The National Museum of Funeral History

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One place I didn’t go in February was Ghana, the west African nation. If I had to pick a place to visit in that part of the world, I might well pick Ghana, for various reasons. One is that the coffin shopping is unlike anywhere else.

Rather, I stopped by the National Museum of Funeral History in northern Houston, which has a connection to Ghana. I was expecting a display of coffins maybe, but the museum has so much more: many hearses, horse-drawn and automobiles; items from the funerals of U.S. presidents and popes, including a large display about the funeral of President George Bush the elder; entire sections on cremation and embalming from the earliest times to now; Victorian death memorabilia in its macabre (to us) variety; a Day of the Dead exhibit; and, to my surprise, Ghanaian coffins, which the museum calls the largest such collection outside west Africa.

My favorite, though it’s a hard choice: the Duracell coffin, with its distinct copper top. Guess those batteries are sold in west Africa. You’d think Energizer would be the better choice.

The museum, founded in 1993, occupies more than 30,000 square feet in an unassuming building in a neighborhood of unassuming buildings. Had it not been for the billboard advertising it on the highway into Houston, I might have missed it. Or not. I have a way of ferreting out smaller museums. One important advantage of the NMFH: it’s open on Mondays. Many Houston museums are closed on Mondays and Tuesdays — the two days I was in town.

As with many specialized museums, NMFH is the legacy of a single person with a driving interest in a single subject and, in his case, access to many of the relevant artifacts. The subject just happens to be death adjacent, so when I mention the museum, people get a little weird.

“The idea for the Museum grew from Robert L. Waltrip’s 25-year dream of establishing an institution to educate the public and preserve the heritage of death care,” the museum says. Waltrip, a Houston mortician born to an undertaker father, didn’t need death care himself until recently, dying in 2023 at 92.

The hearse collection is impressive, making the museum count as a carriage and auto museum. Not all automotive hearses, at least in earlier times, looked like the stretch postwar hearses one thinks of now.

A vehicle the likes of which I’d never seen: a 1921 Rockfalls Hearse, built in Sterling, Illinois, the museum says. The hearse’s hand-carved body is composed of six types of wood.

Some horse-drawn hearses.

A children’s hearse from, of course, Victorian times.

Some coffins and caskets, too. “It’s not the cough/that carries you off/but the coffin/they carry you off in.”

Including an oddity known as the Money Casket, which is on loan to the museum, and was never meant to be put into the ground.

A section about presidential funerals. I spent a while there.

Prominent is a replica of President Lincoln’s casket.

There was a model of Lincoln’s funeral car, probably the most famous such in American history.

Other methods for carrying Lincoln when he wasn’t on the train.

Other presidential funerals got their due, such as those of Washington, Grant, Garfield, McKinley, TR, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford and as mentioned, an entire small room about the elder Bush. He had a funeral train as well, though relatively modest: from Spring to College Station, all within east Texas.

Papal funerals, as you’d think, involve a highly precise set of rituals, told in some detail by the museum.

There is much more.

All in all, a first-rate museum about coping with finality.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park ’26

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In August, you can gather at the natural entrance to Carlsbad Cavern at dusk, sit in a stone theater, and watch the bats fly out of the cave. After more than 50 years, I remember that.

A park ranger at the time mentioned that only once, in all his time watching the bats emerge, had one flown into a person – a woman with a beehive hairdo. That might have been a joke, but anyway all the bats flew away in a surging torrent, the crowd quiet with awe, but the flapping of thousands of wings making a curious whooshing. Then a trickle of straggler bats came out. None interacted with any of us humans. Clearly, bats have better sense than that.

A Greek-theater inspired structure. It must have been. More work of the everywhere-all-the-time (for a little while) CCC. In February, the bats do not emerge at dusk, so isn’t something you can sit for at Carlsbad Caverns National Park.

But you can walk into the natural entrance of the cave, as we did on February 19. I blew $2 on reserving an entrance time, but it was hardly necessary. A fair number of other people were there, but not enough to form a distracting crowd.

