It started with a phone call from Robin.

Crystal Bridges American Art Museum, our destination.

“Hey, you want to drive over to Bentonville, Arkansas to see the new Crystal Bridges art museum?”

Of course I did. We both adore road trips. Bentonville, home of Wal-Mart, was a nice long distance – about 20 hours – from Washington, DC. We could stop and see friends in St. Louis and Memphis on the way out and back.

We have some road trip traditions, Robin and I. One is that whenever we stop for gas, the person not paying for the gas buys lottery tickets. We are not the lottery-ticket-buying type normally, but on a road trip, anything can happen. When it’s my turn, I go for the MegaMillions and Powerballs so we might win big.

We have a winner!

Robin likes the instant gratification (or, usually, the instant non-gratification) of scratch-off games. We had a big day in Bentonville, winning $10 on a scratch-off game. We have not, however, become zillionaires.

On long trips, we sometimes invent silly games: taking turns, for instance, claiming cities of the world to “own.” Not too long ago, in a sneaky move, Robin snatched Paris away from me. I should not have let her get away with that.

It's hard to work the New York Times Sunday crossword in a moving car, but we managed.

Another tradition: looking for local food. We try not to eat in chain restaurants, and we’re willing to saunter off the highway a good ways to eat local. This trip, we followed some signs to Funderburk’s in Pocahontas, Illinois. Frankly, when we drove up and discovered it was located in a Phillips 66 gas station/liquor store, we were doubtful. But we needed to use the bathroom anyway, and we bought a few lottery tickets for yucks. Then the woman behind the counter told us their fried chicken was hand-cooked to order, and they made the potato salad on the premises. Sold.

Yum! Funderburk's fried chicken.

And that chicken was good, fried crispy and spiced with something akin to Old Bay.

Funderburk’s has a slogan: “Fill your tank and fill your belly.” We can’t vouch for the gas, but we cruised on into St. Louis on very full bellies.

We managed on this trip to avoid one of our traditions: ignoring the GPS directions and improvising from a combination of printed maps, exit signs and billboards, and personal intuition. We are easily swayed, and we generally (and inadvertently) add at least a hundred miles or so to our ride, and then swear we will never do it again.

Our most wonderful food find, though, was in Brinkley, Arkansas, not too far from the Tennessee state line. We asked at the gas station, and they directed us to Gene’s Barbecue. You can get barbecue there, but the real specialty at Gene’s is fried catfish, and we snarfed it up.

Gene's fried catfish and me. Notice a fried theme here?

The fish was light and clean-tasting, rolled in well-seasoned cornmeal and fried – you never batter your catfish. The owner, Gene De Priest, was sitting nearby with a few of his buddies. When he heard we were from Maryland, he came over to show us pictures from his recent hunting (turkey) and fishing (rockfish) trip in our area.

Gene DePriest (far right) with his buddies at Gene’s Restaurant and Barbecue.

Gene’s daughter, Connie, was waiting tables that day, taking some time off from her job as manager of a Wal-Mart store after some foot surgery. Somebody from a visitor’s and convention bureau should hire this woman. Hearing that we were on our way to Memphis, she told us where to eat, where to listen to music, and looked up directions from our hotel to every place we wanted to go. Then she gave us her phone number in case we needed anything while we were in Memphis. Both Gene and Connie totally embodied the idea of Southern hospitality, and we stayed a while after the catfish had disappeared from our plates.

The friendliest person we met on this trip (and we met a lot of friendly people) – Connie DePriest.

If you’re ever there…

Gene’s Restaurant & Barbecue

1107 N. Main Street, Exit 216 off I-40

Brinkley, AR 72021

870 734-9965

As I noted in an earlier post, my friends and I loved our trip to Ethiopia.

Lunch outdoors with our driver Asrat in a small town.

And although we’re all experienced travelers, we learned lots as we went. Here are some more things that might help you enjoy your time there – and do go!

1) Talk to people and ask questions.

Not only is English taught in the schools in Ethiopia, but many subjects, like math and science, are taught in English. So younger people almost all speak English (and they want to practice). Although in the countryside we met people who didn’t speak English, we were often able to chat with people in the towns.

Some of our most memorable moments occurred when we when met a priest in a church and asked him questions about his life. He sent a young boy to fetch his most prized possession to show us – an ancient book of the Gospel John handwritten on parchment in Ge-ez, the precursor language to Amharic. Then he demonstrated for us how he prays and chants.

In Lalibela, we chatted with a teacher from a secondary school, and the next thing we knew, he’d invited us in to meet the administration. They showed up their classrooms and told us about the lives of their students. We were struck by how dedicated to learning they were, while making do with the oldest of working computers and a shortage of just about everything.

Computer lab in a secondary school in Lalibela.

In the Red Terror Museum in Addis, a staffer related his personal experiences of imprisonment  and losing family and friends during the Communist rule of the Derg. The exhibits were moving, but his testimony made the horror truly come alive for us.

