Australia & New Zealand

Australia & New Zealand
Part I - Australia, Part II - New Zealand

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Two Years Later- Tundra Roadtrip in the American Midwest


Naturally, I would love to be updating this blog with yet more trips across Australia, but that is not yet in the cards. Meanwhile, I have been doing some travel that may be blogworthy: 16 university campuses in 6 states in 9 working days. Funny that I was in the South this time last year. So this time around I traded the grits and soul food of Charleston, South Carolina and Tuscaloosa, Alabama for a more (ahem) "acquired taste" - howling winds and blowing snow. Picture the Deep North in Queensland and aim for the exact opposite. How did you celebrate Australia Day?

I celebrated January 26 by boarding a redeye flight to Chicago, landing at 5:10am, and driving to Notre Dame, Purdue, IUPUI, and Indiana University. Mind you, I am not complaining. It was time well spent and an agenda that I drew up.

You not might think that a sheer lust for tourism placed me in a rental car, careening across the great icy flat spot that I grew up in and around. In fact, I did. Let me say this, I had a great time visiting more glamorous spots like Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, and London for work trip last summer. The photo below would imply as much (note, I have wifely approval to post this, so don't infer more than I implied!):


The thing is, I really do like everywhere I go and just about everyone I meet. It is admittedly easier to like strolling down the Esplanade in Cairns as the warm humid embrace of an evening breeze joins the up-tempo beat of live music than it is to like hurrying not even
two blocks from your parked car to the Illini Union as the biting wind causes you to lose feeling in your fingers while encouraging altogether too much feeling in other exposed surfaces like your ears, nose, and neck. The thing is, I have heard good things about these places. I fully expected that I would like visiting schools like Indiana, Penn State, and Wisconsin for the first time - and I did.
So what was the agenda? I flew into Chicago and visited Notre Dame, Purdue, IUPUI, Indiana, Washington University in St Louis, Illinois, Penn State, Washington & Jefferson College, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, Duquesne, Ohio State, Marquette, Wisconsin, U of Chicago, and Northwestern. The map below of the Big Ten (an athletic conference of major midwestern universities and yes, they have had 11 members for about 16-17 years now) gives a nice outline - I skipped the two Michigan schools and the two farthest to the West (Iowa and Minnesota), but spent time at all the others. Specifically, I went to fairs at Indiana, Ohio State, and Wisconsin (the three red ones if you're looking at the map), did an info session at Illinois, and met with administrators at all the schools.
The best part of most travel involves things that go wrong, so let me start with the rental car: the "Check Oil" light was blinking the whole time, so I never saw the odometer except when the key was in but the engine off. Shortly into my trip a fuse went out, so I am not sure what other indications I was supposed to get on the dash. The window takes about 15 seconds to go down and when it goes up it does not close properly, so at highway speed it was as if I had my window down by the smallest possible amount. The folks checking me in were a
little surprised to see I'd put 2687 miles on the car and despite these many but minor flaws, I certainly got good value for the firm (less than 10 cents/mile).

My confidence in the Dodge Avenger was never terribly high, so it did not surprise me when the Dodge's perception of my speed did not equate to that of the Illinois Highway patrol. It's not as if I don't ever speed, I just can't abide by getting caught for speeding when I am not. Fortunately, much like in Western Australia, I was pulled over for speeding and I was given a warning instead of a ticket. In Oz, the oncoming policeman did not see where the speed limit had been raised leaving a construction zone (nor did he notice the car tailgating me, the driver of which was apparently frustrated that I was doing the speed limit). In Illinois, I believe the radar granted me the credit for the speed of a larger vehicle passing me. To complete my vehicular lawlessness, I was given a parking ticket for parking
where I thought the Illinois Business School people told me to go - "we've reserved some spots with the hoods on the meters - park there (pointing)." I did, but I apparently picked the wrong hooded meter, reserved by some other department, so I got a ticket that was subsequently waived.

Before I start singling anyone out for being exceptional, please know that they are all lovely schools and if/when I am back in the area I will surely visit all again (except Duquesne).

Indiana is known as being a nicer campus in a classic college town, Bloomington. It had a broad selection of restaurants in town, a quaint town square, and an all-limestone campus that was somewhat reminiscent of my alma mater, Virginia Tech. Looked like a pleasant place that would be really attractive if I had visited when the trees were green. Nice folks and a ton of students studying foreign languages. It is unusual to find college students who speak foreign languages in bulk. Even those elite, foreign-affairs skewing schools tend to be small. This was a huge school with lots of foreign-language-speaking US students (good for business).

