Intelligent Travel

Cinematic Road Trip: Arkansas

For the past few weeks John Ur has been heading on a course due south through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. This week he takes a sharp left turn and heads into Arkansas before turning another ninety degrees and heading back north through the remainder of the Midwestern states.

Let me be frank: The film industry in Arkansas is not exactly booming. The state’s largest city and capital, Little Rock, does not hold many famous landmarks except its capitol building. However, because of its resemblance to the U.S. Capitol building in Washington DC, the Arkansas capitol has served as the stunt double for its more famous counterpart in several films, most notably in the television movie Under Siege (1986), when a group of suicide bombers attacked. John Grisham, one of Arkansas' most famous sons, has had several of his stories converted into movies, and his first hit book, The Firm, was directed by Sydney Pollack with scenes shot in West Memphis, Arkansas (as well as Memphis, Tennessee and Washington DC).

But the state also has a few stars-of-screen natives, including Joey Lauren Adams, Wes Bentley, Mary Steenburgen and Billy Bob Thornton. Early in his career, Thornton was able to pull off an Orson Welles trifecta – to write, direct and star in a film (see Welles in Citizen Kane) using Arkansas as his setting. Thornton wrote Sling Blade, a story of a mentally handicapped man who was released from a psychiatric hospital after serving 25 years for the murder of his mother and her lover at the age of 12. This man, Karl Childers (played by Thornton), became an iconic character in popular culture – his gruff bass voice and rudimentary language oft-repeated in satire for comedic effect: Mmhmm, I reckon. Alright then. I used a Kaiser blade. Some folks call it a sling blade, I call it a Kaiser blade.

Cinematic Road Trip: Oklahoma

John Ur introduces us to the "trigger word" and challenges you not to break into song during his visit to Oklahoma.

On my mother’s side of the family, we have trigger words. It's a running joke between my grandmother, aunt, and my mother and I that has been carried down the line. At any random point in conversation, if you were to say a trigger word, the other person will launch into at least one line of song. So, if you were to say, mention the word “spoonful” around mom, she will immediately jump in with: “A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down." At that point, I usually shake my head in disappointment at myself for not seeing it coming.

I can thank Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein for writing the musical, Oklahoma! We collectively can thank former governor George Nigh for making the title tune Oklahoma’s state song. And I can thank my mother for giving me a life with the trigger word, “Oklahoma.” As soon as the state is mentioned, she will round her lips and raise her eyebrows and proceed into the song and a little two-step dance:

“OOOOOOOOooooooklahoma where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain."

The classic image of Oklahoma, besides the Broadway cowboys with gleaming teeth and bandannas around their necks, can be derived from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath—a family of Okies in their overloaded truck driving off through the dust looking for work in California. John Ford adapted this image of Tom Joad and his family to screen back in 1940. Some scenes were shot in Sayre and McAlester, OK, but much of the rest of the film was shot in New Mexico, California, and on sets built on studio lots. (Tom Joad is also a trigger word for Bruce Springsteen’s “Ghost of Tom Joad” in my book.)

But the dustbowl depicted in the film is a bit dated. Right now Oklahoma is in the midst of promoting the geographic diversity in its ten different land regions: the Ozark Plateau, the Prairie Plains, Ouachita Mountains, Sandstone Hills, Arbuckle Mountains, Wichita Mountains, Red River Valley, Red Beds Plains, Gypsum Hills, and the High Plains. It's also working to promote it's Native American history (modern day OK was where the infamous Trail of Tears began) as well as it’s burgeoning wine industry—according to a friend who recently took a vineyard tour while visiting.

Tour Guide: Biking the Underground Railroad

For history buffs out there (you know who you are), the Adventure Cycling Association has a great tour that combines U.S. history lessons with plenty of exercise.

The 48-day, 2,100-mile Undergound Railroad tour takes 14 cyclists from Mobile, Alabama, through the Deep South and the Tennessee River Valley, across the Ohio River, and up through Buffalo, New York, all the way to Owen Sound, Ontario, just like escaped slaves would have done in the 19th century (minus the bicycle, of course). Along the way, cyclists will stop at historic sites, share cooking responsibilities, and camp.

The Adventure Cycling Association is partners with the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Minority Health, which helped create the UGRR route. To get an idea of what the tour is like, check out Joan and Mike's entry on the Review the Ride Registry, who also have a very detailed blog with lots of photos from last year's trip.

The Association has heaps of other multiweek tours, like the brand-new, 79-day Great Western Loop, as well as shorter trips, like the 7-day Cycle Montana route.

For more information about the group's self-contained bicycling trips (you carry your own stuff) and supported tours (they transport your luggage for you), check out their website.

Photo: Adventure Cycling Association/Dennis Coello

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Cinematic Road Trip: Wyoming

Pop quiz: What U.S. state has a population smaller than that of the city of Washington, DC? The answer is John Ur's latest installment of Cinematic Road Trip: Wyoming.

Let me give you a tip about driving through Wyoming. When you have a vehicle loaded up with camping equipment, clothes, and accessories for traveling across the country, it’s probably a good idea to take it easy going up through the Bighorn Mountains between Buffalo and Worland. Though you may be tempted to floor the gas so your car can creep up the mountains at 60 or 70 mph, you’re likely to overheat the transmission and cause the fluid to expand and leak out onto your engine and smoke to come out of your hood.

If this happens to you, especially in the middle of a night without a moon, where there is only endless darkness in each direction, you may have to stop at Ten Sleep. The town got its name from Native American traders who used the number of days walking between trading-post villages as a unit of measurement. There’s only one gas station and if you order pizza at the bar across the street, the bartender will tell you to walk back to the freezer next to the pool table and pick out the frozen pizza that you want her to heat up in the toaster oven.

Fortunately, once you get out of Ten Sleep, Wyoming has a few unique locations that you won't want to miss: the spooky Devils Tower National Monument, Grand Tetons National Park's regal mountains, and the granddaddy of national parks, Yellowstone, with its signature geysers and rainbow-colored hot springs. You may think that you already have an idea of what Wyoming looks like. This is cowboy country. This is the landscape made famous by Brokeback Mountain. But hold on just a moment.  Though Brokeback Mountain was set in Wyoming, it was actually shot in southern Alberta, Canada.

Cinematic Road Trip: Colorado

John Ur returns with the latest edition of Cinematic Road Trip. This time, he's leading us through Colorado.

If you’ll allow me for the second week in a row to journey back to my childhood memories.... I was 13 years old when I took off in an airplane for the first time and headed west of the Mississippi. I landed in Colorado and as we rode in a bus from Denver to Colorado Springs, I sat fixated at the window, thinking 'Look, there are mountains out there!' What I was seeing was the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, which includes Grays Peak and Pikes Peak, which was the inspiration for "America, the Beautiful."

Colorado has a mean elevation of about 6,800 feet—a higher average than any other state (fun fact for nerds like me—Alaska's average is only 1,900). But the eastern two-fifths of the state is mostly flat, thanks to their place on the western edge of the Great Plains, which stretch from Canada to Mexico through ten U.S. states.

But plains are just plains. Mountains are MOUNTAINS. When John Ford made The Searchers in the 1950s, he wanted mountains to serve as the backdrop for a winter scene with John Wayne and a large unit of cavalry. He chose Gunnison as his setting, a city nestled in the valley between the Sawatch and Anthracite Ranges and the Arkansas River. Some second unit filming (which normally does not involve actors, or at least none with speaking roles) took place in Aspen and southwestern Colorado. Other footage features Utah, New Mexico, and California.