But it’s ocean I want, not a dusty, crime-ridden capital city, so my trip kicks off with a guy hanging out the back of a bus, pointing at me and screaming something in a frightening cadence that I will soon learn does not translate to “Attack that Gringo.” It is simply the bus attendant’s repetition of the bus’s destination, “Rivas, Rivas, Rivas, Rivas!” and therefore his attempt to help me find my bus! In Nicaragua, there are no automated/backlit/electronic signs that correspond to neatly labeled rows and numbered bus routes.  If you think greyhound stations are chaotic, try Managua’s UCA autobus terminal.

Once I sort it out, said man further welcomes me by simultaneously grabbing my bag and my arm, hurling me up and into the belly of the bus while flinging my backpack up and over the top, alongside the basket of bananas from the rider in front of me and the cage of chickens from the rider behind me.  As the bus pulls out, the attendant swings himself through the door opening, clings to a ladder bolted to the side of the bus, scurries to the rooftop, and proceeds to secure (or so I presume from the shuffle and rope noises) all the flung cargo while we speed down the Pan American highway.

At first glance, the Pan American highway is a modern, well-paved thoroughfare running the north-south length of Nicaragua’s western half.  From my chicken-bus window, the highway is transformed into a perilous game of Frogger as the rickety, recycled bus dodges oncoming semi-trucks while passing horse-pulled carts on unbanked curves at hair-raising speeds.  Ever wonder what happens to old school buses deemed un safe to transport American school children?  They become the main source of transportation in Nicaragua, after a few modifications, of course.  First, an assortment of metal tubes, pipes, and brackets are welded to configure a rack that is bolted to the entire roof.  Second, the bus gets a paint job.  Sometimes the whole bus gets a coat, but more often just the front and back are decorated graffiti style with an emblem of blazing fire and a clever name such as “2 fast, 2 furious” while the sides are left to proclaim “Franklin County Department of Education” or some other such remnant from its days of U.S. service.  Third, all emergency buzzers are disabled.

But hey, my two-transfer, three-hour ride to San Juan Del Sur only costs the equivalent of about $3.75.  So maybe I do arrive shaken and dusty (translation: in need of a beer) but I am also under budget.  As a reward for my savvy transportation choice (an air-conditioned tourist shuttle would have cost $40), I splurge for a front room in a boutique hotel whose private balcony overlooks the Pacific Ocean and includes breakfast for a total of $15.  Though I won’t see my generous double bed until morning, after my next 12 hours of madness, I’ll never be so glad to not be sleeping on a hostel cot in a dorm full of Norwegians, Germans, Aussie’s, Canadians, or whoever the hell else.

San Juan Del Sur (SJDS) is a Nica beach town about 20 miles north of its ritzy Costa Rican neighbor’s border.  The best way for me to describe it is to have you close your eyes and drift back in time – 40 years or so should do it.  Imagine Southern California in the late ’60s, early ’70s.  Think Manhattan Beach.  Think cheap entertainment and no rules.  Think dollar beers, shared joints, endless beach, perfect surf breaks and free love.  That’s SJDS…today.

I take my cold shower, throw on a wrinkled sundress and meander down the beach front until I see “Happy Hour: 2 for 1 cocktails.”  Welcome to Nicaragua!  Bamboo Bar turns out to have a somewhat luxurious décor, a friendly, English-speaking bartender, and a stunning, extraordinarily friendly hostess named Graciella.  I’m not sure whether she works for the bar, or if she just works the bar, but after my second full pour of Flor de Cana, it didn’t matter.  The real opportunity here is learning to play Desmoche, a rummy variation and a favorite Nica card game.  But herein lies the challenge:  Graciella consistently holds her hand of nine cards at bosom level as she gives half the instructions in seductive Spanish tones.  Trust me, and I’m a girl, it’s hard to concentrate on the game’s subtleties, such as laying down your three of a kind in alternating colors (rojo, negro, rojo or negro, rojo, negro) when Graciella laughs and leans into you, exonerating you of your mistake while sweeping your 10 Cordoba note off the counter since she’s convinced you that Desmoche is no fun unless all the players lay down a bet.  If you’re a male tourist, I suggest surrendering your wallet at the door, but since we’re only talking 50 cents a game and $1.25 per rum cocktail, it seems a paltry price to pay for such a view.

