We arrived late on a Friday afternoon, after a long but mercifully trouble-free connection through Los Angeles. A much needed vacation. Our hotel, the deLuxe, though just outside the heart of downtown, was very nice, quite luxurious, with friendly and professional staff and one of the more comfortable beds I recall finding at a hotel. Our room - the most basic and least expensive - could have been a tad larger and could have benefited from an armchair, but on balance, it was a more than adequate base of operations.
Somewhat unpacked and marginally refreshed, we walked through the heat of late-afternoon downtown to Nel Centro, a hip Italian joint located in the Hotel Modera (a former Days Inn dressed up in imitation mid-century modern duds) for a happy hour-cum-early dinner. The patio, though attractive, was crowded and lacked any shade whatsoever, so we settled in at the bar for drinks and a couple of delicious small plates. The crowd was young and fashionable - a bit too much for us - but on balance we enjoyed it.
We had no plans for the rest of the evening, so we took a leisurely walk back to the hotel while admiring the downtown architecture and whiled some time away at the Driftwood Room, apparently legendary around Portland. When the hotel was thoroughly renovated a couple of years ago, the regulars fretted over the old bar's fate, but the new owners resurrected it in its original form - walls covered with planks of wood, pieces of namesake driftwood adorning the room, the organic curve of the bar and an almost total darkness, broken up only by a few votives on the small tables and a handful of obliquely placed colored footlights that spotlit the walls without really illuminating anything. My negroni was perfectly proportioned and delicious.
We started our Saturday morning with a breakfast at Mother's, a pilgrimage spot for locals and tourists alike. Arriving a few minutes after the 9:00 a.m. opening time, we found chaotic crowds but were seated almost right away, although not in the main velvet and brass room that contains the bar. The food - fresh berry pancakes for J. and wild salmon hash for me - was delicious, to say nothing of Portland's famous Stumptown coffee, served in an insulated French press and worth every penny of the $7.50 they charged for it.
We took our time finishing breakfast, then gradually made our way to the Saturday Market, a Portland institution, but not before making a detour into the legendary Second Avenue Records. The Market, though lively, proved to be a disappointment. I was hoping for serious local artists exhibiting and selling their work, but although we did see some impressive photography and even one artist who constructed her images out of long sequences of microscopic numbers, on balance we found too many cheesy t-shirts and flowing tie-dye dresses and not enough other things.
Tiring of the market (and probably spending more time there than it warranted), we strolled South along the Willamette River through the unseasonably hot and sunny day, admiring Portland's numerous bridges and eventually arriving at some impressive looking but very new and thus still isolated residential high-rises and, just beyond, one of the more outlandish examples of Portland's preoccupation with public transit -- the Aerial Tram terminal. The Tram took us to the OSHU campus at the top of the hill, where we got an excellent view of snow-covered Mt. Hood, about 45 miles to the South-East and took a few pictures in the small sculpture garden before heading back and catching the streetcar to the Pearl District.
The Pearl is probably the quintessence of pre-recession Portland - hyper-modern and undoubtedly very green condo blocks, boutiques selling hideous urban clothing, chic-looking restaurants. On the whole, though, the neighborhood did less for me than I expected. Some of the residential architecture, to be sure, was far more attractive and engaging than anything I have seen most other places - rooftop gardens, asymmetrically cantilevered balconies, matte exterior paint in muted but contrasting colors. But the neighborhood, while it had sterilized itself of the original grit so plentiful in the rest of the city, did not replace it with dense sidewalk life you might find in a city like San Francisco. On a Saturday afternoon, it felt empty and sterile. Sweaty and tired by this point, we escaped briefly into the Deschutes brewery for a pint of one of their delicious ales, then headed back to the hotel to clean up for dinner.
We had a reservation at Wildwood, located in the Nob Hill area of Portland, and having run out of time to walk or take the streetcar, we ended up experiencing our one cab ride in Portland. The driver, with whom we chatted amiably throughout the ten-minute drive to the restaurant, was a fellow in his mid-twenties, well-spoken and obviously educated. Not something you find in other large or even medium-sized American cities (and small ones have no need for cabs at all these days). He was only the latest example of what I had been observing since the moment we stepped off the airplane. All service jobs in Portland are done by - I have no slick euphemism to employ here - young white people. The city was eerily immigrant-free. I would have to wait another day to find out precisely why that was.
Our dinner at Wildwood proved to be delicious. I started with tiny house-made gnocchi served with fava beans, morel mushrooms and bits of bacon. J. opted for greens with feta, heirloom tomatoes and peas. Both were delicious, with mine decidedly more substantial. For the main course, this being our first proper dinner in the Northwest, J. chose Chinook salmon served over potatoes and green beans, sauced with just a drop of brown butter. Simple to the extreme but just about perfect. I took our server's recommendation and ordered the pork chop, which, though far too large even on a day when I had no lunch, was spectacular -the most tender and flavorful pork I've had in years served over potatoes and shockingly sweet braised leeks. Our wine was a local Pinot Noir from Apolloni - more Californian than Oregonian in style, but very satisfying.
Sated, we slowly walked through the beautiful summer evening back towards downtown and our hotel, admiring the lively bars and restaurants along 23rd Avenue intermingled with stately but still boutique pre-WWII apartment buildings. I must admit that more than once that evening, I caught myself imagining an alternate universe in which Portland was home rather than a destination.
Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Monday, November 30, 2009
New Orleans: The City
Although visitors naturally view the French Quarter as the focal point of New Orleans, for the city as a whole it is the Central Business District, or CBD as the locals call it. It is a fairly conventional high-rise downtown, full of office buildings and multiple representatives of every major hotel chain. The main drag that separates the CBD from the French Quarter is Canal Street, with its requisite stores selling vaguely hip-hop clothing at what they claim to be deep discounts and overpriced electronics shops full of dual-voltage radios and (still!) Pal-SECAM camcorders. With its oceanic width, streetcar tracks running down the middle, and a near-complete lack of any identifiably local businesses, Canal reminded me of nothing so much as San Francisco's Market Street. Go a few blocks up the street away from the river, and the building facades and the sidewalks, none too smooth to begin with, deteriorate further, and the Hiltons give way to Clarions, though a block-long monolith of luxury condos, converted from what looked like a turn of the last century theatre, loudly announces its availability with two-story-high banners, a bit out of place among cut-rate parking lots surrounded by rusting chicken wire.
Crossing Canal from our hotel (Courtyard Marriott at 124 St. Charles Ave., chosen for the pragmatic reason of a conference J. was attending) puts you on the edges of the French Quarter, and another block or two in on any of its main arteries -- Royal, Chartres or, if you make that mistake, Bourbon -- the New Orleans of both tourist brochures and Faulkner's Sketches explodes at you.
I should probably dispense with Bourbon Street quickly. I hated it. It wasn't the nightclubs (Hustler's was the only "brand" name I recognized, but there was plenty in the same vein) - that sort of thing does not bother me. It was the sheer level of noise, day and night. Barkers - a few scantily-clad women, but mostly obnoxious men with large signs - were literally at every door. Drunk crowds spilling into the streets from every bar (and every business that is not a gentlemen's club is a bar) at all hours. Music blaring through open doors and windows, bands frequently attempting, unsuccessfully, to drown one another out, resulting in a headache-inducing cacophony of grandiose proportions. I should mention that taken individually, most bands sounded fantastic. In a few minutes, we caught strains of blues, country and zydeco, all spectacularly performed. The sheer volume, however, combined with overwhelming crowds both indoors and out, scared us off from actually going in and giving them a proper listen.
A typical French Quarter exterior
Turn into any of the side streets, however, and you immediately find yourself in the New Orleans of legend. The architecture and overall feel of the place is completely unique. Despite the name, the style is predominantly Spanish, not French. The wrought-iron railings and posts that make the city famous are just the beginning. Flower-filled wraparound balconies, quaint interior courtyards (some occupied by stores or restaurants and therefore accessible to the passer-by), and cheerful Caribbean-inspired colors add up to create an almost fairy-tale atmosphere. Historic plaques abound. A house that was going to be offered to Napoleon after he was rescued from his exile on St. Helena (he died before the plan could be executed), and a blacksmith shop formerly used as headquarters by the pirate Jean Laffitte (who was going to do the rescuing) are but two that come to mind. Not surprisingly, both have been converted to bars, Napoleon's being the nicer of the two.
Napoleon's House
A fair number of buildings - one in ten, perhaps - is shuttered, either under renovation or simply unused, but there is no indication that all of them were rendered vacant by Katrina. The vast majority of these places date from the 1700s, and no doubt many needed work long before 2005.
At the center of the French Quarter is Jackson Square, with the St. Louis Cathedral and a statue of pre-presidential Andrew Jackson, but while the cathedral is impressive and the park surrounding Jackson is an idyllic place to while away some time on a nice day eating a muffaletta, the charm is definitely in the side streets.
Directly to the East of the French Quarter is the neighborhood of Faubourg-Marigny, almost as old as the Quarter itself and, from what I could gather, the first area into which the city expanded once it breached its original boundaries. The vibe could not be more different,
however. The area is largely residential, and no house is taller than two stories, the predominant styles being the Creole cottage and the famous shotgun. The condition of the houses varies greatly, from hovels barely holding together to impeccably restored and outlandishly painted creampuffs. Some house bed-and-breakfasts with names like the Bohemian Armadillo. Unusual zoning, or, more likely, the ignorance of same (New Orleans' acquaintance with regulation is famously casual), placed a neighborhood bar or two on random corners. My personal favorite, though I did not go in, was an establishment called The John. Ghosts are plentiful here, too - a dilapidated house I stumbled upon, currently for sale, was once the residence of Lizzie Miles.
A house in Faubourg-Marigny
The Warehouse District, located to the South of the Quarter, is home to some museums and galleries and said to have suffered mightily at the hands of Katrina. We didn't take too good a look at it, as the only time we were there was at night in pouring rain, but even so, the luxury condos and lofts were obvious, and the reason we were there - dinner at a hyper-modern restaurant Cochon, more on which later - was telling from more than a culinary perspective. All this was post-Katrina construction. Clearly, neither the private developers (as it should be), nor the city government (as perhaps it should not) want to waste the commercial potential of the place. We certainly would not have found the same in the Lower Ninth.
While on the subject of Katrina, though we did not go on an official Katrina tour (had I known they were still doing them four years after the event, I would have signed up), we ended up getting a bit of an informal one from the van driver who took us to Slidell, LA, one morning to the location of a swamp tour we had booked. Even the outer edges of the CBD had been under a shocking fifteen feet of water, according to him. Aside from trashed sidewalks, the effects aren't immediately obvious to someone who doesn't know what to look for, but as the driver pointed out building after building, we realized that they were abandoned. Not enough time had passed for them to have become ruins, and perhaps the city is doing something to maintain a modicum of outward gentility to these places to prevent blight from snowballing, but once you've been shown one or two of these places, you start seeing them everywhere.
East New Orleans, through which we drove on the way up, was devastated, and is currently in an extremely uneven state of reconstruction. Here, both the abandonment and the renewal are glaring. Some of the houses are literally ruins -- caved-in roofs, gaping windows, eight-foot weeds in the yard. Commercial and office buildings are subtler, but still obvious - parking lots overgrown with grass, no lights or signs, and a strange patina of neglect even on those structures that had withstood the winds. You can tell the newly-built houses by their three-foot-high foundations, required by the useless new building code. Some of the apartment complexes are doing a booming business even though the rents are up by 60%, while others, though perfectly ordinary-looking on the outside, are uninhabitable and are waiting for the wrecking ball. According to our guide, some still have squatters living in them, left in peace by the authorities presumably because they would have nowhere to go if they were evicted. Our driver-guide himself had his house in Slidell completely destroyed; he and his wife spent time living in a FEMA trailer, and are now gradually building a new house. Semi-retired before Katrina, he is now working two jobs to pay for the reconstruction.
The fact that even the evidence of Katrina takes little away from the appeal of the less affected parts of the city is testament to New Orleans power and uniqueness. I found the entire vast Uptown area, located to the Southwest of the CBD and reached easily by the St. Charles Ave. street car, enjoyable. The Garden District, full of historic mansions enormous in scale and luxury, is the famous part, and worth seeing out for a glimpse of antebellum Louisiana (one house is now open for tours, the rest are privately owned but a self-guided walking tour with a good guidebook is still worth the time). But to some extent, the "normal" neighborhoods on either side of St. Charles and especially along Magazine Street, are more interesting because they are less special while still retaining significant local color. After seeing the Garden District, J. and I spent the better part of a day strolling along Magazine, checking out the antique shops, many of them with an unusually high concentration of mid-century modern design. St. Charles Ave. half a mile away, a major thoroughfare that roughly follows the curvature of the river from the CBD to the Tulane Campus, is probably the city's most mixed-use neighborhood, majestic apartment buildings sharing frontage with stores and restaurants, forest-green streetcars (originally build in 1925) completing the picture.