It’s an Empire State Building down, step by step. Even so, you’d think that going down wouldn’t be too difficult, since gravity is doing most of the work. Turns out, gravity is just a mite too enthusiastic when it comes to doing that work, so you struggle to keep a measured pace, full of the stress of knowing that a simple tumble might put you against hard rock in a hard hurry. So the trip down was exhausting.

It doesn’t take long to get to the artificial light zone. Almost all of the void below, that is.

After a 30-minute downward walk, you arrive at the Big Room. “Within the Guadalupe Mountains there are more than 300 caves, and 119 known caves within Carlsbad Caverns National Park,” notes the USGS. “The Big Room in Carlsbad Cavern is the largest cave chamber in North America, with 8.2 acres of floor area.

A limestone phantasmagoria, to promote a word that not only fits, but needs to be used from time to time. The path through the Big Room takes about an hour. Towers such as these have names, but who could be bothered to remember them?

A parade of spectacular stalagmites and -tites and other unbelievably elaborate stone agglomerations, wet with millennia of cave building. In geological terms, about as permanent as an air bubble in a bank of mud, but for short-lived creatures with access to electric lights, a serious wow.

On the other hand, even a cave of superlatives such as Carlsbad begins — like fellow superlative attractions such as trails that wind endlessly through mountains or grand basilicas or giant art museums or even House on the Rock — to wear thin at the end. Wow, more spectacular stalagmites and -tites! More wet agglomerations!

But I quibble. Awesome is awesome, and I say that with the stress on awe.

Guadalupe Mountains National Park

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First things first, especially since I just spent a month in Texas: Remember the Alamo. One hundred ninety years now.

At dinner at our friend Judith’s home late during my visit, she served a delicious cobbler for dessert, and suggested ice cream with it. I was able to bring up that Bennett Cerf-worthy pun, remember the à la mode.

This handy list of U.S. national parks, ranked by number of visitors in 2024, tells me that if you can’t drive to the highlights of the park, people aren’t going to go. Or, if they’ve never heard of the place, they aren’t likely to go either. I can only speculate that that’s because most people spend shockingly little time poring over maps, paper or electronic.

Speculation aside, Guadalupe Mountains National Park in West Texas is the 52nd most-visited park in the current count of 63 parks, which is to say, almost in the bottom 10 least-visited parks, just behind Congaree NP, but ahead of Voyageurs NP. There is a single road that goes to GMNP from the south: the two-lane, remote as can be Texas 54, which joins US 62/180 just south of the park. That’s the way we went on February 18, traveling from Marathon by way of Marfa and Van Horn.

You can drive into the edge of the GMNP on US 62/180, stopping at Pine Springs Visitor Center. If you want to go further in, you walk, or ride a horse, I suppose. We spent a couple of hours in the park, taking short walks — totaling maybe a mile or so — near the visitors center. It was mid-afternoon when we arrived, and more importantly, we weren’t prepared for a long walk, or a horse ride either, especially on a very warm day.

But I did want to stop by, just to be sure that I’d really been to the park. That’s how I think. We might have stopped briefly in the area in August 1972 during our family cave vacation — I imagine there was a roadside stop to admire the Guadalupe Mts., at least — but maybe not. Also, a little reading tells me that the park itself didn’t formally exist in August of that year, when we went to Carlsbad Caverns, but came into being on September 30, 1972. So technically there was no park to visit at that moment. In any case, now I can say for sure that I’ve been to GMNP, as one of the 37 I’ve visited in the U.S.

Even from the visitor center, the Guadalupe Mountains are close at hand.

That is Hunter’s Peak, whose summit is 8,368 feet above sea level, and a fair ways above the visitors center, whose elevation is 5,734 feet. Not huge, but still a pretty photogenic uplift of the Earth’s crust, I’d say.

The sun was in a good position to light up that peak. Not so much for Guadalupe Peak (elev. 8,751), the highest elevation in Texas, at least from where we stood.

Flora along the way. Fauna wasn’t to be seen, except for a few bugs. But they are out there. Maybe some feral pigs.

Speaking of map ignorance, how many people in the wider world realize Texas has mountains? I knew that, of course, but only vaguely that they are relics of an ancient reef, called Capitan Reef by us clever apes; one formed 260 to 270 million years ago – before dinosaurs, even – when the area was under a shallow tropical sea. Visiting the park schools you a little on that hard-to-imagine mountain formation process, in which a thousand thousand years is a small turn of the wheel.