It gets later, business at this relatively calm bar is slow, and Graciella invites me to The Pier.  I’ll discover that whether you arrive at 10, midnight, or closer to sunrise, this on-the-beach bar will be shockingly stocked with dancing people, a healthy mix of Europeans, Nicas, and a smattering of other nationalities.  As a newcomer, you will surely meet Pablo, who upon introducing himself offers me “anything my mind can imagine.”

“Like what?” is my reply that seems at that point in the evening oh so coy.

Pablo could roll his eyes, mutter under his breath (with his bits of English), “stupid American,” or fall back on the Spanish equivalent, “malo Gringa,” but Pablo is a business man so he plays along.

“Ah, mi Chica.  Like drogas, like girls, like experiencias.”  The cable networks in Nicaragua play lots of American B movies.  Pablo’s obviously learned our unimaginative and repetitive use of “like.”  I don’t ask if he has guys for the same price. It’s not that late, and I am too eager to get out on the sand by the bonfire to dance under the peeking moon and in front of the waves.

Among the palm trees we meet an Irish bartender who plays a weekly house game of Texas Hold’em.  This is my favorite card game, and it turns out Graciella’s repertoire extends beyond Desmoche.  I’m not sure if he invites us, or we invite ourselves, but the bartender seems quite content with meeting the usual group of dudes with two female guests in tow.  His surprise will be even greater when he sees we can actually play!

I’m not sure if “Ten” is the czar of SJDS or just an ironically lucky SOB, but he lives in an oceanside penthouse complete with elevator and air conditioning.  Let me emphasize elevator, as I believe it is the only working one in the country outside of the capital, which is necessary since Ten doesn’t have use of his arms and legs.  This doesn’t stop him from commanding the game, or an extraordinary number of bong hits supplied by his demure Nicaraguan aide.  We hand over our buy-in of 100 Cordobas ($5) to a little, short Nica guy who is a lawyer.  We begin a Hold’em evening that will last until 3:00 a.m.

Finally, I take second place and Graciella feels like singing.  We stumble up the main road, cut down a side street, and enter a decidedly darker section of town.  For a moment, I wonder whether this is the part where we meet her “friends” in the alley and they demand my cash card.  My somewhat dysfunctional brain is discarding solutions – pretend not to remember the PIN, throw it into the gutter for morning retrieval, do I even have a cash card on me? – when I hear, no feel, the thumping backtrack of karaoke music.  I enter this known-only-to-Nicas establishment with the guilt of suspecting my new friend, which I quickly discard into a bottle of Tona.

We sing (I think), we dance (I know), we drink (I’m sure).  My limited use of the Spanish language is exhausted.  My head meets the pillow of my pricey bed with a quick look at the rising sun.

If you are ready to time travel, e-mail today for Celina’s UnTourist advice or read about her other travel adventures at: marannmincey.com

~ Celina Mincey

Pictures courtesy of Catch Light Studio

Late in 2009,the Charlottean whom countless gearheads know for her accomplishments on NASCAR’s top race tracks had applied to be a contestant on the popular CBS reality television competition “The Amazing Race.” Together with her potential “Race” teammate, Jennifer Jo Cobb, Robinson had flown to Hollywood to participate in a weeklong series of interviews. Though they’d been recruited for the show, Robinson and Cobb still had to make a pitch to the show’s hosts, producers and directors.

Until that meeting, they were under lock and key. They had designated pool and gym opportunities, as well as windows of time during which they could eat. Otherwise, they were confined to their rooms.

“It was so weird,” said Robinson, 45. “You could not talk to any of the other people. You obviously knew the other (contestants). Like the two cowboys. … You knew they were cowboys because they even wore cowboy hats with their bathing suits on. And then there were two cops from (New England). I don’t know if you saw the latest season (of the show), but that was the one that we would have been on.”

Amazing as this sounds, Robinson’s mind wasn’t focused on “The Amazing Race,” despite the cramped living conditions. Her thoughts had drifted more than 3,000 miles away to her hometown of Charlotte, where NASCAR’s dignitaries were preparing to cut the ribbon on the sport’s anticipated Hall of Fame.

A stock car pioneer who had blazed a trail for female drivers, Robinson had been invited by Hall of Fame marketers to donate memorabilia to display in the hall. Yet she had neglected to send the materials to NASCAR’s marketing team before embarking on her California trip, and her ongoing participation in the “Race” audition meant she’d missed her window of opportunity to be part of the pomp and circumstance.

The hall opened to the public on May 11, 2010. Robinson’s memorabilia remains in her garage.

Family circus
Before Danica, there was Shawna.