Several folks who graduated from Illinois are friends of mine - a neighbor who played on their '83 Rose Bowl team, a childhood friend who went there and now lives out here in the Bay Area - so it was good to go there. We did an info session and I was impressed how many students attended. Thursday nights are notoriously heavy drinking nights on college campuses, yet despite limited advertising, quite a few students fought the cold and eschewed (or at least delayed) the social temptations to listen to me talk about how they could pay to go abroad. I dropped in an Irish place to get something warm and I realized that after having Irish food about once every other year for most of my life, I had just been to Irish restaurants three nights in a row: Bloomington, St Louis, and Urbana/Champaign (OK, that last one was more of a tavern but the first two were definitely restaurants, not just bars).

That reminds me, in the first one, some guy wanted to strike up a conversation. Now I am a social guy, traveling solo, so I am normally game to talk to passing strangers. Hit it off with a guy at the airport when I flew back, but this is not one of those stories. The first night, I had gotten into Bloomington with almost no sleep the night before, I'd had a long day and driven to four schools, and I just wanted to eat and go. Additionally, even fully rested, this was not the kind of person I would want to talk with too much. He starts in with some weak, pointless poem. 30 seconds? 2 minutes? I couldn't say.
I was kind of tuned out and did not want to encourage him. It was delivered as if it was a pearl of wisdom and I thought "just don't look at him, he'll get the point." Having received no feedback and presumably thinking he should elevate his game, he paused about 2 minutes then said another one notable only for having a few rather unambiguous lines on politics - I had concentrated on not listening closely, but even for those who sympathize with his views it would be a best practice to not make what he said the second thing you say to a total stranger. The better you know me the less you can probably picture me saying this - but I turned and asked, "Are you going to do this all night or are you about done?" Within about 2 minutes he picked up his stew and his beer and moved to a different seat. Solid.

Some older buildings on these campuses are just really strangely laid out. One at Penn State had these odd, sort of House of Escher drawing half floors, but the most unusual was at University of Pittsburgh (known as Pitt). Try to follow these directions: "Go to the third floor, head down the hall that way (motioning East), at the end of the hall, go up a few stairs to room 209". So you go up from the 3rd floor to room 2-something? Yeah.

Now that I've made fun of it, let me note that - surprisingly - one of my favorite campuses was Pitt's. It's surprising because I grew up in Pittsburgh and even took a Spanish class one summer at Pitt, but I was not a fan of the campus at the time. Partly because I live in a city I'm a bit more amenable to city campuses and partly because I've been to 63 campuses in the past year and a half for work, Pitt measures up much better.

There are several architecturally interesting buildings, but the signature building is the Cathedral of Learning. The outside looks like something from perhaps one of the Batman movies, some envision a dreary Eastern European monstrosity from the communist era, I've always felt that it looked a little like it was melting. Some people describe the inside of the Cathedral of Learning as something from Harry Potter - I can't really say, but it is unique (here is my poorly filmed 16 seconds of the Cathedral of Learning at Pitt).


Madison, Wisconsin, home of the University of Wisconsin, is another classic college town with a great reputation. It's this cool college town set between two (frozen) lakes and it is also the state capital. Turns out the reputation was well deserved. All the schools were I met students had very good ones: Indiana, Illinois, Ohio State, and Wisconsin. I did not exactly hang out at the frat parties, so I saw the business game face for most. The quirk here was that the fair ran until 8pm. Mind you I have no "bar stories" from the Australia portion of the blog because I was touring with my son (pictures of whom make the blog readable, I know). I got back to the hotel, dropped off my things, and headed out around 9pm expecting to be crushed by thousands of drunken Badgers. Nothing of the sort - I'm grabbing a quick bite and a brew in this mildly crowded place near my hotel called the Nitty Gritty. Then a few minutes before 10pm students start queuing 5 deep on either side of me but not ordering. There's a quick announcement that 10pm is the Power Hour, everything is $1, and it was on - mass mayhem as everyone orders something on the order of 4 rum & cokes and gets change for their $5 bill. Even in the best of places, acquiring and consuming large volumes of mixed drinks is a recipe for, shall we say, people becoming inconsiderate. That just was not the case here: people could not help but bump you (and I did move to the side behind a pillar for faster drink processing for the others), but they all apologized as if it was their fault and a few struck up conversations (vastly superior to the aforementioned Bloomington bar bard). I left within 20 minutes, so I can't say what an hour of high volume, low cost distilled beverage did for their collective considerateness (is that an adjective?) at the end of the hour, but their reputation was certainly in tact.

Wrapped things up in Chicago visiting two premier universities and our language school. I've left out the more personal meetings because travel is usually about discovery - I am not sure I can make meeting up with an old friend in Chicago, another one in Pittsburgh, my mom in Pittsburgh, or alumni of our program in Indianapolis, Bloomington, and St Louis all that interesting. They were interesting to me, but I am not sure that they are to you. Good times and I'll wrap it up with a photo of the cute kid and the very cute wife that I saw when I got home.