To be continued...
Crossing Canal from our hotel (Courtyard Marriott at 124 St. Charles Ave., chosen for the pragmatic reason of a conference J. was attending) puts you on the edges of the French Quarter, and another block or two in on any of its main arteries -- Royal, Chartres or, if you make that mistake, Bourbon -- the New Orleans of both tourist brochures and Faulkner's Sketches explodes at you.
I should probably dispense with Bourbon Street quickly. I hated it. It wasn't the nightclubs (Hustler's was the only "brand" name I recognized, but there was plenty in the same vein) - that sort of thing does not bother me. It was the sheer level of noise, day and night. Barkers - a few scantily-clad women, but mostly obnoxious men with large signs - were literally at every door. Drunk crowds spilling into the streets from every bar (and every business that is not a gentlemen's club is a bar) at all hours. Music blaring through open doors and windows, bands frequently attempting, unsuccessfully, to drown one another out, resulting in a headache-inducing cacophony of grandiose proportions. I should mention that taken individually, most bands sounded fantastic. In a few minutes, we caught strains of blues, country and zydeco, all spectacularly performed. The sheer volume, however, combined with overwhelming crowds both indoors and out, scared us off from actually going in and giving them a proper listen.
A typical French Quarter exterior Turn into any of the side streets, however, and you immediately find yourself in the New Orleans of legend. The architecture and overall feel of the place is completely unique. Despite the name, the style is predominantly Spanish, not French. The wrought-iron railings and posts that make the city famous are just the beginning. Flower-filled wraparound balconies, quaint interior courtyards (some occupied by stores or restaurants and therefore accessible to the passer-by), and cheerful Caribbean-inspired colors add up to create an almost fairy-tale atmosphere. Historic plaques abound. A house that was going to be offered to Napoleon after he was rescued from his exile on St. Helena (he died before the plan could be executed), and a blacksmith shop formerly used as headquarters by the pirate Jean Laffitte (who was going to do the rescuing) are but two that come to mind. Not surprisingly, both have been converted to bars, Napoleon's being the nicer of the two.
Napoleon's HouseA fair number of buildings - one in ten, perhaps - is shuttered, either under renovation or simply unused, but there is no indication that all of them were rendered vacant by Katrina. The vast majority of these places date from the 1700s, and no doubt many needed work long before 2005.
At the center of the French Quarter is Jackson Square, with the St. Louis Cathedral and a statue of pre-presidential Andrew Jackson, but while the cathedral is impressive and the park surrounding Jackson is an idyllic place to while away some time on a nice day eating a muffaletta, the charm is definitely in the side streets.
Directly to the East of the French Quarter is the neighborhood of Faubourg-Marigny, almost as old as the Quarter itself and, from what I could gather, the first area into which the city expanded once it breached its original boundaries. The vibe could not be more different,
however. The area is largely residential, and no house is taller than two stories, the predominant styles being the Creole cottage and the famous shotgun. The condition of the houses varies greatly, from hovels barely holding together to impeccably restored and outlandishly painted creampuffs. Some house bed-and-breakfasts with names like the Bohemian Armadillo. Unusual zoning, or, more likely, the ignorance of same (New Orleans' acquaintance with regulation is famously casual), placed a neighborhood bar or two on random corners. My personal favorite, though I did not go in, was an establishment called The John. Ghosts are plentiful here, too - a dilapidated house I stumbled upon, currently for sale, was once the residence of Lizzie Miles.
A house in Faubourg-MarignyWhile on the subject of Katrina, though we did not go on an official Katrina tour (had I known they were still doing them four years after the event, I would have signed up), we ended up getting a bit of an informal one from the van driver who took us to Slidell, LA, one morning to the location of a swamp tour we had booked. Even the outer edges of the CBD had been under a shocking fifteen feet of water, according to him. Aside from trashed sidewalks, the effects aren't immediately obvious to someone who doesn't know what to look for, but as the driver pointed out building after building, we realized that they were abandoned. Not enough time had passed for them to have become ruins, and perhaps the city is doing something to maintain a modicum of outward gentility to these places to prevent blight from snowballing, but once you've been shown one or two of these places, you start seeing them everywhere.
East New Orleans, through which we drove on the way up, was devastated, and is currently in an extremely uneven state of reconstruction. Here, both the abandonment and the renewal are glaring. Some of the houses are literally ruins -- caved-in roofs, gaping windows, eight-foot weeds in the yard. Commercial and office buildings are subtler, but still obvious - parking lots overgrown with grass, no lights or signs, and a strange patina of neglect even on those structures that had withstood the winds. You can tell the newly-built houses by their three-foot-high foundations, required by the useless new building code. Some of the apartment complexes are doing a booming business even though the rents are up by 60%, while others, though perfectly ordinary-looking on the outside, are uninhabitable and are waiting for the wrecking ball. According to our guide, some still have squatters living in them, left in peace by the authorities presumably because they would have nowhere to go if they were evicted. Our driver-guide himself had his house in Slidell completely destroyed; he and his wife spent time living in a FEMA trailer, and are now gradually building a new house. Semi-retired before Katrina, he is now working two jobs to pay for the reconstruction.
The fact that even the evidence of Katrina takes little away from the appeal of the less affected parts of the city is testament to New Orleans power and uniqueness. I found the entire vast Uptown area, located to the Southwest of the CBD and reached easily by the St. Charles Ave. street car, enjoyable. The Garden District, full of historic mansions enormous in scale and luxury, is the famous part, and worth seeing out for a glimpse of antebellum Louisiana (one house is now open for tours, the rest are privately owned but a self-guided walking tour with a good guidebook is still worth the time). But to some extent, the "normal" neighborhoods on either side of St. Charles and especially along Magazine Street, are more interesting because they are less special while still retaining significant local color. After seeing the Garden District, J. and I spent the better part of a day strolling along Magazine, checking out the antique shops, many of them with an unusually high concentration of mid-century modern design. St. Charles Ave. half a mile away, a major thoroughfare that roughly follows the curvature of the river from the CBD to the Tulane Campus, is probably the city's most mixed-use neighborhood, majestic apartment buildings sharing frontage with stores and restaurants, forest-green streetcars (originally build in 1925) completing the picture.
To be continued...
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Road Trip 2009, Day Five, Part II
Our original plan was to come down the Western side of the state of Michigan and stop for a visit at two legendary breweries in the Grand Rapids area - Founders in Grand Rapids proper, and New Holland in Holland, MI, a few miles away. We were now completely off schedule, however. Determined to catch at least one, we headed for Founders. After an uneventful two and a half hours on US-131, we rolled into downtown Grand Rapids.
Founders, located in the warehouse district on the edge of downtown, turned out to be a block-long hangar, with several roll-top gates, all of them open, separating the cavernous interior from an equally capacious raised deck. At nine o'clock on a Tuesday, the place was well peopled with a stylish twenty-something crowd, but we had no trouble finding two seats at the end of the bar opposite the stage. A singer was performing, accompanying himself on guitar, but the place was so vast that we could barely hear him in our corner. Founders has made a reputation in recent years for being a hotbed of extreme beer, and they did not disappoint. They are most famous, or infamous, for a beer called KBS. It used to stand for Kentucky Bourbon Stout, but seeing as they were nowhere near Kentucky, authorities intervened. Thanks to our generous and enthusiastic bartended, we tasted it. A 11.2% ABV monster aged in Bourbon barrels, it was so intense that the ounce or so he poured for us was more than enough. I cannot imagine drinking even a snifter of the stuff, much less a pint. We had to be a bit careful, seeing as we still had a couple of hours of nighttime driving ahead of us, but I did enjoy a snifter of the Hand of Doom, which is founder's double IPA aged, once again, in Bourbon barrels (definitely a signature of the brewery). It was enormous - huge hops, huge fruit, big funk and pronounced alcohol (10.4% ABV). Evidently, it is not bottled, so we were glad we got to experience it at the source. There were many, many other fascinating-sounding beers on the blackboard, so we made a mental note to come back (the annual release of KBS in March is supposed to be worth attending), and 130 miles later, were back in Ann Arbor.
Founders, located in the warehouse district on the edge of downtown, turned out to be a block-long hangar, with several roll-top gates, all of them open, separating the cavernous interior from an equally capacious raised deck. At nine o'clock on a Tuesday, the place was well peopled with a stylish twenty-something crowd, but we had no trouble finding two seats at the end of the bar opposite the stage. A singer was performing, accompanying himself on guitar, but the place was so vast that we could barely hear him in our corner. Founders has made a reputation in recent years for being a hotbed of extreme beer, and they did not disappoint. They are most famous, or infamous, for a beer called KBS. It used to stand for Kentucky Bourbon Stout, but seeing as they were nowhere near Kentucky, authorities intervened. Thanks to our generous and enthusiastic bartended, we tasted it. A 11.2% ABV monster aged in Bourbon barrels, it was so intense that the ounce or so he poured for us was more than enough. I cannot imagine drinking even a snifter of the stuff, much less a pint. We had to be a bit careful, seeing as we still had a couple of hours of nighttime driving ahead of us, but I did enjoy a snifter of the Hand of Doom, which is founder's double IPA aged, once again, in Bourbon barrels (definitely a signature of the brewery). It was enormous - huge hops, huge fruit, big funk and pronounced alcohol (10.4% ABV). Evidently, it is not bottled, so we were glad we got to experience it at the source. There were many, many other fascinating-sounding beers on the blackboard, so we made a mental note to come back (the annual release of KBS in March is supposed to be worth attending), and 130 miles later, were back in Ann Arbor.
Road Trip 2009, Day Five, Part I
Our second day in the wine country blessed us with the sort of pluperfect weather that I had been disproportionately lucky to experience on my previous visits to Northern Michigan - blindingly bright sun, temperatures in the low sixties, no humidity, and the overpowering blue of the sky that I had only seen in the Southwest. Since wineries didn't open until 11:00 at the earliest, and some not until noon, we had time to kill, so we enjoyed a leisurely and hearty breakfast at the Omlette Shoppe in downtown Traverse City (all the better to absorb Leelanau Peninsula's bounty), then walked around along the lake shore a bit, admiring the views of the bay and discussing G.&N.'s recent idea of leaving dry land altogether and living full-time on a sailboat for a while. I must say that to my myopic, risk-averse mind it sounded completely insane, though if I know anyone who would not only be able to pull it off but actually enjoy it, it would be them.
Our first winery of the day was L. Mawby, and I completely shot ourselves in the foot by not bringing along detailed directions. The place proved to be impossible to find. We drove all around the lower half of Leelanau for at least an hour, stopping to ask for directions and at one point passing within 500 feet of the entrance without realizing it, until we finally arrived by a combination of unmarked, barely paved roads and sheer intuition. I'm glad we persevered. Mawby would be a rarity in most wine-growing regions. To find it in Michigan was downright shocking. They make nothing but sparkling wines, the vast majority of them using the traditional mèthode champenoise, where the wine is fermented in bottles, rather than tanks or barrels. The bottles are arranged on racks and turned periodically to ensure even distribution of yeast. It is an expensive and arcane method of winemaking, but it is what makes Champagne Champagne. In addition to the traditional sparklers, Mawby makes a line of tank-fermented wines under the M. Lawrence label.
The tasting room was small and sparse, with a small deck in the back, and although you could not see the bay, the views of gently rolling hills covered with rows of vines still made for an idyllic location. The tasting is normally paid, and geared towards helping the visitor select their favorite wine, of which they would then buy a glass and enjoy it on the deck. G., however, gently brought his industry connection to bear, and we were able to taste through most of the wines free of charge, poured by the very knowledgeable and pleasant but refreshingly unsalesmanlike middle-aged woman whose name I'm kicking myself for not having asked. The wines were delicious and stood up admirably, in my opinion, to anything from the West Coast. We focused on the traditional wines, though our hostess did talk us into trying one of the tank-fermented ones. The two lines seem to serve radically different markets. The traditional wines are carefully labeled with the French designation of their sweetness (Brut, Sec and so on) and are named either after their types, Champagne-style (Blanc de Blancs, Blanc de Noirs), or with some appropriately hoity-toity sounding moniker (e.g. Cremant Classic). The sweetest of the bunch, Jadore, is fairly sweet, but still balanced and would not be out of place on any dinner table that would take an off-dry Riesling. The tank-fermented wines, on the other hand, all have gimmicky names intended to evoke stereotypical sparkling-wine-drinking occasions (Us, Fizz, Wet, etc.) and are one-dimensionally sweet. The one we tried is the perennial favorite that is actually called Sex. It is a rosé, cloying, with an off-putting, unintegrated finish. It sells like crazy, according to our hostess, for a whole bunch of wrong reasons (the fact that no one wants to say "I don't like Sex" out loud is only the beginning). The pun in the name is no doubt lost on the vast majority of buyers.
