36 hours

The shadow
flying over there
is the plane
I am on.
We converge
with a shudder
and the rumble of
wheels on the ground.
Together again.




The girl and I just went to North Carolina for 36 hours, just like the New York Times travel section columns! We were there for a family wedding - but carved out enough time to go shopping, eat barbecue, have breakfast with old blogging friends, and tour the Governor's Mansion.

And today, I have spent the day moving papers from here to there, tying a little baby quilt, making weird seedy hardtack, and in the pile of papers, I found this little ridiculous poem that I'd jotted down once upon a time - on a trip to Detroit, in point of fact.

Flying is weird, and requires magical thinking, but I'd never have gone to North Carolina for 36 hours otherwise.

Reflections On Traveling in Northern Europe In August 2018

There are wind farms everywhere.

There are many solar panels deployed.

Nearly every single toilet is dual flush.

We stayed in six hotels. In five of them, you had to put your key card in a slot inside the door in order to "turn on" the electricity in the room. No card, no lights. No card, no iPhone charging.

Hotel hallway lights were on motion sensors. Open the door, and the lights go on. Walk down the hall, and the lights go on in segments ahead of you.

In five of the six hotels, there were no amenities of the sort you find in all American hotels - just a wall mounted soap dispenser near the sink, and one in the shower. No conditioner, no lotion, (no souvenirs). In a couple of hotels, the product was the same at both the sink and the shower. In others, it was hand soap by the sink, and shampoo/body wash in the shower. When it comes down to it, is there a difference?

In five of the six hotels, the queen/king bed came with Two. Separate. Duvets. One for each of us. In all seriousness? This is genius. No stealing of covers possible. I may have to institute this at home.

Walking is everything.

There are nearly no overhead wires. Occasionally in the countryside, you see distribution lines. But all of the general electricity and telecommunications is delivered via buried lines. In the city, overhead lighting is suspended from cables.

Traffic is frequently calmed via chicanes - a little zig-zag just to slow you down. I think some chicanes would be useful in my town.

Roundabouts are everywhere.

Denmark is nearly cashless - although I had some cash, I didn't need it and could have gotten away with having none.

Translated signage will never not make me laugh.

Flat Stanley

The first grade classes at our daughter's school do a Flat Stanley project every year. You know Flat Stanley, right? He's a kid who gets accidentally squished to two dimensions, which turns out to be sort of cool because he can slip under doors and travel in a mailing envelope. The school project has the kids make their own Flat Stanley, write a letter to someone, and mail their Stanley off on an adventure.

Me being me, I suggested that the girlie send her Flat Stanley to a State Department friend of mine who was then in Ethiopia. So she did. We got some wonderful emails and photos from Ethiopia:

Sorry for the many delays of Flat Stanley - he has had some adventures, though. We went to a track meet at the International Community School in Addis Ababa. Stanley had a tour of the school, looked at a Tukle, the traditional round Ethiopian house, and hung out in a garden, including a banana tree. The running track here is the best running rack in East Africa, and is a track where the Ethiopian Olympic team frequently trains.

Then they went to Sabahar, a silk weaving place started by friends of ours, where local extract and weave silk at fair wages. Stanley got to hang out with some silk worms and mulberry leaves - the silk worms seemed happy with Stanley and did take any bites out of him - they only eat the leaves!

Stanley got lost for a little while - we had hoped to send him home during a recent visit back to the US, but he got lost in our stuff, so instead we took him traveling some more with us in Ethiopia. A couple weeks ago, we traveled to Axum and Lalibela, Ethiopia. Axum has these huge obelisks called "stellae" that were built over 600 years ago. The churches at Lalibela are often thought to be the 8th wonder of the world - buildings carved out of rock since the 1200's. Look these places up - they're pretty cool.

We may get some other traveling with Stanley done - then finally Stanley should be ready to head home - sorry it's long after the end of the school year, but I hope you enjoy seeing some of his travels!

Stanley didn't come home. And a year went by, and the girlie was now a second grader, and she saw all the Flat Stanleys go up on the bulletin boards in the first grade hallway, and she got teary. Where's my Flat Stanley? Oh, out having adventures, I said, he'll be home one day.