Guadalupe Mountains National Park

“Over millions of years calcareous sponges, algae and other lime-secreting marine organisms precipitated from the seawater,” notes the NPS. “Along with lime, they built to form the 400-mile-long, horseshoe shaped Capitan Reef. Eventually the sea evaporated… the reef was entombed for millions of years until a mountain-building uplift exposed part of it.”

Much more recent chemical reactions created the dazzling void we call Carlsbad Cavern inside the uplifted reef, but that’s a story for another day.

One trail from the visitor center leads to the ruins of a way station on the Butterfield stagecoach route.

Or more exactly, the epic plains and desert route used by the Overland Mail Company, whose stages did mail runs from St. Louis and Memphis to San Francisco from 1858 to 1861. Upstate New Yorker John Butterfield, a stage operator of great experience, was president of the Overland Mail Company and — incidentally — founder of American Express. Quite the story, depicted in movies of earlier times and for all I know, dime novels, though not so much any more.

That stage took passengers, too. Those who gripe about the minor discomforts of modern air travel would be advised to ponder the extreme discomforts of such a journey.

Per Wiki: “A correspondent for the New York Herald, Waterman L. Ormsby, remarked after his 2,812-mile (4,525 km) trek through the western US to San Francisco on a Butterfield Stagecoach thus: ‘Had I not just come out over the route, I would be perfectly willing to go back, but I now know what Hell is like. I’ve just had 24 days of it.’ “

Big Bend National Park ’26

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Texas has a feral hog problem. Driving at night on Texas 130 east of Austin, where the speed limit is 85 mph – the highest posted limit in the Western Hemisphere, according to Wiki – car-hits-hog is no idle scenario. Busted hog, busted machine. So I drove with care when I spotted what I took to be wild hogs on the remote main road into Big Bend National Park.

Took me a minute to work out that they weren’t quite pigs, though clearly evolutionary cousins: javelinas. Also known as peccaries. One of the many creatures living in the desert reaches of Big Bend.

We’d come on February 17 for Yuriko’s first visit to the park, but not mine. Not an issue, since no two visits are ever alike in such an epic desert. First stop, a trail near the visitor center, for a closeup look at some flora, and signs describing them.

Next in my series of national park fire hydrants.

Just where is that water pressure coming from?

We drove where it was possible to drive in the park, such as Chisos Basin, and did some walking where it was possible to walk. But not long walks, since temps were touching 90 F.

Toward the east end of the park is a spot off the road labeled “Rio Grande View” on the map.

Rio Grande View, Big Bend
Rio Grande View, Big Bend

Good view, including some of the Sierra del Carmen, but you have to squint to see the Rio Grande. There it is, I said, spotting a narrow ribbon of greenery off in the distance that might have been the river. Yuriko wasn’t sure she could see it.

A few miles further east, the riverine border is very much visible from a bluff atop the U.S. side, the Boquillas Canyon Overlook.

We’d come to the eastern part of the park for the Hot Spring — the ruins of a bathhouse, these days — but flooding last year made the unpaved road leading that way impassable to vehicles. It was possible to walk there two miles or so along the ruined road, treating it as a track, but we opted out of that, taking the formula Heat + Age + Long Walks = Trouble seriously.

No matter, we backtracked and went to the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive, a road I’d thoroughly enjoyed in 2018, and I did again.

An overlook on that road shows you how little territory a road actually occupies. A ribbon crossing a vast expanse.

My own favorite part of the park: Santa Elena Canyon.

The high bluffs are in Mexico, on the other side of the Rio Grande. ‘

I hate to even mention it, but build a wall through the park? Idiots.

GTT ’26, With a Small Side of NM

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Never cared much for the term snowbird, with its connotations of getting up every morning to play golf during winter in some arid place, or spending the evenings with members of your cohort in some gated community, maybe drinking but definitely grousing about the state of the world. Still, considering that in the winter of 25/26, I’ve spent two out of the last three months – the hard winter months, up Illinois way – in warmer places, it would be churlish to cast shade on fellow old people who happen to enjoy golf or grousing.