Raftshol Vnieyards
Our next stop was going to be Forty-Five North, but we arrived to discover that it was closed, so we moved on immediately to Raftshol Vineyards. We arrived to find a large, dilapidated barn with a small concrete tower, and adjacent to it, a prefabricated single-story structure that claimed to be the tasting room. The interior was a single large room, and it was in complete disarray. A high counter, something you might find in a cut-rate reception hall, to be used by itinerant bartenders, ran alongside one wall; this would prove to be the tasting area. Across the room from it, something akin to an office - desk, a computer, some bookshelves, peeked from behind a mountain of empty cardboards boxes. Various other objects were strewn about, dominated by a bottle labeling machine in one corner. During my research, Raftshol caught my eye because they appeared to emphasize red wines. Reds are notoriously more difficult to make than whites, and the room we were now in did not exude the sort of discipline required to make good reds. A few people were milling about by the counter, but left shortly after we arrived, leaving us in the presence of an elderly gentleman in suspenders and a flannel shirt, sporting a Lincolnesque beard. This turned out to be Warren Raftshol, owner, vine grower and winemaker. He was so self-effacing as to appear almost uncaring. His answer to many of our questions was a shrug of the shoulders followed by "I wasn't paying much attention." Never have I met anyone in the wine world who had so little need for the trappings of wine commerce and the image that frequently goes along with it.
I would have loved to report that the wines were spectacular, smashing once and for all the myriad myths associated with winemaking and wine drinking. Sadly, they were not. The Pinot Noir, which we tasted from dusty, mismatched glasses, was exceedingly light in color and flavor, murky (bottled completely unfiltered, if memory serves) and tasted home-made. The Bordeaux blend (to think that a place like this even made one!) was not a wine I would reach for expectantly, but was at least convincing, the unmistakable flavor combination of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc detectable, even if muted. When I asked whether Mr. Raftshol has had much luck with Cabernet Sauvignon, his reply was a non-chalant "Not really." The straight Cab Franc, not surprisingly, aquitted itself the best, and at $9, was a bargain. G. and I bought a few bottles between the two of us, and Mr. Raftshol labeled them for us on the spot, putting the foil over the necks of the bottles and setting it with a hair dryer before handing the bottles to us and asking us to let them sit for a couple of weeks as he had bottled them only a few days before our visit.
Our long search for L. Mawby had thrown us off-schedule, and we were now well into the afternoon. While at Mawby, we learned that one of the grapes they grew was Vignoles, an obscure French blending grape that seemed to do well in the local climate. Furthermore, we found out that another local winery, Leelanau Cellars, made a varietal Vignoles. Their tasting room was in the village of Suttons Bay, which happened to be only a couple of miles away, so we headed there to try it. They turned out to have not one but two Vignole-based wines. We found the basic, dry, table Vignoles to be good, though not really unique - crisp, but with a decent body and good fruit. A solid, everyday white wine. It was well worth stopping in at Leelanau Cellars for other reasons, though - the winery features a large tasting room, strikingly finished with maple planks on the interior, with an enormous panoramic window overlooking the bay. It was a lovely place to spend some time, and the wines we tasted from Leelanau's enormous portfolio were in tune with the quality of the wines we had been tasting. The biggest surprise turned out to be the other Vignoles - a botrytis dessert wine. Botrytis - a fungus which, under the right conditions, can remove enough moisture from grapes to concentrate the sugars without killing the grape altogether, is, of course, what makes Sauternes, probably the world's most famous dessert wine, Sauternes. Making a botrytis wine is an enormous amount of work, but Leelanau Cellars pulled it off. While I could not describe the flavor with any precision, it was delicious and enormously complex. There is a bottle in my fridge, waiting to be revisited.
At this point, the afternoon was starting to bend towards evening. We relaxed for a while on the deck of the restaurant next door to the tasting room, enjoying a glass of wine and mesmerizing views of the bay, then got on the road and headed South, for we had one more place to visit before returning to Ann Arbor.
Our first winery of the day was L. Mawby, and I completely shot ourselves in the foot by not bringing along detailed directions. The place proved to be impossible to find. We drove all around the lower half of Leelanau for at least an hour, stopping to ask for directions and at one point passing within 500 feet of the entrance without realizing it, until we finally arrived by a combination of unmarked, barely paved roads and sheer intuition. I'm glad we persevered. Mawby would be a rarity in most wine-growing regions. To find it in Michigan was downright shocking. They make nothing but sparkling wines, the vast majority of them using the traditional mèthode champenoise, where the wine is fermented in bottles, rather than tanks or barrels. The bottles are arranged on racks and turned periodically to ensure even distribution of yeast. It is an expensive and arcane method of winemaking, but it is what makes Champagne Champagne. In addition to the traditional sparklers, Mawby makes a line of tank-fermented wines under the M. Lawrence label.
The tasting room was small and sparse, with a small deck in the back, and although you could not see the bay, the views of gently rolling hills covered with rows of vines still made for an idyllic location. The tasting is normally paid, and geared towards helping the visitor select their favorite wine, of which they would then buy a glass and enjoy it on the deck. G., however, gently brought his industry connection to bear, and we were able to taste through most of the wines free of charge, poured by the very knowledgeable and pleasant but refreshingly unsalesmanlike middle-aged woman whose name I'm kicking myself for not having asked. The wines were delicious and stood up admirably, in my opinion, to anything from the West Coast. We focused on the traditional wines, though our hostess did talk us into trying one of the tank-fermented ones. The two lines seem to serve radically different markets. The traditional wines are carefully labeled with the French designation of their sweetness (Brut, Sec and so on) and are named either after their types, Champagne-style (Blanc de Blancs, Blanc de Noirs), or with some appropriately hoity-toity sounding moniker (e.g. Cremant Classic). The sweetest of the bunch, Jadore, is fairly sweet, but still balanced and would not be out of place on any dinner table that would take an off-dry Riesling. The tank-fermented wines, on the other hand, all have gimmicky names intended to evoke stereotypical sparkling-wine-drinking occasions (Us, Fizz, Wet, etc.) and are one-dimensionally sweet. The one we tried is the perennial favorite that is actually called Sex. It is a rosé, cloying, with an off-putting, unintegrated finish. It sells like crazy, according to our hostess, for a whole bunch of wrong reasons (the fact that no one wants to say "I don't like Sex" out loud is only the beginning). The pun in the name is no doubt lost on the vast majority of buyers.
Raftshol Vnieyards Our next stop was going to be Forty-Five North, but we arrived to discover that it was closed, so we moved on immediately to Raftshol Vineyards. We arrived to find a large, dilapidated barn with a small concrete tower, and adjacent to it, a prefabricated single-story structure that claimed to be the tasting room. The interior was a single large room, and it was in complete disarray. A high counter, something you might find in a cut-rate reception hall, to be used by itinerant bartenders, ran alongside one wall; this would prove to be the tasting area. Across the room from it, something akin to an office - desk, a computer, some bookshelves, peeked from behind a mountain of empty cardboards boxes. Various other objects were strewn about, dominated by a bottle labeling machine in one corner. During my research, Raftshol caught my eye because they appeared to emphasize red wines. Reds are notoriously more difficult to make than whites, and the room we were now in did not exude the sort of discipline required to make good reds. A few people were milling about by the counter, but left shortly after we arrived, leaving us in the presence of an elderly gentleman in suspenders and a flannel shirt, sporting a Lincolnesque beard. This turned out to be Warren Raftshol, owner, vine grower and winemaker. He was so self-effacing as to appear almost uncaring. His answer to many of our questions was a shrug of the shoulders followed by "I wasn't paying much attention." Never have I met anyone in the wine world who had so little need for the trappings of wine commerce and the image that frequently goes along with it.
I would have loved to report that the wines were spectacular, smashing once and for all the myriad myths associated with winemaking and wine drinking. Sadly, they were not. The Pinot Noir, which we tasted from dusty, mismatched glasses, was exceedingly light in color and flavor, murky (bottled completely unfiltered, if memory serves) and tasted home-made. The Bordeaux blend (to think that a place like this even made one!) was not a wine I would reach for expectantly, but was at least convincing, the unmistakable flavor combination of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc detectable, even if muted. When I asked whether Mr. Raftshol has had much luck with Cabernet Sauvignon, his reply was a non-chalant "Not really." The straight Cab Franc, not surprisingly, aquitted itself the best, and at $9, was a bargain. G. and I bought a few bottles between the two of us, and Mr. Raftshol labeled them for us on the spot, putting the foil over the necks of the bottles and setting it with a hair dryer before handing the bottles to us and asking us to let them sit for a couple of weeks as he had bottled them only a few days before our visit.
Our long search for L. Mawby had thrown us off-schedule, and we were now well into the afternoon. While at Mawby, we learned that one of the grapes they grew was Vignoles, an obscure French blending grape that seemed to do well in the local climate. Furthermore, we found out that another local winery, Leelanau Cellars, made a varietal Vignoles. Their tasting room was in the village of Suttons Bay, which happened to be only a couple of miles away, so we headed there to try it. They turned out to have not one but two Vignole-based wines. We found the basic, dry, table Vignoles to be good, though not really unique - crisp, but with a decent body and good fruit. A solid, everyday white wine. It was well worth stopping in at Leelanau Cellars for other reasons, though - the winery features a large tasting room, strikingly finished with maple planks on the interior, with an enormous panoramic window overlooking the bay. It was a lovely place to spend some time, and the wines we tasted from Leelanau's enormous portfolio were in tune with the quality of the wines we had been tasting. The biggest surprise turned out to be the other Vignoles - a botrytis dessert wine. Botrytis - a fungus which, under the right conditions, can remove enough moisture from grapes to concentrate the sugars without killing the grape altogether, is, of course, what makes Sauternes, probably the world's most famous dessert wine, Sauternes. Making a botrytis wine is an enormous amount of work, but Leelanau Cellars pulled it off. While I could not describe the flavor with any precision, it was delicious and enormously complex. There is a bottle in my fridge, waiting to be revisited.
At this point, the afternoon was starting to bend towards evening. We relaxed for a while on the deck of the restaurant next door to the tasting room, enjoying a glass of wine and mesmerizing views of the bay, then got on the road and headed South, for we had one more place to visit before returning to Ann Arbor.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Road Trip 2009, Days Three and Four
I spent an uneventful but very pleasant Sunday in Ann Arbor, catching up with my friends, walking leisurely around downtown and eating a delicious meal of quesadillas with home-made pico de gallo and guacamole that my friends prepared. At 7:00 a.m. Monday morning, G. and I, leaving N. behind to a much-needed couple of days of peace and quiet, set off for Traverse City. Here, I should give props to G., who would win a gold medal if staying up late and sleeping in was an Olympic sport, for being up and out at the crack of dawn, making the travel tyrant in me very happy.
The four-hour drive under the relentless gray of central Michigan skies passed without incident, and we rolled into downtown Traverse City a little after noon.
We had lunch at a small place on Front St. that featured local organic ingredients (the name escapes me for some reason), where I had a minimalist but delicious sandwich of local Lake Michigan walleye pan-fried in olive oil, then immediately set off for the wineries.
Two peninsulas jut out into Grand Traverse Bay on either side of Traverse City - Leelanau and the much smaller Old Mission to the East. Over two dozen wineries are spread across the two. As a wine-growing an wine-making region, the area is young: the earliest wineries were established in the late 1970s, but most have sprung up in the 80s and early 90s. Besides the microclimate created by the geography of the peninsulas and the bay, the area lies directly on the 45th parallel, said to create ideal conditions for growing grapes because of the angle at which the sun's rays hit the ground. Willamette Valley in Oregon, among others, is located on the 45th parallel. To the extent that the area is known at all, which isn't much, it is known for Riesling and Gewurztraminer - not surprising, given those grapes' predilection for cool climates. We would soon find out that Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris were also common, and that Cabernet Franc has taken off like gangbusters. Similar to other "secondary" wine-growing areas like Virginia and New York's Finger Lakes, Michigan makes a fair number of sweet, fruit-flavored wines (the primary flavoring being locally grown cherries), but "serious" wines are also plentiful and growing stronger.