And then Maternal Dementia posted about their Flat Stanley going missing, and I felt better. Except that she was able to clone theirs, with the full acquiescence of her child, because Stanley had been lost In Their Very House, so I didn't really feel better. But I knew in my heart of hearts that Stanley was going to turn up.

And you know what? Stanley just came home, after 18 months of international travel. I do believe he's the best traveled Stanley ever sent out from that school - having gone to Virginia, then Ethiopia, then Pennsylvania, then back to Ethiopia, and then to New Jersey, and now back to New York. He's just exhausted, and terribly thin, but we're all so pleased to have him back. I think he'll stay home for a while.

But we're definitely going to have to fatten him up. Luckily, there's an Ethiopian restaurant in the next town. He'll probably like that.

Wordless Wednesday: Self Portrait in Convertible

(No, I wasn't driving!)

Traveling

Everyone always complains about air travel. But you know something? Sometimes it works out just fine.

Remember my tale of the nice twitter assistant at Delta? Our flight to San Diego was just swell. Sure, tight quarters because we were flying steerage, but there were TV screens on the backs of the seats which made the girlie swoon.

The day before we were to fly home, I duly checked in and got our boarding passes printed. We went to bed, setting the alarms for 5:00am because we had a 7:30-ish flight.

At 4:30am, my phone went off. I picked it up and fumbled around, thinking it was my alarm. When my husband said, but it's 4:30, I realized it had been a phone call, not the alarm at all, not that I needed an alarm anymore. My heart sank when I looked at the number and found that it was Delta calling. Without listening to the voice mail, I called them back. Cancelled. They'd cancelled our flight due to "equipment damage". The chipper person on the end of the line told me that we'd been rebooked at midday on a one-stop through someplace, and were due home at midnight. While my first thought was more time on the beach, I protested, isn't there anything else?

Yes. In fact, there was. The nice Delta person proceeded to book us onto a non-stop American Airlines flight at just about the same time the Delta flight would have left, meaning virtually no change in travel. Because she was from Delta, she couldn't do anything about seat assignments, and told us to work it out at the airport.

I stood on line to get boarding passes from a human, a very nice human who gave us three seats not together, but sent along a note to the gate and told me to talk to the gate agent. I was first in line at the gate, and sure enough, the gate agent gave us new boarding passes, three seats together in the last row, but he said I'll let you know if something changes. About 10 minutes later, he called my name - at the desk, he took my boarding passes, and handed me three new ones, three seats together in the eighth row.

It was lucky and awesome and efficient, and I'm kind of amazed it worked out as well as it did.

San Diego in Fragments

The girl spent many hours boogie boarding in the surf, after having never really been in the ocean before. It was all we could do to get her out of the water. And now, her bathing suit is forever full of sand.

At a stop light, we pulled alongside a curvy red convertible, with the top down, driven by an ordinary looking guy. He was blasting his car stereo: bagpipes. Totally incongruous.

In an effort to inject a little history into the trip, we drove up to the San Diego Mission. I wondered, as we parked, why it seemed so crowded. Oops, we'd stumbled into Sunday morning mass.

We ate at a "nouvelle" Mexican restaurant, called El Agave, which doubles as a tequila museum. The food was mind-blowingly good - delicate, complicated, tasty - and nothing like the rice and beans slop you get in so many "Mexican" restaurants. Thousands of bottles of tequila surrounded us, lining all the walls and even on shelves hanging from the ceiling.

While I was at the conference, my peeps went to Sea World and the San Diego Zoo. In retrospect, my husband said he'd rather have spent two days at the Zoo. The girl would like to go back and buy everything at Sea World.

The storied Hotel Del Coronado was built in 1888, and is a huge pile of wood - one of a few surviving Victorian beach resorts. The main building is a riot of shingles and balconies, and when the fire alarm went off at 6:53 in the morning, we got the hell out. It turned out to be a false alarm, but we were shocked at how few people actually did leave their rooms. They'd have been toast if it had really been a fire.

A friend from high school - elementary school actually - met us for a drink. She'd moved to San Diego in 1987 and never looked back. I understand it; the weather and the natural beauty and the contained distances make it seem like a really livable city.