Danica Patrick, the pretty brunette sitting behind the wheel of the No. 7 GoDaddy.com car, receives more than enough ink by competing in the IndyCar, ARCA and NASCAR racing series. But 20 years before Patrick became the first woman to win an IndyCar race in 2008, redheaded Robinson was burning rubber on top NASCAR tracks like Talladega, Darlington, and the Daytona International Speedway.

“In Daytona, during my first time racing that track, I finished third,” Robinson exclaimed. “In my sixth race (the AC Delco 100 in Asheville), I became the first woman ever to win a race in a stock car.”

You could argue that racing is in Robinson’s blood. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, as the youngest of five children, she always was around automobiles. Her father, who raced late-model cars, made sure the Robinson clan spent their weekends at Midwestern racetracks.

“I was the little girl playing in the infield with my sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins. It truly was a family ordeal,” Robinson said. “I knew how to ride a motorcycle at age 4. That’s just what we did.”

The Robinson family wasn’t wealthy. But they were known for inventing automotive routines to entertain crowds at stock car shows. Some of their creations even scored them national acclaim. One of Shawna’s brothers jumped so many trucks during a live race event in the early 1980s that the television variety program “That’s Incredible!” featured him in a segment.

“We always called my father the circus leader, because we were the circus, and he was our leader,” Robinson said. “It was very strange. But that was just my dad. He was so full of life.”

And full of ideas. Robinson said it was her father who first put her behind the wheel of a truck so she could warm up the track and introduce racers. He believed that truck racing – and the site of a female, teenage driver – would only increase fan appeal at stock car events.

Two days after graduating high school in 1983, 18-year-old Robinson drove her first truck around a short track in Toledo, Ohio. The love affair that would span three decades had begun.

A steady climb
One year later, Robinson launched her official racing career when she joined the GATR Truck Series.

“That’s when I came to realize that I was going to be a racer – when I came to terms with the fact that this is what I was going to be,” she recalled.

Not that her truck-driving competition wanted her there. “They hated me,” she said of the other racers. “They thought that a woman’s place was in the kitchen, not on the race track. … It was nasty, but it was fun. It was competitive. They didn’t intimidate me.”

On the racetrack is where Robinson consistently proved herself. Pocono, Atlanta and Bristol were just a few of the big-league tracks Robinson conquered in her debut year. She earned Rookie of the Year honors in 1984, moving from Iowa to Pennsylvania so she could continue to market her talents on Northeast truck tracks, in trade shows and at racing exhibits. Her owners also tolerated Robinson’s presence because a female driver in a male-dominated sport scored valuable media attention.

It only took four years for NASCAR to notice. Robinson made her stock car debut in 1988, racing in the now-defunct NASCAR Dash Series. She competed at the Daytona International Speedway that year with the Daytona Dash Cars, a series that previously had hosted Michael Waltrip and Kyle Petty, to name a few.

If there were obstacles to overcome in transitioning from trucks to stock cars, Robinson didn’t notice. She’d already familiarized herself with dirt and asphalt racing on short and long tracks in the truck series. Once she learned how to properly draft – or ride behind other vehicles – in her car, the difference in weight (trucks, obviously, are much heavier than cars) was negotiable. In her first two years on the NASCAR circuit, Robinson earned Most Popular Driver honors.

With each passing year came another climb up the NASCAR ladder. Robinson moved into the Busch Series in 1991. Highlights of her tenure included a second-place qualifying at Rockingham in 1994 and, two races later, her first career pole at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

“My butt was always in a seat,” she said. “It was always driving, and always on a different type of race track. … I wasn’t consistently a frontrunner, but I was always near the Top 10.”

Her run, however, was short-lived.

For several days every summer, since 2002, the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival has drawn crowds of up to 80,000 to a farm about an hour southeast of Nashville. More than 100 bands, ranging from indie rock to hip hop to gospel, entertain the ’Roo faithful.

My companion for the festival is a high school friend, Brandon. He’s now been to five Bonnaroo festivals. He’s sitting to the side of me, far more relaxed, talking with the couple sharing our pod. They’re from Nashville and they have a kid. The father is both concerned and intrigued that his 6-year-old son isn’t into sports, and that the kid may be an artist. Brandon, a film student in New York, confirms some of the signs. His wife, a blonde named Sarah, is wearing cowboy boots and has one foot propped up against the door to our little rocking metal deathtrap. She notices my death-grip and offers me her Gatorade bottle.