There was no way we could visit all the wineries in the two days available to us, and although I had done some research, my choices were somewhat random - I looked for places that emphasized "serious" wines and deemphasized cherry-flavored nonsense or grew unusual varieties and made unusual styles, as well as wineries that focused on wines and did not attempt to cram restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts into their properties. Our first stop was Penninsula Cellars, whose tasting room is located in a former one-room schoolhouse build in 1896. Their portfolio is large and does include some fruit-flavored wines, along with a full spectrum of whites and a few reds, some of them off-dry. We focused on the dry wines, poured by a friendly but excessively languid young blonde, and I was immediately struck by the quality. These were delicious, well-made wines with no obvious defects. Trying to take detailed tasting notes would have been overwhelming, but the few I did jot down tell me that the Gewurztraminer was a standout. There is a bottle still in my fridge, so I'll be able to do a proper review soon enough. I also bought a bottle of their dry Riesling and opened it a couple of weeks after getting home. In addition to the typical Riesling flavors of citrus and that elusive petroleum quality on the back palate, the Peninsula had a pronounced flavor of honeydew melon. It was delicious.
From Peninsula, we headed up the road to Chateau Grand Traverse, the largest and most commercial winery we would visit on our entire tour. We took a tour of the wine-making facilities (G., who is a trained sommelier, was impressed by the winery's methodic approach - we would see its opposite the following day), then tasted a few wines from their long list in the giant and excessively touristy tasting room-cum-gift shop. Despite the scale and the commercial focus, the wines were good, and, probably thanks to the volume, more affordable than elsewhere. Much like in Virginia, Michigan wines tend to be on the expensive side - the economics of winemaking and the need to recoup the enormous investment a winery requires, I suppose. We've all heard the joke: Q: How do you make a small fortune in wine-making? A: Start with a large one.
Our next stop was Brys Estate (pronounced "Brice"). Visibly a high-end operation, with a stylish, oak-paneled tasting room, it had no fruit-flavored wines in its portfolio and was the site of our first paid tasting. It was also the only scam and the only real disappointment of the trip. Our wine was poured by a handsome and gregarious young fellow, friendly but ever so slightly slippery, with something of a faux-intellectual air about him. 2007, evidently, was the best vintage in the history of Michigan winemaking, and Brys had made a series of super-premium wines in that vintage. With only 500 bottles of each wine available, they were selling for a shocking $50/bottle, but for $10, we could taste all of them, and even get some food thrown in. What a deal. The food proved to be downright insulting - a soggy Carr's cracker, a small glop of stale goat cheese and a piece of "salami" that I was convinced was actually Slim-Jim, on a paper plate directly out of the refrigerator, where I am sure it had been sitting since before the 2007 vintage was even picked. Out first wine was a Chardonnay, and I immediately got a whiff of nail polish - ethyl acetate (thanks, G., for the chemistry lesson), a classic flaw in a wine. Our trust was permanently undermined, though I must admit that objectively, the reds - a Pinot Noir, a Merlot and a Cab Franc - were good. Just not $50 good.
Our last stop on Old Mission was 2Lads, the Northern-most winery on the Peninsula. Located in a striking modernist building overlooking the vineyards and Grand Traverse Bay beyond, the place is breathtaking for its location and design, but you might conclude that the attention and investment lavished on the appearance would be concomitantly absent from their products. You would be wrong - the wines were delicious; the best we tasted that day and the best reds of the entire trip. The portfolio is small - these guys are super-focused - but they get back in quality what they sacrifice in variety. Both the Pinot Noir and the Cabernet Franc, though pricey at $25, were knockouts: the Pinot smooth and fruity but with excellent depth and structure, the Cab enormous and packed with flavor, drinkable now with a hearty meal but designed, I suspect, for cellaring. The people at the tasting room were very knowledgeable, and we left with a feeling of having found the holy grail of Michigan wine.
It had started to rain by this time, and after having paid a quick visit to the lighthouse at the tip of the peninsula, we drove back to Traverse City, checked into our motel and, somewhat refreshed, set out in search of dinner and, for a change, a non-grape-based beverage. I knew of two brewpubs in town - Mackinaw and North Peak, and we intended to try them both. The server at Mackinaw, however, informed us of a new place - Right Brain Brewing Company - well hidden in a former warehouse on the edge of downtown and accessed through an entrance shared with a hair salon. Intrigued, we abandoned North Peak in its favor. What we found was a relatively quiet, well-lit room with cafeteria-style tables and a bar that looked more like a diner counter. The place felt like a mixture of a coffeehouse and a public library, not a pub. Right Brain's planning and scheduling still needs to be ironed out, apparently - they were out of many of the beers on their list - but we did have a delicious, crisp ESB and an enormously complex, aromatic barley wine. I wish I had taken detailed notes.
It was late by this time, but one of the cafes downtown was still open, so we stopped in for a detoxifying pot of green tea and a bit of ceremonial reading from Kingsley Amis's On Drink before heading back to the motel to sleep off our first day of tasting.
The four-hour drive under the relentless gray of central Michigan skies passed without incident, and we rolled into downtown Traverse City a little after noon.
We had lunch at a small place on Front St. that featured local organic ingredients (the name escapes me for some reason), where I had a minimalist but delicious sandwich of local Lake Michigan walleye pan-fried in olive oil, then immediately set off for the wineries.Two peninsulas jut out into Grand Traverse Bay on either side of Traverse City - Leelanau and the much smaller Old Mission to the East. Over two dozen wineries are spread across the two. As a wine-growing an wine-making region, the area is young: the earliest wineries were established in the late 1970s, but most have sprung up in the 80s and early 90s. Besides the microclimate created by the geography of the peninsulas and the bay, the area lies directly on the 45th parallel, said to create ideal conditions for growing grapes because of the angle at which the sun's rays hit the ground. Willamette Valley in Oregon, among others, is located on the 45th parallel. To the extent that the area is known at all, which isn't much, it is known for Riesling and Gewurztraminer - not surprising, given those grapes' predilection for cool climates. We would soon find out that Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris were also common, and that Cabernet Franc has taken off like gangbusters. Similar to other "secondary" wine-growing areas like Virginia and New York's Finger Lakes, Michigan makes a fair number of sweet, fruit-flavored wines (the primary flavoring being locally grown cherries), but "serious" wines are also plentiful and growing stronger.
There was no way we could visit all the wineries in the two days available to us, and although I had done some research, my choices were somewhat random - I looked for places that emphasized "serious" wines and deemphasized cherry-flavored nonsense or grew unusual varieties and made unusual styles, as well as wineries that focused on wines and did not attempt to cram restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts into their properties. Our first stop was Penninsula Cellars, whose tasting room is located in a former one-room schoolhouse build in 1896. Their portfolio is large and does include some fruit-flavored wines, along with a full spectrum of whites and a few reds, some of them off-dry. We focused on the dry wines, poured by a friendly but excessively languid young blonde, and I was immediately struck by the quality. These were delicious, well-made wines with no obvious defects. Trying to take detailed tasting notes would have been overwhelming, but the few I did jot down tell me that the Gewurztraminer was a standout. There is a bottle still in my fridge, so I'll be able to do a proper review soon enough. I also bought a bottle of their dry Riesling and opened it a couple of weeks after getting home. In addition to the typical Riesling flavors of citrus and that elusive petroleum quality on the back palate, the Peninsula had a pronounced flavor of honeydew melon. It was delicious.
From Peninsula, we headed up the road to Chateau Grand Traverse, the largest and most commercial winery we would visit on our entire tour. We took a tour of the wine-making facilities (G., who is a trained sommelier, was impressed by the winery's methodic approach - we would see its opposite the following day), then tasted a few wines from their long list in the giant and excessively touristy tasting room-cum-gift shop. Despite the scale and the commercial focus, the wines were good, and, probably thanks to the volume, more affordable than elsewhere. Much like in Virginia, Michigan wines tend to be on the expensive side - the economics of winemaking and the need to recoup the enormous investment a winery requires, I suppose. We've all heard the joke: Q: How do you make a small fortune in wine-making? A: Start with a large one.
Our next stop was Brys Estate (pronounced "Brice"). Visibly a high-end operation, with a stylish, oak-paneled tasting room, it had no fruit-flavored wines in its portfolio and was the site of our first paid tasting. It was also the only scam and the only real disappointment of the trip. Our wine was poured by a handsome and gregarious young fellow, friendly but ever so slightly slippery, with something of a faux-intellectual air about him. 2007, evidently, was the best vintage in the history of Michigan winemaking, and Brys had made a series of super-premium wines in that vintage. With only 500 bottles of each wine available, they were selling for a shocking $50/bottle, but for $10, we could taste all of them, and even get some food thrown in. What a deal. The food proved to be downright insulting - a soggy Carr's cracker, a small glop of stale goat cheese and a piece of "salami" that I was convinced was actually Slim-Jim, on a paper plate directly out of the refrigerator, where I am sure it had been sitting since before the 2007 vintage was even picked. Out first wine was a Chardonnay, and I immediately got a whiff of nail polish - ethyl acetate (thanks, G., for the chemistry lesson), a classic flaw in a wine. Our trust was permanently undermined, though I must admit that objectively, the reds - a Pinot Noir, a Merlot and a Cab Franc - were good. Just not $50 good.
Our last stop on Old Mission was 2Lads, the Northern-most winery on the Peninsula. Located in a striking modernist building overlooking the vineyards and Grand Traverse Bay beyond, the place is breathtaking for its location and design, but you might conclude that the attention and investment lavished on the appearance would be concomitantly absent from their products. You would be wrong - the wines were delicious; the best we tasted that day and the best reds of the entire trip. The portfolio is small - these guys are super-focused - but they get back in quality what they sacrifice in variety. Both the Pinot Noir and the Cabernet Franc, though pricey at $25, were knockouts: the Pinot smooth and fruity but with excellent depth and structure, the Cab enormous and packed with flavor, drinkable now with a hearty meal but designed, I suspect, for cellaring. The people at the tasting room were very knowledgeable, and we left with a feeling of having found the holy grail of Michigan wine.
It had started to rain by this time, and after having paid a quick visit to the lighthouse at the tip of the peninsula, we drove back to Traverse City, checked into our motel and, somewhat refreshed, set out in search of dinner and, for a change, a non-grape-based beverage. I knew of two brewpubs in town - Mackinaw and North Peak, and we intended to try them both. The server at Mackinaw, however, informed us of a new place - Right Brain Brewing Company - well hidden in a former warehouse on the edge of downtown and accessed through an entrance shared with a hair salon. Intrigued, we abandoned North Peak in its favor. What we found was a relatively quiet, well-lit room with cafeteria-style tables and a bar that looked more like a diner counter. The place felt like a mixture of a coffeehouse and a public library, not a pub. Right Brain's planning and scheduling still needs to be ironed out, apparently - they were out of many of the beers on their list - but we did have a delicious, crisp ESB and an enormously complex, aromatic barley wine. I wish I had taken detailed notes.It was late by this time, but one of the cafes downtown was still open, so we stopped in for a detoxifying pot of green tea and a bit of ceremonial reading from Kingsley Amis's On Drink before heading back to the motel to sleep off our first day of tasting.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Road Trip 2009, Day Two, Part II
Heading out of Pittsburgh, the road passed through the city's Northwestern suburbs - Avalon, Elmsworth, Sewickley -- generic and somewhat dusty, but not the ghosts of their former selves I was expecting (I would get that soon enough). A pristine brown E-Type, an early, six-cylinder model, passed me, its driver waving back when I gave him a thumbs-up. I crossed the Ohio at Rochester, PA, where the river bends sharply to the West and a few minutes later was driving through Beaver, PA - a gem of a town with a textbook Main Street running through the heart of downtown. This was to be the last bit of prosperity I would see all day.