I knew San Diego was a military town, but I didn't know that it had a national cemetery. Fort Rosecrans overlooks the Pacific and is ineffably lovely. If I'd been in the military, I'd want to be buried there.

Whirlwind

It was supposed to be me and my father and my sister, flying to California to visit his brother, our uncle, who's not well with some ill defined progressive neurological deterioration. But two days before hand, Pop canceled out sick, leaving Pinky and me to go it alone.

While this was kind of a bummer - it would have been nice if he'd been with us - it did open up a world of possibility. Three people meant we needed to rent a sedate sedan; two let us get a convertible. Pinky dubbed it the Snooki-mobile, but no matter - we had the wind in our hair (and cooperating weather). Pop might not have wanted to detour through Santa Cruz for lunch with an old college friend of mine; Pinky was game and we ended up walking along the ocean and spotting surfers in the waves. We stayed overnight with our aunt and uncle, happy to spend time with him on their deck high in the hills with a panoramic view of the Pacific, delighted to try on her tap shoes and learn brush step / brush step / brush step / ball change from her, the old show girl, still spry at nearly 90.

We bid our adieus, and headed north - choosing to forego the direct route offered up by Google maps in favor of a trip on twisty mountain roads through the redwoods. Serendipitously, we came across a splendid overlook where the ocean was visible between distant mountains, and Monterey rose up in the south.

Descending back into the developed valley, we Yelped up some tacos for a late lunch on our way to see our step-sister. I've seen and been in touch with Helen in recent years; Pinky hadn't seen her in 25-odd years. Dinner, Scrabble Flash, wine, and reminiscing - with lots of talk of our father, her mother, their marriage, and Helen's extended complicated family - ensued. (Helen's family is so complicated that when her children were asked to do family trees in elementary school, she told them to just make something up - there's no way a child could grasp the intricacies of who was married to whom how many times, not to mention the step-siblings that were also second cousins so that when they were no longer step-sibs they still retained family ties. Et cetera.)

Alas, our last day dawned foggy and chilly and we were forced to return to the airport with the top up on the convertible.

All told, though, it was a perfect whirlwind trip to California - 48 hours on the ground, 60 hours away from NY - chock full of novelty and nostalgia - punctuated by texts from home cataloging the dipping temperatures in the East.

One Last Pair

Seeing as I whined on Twitter about the fact that I’d miscalculated how many pairs of underpants I would need for that two week vacation of ours, someone was bound to leave a comment on my “vacation by the numbers” post.

You left out how many pairs of undies. ;-)

In point of fact, I lost track. We practice a suitcase management technique called “vacation underwear” where you pack and wear all your really ratty undies – the kind that can always be worn once more, but probably shouldn’t be – and throw them out along the way. After those were gone, I moved onto my standard issue cotton bikinis, which were duly filed away into the laundry bag at day’s end. Then I realized the impending shortfall, and suffered through a couple of days of two in a row – because I just couldn’t bring myself to doing laundry at a Laundromat for three pairs of underpants, and handwashing was out of the question because they’d have never been dry. Finally, though, we got to Mecca and hit the Jockey store in Freeport – all hail discount shopping on vacation (and yes, we went to the LLBean Mothership too). And then I found One Last Pair, which actually turned out to be the final pair of vacation underwear, and thus was discarded at home when we finally got there.

All I know is that I have six new pairs, three that I like and three that I don't.

But let me ask you this: if you go away on a two week road trip, do you take two weeks worth of underpants?

Vacation by the Numbers

3301 miles

16 days on the road

15 nights away from home

11 different beds

• Boston, MA
• West Tremont, ME
• St. John, NB
• Mavilette, NS
• Halifax, NS
• Ingonish, NS
• Panmure Island, PE
• Alma, NB
• St. Andrews, NB
• Orr’s Island, ME
• Boston, MA

7 ferries (from big ones with tractor-trailers and free wifi, to tiny ones where we drove off onto the sand)

7 museums/historical sites

• Boston Museum of Science
• Wedgeport Sport Tuna Fishing Museum 
• Maritime Museum of the Atlantic
• Halifax Citadel
• Fortress of Louisbourg
• Green Gables
• Ganong Chocolate Museum

5 states (NY-CT-MA-NH-ME)

4 audiobooks in the car

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
• The Trumpet of the Swan
• Little House on the Prairie
• Pippi Longstocking

3 provinces (NB-NS-PE)

2 lunches with bloggers (Bon and Sue), which also means two more bloggers met in person!

