles, in favor of the rest area. Rest areas are apparently where one reads maps, so he pulls out the map, and the men confer. They decide to do what we’ve been talking about — turn around. Except you can’t. Because Louisville is like Belgium, or the Autobahn, or Hotel California — once you get on, you can’t seem to get off.

My uncle finally flips a U across the grassy meridian, right in front of the CHP sign instructing him against it, and my father, much to my mother’s chagrin, follows. You wouldn’t think a little PT Cruiser could tip, but oh I bet you it could. I have now seen it come close. My mother, bless her little law-abiding heart, is sitting in a state of shock in the backseat.

I wish for music and an iPhone. My brother tells me people with iPhones don’t have girlfriends; they’re the ones at the party dating their cell in the back of the room. My brother, who has drank his second grande coffee of the day, now begins to bounce around like a four year old in the backseat. He is armed with my camera and shoves it in my face every few seconds, aiming for the most grotesque picture of my nostrils that he can manage.

I drop the map and hold my breath with each driving decision my uncle makes. Will he do it right this time? And this? He does and we make it just as the bride and groom are arriving. It’s the kind of too long adventure that makes you jet for the stiff drinks at the bar.

I must say, I stepped out of the airport Thursday morning at 8:30am, frazzled from a sleepless middle seat flight, and a rotten layover in Cincinnati, and was immediately hit by not only a good whiff of cigarette smoke, but the uncanny sensation of having stepped inside a baked potato. I kid you not. It smelled and felt the same. But mugginess and freeway planning aside, what this town has going for it are the fine expanses of woodsy ranches and an even finer sense for the mint julep.

I stood in line at the bar, eager to have a real mint julep, not the California kind with too much lemon and the wrong bourbon. The born and bred L’ulvillers warned me against it, but one taste told me it had everything I love about mixed drinks: mint, heaps of sugar, and even more bourbon. Oh, the beauty.

Unfortunately, we also discovered that this town has White Castles, the infamous chain with which I had my first, and likely last, experience. At 70-something cents a piece, the cheeseburgers appear to be an excellent deal. Easy too — four bites and you’re done with one. They are served in individual boxes, which attacked every environmental sentiment my little leftist born heart holds dear, and frankly, they are awful. The taste itself could be decent if it weren’t for the consistency. The consistency… well, it’s hard to tell where the meat starts and the bread ends. Were I to be caring for someone recuperating from a wisdom teeth extraction, or were liquid food to once again become the diet rage, I would immediately propose White Castle burgers as paragon. I walked out of the place worse off than when walked in, my metabolism skittish and my stomach seriously confused.

Perhaps in a land where the only restaurants are recognizable, plasticized names — places where you can look at pictures of your food on the laminated fold up menu before you order that food — the burgers are not as deplorable as I found them to be. Or perhaps, as I’ve been told by mid-westerners, they strike at a sweet spot of nostalgia deep in the heart.

But I’m working more on being positive. No longer can you find me hanging in a new town, saying, “Gosh I could never live where I have to drive as much as this.” Nor do I comment upon the local food, which in this case sent me to the “Wal-Mart Neighborhood Grocery” (don’t even get me started on that!) for some yogurt and an apple. No, I do comment out loud, though I silently yearn for my bicycle and organic salad dressings. I am learning to be appropriate and kind at these traditionally happy gatherings, so I discuss my love of the state drink, the tradition of horse racing, and I happily entertain the inevitable questions about grad school.