Continuing downstream along PA-39, I crossed into Ohio a few miles later. The industrial landscape of the Ohio River Valley was already in evidence a few miles north of Pittsburgh, but the riverside factories and warehouses there, though I couldn't quite tell what they manufactured, all looked operational. Smoke was billowing from their smokestacks, barges were moored nearby and an occasional eighteen-wheeler would pull out of the gates despite it being Saturday. Once on the Ohio side, however, the level of activity dropped precipitously. The town of East Liverpool, the first I hit in the state, was a dismal place from the first house. Covered with decades' worth of industrial grime, the houses all listed and sagged, many of their windows cracked and hung inside with dirty blankets instead of curtains. Cars - mostly dented Chevies and Pontiacs - sat in driveways or along the curbs, but there were no people on the street, not even sitting idly on the steps of their porches or hanging out aimlessly on street corners. The city was a complete ghost town. As I drove past a block-long single-level warehouse, once blue but now of an indeterminate color, its glassless windows gaping vacantly, a teenage boy rode by in the opposite direction on a BMX bike. Naked from the waist up, his body was completely covered with tattoos. He was my only evidence that the town was not completely abandoned. As we passed each other, he did not even glance in my direction even though mine was the only car on the road.
As I continued South on OH-7, the industry started up again on a vast scale. These were obviously power plants. At least one looked nuclear. The landscape was hilly and not unattractive - I was still in the Western foothills of the Appalachians, after all. I couldn't decide whether the massive smokestacks ruined or enhanced it. I've been in love with industrial landscapes since childhood, but in places where I first experienced them - the no-man's land between Brooklyn and Queens - they were total, stretching as far as the eye could see and consuming not only the entire city but seemingly the whole planet. Here, the iron and concrete coexisted with bucolic green hills and a lazily flowing river. Impressive though the power plants were, the coexistence looked uneasy.
I drove South as far as Steubenville, making a point to cut through downtown (larger, but still dead, with a modicum of car traffic but no more pedestrians than E. Liverpool), then cut West on US-22. Almost immediately, the hills leveled off and I was in the farm country Ohio is known for - flat and monotonous. I turned up the music and settled into a sort of stupor, glancing occasionally to the sides of the road and finding nothing but acres of corn and some other equally plentiful crop I couldn't identify. It was well after 1:00 p.m. when I reached Zanesville, named after Ebenezer Zane, an early settler, and not Zane Grey, the writer of Westerns, although Grey was apparently a descendant of Zane and was born here.
Driving through downtown netted no lunch possibilities - the place was dead. A thrift shop here and there, but otherwise, empty storefronts with equally empty loft spaces above them. If I was looking for the proof that the average Midwestern city was dead, I found it here in spades. I learned later that apparently there is a shopping and restaurant district to the North of downtown, along with an artist colony, but knowing nothing of it at the time (I managed to miss the famous Y-Bridge which Amelia Earhart had used for navigation, too), I stayed on US-22 and stopped at a surprisingly cheerful-looking diner a mile or so outside downtown. It was a retro-fifties job, but small, clean, and well kept-up. There was a number of customers at the tables even though it was well past regular lunch time. Sitting at the counter, I ordered a sandwich from a slim woman somewhere in her forties, friendly, her lively dark eyes and youthfully styled hair hinting at the beauty prematurely extinguished (I wanted to think) by life in a place like this. I asked her what the population of the city was. Not knowing, she called over a co-worked, a much older woman, wiry and stern-looking, who said that it had once been fifty thousand, but was now more like thirty-five. The real figure was about twenty-five, I later learned, but it didn't matter. The question I really wanted to ask was "what do people do here?" and was looking for a polite way to ask it. When I managed something along those lines, she launched into exactly the sort of monologue I would have wanted if I was a journalist writing an article about the decline of the American Steel Belt. "There used to be a lot of work here, but one by one the companies left. The mines were good, too, but they are all gone now. Etc., etc." But thirty-five thousand people, I thought. They must do something. They can't all be on the dole. "So what do people do for work now?" I asked. She never answered, doing some more lamenting about the former employers instead, but perhaps her lack of answer was the answer I was looking for.
US-22 Southwest of Zanesville is designated scenic by the AAA, and indeed it was, to the extent possible in the middle of Ohio. My next stop was Lancaster, the birthplace of General Sherman (of Sherman's March). There was a small monument to him in the middle downtown. Knowing that Lancaster was home to an Ohio University campus, I was hoping to get a cup decent coffee, but to no avail. Downtown Lancaster was every bit as dead as Zanesville despite a small festival going on in a park a couple of blocks from where I parked the car. Strangely, a luxurious boutique hotel shared frontage with vacant stores and a pawn shop.
Having looked up some information on these places after the fact, I discovered that all of them - Zanesville, Lancaster, probably even East Liverpool, have some life - communities, restaurants, festivals, museums, art scenes. But it certainly was not obvious from a casual stroll through these cities' downtowns. To an uninformed traveler, they offer little more than on overpowering sense of having been left behind by time.
From Lancaster, I continued South for a while longer on OH-159, also a designated scenic road, then cut North on US-23, bypassed Columbus to the West on its beltway, and continued Northwest on US-33 to Marysville, OH-31 to Kenton, then US-68 to Findlay where I was briefly forced onto I-75 before taking OH-25 to the Toledo bypass and onto US-23 into Michigan, finally arriving in bustling downtown Ann Arbor a few minutes after 9:30 p.m. I made only one other brief stop, in Mt. Victory, OH, where I spotted a complete vintage Gulf gas station. I hoped it was still operational, but it turned out to be just a façade, the building behind it housing a regular auto repair shop.
Continuing downstream along PA-39, I crossed into Ohio a few miles later. The industrial landscape of the Ohio River Valley was already in evidence a few miles north of Pittsburgh, but the riverside factories and warehouses there, though I couldn't quite tell what they manufactured, all looked operational. Smoke was billowing from their smokestacks, barges were moored nearby and an occasional eighteen-wheeler would pull out of the gates despite it being Saturday. Once on the Ohio side, however, the level of activity dropped precipitously. The town of East Liverpool, the first I hit in the state, was a dismal place from the first house. Covered with decades' worth of industrial grime, the houses all listed and sagged, many of their windows cracked and hung inside with dirty blankets instead of curtains. Cars - mostly dented Chevies and Pontiacs - sat in driveways or along the curbs, but there were no people on the street, not even sitting idly on the steps of their porches or hanging out aimlessly on street corners. The city was a complete ghost town. As I drove past a block-long single-level warehouse, once blue but now of an indeterminate color, its glassless windows gaping vacantly, a teenage boy rode by in the opposite direction on a BMX bike. Naked from the waist up, his body was completely covered with tattoos. He was my only evidence that the town was not completely abandoned. As we passed each other, he did not even glance in my direction even though mine was the only car on the road.
As I continued South on OH-7, the industry started up again on a vast scale. These were obviously power plants. At least one looked nuclear. The landscape was hilly and not unattractive - I was still in the Western foothills of the Appalachians, after all. I couldn't decide whether the massive smokestacks ruined or enhanced it. I've been in love with industrial landscapes since childhood, but in places where I first experienced them - the no-man's land between Brooklyn and Queens - they were total, stretching as far as the eye could see and consuming not only the entire city but seemingly the whole planet. Here, the iron and concrete coexisted with bucolic green hills and a lazily flowing river. Impressive though the power plants were, the coexistence looked uneasy.
I drove South as far as Steubenville, making a point to cut through downtown (larger, but still dead, with a modicum of car traffic but no more pedestrians than E. Liverpool), then cut West on US-22. Almost immediately, the hills leveled off and I was in the farm country Ohio is known for - flat and monotonous. I turned up the music and settled into a sort of stupor, glancing occasionally to the sides of the road and finding nothing but acres of corn and some other equally plentiful crop I couldn't identify. It was well after 1:00 p.m. when I reached Zanesville, named after Ebenezer Zane, an early settler, and not Zane Grey, the writer of Westerns, although Grey was apparently a descendant of Zane and was born here.
Driving through downtown netted no lunch possibilities - the place was dead. A thrift shop here and there, but otherwise, empty storefronts with equally empty loft spaces above them. If I was looking for the proof that the average Midwestern city was dead, I found it here in spades. I learned later that apparently there is a shopping and restaurant district to the North of downtown, along with an artist colony, but knowing nothing of it at the time (I managed to miss the famous Y-Bridge which Amelia Earhart had used for navigation, too), I stayed on US-22 and stopped at a surprisingly cheerful-looking diner a mile or so outside downtown. It was a retro-fifties job, but small, clean, and well kept-up. There was a number of customers at the tables even though it was well past regular lunch time. Sitting at the counter, I ordered a sandwich from a slim woman somewhere in her forties, friendly, her lively dark eyes and youthfully styled hair hinting at the beauty prematurely extinguished (I wanted to think) by life in a place like this. I asked her what the population of the city was. Not knowing, she called over a co-worked, a much older woman, wiry and stern-looking, who said that it had once been fifty thousand, but was now more like thirty-five. The real figure was about twenty-five, I later learned, but it didn't matter. The question I really wanted to ask was "what do people do here?" and was looking for a polite way to ask it. When I managed something along those lines, she launched into exactly the sort of monologue I would have wanted if I was a journalist writing an article about the decline of the American Steel Belt. "There used to be a lot of work here, but one by one the companies left. The mines were good, too, but they are all gone now. Etc., etc." But thirty-five thousand people, I thought. They must do something. They can't all be on the dole. "So what do people do for work now?" I asked. She never answered, doing some more lamenting about the former employers instead, but perhaps her lack of answer was the answer I was looking for.
US-22 Southwest of Zanesville is designated scenic by the AAA, and indeed it was, to the extent possible in the middle of Ohio. My next stop was Lancaster, the birthplace of General Sherman (of Sherman's March). There was a small monument to him in the middle downtown. Knowing that Lancaster was home to an Ohio University campus, I was hoping to get a cup decent coffee, but to no avail. Downtown Lancaster was every bit as dead as Zanesville despite a small festival going on in a park a couple of blocks from where I parked the car. Strangely, a luxurious boutique hotel shared frontage with vacant stores and a pawn shop.
Having looked up some information on these places after the fact, I discovered that all of them - Zanesville, Lancaster, probably even East Liverpool, have some life - communities, restaurants, festivals, museums, art scenes. But it certainly was not obvious from a casual stroll through these cities' downtowns. To an uninformed traveler, they offer little more than on overpowering sense of having been left behind by time.
From Lancaster, I continued South for a while longer on OH-159, also a designated scenic road, then cut North on US-23, bypassed Columbus to the West on its beltway, and continued Northwest on US-33 to Marysville, OH-31 to Kenton, then US-68 to Findlay where I was briefly forced onto I-75 before taking OH-25 to the Toledo bypass and onto US-23 into Michigan, finally arriving in bustling downtown Ann Arbor a few minutes after 9:30 p.m. I made only one other brief stop, in Mt. Victory, OH, where I spotted a complete vintage Gulf gas station. I hoped it was still operational, but it turned out to be just a façade, the building behind it housing a regular auto repair shop.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Road Trip 2009, Day Two, Part I
The second day of driving would take me across the Ohio River Valley and across the endless farmlands of Ohio. First, however, there was the question of breakfast. I initially wanted to go to the Steel City Diner, a downtown greasy spoon J. and I enjoyed on our visit three years ago, but I walked the six or so blocks only to find that it had closed. Plan B was Pamela's in the Strip, recommended the previous night by the Church's bartender and corroborated by the woman at my hotel's front desk.
The Strip - essentially the area between Liberty Ave. and the bank of the Allegheny River, stretching from downtown roughly to 31st St. -- is, for my money, Pittsburgh's most distinctive, and also useful, neighborhood, especially on Saturday mornings. Originally, and to a great extent still, it was the city's warehouse district. Many of the warehouses have been converted to stores, restaurants and nightclubs, but they happily share real estate with the old machine shops and wholesale glass cutters. In terms of shopping, the twin focus is on home furnishings and food, and while the inexorable march of gentrification hasn't left the Strip untouched, adding a sprinkling of stores selling designer lamps and colorful throw-pillows made from recycled fibers, many of the businesses hark back to the city's days as a working class burg populated by Italian, Polish and Asian immigrants and their descendants. On Saturday mornings, the entire Strip spills out onto the sidewalks and the whole neighborhood turns into an enormous outdoor marketplace. Food vendors of every stripe, especially Italian pastry shops, display their tantalizing wares, many of them baked mere minutes earlier. Espresso machines hiss and foam everywhere. Piles of cheap plastic toys and 99-cent flip-flops block the sidewalks, Chinatown style. It being Pittsburgh, the entire cauldron is generously seasoned with Steelers and Penguins t-shirts.