1 first oyster eaten by the six and ¾ year old

And

The only time we stopped for fast food in sixteen days on the road was for donuts and coffee at a Tim Horton’s one morning, just because we were in Canada and all.

Thirteen Sights in Two Days

Remember when we went to Boston last summer, and played intense tourist for two days? We did it again, this time closer to home. My sister-in-law had given us a gift certificate for two nights at the Algonquin, and it was about to expire and the girl had spring break, and so we sprung.

We took the train to the city on Sunday, and walked the two blocks over to the hotel. Along the way, we learned that “there are three pigeons in New York and their names are Susie, John and Marissa”, in case you were wondering. The Algonquin is fabulous and antique and totally my idea of a hotel – it has character coming out of its ears. There are Dorothy Parker quotes on the doors to all the rooms, there’s a cat in the lobby, and the gloriously deep bathtub looks like it’s the 1902 original. The wallpaper in the halls is a pastiche of New Yorker cartoons, so you can say "No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?" while you wait for the elevator. I even liked the airshaft view out our back window, and the front window was good for peeping into some random offices across the way.

After a pause, we scarpered over to 42nd Street, which doesn’t look like 42nd Street anymore, it looks like a mall, but whatever. We had tickets to a fine little show – four Australians doing "46 Circus Acts in 45 Minutes" which was as madcap and charming as you can imagine; the girl was rapt throughout. Incidentally, if you’re in NY with children, you should take them to almost anything at the New Victory – it’s a little jewelbox of a theater "for kids and families", and you don’t even have ask for a booster seat – the ushers just know that six year olds need them. We had dinner at Bond 45 – a completely serviceable Italian restaurant between the theater and the hotel, where they treated the girl right: six cherries in her Shirley Temple, and a package of freshly baked chocolate cookies to go.

Monday, we got up and wore ourselves out:

• Ate breakfast in the fabulously Victorian round table room
• Rode the ferris wheel at the Times Square Toys R Us (because we’d accidently walked by it the night before and there was no way out)
• Successfully bought nothing at the afore-mentioned Toys R Us
• Took the subway up to the Museum of Natural History, where we saw live butterflies, dead rodents, American Indians, and the big whale
• Successfully avoided every last gift shop at the afore-mentioned museum
• Took the subway back down to Chinatown for a dumpling lunch
• Agreed to purchase pink! silk! pajamas! at Pearl River Trading (though they’re really rayon)
• Took the subway further downtown, and rode the Staten Island Ferry back and forth. Free! It’s free! We’d thought about going to the Statue of Liberty but rode the ferry instead. Did I mention that it’s free?
• Headed uptown to Macy*s to see the flower show
• Gave into demand that we buy something at Macy*s for the child, and got her a shirt and a denim dress, a/k/a useful souvenirs
• Walked back to the hotel and crashed for a moment
• Went out to dinner at a most excellent pizza place called Co, by the "no-knead bread" guy
• Came back to the hotel, where I took a bath in peace and quiet

Tuesday, I went to work and the girl and her father traipsed around some more in the POURING rain. I think I might have gotten the better end of that stick, though she came home with bathroom fixtures for her dollhouse and a chocolate bunny.

And that, friends, is how to see New York. Bang zoom. Theater, museum, ferry, subway, restaurants, shops, hotel. Two days. Though you might need a vacation from your vacation. Luckily, it's still spring break.

Wish You Were Here - Photo edition

Dear Moky:

Here are some of the pictures we took on our trip to Maine.

MAINE

Click on the picture; it'll take you to a web album. I hope you like them.

Love,

M.

