A Trip To Fort Wayne

(Picture from the city's Wikipedia page.)

The wife & I drove to Fort Wayne, Indiana, yesterday, because that was the closest (so far) that Bill Maher has come to Kentucky recently.  Fort Wayne is about 250 miles from Lexington, but because there's not a major highway connecting the two cities, you have to spend some portion of the drive on highways which pass through small towns, which means stop lights, varying speed limits, & the occasionally horse & buggy.  We opted, on the way, there, to follow I-75 through Ohio most of the way, & arrived in about four & a half hours.

A friend at WRFL, who is from Indiana, told me the place was a "shithole."  My wife, who has not-very-fond memories of living in West Virginia, decided the place reminded her of Huntington.  (Huntington, however, is about an eighth smaller than Fort Wayne, & doesn't have anything resembling a skyline.)  I kept an open mind.  We were going to be there for less than a day; why have preconceived notions that color your short stay?

Complicating matters somewhat was that our youngest beagle, Pauline, who wants to be friends with everything, which means wanting to play with everything, which has resulted in the deaths of things too small to play with (birds, chipmunks) & sometimes mean reactions from things of the same size & even species who didn't want to playing with her (cats, unfriendly dogs), tried to make friends with a skunk on Friday night, which ended as you might expect, & though the wife did her best to de-stink her, we drove the long drive with a lingering skunky smell in the car.  A skunky smell will, in small doses, cause a skunky smell headache, which got to me a little as I drove the last leg there.

But!  Fort Wayne has an awesome vegan restaurant called Loving Cafe which was packed when we visited, & we know why: the food was great.  It broke my heart to think I might never visit there again - when will I find another reason to visit Fort Wayne?  It took nearly forty-eight years & the eccentricities of Bill Maher's schedule to bring me there in the first place!

The weather was chilly but good & though parking was a bitch, we got to the Embassy to see the man himself, & were sandwiched in-between two older couples who, I confess, I would've taken for more conservative on first glance.  (The city has a Democratic mayor, but its City Council & state representatives are overwhelmingly Republican.)  Maher himself joked that perhaps all the liberals in the city were there that night.  He was great, he talked/told jokes/was himself for ninety minutes, & we went back to the hotel, where our pups were waiting, & we were lucky the place let us open the window to the room, because it was a little skunky in there.  (Our apologies to the nice people who had to clean the place.)

After we woke this morning, we walked the dogs through Headwaters Park in the downtown area.  We went to a nice bakery for lunch & I begged the wife to let me drive the longer drive (by around an hour) through rural Indiana, basically running parallel to I-75 on the Indiana side, & driving through such notable small towns as Decatur, Berne, Portland, & Richmond, before stepping over into Ohio through Oxford, & finally down to Cincinnati to pick up good vegan pizza at a place called Mac's, & heading home.

When I lived in Austin, & had to visit the family in Dallas, I would often drive the longer drive through Texas east or west of I-35 just to see more (& also not to drive on dangerous I-35), but eventually I knew it would be faster to just risk my life on that eighteen-wheeler-clogged artery because I knew I'd get there in roughly three hours.  But you see so much of the world by taking a little bit of time - we did in fact see a horse & buggy on the road, as well as driving slowly through Levi Coffin Days in Richmond, & seeing a surprising number of Confederate flags flying from Indiana porches.  (They do know, don't they, which side Indiana fought on during that war?  Here's a hint: the winning side.)

Such a nice little trip we took.  I liked Fort Wayne.  I wish Lexington had a vegan or vegetarian restaurant.  Don't the city's daring restauranteurs know that anyone can eat vegan food?  My wife mentioned while we were at the Loving Cafe that we might be the only actual vegans eating there at that moment!  Let's hope Fort Wayne gives me another excuse one day to visit the town that - contrary to what my friend at RFL said - was a nice little urban area.