Pamela's (60 21st St.) is located in the heart of all this. By the time I got there a little after nine and parked the car, both the smallish dining room and the half-dozen outdoor tables were full, and at least a dozen people were waiting, but the counter - the solo traveler's savior -- was empty, so I plopped myself on one of the old-school vinyl-upholstered stools and ordered a much-needed mug of coffee. The place had a retro décor, but it was more sixties than the faux-fifties more common to postmodern diners. Instead of juke boxes and pictures of Elvis, it was advertisements for 1960s American cars - as far as I could tell original flyers and magazine pages shellacked onto one of the walls, covering it entirely. A shelf in the corner held a bakelite rotary phone, an old radio, a couple of kidney-shaped ash trays. The colors around me were relatively bright, but definitely tended towards the turquoise and pale yellow of the sixties, making the room feel inviting and far less contrived than one might expect.
The menu was fairly standard American Diner, though their specialty - giant thin pancakes, somewhere between a flapjack and a crepe -- were featured prominently. They looked appetizing - I kept seeing platefuls of them being brought out every few minutes -- but I was craving protein, and opted for an artery-clogging treat of fried eggs and respectably greasy and spicy chorizo. In Pittsburgh - who would have thought?
While driving around the neighborhood earlier looking for parking, I had spotted a tiny café in one of the side streets, and after breakfast, although I was already over-caffeinated, I stopped in. The place, called The Leaf and Bean (2200 Penn Ave., entrance around the corner), proved to be well worth checking out, not for its large selection of cigars (the "Leaf"), but for the overwhelming amount of junk that covered every square inch of the walls and ceiling. Interior décor is best when taken to either of the two extremes - sparse and minimalist or so overstuffed that you are constantly finding something new to look at. This was a perfect example of the latter. I ordered an espresso, which turned out to be top-notch, and spent the couple of minutes that it took me to drink it taking in the surroundings. On the counter by the cash register was an old rotary telephone (the theme of the morning, it seemed), the kind with a separate earpiece that hangs on a hook. I asked the barista if it was for sale. It was not.
It was time to hit the road. Now really bouncing from caffeine and sugar and with grease coursing through my veins, I crossed the Allegheny on the 16th Street Bridge and headed West past downtown, then North along the Ohio on PA-65, Gerry Mulligan supplying the soundtrack.
The Strip - essentially the area between Liberty Ave. and the bank of the Allegheny River, stretching from downtown roughly to 31st St. -- is, for my money, Pittsburgh's most distinctive, and also useful, neighborhood, especially on Saturday mornings. Originally, and to a great extent still, it was the city's warehouse district. Many of the warehouses have been converted to stores, restaurants and nightclubs, but they happily share real estate with the old machine shops and wholesale glass cutters. In terms of shopping, the twin focus is on home furnishings and food, and while the inexorable march of gentrification hasn't left the Strip untouched, adding a sprinkling of stores selling designer lamps and colorful throw-pillows made from recycled fibers, many of the businesses hark back to the city's days as a working class burg populated by Italian, Polish and Asian immigrants and their descendants. On Saturday mornings, the entire Strip spills out onto the sidewalks and the whole neighborhood turns into an enormous outdoor marketplace. Food vendors of every stripe, especially Italian pastry shops, display their tantalizing wares, many of them baked mere minutes earlier. Espresso machines hiss and foam everywhere. Piles of cheap plastic toys and 99-cent flip-flops block the sidewalks, Chinatown style. It being Pittsburgh, the entire cauldron is generously seasoned with Steelers and Penguins t-shirts.
Pamela's (60 21st St.) is located in the heart of all this. By the time I got there a little after nine and parked the car, both the smallish dining room and the half-dozen outdoor tables were full, and at least a dozen people were waiting, but the counter - the solo traveler's savior -- was empty, so I plopped myself on one of the old-school vinyl-upholstered stools and ordered a much-needed mug of coffee. The place had a retro décor, but it was more sixties than the faux-fifties more common to postmodern diners. Instead of juke boxes and pictures of Elvis, it was advertisements for 1960s American cars - as far as I could tell original flyers and magazine pages shellacked onto one of the walls, covering it entirely. A shelf in the corner held a bakelite rotary phone, an old radio, a couple of kidney-shaped ash trays. The colors around me were relatively bright, but definitely tended towards the turquoise and pale yellow of the sixties, making the room feel inviting and far less contrived than one might expect.
The menu was fairly standard American Diner, though their specialty - giant thin pancakes, somewhere between a flapjack and a crepe -- were featured prominently. They looked appetizing - I kept seeing platefuls of them being brought out every few minutes -- but I was craving protein, and opted for an artery-clogging treat of fried eggs and respectably greasy and spicy chorizo. In Pittsburgh - who would have thought?
While driving around the neighborhood earlier looking for parking, I had spotted a tiny café in one of the side streets, and after breakfast, although I was already over-caffeinated, I stopped in. The place, called The Leaf and Bean (2200 Penn Ave., entrance around the corner), proved to be well worth checking out, not for its large selection of cigars (the "Leaf"), but for the overwhelming amount of junk that covered every square inch of the walls and ceiling. Interior décor is best when taken to either of the two extremes - sparse and minimalist or so overstuffed that you are constantly finding something new to look at. This was a perfect example of the latter. I ordered an espresso, which turned out to be top-notch, and spent the couple of minutes that it took me to drink it taking in the surroundings. On the counter by the cash register was an old rotary telephone (the theme of the morning, it seemed), the kind with a separate earpiece that hangs on a hook. I asked the barista if it was for sale. It was not.
It was time to hit the road. Now really bouncing from caffeine and sugar and with grease coursing through my veins, I crossed the Allegheny on the 16th Street Bridge and headed West past downtown, then North along the Ohio on PA-65, Gerry Mulligan supplying the soundtrack.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Road Trip 2009, Day One, Part II
Late afternoon found me heading North-West along a stretch of US-40 I had driven before. I took it as far as Uniontown, PA, stopping along the way at General Braddock's grave. Even though I live within easy reach of Braddock Road in Alexandria, 
I never knew who Braddock was, and had always assumed he was a Civil War hero. Turns out he was a British general during the French and Indian Wars of the 1750s. Washington was a colonel under him. Braddock was fatally wounded in a failed raid on Fort Duquesne 
(modern-day Pittsburgh) in 1755, and died as his troops retreated along the route I was now driving. He was buried in an unmarked grave to prevent local Indians from discovering and desecrating it. In the early 1800s, the grave was discovered, Braddock's remains exhumed and moved fifty or so paces closer to the road, where a monument now stands. During the ten minutes or so I spent at the site reading the plaques and displays, I was the only visitor.
I reached Uniontown, which I had also visited before, and which claims to have been founded on July 4th, 1776, a little before six. Its small downtown looks and feels more prosperous than one might expect, owing no doubt to its proximity to some luxury mountain resorts in the area as well as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. I was tempted to stop and walk around a bit, but decided to press on to Pittsburgh in the interest of time. Heading directly North on PA-51 through a part of the state rich in auto repair shops and purveyors of lawn equipment, I was within city limits in a little under an hour.
Downtown Pittsburgh is respectably sized and infamously canyon-like, and urban renewal of the 1950s did not do it any favors, surrounding it on all sides with a tightly-woven net of highways and ramps like a giant squid choking a whale, but I managed to find my hotel - the Pittsburgh Doubletree (1 Bigelow Sq.) where Hotwire.com had put me - with fewer than a dozen wrong turns and without crossing either of the city's two rivers unnecessarily. Checked-in and cleaned up, I headed to dinner at a place that J. and I first tried when we were in Pittsburgh a couple of years ago, and that has a bit of a legendary status in beer circles - the Church Brew Works (3525 Liberty Ave.) in the Strip district.
Built as the church of St. John the Baptist in 1902, the building was deconsecrated in 1993 and opened as a brewery and restaurant three years later. When a good friend originally recommended the place several years ago, I was mostly intrigued by the concept - it is always gratifying to see religion's most wasteful and self-indulgent aspect turned on its head and used for what's truly important. The fact that the mash tuns and fermentation tanks are located where the altar had once been only added to the appeal. Having been there twice now, however, I must say the excitement has worn thin. It's impossible to make a space of that size and scale feel quaint and intimate -- required attributes of a good pub, and while certainly unlike anything else, the Church did not feel particularly inviting on this visit. The beers were mostly good, but not particularly unique, and in one case downright disappointing.
I started with a Thunder Hop IPA, which was an excellent exponent of its style. More bitter than floral in its hop flavor, it was big and tasted exceptionally fresh. Thanks to the generous dry-hopping, the nose was huge and fragrant. Delicious all around. I moved on to their Breakfast Stout. Brewed with six kinds of malt plus oats and sweetened with milk sugar in a quasi-Belgian twist, it was very rich and relatively sweet, but still well-balanced, probably due to the coffee added to the beer after fermentation. In fact, the flavor was surprisingly subtle for something that has both coffee and oats. I liked it. My dessert - I could sample to my heart's content thanks to Doubletree's city-wide free shuttle - was a goblet of Millenium Trippel. This was the disappointment. Though it looked the part, it was one-dimensionally sweet. The best Belgian (and a small handful of American) triples are sweet to be sure, but something about the yeast strains used to make the good ones balances out the flavor - something that the Church's brewers completely missed. The beer was cloying. To accompany the beers, I ordered a bowl of chile pork stew which was surprisingly respectable, though not nearly spicy enough for something that has the word "chile" in the name.
It was quite late by the time I was done, and, having armed myself with the bartender's recommendation for a breakfast spot, I returned to the hotel and turned in in anticipation of another long day of driving.
I never knew who Braddock was, and had always assumed he was a Civil War hero. Turns out he was a British general during the French and Indian Wars of the 1750s. Washington was a colonel under him. Braddock was fatally wounded in a failed raid on Fort Duquesne 
(modern-day Pittsburgh) in 1755, and died as his troops retreated along the route I was now driving. He was buried in an unmarked grave to prevent local Indians from discovering and desecrating it. In the early 1800s, the grave was discovered, Braddock's remains exhumed and moved fifty or so paces closer to the road, where a monument now stands. During the ten minutes or so I spent at the site reading the plaques and displays, I was the only visitor.I reached Uniontown, which I had also visited before, and which claims to have been founded on July 4th, 1776, a little before six. Its small downtown looks and feels more prosperous than one might expect, owing no doubt to its proximity to some luxury mountain resorts in the area as well as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. I was tempted to stop and walk around a bit, but decided to press on to Pittsburgh in the interest of time. Heading directly North on PA-51 through a part of the state rich in auto repair shops and purveyors of lawn equipment, I was within city limits in a little under an hour.
Downtown Pittsburgh is respectably sized and infamously canyon-like, and urban renewal of the 1950s did not do it any favors, surrounding it on all sides with a tightly-woven net of highways and ramps like a giant squid choking a whale, but I managed to find my hotel - the Pittsburgh Doubletree (1 Bigelow Sq.) where Hotwire.com had put me - with fewer than a dozen wrong turns and without crossing either of the city's two rivers unnecessarily. Checked-in and cleaned up, I headed to dinner at a place that J. and I first tried when we were in Pittsburgh a couple of years ago, and that has a bit of a legendary status in beer circles - the Church Brew Works (3525 Liberty Ave.) in the Strip district.
Built as the church of St. John the Baptist in 1902, the building was deconsecrated in 1993 and opened as a brewery and restaurant three years later. When a good friend originally recommended the place several years ago, I was mostly intrigued by the concept - it is always gratifying to see religion's most wasteful and self-indulgent aspect turned on its head and used for what's truly important. The fact that the mash tuns and fermentation tanks are located where the altar had once been only added to the appeal. Having been there twice now, however, I must say the excitement has worn thin. It's impossible to make a space of that size and scale feel quaint and intimate -- required attributes of a good pub, and while certainly unlike anything else, the Church did not feel particularly inviting on this visit. The beers were mostly good, but not particularly unique, and in one case downright disappointing.
I started with a Thunder Hop IPA, which was an excellent exponent of its style. More bitter than floral in its hop flavor, it was big and tasted exceptionally fresh. Thanks to the generous dry-hopping, the nose was huge and fragrant. Delicious all around. I moved on to their Breakfast Stout. Brewed with six kinds of malt plus oats and sweetened with milk sugar in a quasi-Belgian twist, it was very rich and relatively sweet, but still well-balanced, probably due to the coffee added to the beer after fermentation. In fact, the flavor was surprisingly subtle for something that has both coffee and oats. I liked it. My dessert - I could sample to my heart's content thanks to Doubletree's city-wide free shuttle - was a goblet of Millenium Trippel. This was the disappointment. Though it looked the part, it was one-dimensionally sweet. The best Belgian (and a small handful of American) triples are sweet to be sure, but something about the yeast strains used to make the good ones balances out the flavor - something that the Church's brewers completely missed. The beer was cloying. To accompany the beers, I ordered a bowl of chile pork stew which was surprisingly respectable, though not nearly spicy enough for something that has the word "chile" in the name.