 2) Pack your oldest shoes.

Ethiopia is a very dusty country, and outside of Addis you’ll mostly be walking on dirt roads. We weren’t hiking, so mostly wore sneakers and walking shoes every day. I wore a single pair of sneakers every day, and at the end of the trip, I left them in Lalibela, where many young students need any extra clothes or shoes you can spare.

3) Don’t expect to use your credit cards.

Outside of Addis Ababa (and even there at many places), our credit cards didn’t do us a bit of good. Everything operates on cash. But the good news is that Ethiopia is a terrifically inexpensive country. When we arrived, I took a bit over $500 worth of birr out of the airport ATM. When we left two weeks later, I still had over $100 of birr to trade back in. On the way, I’d paid for all my lunches and dinners and tips to guides and drivers, and done a tiny bit of shopping. And I still had money left over.

4) Follow your ears and your eyes.

On several mornings, we heard chanting wafting through the air, beginning as early as 3am. In Lalibela, we asked to see the source. And there, in a centuries-old church courtyard carved out of the living rock, we witnessed a religious ceremony in which priests and monks chanted hauntingly and danced carrying brightly colored spangled umbrellas (part of their ritual vestments). It was a beautiful and moving scene.

Outside of Bahir Dar, high up on a viewpoint above Lake Tana, we spotted a herd of cows down below. “Can we see the cows?” we asked. Soon we were walking in the pasture, admiring the livestock and surrounded by young people who’d been playing soccer a few minutes before. In fact, we braked for cows just about everywhere and scampered out to get a closer look.

5) If you’re going as a group, use a “mommy wallet.”

With four of us in our group, we were constantly paying for meals or tips – and usually one or more of us didn’t have the correct change. So we designated one extra wallet as the “mommy.” Each of us put $100 worth of birr into this joint wallet, and we used it to pay for anything where we all owed about the same thing. When the “mommy wallet” ran out of money, we replenished.

One person we tipped was the young man who watched our shoes when we entered the rock-hewn churches -- and helped us up and down steep steps.

And at the end of the trip, we disbursed what was left four ways.

One person carried our “mommy wallet” the whole time, making it much more simple than for us to keep remembering who borrowed money from whom.

6) (For women.) Bring a scarf to cover your hair in churches.

Although it’s not required for tourists to cover their hair in churches, all of the Ethiopian women do, and we felt it was most respectful to do the same.

More to come in Part III.

Before 8am, three days ago, I got a call from my friend Ann. “I’m down at the Tidal Basin, and the cherry trees are fabulous. You should be here.”

Ann remembers almost every year to make a pilgrimage to see the blossoms. This year, she was willing to do it again so I could go too. I left my house at 6:30 this morning, just as the sky behind the buildings was lightening to that beautiful Maxfield Parrish blue that makes everything look like a stage set. By the time I got to the Mall, the sun was an orange ball peeking around the Capitol dome.

We still had the morning light as we strolled around the Tidal Basin. Some of these pictures make it look like we were the only people around…but that’s deceiving. There was an army of photographers – people carrying cameras with long lenses and tripods, people who looked quite serious about framing their shots. I’m sure we walked into quite a few of them. Other people had brought blankets and were having breakfast picnics between the Roosevelt Memorial and the water.

This year, for the first time, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial is on the cherry blossom path; the statue of Dr. King gleamed among the blossoms in the early morning light.

By the time we finished our circuit, tourists were arriving in force. We made our getaway, serene and smiling.

We loved Ethiopia! My friends Merianne, Jean, Lisa and I spent nearly two weeks In February doing what is called the Northern Circuit. It’s composed of visits to four towns of historic significance – Bahir Dar, Gondar, Axum and Lalibela. We all agreed it was one of our best trips ever.

If you’re considering a trip here (and we really suggest you do), here are some things we learned that might be helpful to you:

1) Choose a local company for your travel arrangements.

At our age (we’re all in our 50’s and 60’s), backpacking through Africa is not an option. Instead, we used a tour company, Travel Ethiopia, to make hotel arrangements and provide a guide and driver when we needed them. It’s a locally-owned (and, yay, woman-owned) business, which meant their prices were much  better than some British companies we contacted in our planning.

Although we adored our guide in Bahir Dar (see previous post), for much of the trip we were simply with a driver/guide, Asrat Eshete. Asrat not only provided all of the information we needed, but he was incredibly attentive to our interests.

This farm family generously invited us in to see their home.

When we said we’d like to see the inside of one of the farm houses outside of Gondar, he pulled off the road, loped across a field and asked a family if we could visit them. Being invited into their two-room house – one room for family, one room for storage and animals – was a highlight of our trip.

2) Spend at least two nights – preferably three – in every town.

