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I am just in following an afternoon spent in airports and in the air, and it feels wonderful to be back in my own house among my own things, relaxing on my couch with my cat on my lap.

The Washington trip was beyond belief, and tomorrow (Sunday) I will certainly write all about it.

WASHINGTON — Until I was an adult I had never slept in a hotel.  A motel, yes, but a hotel–with hallways inside–was something I didn’t know anything about.  Since that first stay, in an old building on Boulevard de Magenta in Paris in May 2001, I have spent many nights in hotels in places near and far.  Some of these hotels have been dismal and some have been very comfortable and some have been quite fancy.  But the hotel where I am staying this week is opulent.  There’s really no other way to describe it than extreme luxury.

The Omni Shoreham is an historic hotel, opened in the early 1930s as the Depression was crippling the nation.  Roosevelt had is innagural ball here in 1933, and many presidents since then have as well.  The Beatles had their own floor in here in 1964.  The grounds are splendid, with a gorgeous garden.  And, though it requires a short subway ride to get to the Mall, the neighborhood is charming, and we’re right across the street from a popular and tasty eatery. When I woke up this morning there was hot chocolate and a Washington Post outside my door.

But, last night, as I was sitting on the patio above the garden next to a firebowl, watching the lights flickering in a fountain beneath bright yellow and crimson trees, I thought about how unlikely the situation was.  I study British literature, and a significant theme in 18th- and 19th Century novels is class.  Two hundred years ago, only the super rich would have ever experienced such opulence.  In fact, even when this hotel opened, only a select few Americans could afford to stay.  I am really surprised to find myself in this situation.

WASHINGTON  — The “river visual” approach into Washington National Airport is amazing.  The airport itself sits along the Potomac, and to keep planes from flying over the monuments and the White House, pilots guide large jets down the river, getting lower and lower, while making sharp turns to follow the contours of the water.  If you’re on the port side of the plane (and I was), at the very last minute before touchdown, the Washington Monument, Capitol, White House, Watergate, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Memorial and Jefferson Memorial all come into view.  Then the pilot puts the engines into hard reverse to keep from driving off the runway.

The same day that I flew from Gainesville to Atlanta, then Atlanta to Washington–a trip totalling less than two and a half hours of air time–I also saw the first airplane that ever flew.  And a in a room right next to it, the spacecraft that put the first astronauts on the Moon.  I saw their spacesuits, too, and touched a piece of moon rock.  I saw the Spirit of St. Louis and the Gemini capsule to took John Glenn into orbit.  It defies belief.

A whirlwind roadtrip to North Carolina this last weekend with friends (photos here) took me to a used bookstore in Chapel Hill that was a delight, with tall stacks of old books piled high to the ceiling.  There were even cats walking around, and lying next to the cash register.

I have been looking, of course, for novels related to the courses I am taking, and others from the 18th- and 19th Centuries.  In that regard I found thousands of different volumes that qualified.  But, as I may have written before, I have become fond of a few different series of books put out by Oxford World’s Classics, Norton Critical Editions and Penguin Classics.  This shop had many of those.  I found, alas, many of them full of highlighting and notes in margins, which I simply cannot abide.  I certainly have no qualms about owning something used, but it’s distracting to see what previous readers felt was important, and which I may not feel as significant.  But I did find pristine copies of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Brontë’s Jane Eyre. for $3.99 apiece.  I was distressed that the expired parking meter ended my visit before I could browse the poetry and children’s section.  I would have loved to pick up some Milton and Donne, and a copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

So, now inspired by this great old store, I hope to visit more like it.

So, it occurs to me that I didn’t give a detailed account of the trip to South Carolina since I returned last week, so, here goes.