Wish You Were Here

Dear Moky,

We've just gotten back from a short vacation, up in Maine mostly. We left on Friday, a little worried about the possibility of Tropical Storm Danny getting in the way of our plans - but time and tide wait for no man, and we had a boat to catch. On the drive up from New York to Maine, we stopped for lunch at about the mid-point, at a pizza place in Worcester that I found on Roadfood.com. "Pizza place" doesn't really do it justice - this was the best pizza I've ever had: paper thin crust, perfect toppings. We got two - one with the usual tomato and cheese, which Mir ate almost all of by herself. The second one had sliced potatoes, caramelized onions, bacon, shallots, garlic butter and a sprinkling of grated cheese - no tomato, no mozzarella. I think I have never tasted ANYTHING as good. You'd have loved the place, if for nothing other than the mess of galvanized trays and stands and pitchers.

We stayed in a little hotel (inn? what's the difference) up on Pemaquid Point - the kind of funky, gracious, idiosyncratic hotel that would have appealed to you. It had been built in the late 1800s as a boarding house - and still has the narrow hallways to show for it. I was tickled to find a huge antique nautical chart in our room - of Long Island Sound. Funny to find that up in Maine. After dropping our stuff, we headed out to a lobster place for beer and lobsters and bugs and the sunset. Mir said she wanted a lobster, and she duly ate both claws - even cracked them herself. Of course, she dipped the lobster meat in ketchup, but what are you going to do?

Luckily, the threatened hurricane moved offshore, but did dump a lot of water - it rained all day Saturday, meaning that we had to stick to indoor activities. Luckily, there's a little aquarium on the next peninsula - so we drove over there and spent some time mucking around in their terrific touch tank. Mir picked up sea cucumbers and lobsters and starfish and crabs, and managed to get soaking wet - good thing we were inside, eh? After another lobster lunch, we headed to the mothership: LL Bean. What else to do on a rainy day? Mir got some new clothes for school and we headed back to the hotel, stopping in Wiscasset for a lobster roll at Red's Eats - thanks to a recommendation from Anna. It may indeed have been the best lobster roll ever - even better than the fancy one in Boston a couple of months ago that cost twice as much.

After breakfast on Sunday, we headed to Rockland, to board our boat - the schooner Nathaniel Bowditch. Wow. Again, you'd have loved it. Granted, the accomodations are spartan, at best, and there are ladders to navigate to get down to the bunks and the heads and the galley, but the sailing was splendid, the food was great, the weather was perfect, and the boat had an abundance of character. We were encouraged to help with the sailing, like providing muscle to raise the mainsail and pull up the anchor, but mostly we just stared out at the glorious wild coast of Maine. And people stared at us! There are so few of those big old sailboats left that when one shows up, everyone looks and takes a picture. We sailed from Rockland up to Castine and back, anchoring near Warren Island one night, and in Pulpit Harbor the next. And on that second night, Mir slept up on deck in a lifeboat with the four year old son of the captain - counting 3000 stars in the sky!

After docking again the next day, we moseyed down to Boston - with a stop in Yarmouth for lunch with an old friend of mine. She's got a house on the water with killer views - no beach, too cold to swim, but beautiful none-the-less. I know that you'd rather have a beach and warmer water, but you'd have liked this, I think.

Boston was a great way station - we checked into our swanky hotel and headed straight to the pool/hot tub/sauna/steam room. After all, we hadn't had a shower on board the boat, and hauling up anchors is hard work! We had an early dinner at an old German beer hall, thanks to a recommendation from Erika - the blog friends really came through on the restaurant tips.

Finally, yesterday, we drove home via the scenic and indirect route. One thing led to another and we stopped in Northampton, to show Mir where you'd gone to college. I had an ice cream cone there that knocked my socks off (well, I wasn't wearing socks, but, you know). It was Burnt Sugar 'n' Butter ice cream - sort of caramelly, with a salty kick from the butter. Looks like there's a Herrell's in Huntington - I wonder if you've ever been there?

We put enough miles on the new car to break her in - and she performed beautifully. She's fun to drive, and perfect for our little family of three. And Mir tackled three whole lobsters, though all little one pounders - not like that enormous one you once had on Cape Cod. I think it might have been the perfect vacation, even if it was only five nights away from home. I'm sorry you weren't there.

Love,

-M.

P.S. I'll have some photos to show you, soon.

Trot, trot, to Boston...Home, home again

We had a whirlwind trip to Boston - entertaining to a fare-thee-well.