It was quite late by the time I was done, and, having armed myself with the bartender's recommendation for a breakfast spot, I returned to the hotel and turned in in anticipation of another long day of driving.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Road Trip 2009, Day One, Part I
For the past six years, I have been making a trip to Ann Arbor, MI, to visit my dear friends G.&N. I usually spend three or four days in Ann Arbor, but I felt like I needed more time than that away from home and work this year, and J. was not able to travel with me, so I decided to make the entire trip using back roads, stopping along the way to see random things and places and attempt to capture what little local color might be left over from the pre-interstate age of automobile travel. It would take me two days to get from Alexandria to Ann Arbor, instead of the usual nine hours, and I would spend the night in Pittsburgh.
Leaving home at the tail end of the morning rush hour on a Friday, I headed West on VA-7, intending to stop in Leesburg, VA. Strange as it may sound, in my ten years, give or take, of living in the DC area, I have never been to Leesburg, and never driven on Rt. 7 any further than Tyson's Corner. To my great disappointment, the road proved to be far from the idyllic country drive I had hoped for, though I suspect until ten years or so ago it mostly was. Today, however, it cuts its way through the worst kind of exurbia, punctuated by a traffic light every half mile, all of them, needless to say, red. I didn't arrive in Leesburg until after eleven.
Historic downtown Leesburg, however, was attractive, quaint, and quite lively, sustained by a combination of tourists and day-trippers from DC and the horsey set from the surrounding Virginia countryside.
I parked the car and walked around a bit, taking mental note of places worth visiting if J. and I were to come there together. I had my coffee mug refilled at the Shoe Coffeehouse, evidently a shoe repair shop in its previous life. The coffee was decent, albeit on the weak side. My attempts, admittedly lame, to joke with the barista fell flat.
Leaving Leesburg, I headed North on US-15, crossing the Potomac into Maryland at Point of Rocks. I was now driving through the sort of environment I had been hoping for - the two lane road winding through thick greenery on both sides. The traffic was still fairly heavy. Bypassing Frederick, MD, which I have visited numerous times, entirely, I headed for Hagerstown, MD. My original intention was to take US-40 as far as was practical. US-40 was the first major US highway designed for automobile travel in the 1920s, and had once crossed the US from Atlantic City to San Francisco. Today, however, the segment West of Park City, UT, has disappeared entirely, and the remainder has been subsumed in many parts by interstates, including I-70 in Maryland. So I took what the DOT now calls "Alternate US-40," a genuine back road that apparently hews closer to the path of the old National Road, originally planned in 1806 and approved by Jefferson himself. I was in downtown Hagerstown a little after 1:00 p.m.
To many DC area residents, Hagerstown is known primarily for the large outlet mall on its outskirts, but apparently the city, originally an industrial railroad town that has been hit by the disappearance of railroads, mining and manufacturing like countless others in the Steel Belt, has been making an effort to reinvent itself as a tourist destination, boasting of quaint neighborhoods, bed-and-breakfasts and antique shops. Based on what I saw, it has been partially successful. Downtown Hagerstown was larger than I expected, stretching for many blocks in every direction. The neighborhoods leading up to it looked like the neighborhoods I've seen elsewhere in Maryland, and seemed none too prosperous - narrow pot-holed streets, run-down brick townhouses, a dented Chrysler K-car parked here and there. Downtown proper, however, had a bit more life to it. Most of the storefronts were occupied, there was a fair number of people on the sidewalks, and traffic was congested. While it didn't quite reach bustling level, it was clearly a city that has managed to retain, or regain, at least some vibrancy. The most obvious sign was an abundance of late-model Lexus and Mercedes cars, obviously not owned by locals, parked all along the streets. I parked my own far less impressive vehicle across the street from the large, institutional-looking public library and set out in search of lunch.
Walking around, I realized quickly that in its heyday, the downtown must have been gorgeous. Ornate facades, some preserved or restored to something resembling their original glory, were everywhere, and the building themselves had the impressive heft born of the confidence the community had once had in its position in the world. 
Some, to be sure, were in disrepair and looked sad, but enough remained at least to tickle my imagination, if not quite enable me to experience Hagerstown's golden days first-hand.
A couple of pubs downtown were open, and fairly well peopled with customers, but I opted for Skyline Coffee (2 Washington St.), located on Public Square, the geographic center of Hagerstown. For all the world, Skyline looked and felt like a big-city café, with the menu hand-written on giant chalkboards and the walls painted an inviting brick-red. The woman behind the counter looked like a textbook coffeehouse employee, too - young and attractive, with pale skin, green eyes and straight red hair worn in a disheveled ponytail, dressed in a tank top and hiking pants. My optimism, however, was shot down quickly. The woman, who I later found out was the owner, had the flattest affect of anyone I have ever met. No smile; monosyllabic responses. She clearly had no interest in making her customers feel welcome, much less being engaged in a conversation. In fact, she looked like she had no interest in anything at all. I ordered the grilled ham and cheese, which according to the menu came with green apple chutney.
When I found none on the completed sandwich and asked what happened to the green apples, she replied, her voice never wavering from its original frequency, that they had none. By the time I was done with the mediocre sandwich, she was sitting at one of the outside tables smoking a cigarette, looking straight through me at some non-existent point far in the distance. Really wanting to like the place in spite of my experience thus far, I went back inside to find another employee, a tall and emaciated man of indeterminate age with vaguely exotic features and long black hair worn in an looped pony tail the way an American Indian at one time might have. He turned out to be quite a bit friendlier and, to give credit where it is due, made me an absolutely delicious espresso.
Walking back to the car, I stumbled upon a used bookshop called Barnwood Books (103 S. Potomac St.), and wandered in. The large main room was filled with shelf upon shelf of paperback romance novels and other popular fiction, neatly arranged, while what I tend to think of as "real" books were located, in great disarray, in a much smaller room off to the side. There was only one other customer in the store, browsing the romances. I looked around idly for a couple of minutes until I stumbled upon a hardcover copy of Joseph Epstein's Snobbery: The American Version. When I walked up to the counter to pay for it, I was shocked to hear the clerk, in response to my question, say that business was great, and that the recession has only made it better since people were buying used books instead of new ones. I must say hearing her say that made up for the bad lunch.
I was back on the road some time before three, staying on US-40 which paralleled I-68 just South of the Pennsylvania border. Bypassing Cumberland but going straight through the heart of Frostburg, MD, an appealing-looking college town, I finally crossed into Pennsylvania near Grantsville, MD, and headed due North across Laurel Highlands towards Pittsburgh.
Leaving home at the tail end of the morning rush hour on a Friday, I headed West on VA-7, intending to stop in Leesburg, VA. Strange as it may sound, in my ten years, give or take, of living in the DC area, I have never been to Leesburg, and never driven on Rt. 7 any further than Tyson's Corner. To my great disappointment, the road proved to be far from the idyllic country drive I had hoped for, though I suspect until ten years or so ago it mostly was. Today, however, it cuts its way through the worst kind of exurbia, punctuated by a traffic light every half mile, all of them, needless to say, red. I didn't arrive in Leesburg until after eleven.
Historic downtown Leesburg, however, was attractive, quaint, and quite lively, sustained by a combination of tourists and day-trippers from DC and the horsey set from the surrounding Virginia countryside.
I parked the car and walked around a bit, taking mental note of places worth visiting if J. and I were to come there together. I had my coffee mug refilled at the Shoe Coffeehouse, evidently a shoe repair shop in its previous life. The coffee was decent, albeit on the weak side. My attempts, admittedly lame, to joke with the barista fell flat.Leaving Leesburg, I headed North on US-15, crossing the Potomac into Maryland at Point of Rocks. I was now driving through the sort of environment I had been hoping for - the two lane road winding through thick greenery on both sides. The traffic was still fairly heavy. Bypassing Frederick, MD, which I have visited numerous times, entirely, I headed for Hagerstown, MD. My original intention was to take US-40 as far as was practical. US-40 was the first major US highway designed for automobile travel in the 1920s, and had once crossed the US from Atlantic City to San Francisco. Today, however, the segment West of Park City, UT, has disappeared entirely, and the remainder has been subsumed in many parts by interstates, including I-70 in Maryland. So I took what the DOT now calls "Alternate US-40," a genuine back road that apparently hews closer to the path of the old National Road, originally planned in 1806 and approved by Jefferson himself. I was in downtown Hagerstown a little after 1:00 p.m.
To many DC area residents, Hagerstown is known primarily for the large outlet mall on its outskirts, but apparently the city, originally an industrial railroad town that has been hit by the disappearance of railroads, mining and manufacturing like countless others in the Steel Belt, has been making an effort to reinvent itself as a tourist destination, boasting of quaint neighborhoods, bed-and-breakfasts and antique shops. Based on what I saw, it has been partially successful. Downtown Hagerstown was larger than I expected, stretching for many blocks in every direction. The neighborhoods leading up to it looked like the neighborhoods I've seen elsewhere in Maryland, and seemed none too prosperous - narrow pot-holed streets, run-down brick townhouses, a dented Chrysler K-car parked here and there. Downtown proper, however, had a bit more life to it. Most of the storefronts were occupied, there was a fair number of people on the sidewalks, and traffic was congested. While it didn't quite reach bustling level, it was clearly a city that has managed to retain, or regain, at least some vibrancy. The most obvious sign was an abundance of late-model Lexus and Mercedes cars, obviously not owned by locals, parked all along the streets. I parked my own far less impressive vehicle across the street from the large, institutional-looking public library and set out in search of lunch.
Walking around, I realized quickly that in its heyday, the downtown must have been gorgeous. Ornate facades, some preserved or restored to something resembling their original glory, were everywhere, and the building themselves had the impressive heft born of the confidence the community had once had in its position in the world. 
Some, to be sure, were in disrepair and looked sad, but enough remained at least to tickle my imagination, if not quite enable me to experience Hagerstown's golden days first-hand.A couple of pubs downtown were open, and fairly well peopled with customers, but I opted for Skyline Coffee (2 Washington St.), located on Public Square, the geographic center of Hagerstown. For all the world, Skyline looked and felt like a big-city café, with the menu hand-written on giant chalkboards and the walls painted an inviting brick-red. The woman behind the counter looked like a textbook coffeehouse employee, too - young and attractive, with pale skin, green eyes and straight red hair worn in a disheveled ponytail, dressed in a tank top and hiking pants. My optimism, however, was shot down quickly. The woman, who I later found out was the owner, had the flattest affect of anyone I have ever met. No smile; monosyllabic responses. She clearly had no interest in making her customers feel welcome, much less being engaged in a conversation. In fact, she looked like she had no interest in anything at all. I ordered the grilled ham and cheese, which according to the menu came with green apple chutney.
When I found none on the completed sandwich and asked what happened to the green apples, she replied, her voice never wavering from its original frequency, that they had none. By the time I was done with the mediocre sandwich, she was sitting at one of the outside tables smoking a cigarette, looking straight through me at some non-existent point far in the distance. Really wanting to like the place in spite of my experience thus far, I went back inside to find another employee, a tall and emaciated man of indeterminate age with vaguely exotic features and long black hair worn in an looped pony tail the way an American Indian at one time might have. He turned out to be quite a bit friendlier and, to give credit where it is due, made me an absolutely delicious espresso.Walking back to the car, I stumbled upon a used bookshop called Barnwood Books (103 S. Potomac St.), and wandered in. The large main room was filled with shelf upon shelf of paperback romance novels and other popular fiction, neatly arranged, while what I tend to think of as "real" books were located, in great disarray, in a much smaller room off to the side. There was only one other customer in the store, browsing the romances. I looked around idly for a couple of minutes until I stumbled upon a hardcover copy of Joseph Epstein's Snobbery: The American Version. When I walked up to the counter to pay for it, I was shocked to hear the clerk, in response to my question, say that business was great, and that the recession has only made it better since people were buying used books instead of new ones. I must say hearing her say that made up for the bad lunch.