If you look at the tour group itineraries, they move often, usually just spending one night in each town. And during that single day, they start early and end late.

An outdoor setting for the traditional coffee ceremony. And the coffee is, not surprisingly, fabulous.

To us, that’s exhausting. We took a typical two-week itinerary and stripped it down to five different places, so in a couple of places we spent three nights. It’s heaven not to be packing and unpacking.

And don’t worry; there’s always plenty to do, even if that plenty is just sitting on the back terrace of the hotel having a drink and watching the sunset.

We also specified, as we always do, that we didn’t want to stay at hotels that catered especially to Americans. We already know a lot of Americans. We were interested in staying where Africans stay. As it turned out, most of our hotels, while distinctly down-market if they were in the US, were among the best in the towns. And we rarely saw Americans there.

The patio of the Tana Hotel in Bahir Dar at sunset.

3) Tell your guide or driver what you’re really interested in.

Although we started with a standard itinerary of the Northern Circuit, we amended it even before we left.

And once we were there, we often ignored what the guidebooks said – and even our established itinerary. Among our group, we were interested in livestock, children and schools, women’s centers, and libraries, for instance.

As a result, in Gondar, Merianne noted that it was wedding season and wondered aloud if we could see a wedding. Soon we encountered two men on horseback, dressed in white with sashes across their breasts in the Ethiopian national colors – definitely a sign of a wedding. We followed them down the road. At the church, Asrat went in to ask if we might come in.

Lots of singing and dancing at the wedding.

We missed the ceremony, but loved the singing and dancing that surrounded the wedding party as they left the church. We took lots of pictures of the bride and groom (they wore traditional silver crowns and capes) and their wedding videographer took lots of shots of us.

In Addis, we inquired about commercial greenhouses, knowing that Ethiopia is a big exporter of flowers to Europe. Sure enough, Asrat drove us out of town, through the beautiful alpine-looking Entoto mountains, to visit a collection of greenhouses.

We learned a lot about growing flowers from this agronomist.

An agronomist walked us through the growing flowers and told us all about cultivating freesia and statice for export; it was a highlight of the trip – but definitely not on any tourist itinerary.

More to come in Part 2.

My friend Merianne and I are highly opinionated about tour guides. Although we knew we’d need guides on our trip to the Northern Circuit of Ethiopia, we were also wary.

With our guide Bob on Lake Tana

We hate being lectured to, especially when guides rattle off dates and events that sound like a 19th century history lesson. We’re much more interested in how people live their everyday lives, and we’d prefer to ask questions than listen to memorized spiels.

So we’ve been delighted here on our first few days in Ethiopia. Our guide, Yinebob Mezigebu, who we connected with through Travel Ethiopia, is our ideal. Bob, as he told us to call him (though the word sounds more like Bohb here), speaks excellent English, always a plus. But what we liked most about him was: he asked us questions before we set out.

We had a set itinerary for our two days here – the usual tourist stops. But Bob wanted to know what we were interested in. Yes, we wanted to see one of the famous 14th century monasteries on Lake Tana, but one was enough. No, we didn’t want to go to the Blue Nile Falls; they’ve been dried up by a government hydroelectric project. Yes, we’d love to see the Nile itself as it flowed out of the lake on its way to Egypt.

Yum! Ethiopian "national food."

We love to visit schools and farms and villages, we told him, not so much monuments and museums.

Perfect. We spent our first morning with a glorious boat ride on the lake, just our group of four American women, Bob and the boat captain. He offered us a choice – there was a longer walk to see the most beautiful monastery on the Zege Peninsula, but we could also visit a nice one where we didn’t have to walk so far. We like to walk, we assured him.

When we needed to bargain with the vendors along the walk, Bob helped us make choices.

14th century painting in the monastery church at Ura Kidane Mihret

Inside the monastery church, he shared both his formal knowledge of the striking canvas murals of Christian Biblical scenes and stories unique to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, but he also told us about his own experience of Christianity.

In the afternoon, abandoning the planned agenda, we visited a school, then walked in the fields among herds of Ethiopian Baran cattle. (Show me livestock and I am a happy camper.)

You can never see too many cattle.

In the early evening, we sat on the terrace outside our hotel, overlooking the lake, drinking wine and eating chocolate, and asked lots of questions about Ethiopian history and everyday life – the way we like to learn.

Before dawn this morning, Merianne and Jean set out with Bob to see an exorcism (yes, you read that right) at a local church – definitely not the usual thing mentioned in the guidebooks. Then the group spent the morning visiting the Grace Center Foundation, an NGO that serves 850 women and orphaned children, and this afternoon, we’re going to the food market.

When we move on to Gondar tomorrow, we’ll lose Bob. We’ll miss him. But if you come to Bahir Dar (and we really suggest you do), you can contact him at Ymezigebe@yahoo.com.

Bob and “Siegfried,” our driver in Bahir Dar