On the other hand, I’m not about to claim snowbird as descriptive for myself. I just happen to be able to take long trips during the cold months (along with my laptop, for work). In December, Florida. In February, Texas.

Back on February 3, I got on a plane and flew to Austin. I flew home from Dallas on March 3. In between, I spent time – and Yuriko joined me for a while – traversing the state of Texas, going so far west at one point that we ended up in New Mexico. By traversing, I mean long drives, in a rental car part of the time, and in my brother Jay’s car as well, a blue Subaru known as the Blubaru.

I drove from Austin east to Houston, mostly on US 290; from Houston to Nacogdoches, mostly on US 59; then to Dallas on various state highways, such as Texas 21 and 19; and from Dallas to San Angelo to Marathon, Texas, on US 67 and on the grandly remote US 385, which will also take you to the desert reaches of the Big Bend.

From Marathon, Texas, across to Carlsbad, NM, our route took us along US 90, then Texas 56, then US 62/180. Later, US 62/180 took us from Carlsbad part way back to Dallas — to Sweetwater, Texas — but mostly we went on the faster but less interesting I-20. Dallas to San Antonio was partly I-35, but also US 281, which takes you around the perma-gridlock that is Austin.

Of all those, the road between Nacogdoches and San Augustine on a day trip, Texas 21 heading east, winding through greenish (for February) rolling hills, was a favorite.

The towns listed above were just the places I spent the night, alone or with Yuriko or with my brothers. In between were such places as Bastrop, these days a day-trip from Austin, with the requisite boutiques and restaurants; Huntsville, home of Sam Houston and memorials to the first president of Texas; San Augustine, rival with Nacogdoches in claiming to be the oldest town in Texas; Stephenville and Ballinger, geographically about as deep in the heart of Texas as you can be; the West Texas art town of Marfa and the way station of Van Horn; a string of oil patch towns such as Hobbs, NM, and Seminole, Lamesa, Snyder, and Sweetwater, back in Texas. Later, traversing north to south and back again, I stopped in Hillsboro and Belton, along the I-35 axis; and Lockhart, which has claimed for itself barbecue capital of the state.

Along the way, oddities were encountered. Otherwise, why drive on smaller roads?

Such as an ice cream shop in Waller, Texas.

Or a highly visible ad for Rockets RV Park in Gaines County, Texas, not far east of the border with New Mexico.

A former Texaco station on an obscure Texas highway (Farm-to-Market 1690).

Had various encounters with the historic El Camino Real, whose various tendrils crossed a large slice of the future state of Texas, once upon a time.

Yuriko and I visited Big Bend National Park, Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns National Park. I saw the National Museum of Funeral History in the city of Houston and the museum devoted to Houston (the man) in Huntsville. Also, Roadside America in Hillsboro, an eccentric collection of American commercial art, complete with a personal tour by the proprietor, and the outdoor art at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, that is, brutalist concrete structures in the brutal desert environment. I became acquainted with the splendid Glenwood Cemetery in Houston and the smaller and more ragged, but no less interesting city cemeteries in Huntsville and Nacogdoches. I stopped and looked at about a dozen county courthouses, of which Texas has many.

We ate a lot of meat along the way. As one does in Texas.

Also, Mexican food.

Eat like that and you’d better do some walking, and I did: various places in Austin and Houston and Dallas, in all three national parks, around downtowns and courthouse squares in a number of small towns, and a handful of local parks.

All that was good, but of course best of all, I had time to visit friends and relatives, of whom there are many in Texas: Tom and Nancy in Austin, Kirk and Lisa in Nacogdoches, another Tom and Steve and Ron and Greg and Judith in San Antonio, to list the friends; both brothers, two out of three nephews and their wives and all four of their children, to list relatives, along with the mother of one nephew’s wife (niece-in-law sounds peculiar, but that fits too). Also, I met for the first time two good friends of Tom’s, and one of Kirk and Lisa’s granddaughters.

I’d set out to do four long drives when I was 64, but this makes five. Guess I’m an overachiever about driving, anyway.

Hiatus ’26

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Time for another winter hiatus. Back in the first week of March, which is still winterish in northern Illinois, but at least the snow tends to melt after a few days. Snow was persistent in January this year, a refresh every few days, and temps too low to lose any of it.

