Tuesday, February 11, 2003

Today Tallahassee! We had a light breakfast and drove about 30 miles north to Tallahassee. We found the listed start point for the walk at Gold’s Gym, but they said the start box had moved to the Holiday Inn which was across Magnolia Street and one block down the Appalachee Parkway. We drove there and found that there were two alternate walks for the event, one to Lake Ella and one to the state capital. We took both directions and decided to do the capital area walk.

The route lead down Magnolia and then west thru some side streets. I couldn’t see any sign of the capital, and we finally discovered that we were actually using the Lake Ella walk directions. Since we were already a third of the way into the walk, we decided to continue it and do the state capital walk after we returned. The route to Lake Ella wandered thru an old subdivision with a large, Spanish-style entrance and Spanish names for all the streets. The houses differed widely from very small, old cottages to larger and newer homes, almost mansions.

At Lake Ella, we were greeted by some really ugly ducklings, kind of a cross between a turkey vulture and a duck. The lake was quite pretty and was adorned by two fountains spraying water high into the air. From Lake Ella we looped back thru some different neighborhoods to the finish point. We were getting hungry and passed a funky looking restaurant with the name “Kool Beanz”, but we decided we weren’t quite hungry enough to stop and kept going.

We essentially made a U-turn at the start/finish and started the walk to the state capital. This walk circled a rather nice park before passing a Korean War memorial and a government building that looked for all the world like Frank Lloyd Wright had designed it—but I couldn’t find any plaque that either confirmed or disconfirmed that suspicion. There are two state capitol buildings, a nice old one that looks like a traditional state capitol, and right in back of it towers a monstrous monolithic skyscraper completely devoid of artistic merit that is the new state capitol. We circled this set of buildings and passed the traditional-looking Supreme Court building along the way.

By this time we were getting very hungry, but only places near the capital were crowded with suits having lunch. We pressed on and bent the route to walk along Monroe Street, a main drag, hoping to find food. We didn’t have any luck, and I started to get concerned when Monika got dizzy while we were pausing in a used bookstore. And wouldn’t you know it, around the very next bend in the route was, once again, the Kool Beanz Café. Well, who are we to argue with fate? We gave in and went there for lunch.

As the name might suggest, the Kool Beanz Café tries desperately hard to have a California trendy look and cuisine. The artwork on the walls was the currently faddish cartoon-like modern art—Kimi’s new stuff would have fit right in. The wine rack had spaces for 252 bottles of wine, most of which were filled. The menu was printed in all lower-case letters with almost no punctuation, and it took me a minute to figure out that the single number at the end of each sentence was the price of the entree. I wasn’t sure if fate was playing games with us or not and thought longingly of the “Whattaburger” joint that we had seen two blocks away.

Anyway, I had poached salmon and Monika had flank steak, and they turned out to be wonderful meals. The combinations of vegetables and sauces offered with each entrée were unique, but extremely tasty. We saw two real chefs in white uniforms working in the back, and they really did a nice job on our meals. We also enjoyed the freshly-baked bread that was offered for an appetizer. Afterwards, we both felt re-energized for completing the last section of the capital walk, which lead back thru the residential areas to the finish point. Altho both of the walks were nice, we felt the state capital walk had more variety and was overall more interesting. If you are up to it, combining the two walks for a 20 km walk is well worth it, even if you end up somewhat tired and sore like we did. No matter which route you take you will pass the Kool Beanz Café, and you might consider having lunch there if you like California cuisine.

We drove home and were so well fed that we just had a peanut butter and jelly for dinner, which made the clean up easier. That meant less moving around, which was another good thing since we were both stiff. During the night we had yet another Raccoon Encounter. This time, however, he just batted a couple of empty bottles around and then wandered off in disgust. This I would count as a victory for us, so it is now Raccoons 3, Holts 2. Since we have one state park yet to camp in, we have high hopes of evening up the score before we leave Florida.