The Westin hotel at Hilton Head Island is nice enough.  The room was pleasant, with a large, comfortable bed, and a couch near a sliding glass door that opened to a balcony overlooking a courtyard with oak trees and a small pond with a fountain.  To the left was a small circular pool, and slightly obscured by shrubbery was a hot tub.  Beyond still more trees was the main pool, which was constantly in use by the children of guests.  There was a cabana with yellow towels to the right, which guests used both at the pool, and at the beach which was to the left of our room, beyond the dunes.  The beach access was via a boardwalk, and the sand at the end was white and deep, and at the shore a bit grittier, with bits of crushed shells.

We took a long walk the first evening, down the strand to where it curved out of sight to the west.  North of the hotel were private homes, many of which had their own boardwalks over the dunes of sea oats to the beach.  I was surprised by how wooded the beach was, with tall pine trees in several places coming right up to the sand.  I have watched for years as Atlantic hurricanes head invariably toward the Carolina coast.  It would seem, however, that this particular stretch of shore has been spared.  The large beachfront homes had, in many cases, enormous unprotected windows.  I wondered how expensive it would be to ensure these structures.

At a point far to the northeast of the hotel (visible at the bottom left of this satellite image), the shore curves sharply to the north by northwest, and marks the end of the island, and the opening of a channel into the inter-coastal water way.  It was just past that point, at some wooden pilings driven into the sand, that we turned around and headed back to the hotel.

That evening we went to a local shopping center to pick up some supplies to get us through our stay.  I bought Hawaiian Punch, which I love.  That night, and each night thereafter I watched the Olympics on TV, though I was surprised and disappointed by the small low-def television in our room.

The next morning I attempted to begin reading Robinson Crusoe on the deck down by the pool, but the shouting and cavorting of children made it so that I couldn’t concentrate.  The weather in the morning was overcast, and surprisingly cool, so that it felt and looked like Florida in the winter.  Miriam had the afternoon off, so we went exploring the island, stopping first to have lunch at a barbecue place, which was tasty.  Miriam had picked up a map from the concierge desk, and she had an idea to check out an area on the southwest part of the island which supposedly had a lighthouse.  It was terribly disappointing, however, as we found that this was all merely stagecraft.  The “lighthouse” was not a real lighthouse, but just a three or four story round structure built for show above some lame gift shops selling garbage nobody could possibly need.  There were some large yachts in the marina there, and some smaller vessels for hire to wealthy vacationers wanting to fish for sharks.  I say wealthy, because the fees were in the several hundreds of dollars per trip.  Seeing how every structure on the island (except the fake lighthouse) was painted in one of only about three or four drab colors, and how entirely void of culture and imagination this whole place seemed to be, we went back to our hotel bitterly disappointed.  It could not escape my notice that the whole Hilton Head enterprise seemed to rely on a type of caste system, in which every person I saw at leisure was white, and, almost without exception, every servant and laborer was black or Mexican.  Some of the personnel at the front desk of the hotel were white, as was an employee of a bookstore I went to.  But every person doing actual work was a minority, and it depressed me to realize how society there depended upon this social stratification.  That isn’t to say that Oprah or Tiger Woods wouldn’t have been welcomed with open arms.  Rather, what was so depressing to me was the observation that, for many scores of children living in Hilton Head, or visiting regularly, this hierarchy might reinforce the notion that it is the privilege of rich people to have endless leisure, while people of color exist to serve.  I have traveled around the country, and to other parts of the world, even, but never had I seen such a degree of what was referred to in Samuel Johnson’s time as social “subordination”.  As someone who lives in a diverse community, I found this to be shocking, and dispiriting.  Vacation is obviously something that requires a certain amount of disposable income, and for many working poor, there is far less income to be alotted to liesure these days.  But, in spite of its total lack of culture, inspiration and imagination, Hilton Head, South Carolina attracts a far less varied spectrum of society than Walt Disney World.

So, finding there to be only one worthwhile attraction (the beach), and finding the next two days of our stay spoiled by rain, I spent all the remainder of my time either in my room reading, or in the lobby watching the Olympics and drinking delicious lemonade.  I am sorry to say that free lemonade was the best thing about Hilton Head, South Carolina.