At a Key West restaurant.

Big Four Bridge

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Even the last day of a long trip can include – should include – something to see. With that in mind on December 22, after we crossed the Ohio River from Louisville on the I-65 bridge, which I have done many times, we took the first exit to go to Jeffersonville, Indiana, which I have done only once, in 1990. Then we went back across the river to Louisville, this time on foot on a massive iron structure known as the Big Four Bridge.

The Jeffersonville side of the bridge offers views of that town and its riverfront, where I took a wintertime stroll all those years ago. At that time, Big Four Bridge was a decaying relic, inaccessible to the public.

You can also see the I-65 bridge from that vantage. It too is an elegant design.

But not as impressive as the sweeping ironwork of Big Four Bridge.

The Ohio sweeps along as well.

I couldn’t take enough pictures of Big Four.

Once upon a time, Big Four carried the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway, also nicknamed the Big Four Railroad. The 2,525-foot span contains six trusses, beginning as a late 19th-century project, the sort of pre-OSHA work that killed dozens of workers during construction (so why not ghost stories?).

Completed in 1895, “The Big Four Bridge allowed freight traffic to dramatically increase in Louisville, and began carrying high-speed interurbans on September 12, 1905…” says Bridges & Tunnels. “Due to bigger and larger trains, not only in size, but in weight, contracts were let in June 1928 to build a larger Big Four Bridge. The new span, constructed by the Louisville & Jefferson Bridge Co., was built on the piers of the old bridge, while leaving the existing span intact while it was upgraded.”

That is the structure we see today, except that in the early 21st century, it was redeveloped into a pedestrian/bicycle bridge.

At the Louisville side of the bridge, views of the city.

And looking back at the bridge from the Kentucky (Louisville) side.


We saw the daytime bridge, of course. But “the Big Four Bridge has an LED lighting system that wraps the iron fretwork in vibrant colors,” says Our Waterfront. “The lights can be programmed to have a rainbow effect, highlighting the beauty and strength of the bridge structure. At night, the bridge becomes a colorful beacon in our city. Lights operate daily from twilight until 1 am.”

Another reason to come back to Louisville-Jeffersonville, obviously.

Pardon Me, Boy –

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It was some years before I got the joke.

For good reasons. I was only 13 when the movie came out, with no memory of the original reference, and you couldn’t just dial up any old song on your machine in those days. Still, I’m happy to say I saw Young Frankenstein in the theater, as I did Blazing Saddles that same year, which also included some references I didn’t understand until later, notably the names of Lili Von Shtupp and Gov. Le Petomane.

On the road home from Florida, we passed through Chattanooga, a city I hadn’t visited since sometime in the 1980s. I also have handful of memories of Chattanooga during our family road trip around the South in 1969, especially the hotel.

This time I noticed that the Chattanooga Choo-Choo was only a few blocks from the Interstate. So we paused our drive for a short visit.

“This landmark Chattanooga hotel located on Market Street in downtown Chattanooga initially served as the Southern Railway Terminal,” the Tennessee Encyclopedia says. “Designed by Beaux-Arts-trained architect Donn Barber of New York City, this magnificent architectural gateway to the Deep South opened during the Christmas season of 1909.”

With the mid-century decline of passenger rail in the U.S. came the near-demolition of the terminal, but the lesson of Penn Station and the era’s other thoughtless architectural destruction was apparently enough to fuel the Southern Railway Terminal’s preservation. With its redevelopment into a hotel-retail-entertainment complex came a new, instantly recognizable name: the Chattanooga Choo-Choo.

Inside, the sort of grand hall that marks grand old train terminals.

Behind the main building, relics of past choo-choos.

In case you’ve forgotten where you are.

Shovel all the coal in, gotta keep it rollin’
Woo, woo, Chattanooga, there you are

Ann at 23

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Time again to drag out that hoary old saying about children growing up fast, which is true only in the same sense that one’s entire life goes by fast, once you’ve reached the point of having lived most of it already.

Regardless, this week Ann turned 23, now a grown woman, fully employed, etc. That doesn’t mean you can’t have birthday cake, however.