“Here, this will help,” she says, passing it to me. I take the cap off the bottle and recognize Captain Morgan in the mix, but it’s not nearly strong enough to help with my rising displeasure – unless the ride takes 20 more minutes, in which case I’ll need the whole bottle. It does, however, give me a little courage to look over the sides.
Off to my right is a massive, open parking lot. Tents and cars alternate colors off in the distance like a refugee camp, and gas-powered, stand-alone streetlights fill some of the dirt roads with limited light. Behind me is the main entrance to the fairgrounds, where spotty bag checks keep out very little illegal material. Sarah is one of thousands of Bonnaroo patrons who smuggled alcohol or drugs past the security checks at the front gate today.

Inside the compound, people smoke pot in the open with the same nonchalance as if they’re checking their cell phones for the time. None of the security staff cares about drugs at the checkpoint: They’re looking for weapons, firearms and SLR cameras – the three gate-check taboos. At the end of the night, stockpiles of smuggled booze are shared; that way there’s nothing to carry on the long walk back to wherever your camp is.

Over the left side of the Ferris wheel lies the rest of the festival: a half-dozen tents and stages erected alongside a sprawling complex. In the center, rows and rows of vendors peddle everything from homemade jewelry to flower power-esque dresses.

Bonnaroo is one of the last holdouts of the post-hippie movement, where the Deadheads all gather to pay tribute to their movement by encouraging everyone to recycle and teaching seminars on how to grow gardens to shrink your carbon footprint.

But I’m admittedly surprised on my last night. The hippie culture isn’t necessarily the dominant culture at Bonnaroo anymore. Mainstream bands draw mainstream audiences – college kids off for the summer who want to enjoy themselves. They’re the driving force, along with parents and teenage children, and, of course, journalists.

I’m already skipping out on press events by Friday morning when Bonnaroo starts to pick up speed. The orientation overlaps with the wait for Conan O’Brien’s comedy set. Brandon heads out early to get a place in line for us.

I’m still in bed when he leaves. The sunlight pours into our RV through the window next to my bunk. I roll over and ignore it for another half hour of restless sleep, before the next RV over decides it’s time to sound the wakeup call with a healthy dose of Primus.

We still don’t have any water in our tank – they’re fixing it, they promise – so I head out of the VIP section with a backpack full of bottled water, feeling grimy and sweaty from Thursday, but smelling of fresh sunscreen, and wishing I could wash my hands.

I’m not the adventurous type. I’m at Bonnaroo 2010 because I broke a promise to Brandon last year: I said I would go and I didn’t, so this year I have no way out.
I should be enjoying myself. I like concerts more than most people. In fact, I love live music, jam bands, and everything about the concert culture.

But I hate camping. I hate long walks on humid summer days, and not being able to go home and sleep in a familiar place at the end of the day. So Bonnaroo could be a fantastic and efficient way for me to see a lot of bands I love, or a miserable four-day sweaty camping nightmare.

This is the silent fear of every mainstream attendant of the festival. The extremists – those diehard fans and groupies who would follow their favorite acts into hell as long as they could find a decent lawn seat for the Eternal Damnation Tour – could care less. Hot, cold, wet, dry, Tennessee, Afghanistan: They’ll be there. After nearly a decade, the ’Roo brings out thousands of stoners, post-hippies, the older generation of Deadheads, the younger generations of Dave Matthews fans and Phish fans, and a decent sampling of other people just looking for live music and a good time. The big-name live performers bring them all together for this one big event.

As I make my way across the festival grounds to the Comedy Tent, I’m bumping into a complete cross-section: girls walk by in bikini tops and shorts, or just bikinis, or just their bare chests painted to look like they’re wearing bikinis. The guys are shirtless, mostly pale and out of shape. A noticeable number have a Camelbak hydration pack strung over their shoulders with not-so-clear liquids running up the long straws as they suck it through their dry lips. Under the few sparse trees around the endless fields, people cram together for the shade. Most are sleeping or passing pipes around.

It rained earlier in the week, and the ground is mushy underfoot. My shoes pick up some mud and dirt just from following the well-tread pathways between stages. Most of the grass is gone, and some of the wet spots smell like a ruptured septic tank. It’s that way all over the festival, and every so often one poor patron who wasn’t watching his footing passes by, covered in mud from head to toe.

The line for Conan snakes back and forth for hundreds of heads. A few people step out of line to toss a Frisbee around. By this point I’m soaked in a new day’s coating of sweat, and the sunscreen running off my forehead stings my eyes.

