Into the Land of the Large

Created on Sunday, 17 October 2010 22:40

Published on Sunday, 17 October 2010 22:40

Written by Randy Garbin

Rough Draft Roadtrip, Sixth Day

North of Cave City along Route 31E, you will find plenty of pleasant scenic countryside, but you won’t find much in the way of classic roadside attractions. The road does drive pretty fast, though, so it makes an excellent alternative route to Louisville over the Interstate. Ten minutes on I-​anything, and I can feel my blood pressure rise a few points and the fatigue seep into me like coffee into a doughnut. The back road might add an hour to the drive, but you arrive more relaxed — tired but happy.

Scream all you want, but you’ll get no ice cream here. This sign hangs over a charming but closed store front in Horse Cave, Kentucky.

Except for the travel between home and Winchester, Virginia and the stretch across the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the only part of this trip where I retraced any of my steps from previous roadtrips was in Goshen, Kentucky. In 1998, during a cross-​country road trip from Portland, Oregon to Worcester, Massachusetts I met up with Ava Fox, a woman who had called me a few weeks before to identify herself and her then-​husband, actor Ken Kerchival as the ones who purchased and moved Schmid’s U.S. 30 Diner in Ronks, Pennsylvania back in the late 1980s. This solved quite a mystery, because this diner appears on a very common postcard, and ever since I started Roadside, I had heard of rumors of Kerchival buying this diner and moving it to Los Angeles. In fact, the diner only made it as far as Tennessee.

Ava told me that she and Ken had the diner dismantled by a crew of local Mennonites to break down the structure and stuff all the parts on on a semi-​trailer. The plan then called for reconstructing the frame on the California site and reaffixing all the parts, creating a new diner from the original pieces. As described in our story Ava Fox’s Diner Odyssey in issue 27, her plans soon fell apart and the project was abandoned.

On my way back from Portland, I met with Ava and she gave me further details about her amazing story, asking me if I might find a buyer for the dismantled structure. I couldn’t, but I eventually lost touch with Ava, and worse still, I never saw the diner. She told me at the time that she had it in storage on her grandfather’s farm north of Nashville.

I drove up Route 42 from I-​271 and nothing looked at all familiar. In fact, the one landmark that I’d never forget, the Melrose Motel and Restaurant, had long since replaced with a strip mall. I stayed at the motel and had dinner with Ava at the restaurant. I passed through Goshen without any idea of how to find Ava, so I kept driving now into virgin (for me) territory. I have to think Shmid’s ended up in a landfill or saw some parts auctioned off, but I could be wrong. I hope I am.

For scenic drives, you can’t do much worse than Route 42 along the Ohio. Though you’ll find no diners along this stretch of the road, diner fanatics will find something on the way that might interest them. North American Stainless Steel operates a gargantuan plant on this road right on the banks of the river. Other than that, hardly a vintage motel or neon or much of anything else but farms and the occasional subdivision, several unfinished and not likely to be finished anytime soon.

The night ended with dinner at Frisch’s Big Boy and sleep in another EconoLodge. I hadn’t dined in any Big Boy franchise since stopping in the original in Los Angeles in 2000. No “googie” styling here in Erlanger, Kentucky, though, but the restaurant did feature a real fiberglass Big Boy statue. Most of the Frischs’ do, though their versions strike a different pose than the one we all know and love (and that Baeder has in his back yard).

Sadly, most of the clientele in that place seem to be doing their utter best to mimic Big’s physique. I had entered the Land of the Large. I wish I could say I exaggerate, but easily three-​quarters of the customers in that restaurant appeared morbidly obese. And nothing saddens me more than children in this state. No wonder the Chinese are eating our lunch.

The view from my room at the EconoLodge, Erlanger, Kentucky.

I want to warn you against sleeping in an EconoLodge, at least based on my last night on the road. Despite its status as your basic, low-​cost chain motel, the quality between these places seems to vary as wildly as their price. In fact, I paid ten dollars more for this room than the Econo room I had in Lebanon, Tennessee, but the experience sleeping there just about sucked any remaining desire I had to stay on the road. Beige, brown, tired, dingy, and yes, inhabited by cockroaches, the Erlanger EconoLodge looks like the set for a low-​budget 1970s porn flick… from Soviet Russia. The TV worked and the bathroom had a good strong shower, but housekeeping also forgot to clean my in-​room coffee maker and didn’t provide me with a working pen to make notes on the supplied pad. I used my own to write on a sheet of paper I left near the tip envelope:

Cockroach in bathroom

Coffee maker not cleaned.

Pen not working.

So, tip not left.