• On the way there, we stopped to wander around "my" college campus, grabbed a cheap lunch in the student center, and scampered through the art museum - where Mir announced that she wanted to marry a sculpture, a non-figurative sculpture that took up a whole gallery.
• After checking into the hotel, we looked at the swan boats in the Boston Public Garden, before embarking on the corny touristy but lots of fun Duck Tour.
• At a steak house near the hotel, I had a sublime goat cheese croquette with tomato and chorizo - and the girl had plain pasta. Yes, I know it was a steak house.
• We splurged on room service for breakfast on Saturday before heading out to the aquarium to see sharks and seals and starfish.
• On the recommendation of the hotel concierge, we had lunch at a fish place in the North End, where we perpetrated a most extreme fraud on the child: we ordered her a plate of fried clams, and told her they were chicken nuggets. And she ate them, and loved them, and they were really good, as was absolutely everything there.
• We hiked a teensy bit of the Freedom Trail, including the Paul Revere House, The Old North Church, and the Copp's Hill Burying Ground. We ended up at the USS Constitution - which we skipped because the line was way too long.
• After being out all day, we relaxed in the hotel pool - and W. and I took turns in the saunas and steam rooms, while the girl bobbed in and out of the water.
• Because we were beat and lazy, we had dinner at the hotel restaurant on Saturday night, where we had a charming and chatty waiter who reminded me that you can buy wine at Trader Joe's on Sundays in Massachusetts!
• Sunday morning, we checked out and drove to Cambridge, where we had crepes with a blogger (and her little fat baby).
• The glass flowers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History were next - and the girl got to hold a chunk of coprolite, "ew, dinosaur poop!"
• The girl got soaked running through a fountain, so we changed her clothes on the sidewalk, and she rode all the way home without underpants.

The end.

Oh, the moral of the story? When the kid announces that she has to pee, shamelessness helps. We availed ourselves of the kindness of a real estate agent and a church gardener.

The end, really.

Oh, and I did buy two cases of wine at Trader Joe's. Best souvenir ever.

Now, the end.

Although I forgot the part where we went to Providence on the way home, because we had to give equal opportunity visitation to Daddy's alma mater.

The end?

Tales from San Francisco: Food

I feel pretty lucky to work near the Union Square Greenmarket, and to belong to a CSA, and to commute through Grand Central where there is a branch of Murray's Cheese, but San Francisco is a pretty good town for eating.

I mentioned to a local friend that I wanted to go check out the Ferry Terminal and its farmer's market; she said she'd take me. Then she called back and said "no, I want to take you to where the locals go". So Saturday morning, we hit two markets.

First up was Alemany - a funky swath of stalls in the shadow of the freeway, complete with fresh tamales, live chickens, and a sea of divine produce. Every fruit seller was offering tastes - each peach was better than the next. There were piles and piles of bitter melon, both smooth bumpy and prickly bumpy. We had tamales for breakfast; my friend bought plums ($1/lb) and tomatoes ($1.50/lb) and basil ($1/bunch) and garlic.

Then we went to the ferry terminal. There was more cheese, more prepared foods, and some of the same produce vendors. But the same glorious peaches? $3 a pound. The tomatoes? $3.50. The ferry terminal is the high rent district.

I did buy some Recchiuti salted caramels for my husband (read, for me.) And we got coffee, plain drip coffee, from a stand that defies logic.

I'd heard about Blue Bottle; they were written up in the Times about six months ago, because of their decadently expensive Japanese coffee siphon. The ferry terminal stand doesn't have the fancy machinery - instead, they're making individual cups of drip coffee. That is, one at a time. They've got an array of tea kettles on burners, six in a row. The coffee person uses the hot water out of the rightmost kettle, and then moves them all over one at a time - and refills the leftmost one. Adjacent to the kettle operation is a rack holding eight ceramic cones. One by one, paper filters are placed in the cones, each filter is dampened with hot water, a prodigious amount of ground coffee is added, and the coffee person begins to pour the boiling water. One cup at a time.

It took rather a while to get our two cups of drip coffee, which was only $2. Given the amount of labor that went into it, $2 was a bargain. The coffee was stronger 'n all get out, but good. Drinkable black good.

The only thing that would have made it all better? Time in a kitchen with all that great stuff.