It’s almost 90 degrees, and the humidity is easily within 10 points of complete saturation. Everyone with a gray T-shirt is sporting dark rings of sweat. Larger people like myself are acquiring unattractive lactation rings. Sweat is beading on my arms, legs, thighs and the backs of my knees. It’s starting to drip down my neck, back and some other places where water retention in the morning means chafing in the afternoon.

Uptown: You get to travel all over the country in your role as Chef on Assignment for Johnson & Wales. What are you seeing in the way of food trends that may be coming our way?
PR: Different regions of the country tend to pick up on various trends at their own pace and with their own regional spin, such as we saw with the organic and the farm-to-table trends a few years ago. The trends tend to start on the West Coast, then slingshot to big cities like New York and Chicago, and then radiate their way out to other cities where chefs or savvy food businesses make them their own. In the south, Birmingham (Ala.) has recently been very influential, as well as Charleston and also Chapel Hill. Charlotte has also gotten on board, albeit later than the leading food towns, with its growing participation in the Slow Food Movement as well as the growth of local farmers markets and food growers. But we’re in danger of missing what promises to be the next big trend, perhaps one of the most exciting developments in years. I’m talking about the food cart phenomenon.

Uptown: What on earth is the food cart phenomenon? Are you talking about taco trucks?
PR: Taco trucks are a tiny tip of the iceberg. I’m really talking about mobile food trucks inside of retro-fitted carts, complete with cooking gear, grills, ovens and the like. These are movable feasts capable of turning out a limited menu, but they do it extremely well. Let me give you some perspective. In Portland, Oregon, which is probably the epicenter of the food cart scene in the U.S., there are over 250 food carts, featuring every sort of food imaginable. Wood-fired pizza trucks, Korean fusion taco trucks (imagine a carne asada taco garnished with kim chee – it’s fantastic!), French fried potato trucks that also serve poutine (the national potato dish of Canada – crispy, twice-fried potatoes covered with fresh cheese curds and brown gravy. Hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Yes, it’s a gut bomb but it sure tastes good!), health food cart, wild and crazy food carts, dessert trucks, smoothie carts, Cuban sandwich carts, crepe trucks, and on and on. Portland has even designated empty parking lots, licensing some of these food cart operators to permanently park there. In other words, they’ve created a number of “food cart courts,” which become instant festivals for anyone looking for fun and fellow food freaks. During business hours you see a lot of businessmen eating at the carts – it’s the new power lunch forum.

Uptown: Sounds like fun – when are we going to see those here?
PR: Well, currently we have one food cart here that could be competitive in Portland. That’s the Harvest Moon Grille, which could hold its own anywhere, especially with their amazing pork and grits <editor’s note: see page __ in this issue for a story about this cart>.  The problem is that the folks who issue permits are worried about crime and, probably, also about the unfair competitive advantage that low-overhead carts present to what we call brick and mortar restaurants. It’s a delicate balance to make something like a food cart scene work. There were probably a few negative incidents around some of the taco trucks awhile back and that kind of soured the authorities on the idea of food carts in general. But the other side of the coin is that these food carts are fabulous entrepreneur laboratories, maybe the first step to a later incarnation as a true brick and mortar restaurant. This is what happened in Portland, as the food carts there have become part of the cultural identity for the city, highlighting the creativity and diversity of the area. There’s so much excitement and buzz about the carts there that some of the trucks move to different locations every night and Twitter to their followers, who show up en masse, like a spontaneous rave or happening. We have nothing like that here yet.

Uptown: Do you see something like that ever happening here?
PR: I’m not sure. In my six years living in Charlotte I’ve seen a growing interest in food and such, but we’re also somewhat conservative and don’t really like to take too many out-of-the-box chances. But I could see it happening in areas of town like NoDa and, if we get the Center City year-round farmers market we’ve been hearing about, it could be an ideal location for something like a food cart court. Once the city makes it easier for the start-up cart operations to do business we could see all that latent creativity come to fruition.

Uptown: Yes, but do you think it will really happen?
PR: Let me put it this way: If we don’t do it first, Atlanta probably will and then we’ll just be playing catch-up, still waiting for the next wave. I’m convinced that this is the biggest wave, the one we’ve been waiting for. It’s already happening in L.A., Chicago and New York City. In fact, some of the brick and mortar restaurants in Los Angeles and New York are now reverse engineering it – they’re sending out their own food carts to capitalize on the interest and also to allow them to make some fun foods that they don’t do in their restaurants. I hope we catch this wave soon so I don’t have to go to Atlanta or one of those other cities for my kim chee taco. I’m telling you, though, it’s worth the drive.