World of Coca-Cola

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Years ago, when we visited the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota, I noted with satisfaction that Monty Python’s Spam Sketch was playing on demand in one of the exhibit rooms. I understand the museum has moved to a different location in Austin since then, but I hope they still play the sketch.

As far as I noticed, there was no clip of One, Two, Three playing at the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta last month. The scene I’d pick is the back-and-forth about Soviet scientists’ efforts to replicate Coca-Cola without its famously secret formula: “Even the Albanians wouldn’t drink it.”

I’d have this clip playing, too.

Or even the jingle scene from The Coca-Cola Kid. Nice jingle.

The World of Coca-Cola shares a plaza with the Georgia Aquarium. Pemberton Plaza, named for the doctor who invented a particularly successful “brain tonic,” back in the days when enterprising doctors and druggists did that sort of thing. Interestingly, the museum doesn’t play up Lt. Col. John Pemberton’s military service for the CSA, or his morphine addiction, which drove him to experiment with a new wonder drug, cocaine, to kick his habit. That didn’t work out, but he did leave a lasting soft drink legacy.

At 300,000 square feet, the museum is expansive, a 1990s design by architectural firm Jerde.

In December, decorations outside and in.

As a museum, the place includes a number of interactive exhibits and activities, starting at the Coca-Cola Theater with a six-minute commercial. I mean, a short history of Coke. You can also see the vault where the secret formula supposedly resides —

— check out various smells associated with the cola-making process, “explore Coca-Cola’s iconic influence on art, music, fashion, sports, and entertainment,” and “engage with interactive displays and AI magic that bring Coca-Cola’s legacy to life in new, unforgettable ways,” the museum explains. You can even, if you register – maybe with some app? – stand in line to have your picture taken with a person in a polar bear suit.

“The Coca-Cola Polar Bear… became truly iconic in 1993 with the launch of the ‘Always Coca-Cola’ campaign. In the famous ‘Northern Lights’ commercial, created by Ken Stewart, animated bears gather to watch the aurora borealis while enjoying Coca-Cola — a scene that brought the Polar Bear to life and captured the hearts of viewers worldwide,” the museum notes.

Does it rise to the level of icon? Somehow the Coca-Cola Polar Bear had made only a faint impression on either of us, so we took a pass on it. Also, there was a line. And it cost extra? Always with the revenue streams. But I did enjoy the more standard sort of museum exhibits on offer at World of Coca-Cola.

A seasonal observation.

Artifacts from long ago.

Ads from long ago.

And from distant places.

I seem to remember a similar political cartoon of featuring the Earth being nursed back to health after the ravages of WWII, but I can’t quite place it.

There were video clips, including of course the “Hilltop” commercial. That, I remember. Many people old enough do too, which naturally gave the final moment of Mad Men its punch.

The museum also featured Coke product cans and bottles of various kinds (but not a collection of caps that I saw), many more than you see in everyday grocery stores. For instance, Sting and Bon Jovi had their own cans at one point, as part of a musician series.

Cans from around the world.

A very crowded room includes soda and water dispensers that allow visitors to sample Coca-Cola products from around the world. We went to town trying the various concoctions, as did a lot of people, and eventually I found my favorite: Bonbon Anglais, a wonderful fruit drink from Madagascar.

The web site Madagasikara tells us: La boisson gazeuse Bonbon Anglais est fabriquée à Madagascar, un pays reconnu pour ses produits naturels et son savoir-faire artisanal. I would expect no less.

The gift shop was crowded, too. I took pics but bought no Coke merch. (I might have bought a postcard, but found none.)

To my way of thinking, the Coca-Cola Co. should pay me – even a little – to advertise its products on my person. Also, while I’m on that particular hobby horse, the World of Coca-Cola shouldn’t charge admission, especially not as much as a standard museum.

I ran the numbers, and World of Coca-Cola admission costs more than twice as much as admission to the Taj Mahal. Sure, Georgia isn’t Uttar Pradesh, but it’s galling that you’re paying at all, just to be marketed to. Obviously Middle America disagrees with me – and Yuriko didn’t mind paying for both of us – so that idea will just have to be a quixotic hobby horse of mine.