I was back on the road some time before three, staying on US-40 which paralleled I-68 just South of the Pennsylvania border. Bypassing Cumberland but going straight through the heart of Frostburg, MD, an appealing-looking college town, I finally crossed into Pennsylvania near Grantsville, MD, and headed due North across Laurel Highlands towards Pittsburgh.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Bermuda
J. and I spent last week in Bermuda, on a belated honeymoon. It wasn’t the sort of trip that warrants one of my usual day-by-day travelogues, but I’ll offer a few impressions.
Bermuda is a pretty interesting place. A local told us that it was currently the wealthiest place in the world, though a more unbiased source puts it at number three, presumably behind Switzerland and Dubai. Still impressive for an island of 30 miles long by a mile across, where a hair over 60,000 people produce a GDP of over $4 billion per year. Some will go so far as to claim that there is no unemployment, but even those who do not endorse that claim generally agree that the 2% typically cited is largely voluntary.
Your worst enemy in Bermuda is the weather. Very strong winds – up to 40 knots on some days (46 mph) – combined with relatively chilly water (about 69 degrees F at the surface) precluded us from doing most of the water activities we had planned. So we did not go whale-watching even though April is officially Whale Month, did no snorkeling and no kayaking. The most unnerving thing is that while on the island, the winds are not obvious, but the whale people warned us of 12-foot waves less than a mile from shore, and the marine forecast on local television backed them up.
On the one truly nice day, we got out in a glass-bottom boat for a tour of the local coral reefs. It was gorgeous and absolutely fascinating. Corals of every imaginable shape, size and color practically brushed up against the bottom of the boat. There were some that looked like shrubs with blue branches, others resembled salad greens, and still others – J.’s favorites – were dead ringers for human brains. At least a dozen varieties of fish swam under the boat, ranging from a couple of inches to a couple of feet in size, from plain gray (but evidently very delicious) chubs to brightly striped sergeant-majors. We even saw a small shark and, later, a sea turtle surfacing to take a breath of air.
On our last day on the island, we did spend a couple of hours on the beach at Horseshoe Bay (until a passing rainstorm drove us off) and got into the water, which was crystal-clear, beautifully blue and delightfully refreshing. Bermuda’s sand has a reputation for being pink, but in person it’s not really. There is a bit of a reddish tint to it, thanks to microscopic crustaceans whose skeletons turn pink when they die, but mostly it looks like normal sand, just finer than what we’re used to on the Atlantic coast of the US.
For the rest of the time, we were confined to the island. Two of the major attractions are the Royal Naval Dockyard and the town of St. George. The Dockyard has historically been the largest of Bermuda’s forts and the center for its defense. It was borrowed by the US Navy during WWII to serve as a base for the support of its Atlantic supply convoys. Today, it features a large historical museum, some shopping and local crafts, and one of the most famous pubs in Bermuda (and the only one that brews its own beer) – the Frog and Onion. The museum, which we saw partly out of interest, but partly because we needed a place to get out of the rain, was interesting but offered far more historical detail than we could reasonably absorb. For a military and colonial history buff, it is a godsend. Beyond the museum, the biggest Dockyard attraction is probably the Bermuda Glassworks, where you can watch local and visiting artisans create colored glass pieces. Most of the works are attractive in a sunny, cheerful sort of way, and the prices are reasonable. We bought a Christmas ornament and a few small snail figurines as souvenirs for friends and relatives back home.
The Glassworks shares its building with the Bermuda Rum Cake Company. The rum cake is an island specialty – essentially a round pound cake soaked in dark rum. It is delicious, though a little goes a long way. Though several brands are available throughout the island, the Bermuda Rum Cake Company claims to be the only one that bakes theirs right in Bermuda. The rest are apparently made in the US and shipped back.
The historic town of St. George, which we visited a few days later, is located on the opposite end of the island. It was Bermuda’s original capital, and features the oldest buildings on the island, some dating from the XVII century (the island was settled in 1609). The centerpiece is St. Peter’s church, in continuous operation since the early 1700s. All this was interesting, but I found the town somewhat depressing. Since it was advertised as a major piece of local history and the Island’s most important tourist attraction, I expected some vibrancy or at least glitz, but the place had a decidedly dusty and forgotten feel about it. A few shops ringed the main square, but by the time we decided to stop in and browse, it was after 4:00 p.m. and everything was closed. Private houses started a few blocks from the center, and they were the least prosperous-looking we’ve seen anywhere in Bermuda. The large unfinished church, further damaged by a hurricane since construction was abandoned in the mid-1800s, and the ruin of a large house a block away only added to the joyless impression.
One pleasant surprise in St. George was the Bermuda Perfumery. It has been making perfume locally since 1928, and much of the original equipment is still in use. Everything is blended and bottled by hand. We took a tour of the old house in which it is presently located and did the olfactory equivalent of a tasting (a sniffing?) of their products. Their signature men’s cologne, unchanged since the early 1930s, is still made by collecting sawdust from local carpenters who use local Bermuda cedar in their work and macerating it in alcohol in upside-down jars to extract the oils.
About a kilometer from the center of St. George lies Fort St. Catherine, the second largest in Bermuda. It, too, is now a museum. We walked to it in the afternoon and found it completely deserted. We wondered around for a while, briefly looking at the exhibits and taking in the magnificent views of the ocean from the ramparts. The excruciating amount of detail about British naval artillery got very quickly even to me, who is occasionally capable of enjoying that sort of thing, though I must admit that I found fascinating the fact that a cannon originally commissioned in the 1880s was still in use by the Royal Navy in the 1950s.
Your second worst enemy in Bermuda is the food. When I was making our travel arrangements, I was struck by the abundance of cottages and housekeeping units relative to traditional hotels. We quickly found out why when we got there. Restaurants are outrageously expensive – a combination of the local economy and the fact that pretty much everything has to be imported. The cooking tradition is definitely pre-modern British – cook everything to death and serve it with a minimum of vegetables. There is some seafood being caught commercially in local waters, most notably wahoo, black grouper and some species of tuna, but we were not willing to pay gourmet restaurant prices, and lesser places just did not do it justice. The biggest disappointment was Bistro J. in downtown Hamilton (the capital and the only real city). It was a small place, about a dozen tables, quaint, candle-lit, good service, chalkboard menu that changed daily, and an impressive wine list, but the wahoo which both J. and I ordered was drier than a shoe sole. Pubs, of which there is a good number, offer decent food, but it’s not really distinctive and still pricey, though more reasonable than the upscale places.
The one bright spot in the otherwise bleak culinary landscape of Bermuda is the fish chowder, another island specialty. It is ubiquitous – every restaurant serves it regardless of the type of the rest of their cuisine, and it is usually excellent. Dark brown, thick with chunks of fresh and smoked fish and tender cubes of potato, it is deeply flavorful and usually served with cruets of black rum and sherry peppers (a slightly medicinal vinegary sauce) which you can use to doctor up your bowl to the extent you see fit. We’ve had several bowls over the course of the week and loved every singe spoonful.
Another meal worth mentioning was a late lunch at a place called Island Cuisine in Southampton, about 12 kilometers outside of Hamilton, where we stopped after a long meandering bike ride around the southern part of the island one day. Probably the least touristy of the places we’ve tried, it was essentially a Bermudian diner. We had delicious salt cod cakes – a humble version of our own crab cake made with potatoes and bacalao (dried salt cod soaked in milk), the most prominent evidence of Bermuda’s substantial Portuguese community.
One of the most pleasant aspects of the trip was our hotel, the Royal Palms. A little less than a kilometer outside of Hamilton proper, it was an oasis of peace and quiet in a place that was already pretty peaceful and quiet. The 1903 building was clean, comfortable, and in excellent condition, with smallish but impeccably kept rooms. The real treasure, though, were the lush, overgrown grounds filled with palm trees and rose bushes where you could happily while away an afternoon in a lawn chair with a good book. We were shocked that the hotel was almost completely empty -- we saw only one other couple regularly at breakfast, plus a smattering of business guests throughout the week, but on the whole the place was pretty much dead. It does cater to business visitors, evidently, and even political ones – one morning while having breakfast in the giant sunroom, we saw a man in business attire get into a white Chevy Impala with two large US flags flying on its front fenders.
There as a restaurant at the hotel, Ascots – reportedly one of the best on the island – but it was completely unaffordable. The bar, on the other hand, was very inviting and no more expensive than a moderately classy place in the US would be. We stopped there at the end of almost every evening to wind down over Bermuda’s signature drink – the Dark and Stormy, equal parts of black rum (Gosling’s is the locals’ favorite, though the volume producer is Bacardi, whose world headquarters are in Hamilton) and ginger beer. They were absolutely delicious. The spicy sweetness of the ginger beer which regular ginger ale lacks made all the difference.
Despite being thwarted in our attempts to spend time on the water, the week passed quickly, though by the end I felt like we were running out of things to do. If we were to go back, we would definitely rent a place with a real kitchen well outside of town, rent scooters (there are no car rentals in Bermuda) and do some research on where to get fresh fish directly from the fishermen and Bermuda onions (some are still grown on the island) from the farmers. If you can cook your own food, it’s a great place to relax.
Bermuda is a pretty interesting place. A local told us that it was currently the wealthiest place in the world, though a more unbiased source puts it at number three, presumably behind Switzerland and Dubai. Still impressive for an island of 30 miles long by a mile across, where a hair over 60,000 people produce a GDP of over $4 billion per year. Some will go so far as to claim that there is no unemployment, but even those who do not endorse that claim generally agree that the 2% typically cited is largely voluntary.
Your worst enemy in Bermuda is the weather. Very strong winds – up to 40 knots on some days (46 mph) – combined with relatively chilly water (about 69 degrees F at the surface) precluded us from doing most of the water activities we had planned. So we did not go whale-watching even though April is officially Whale Month, did no snorkeling and no kayaking. The most unnerving thing is that while on the island, the winds are not obvious, but the whale people warned us of 12-foot waves less than a mile from shore, and the marine forecast on local television backed them up.
On the one truly nice day, we got out in a glass-bottom boat for a tour of the local coral reefs. It was gorgeous and absolutely fascinating. Corals of every imaginable shape, size and color practically brushed up against the bottom of the boat. There were some that looked like shrubs with blue branches, others resembled salad greens, and still others – J.’s favorites – were dead ringers for human brains. At least a dozen varieties of fish swam under the boat, ranging from a couple of inches to a couple of feet in size, from plain gray (but evidently very delicious) chubs to brightly striped sergeant-majors. We even saw a small shark and, later, a sea turtle surfacing to take a breath of air.
On our last day on the island, we did spend a couple of hours on the beach at Horseshoe Bay (until a passing rainstorm drove us off) and got into the water, which was crystal-clear, beautifully blue and delightfully refreshing. Bermuda’s sand has a reputation for being pink, but in person it’s not really. There is a bit of a reddish tint to it, thanks to microscopic crustaceans whose skeletons turn pink when they die, but mostly it looks like normal sand, just finer than what we’re used to on the Atlantic coast of the US.For the rest of the time, we were confined to the island. Two of the major attractions are the Royal Naval Dockyard and the town of St. George. The Dockyard has historically been the largest of Bermuda’s forts and the center for its defense. It was borrowed by the US Navy during WWII to serve as a base for the support of its Atlantic supply convoys. Today, it features a large historical museum, some shopping and local crafts, and one of the most famous pubs in Bermuda (and the only one that brews its own beer) – the Frog and Onion. The museum, which we saw partly out of interest, but partly because we needed a place to get out of the rain, was interesting but offered far more historical detail than we could reasonably absorb. For a military and colonial history buff, it is a godsend. Beyond the museum, the biggest Dockyard attraction is probably the Bermuda Glassworks, where you can watch local and visiting artisans create colored glass pieces. Most of the works are attractive in a sunny, cheerful sort of way, and the prices are reasonable. We bought a Christmas ornament and a few small snail figurines as souvenirs for friends and relatives back home.
The Glassworks shares its building with the Bermuda Rum Cake Company. The rum cake is an island specialty – essentially a round pound cake soaked in dark rum. It is delicious, though a little goes a long way. Though several brands are available throughout the island, the Bermuda Rum Cake Company claims to be the only one that bakes theirs right in Bermuda. The rest are apparently made in the US and shipped back.
The historic town of St. George, which we visited a few days later, is located on the opposite end of the island. It was Bermuda’s original capital, and features the oldest buildings on the island, some dating from the XVII century (the island was settled in 1609). The centerpiece is St. Peter’s church, in continuous operation since the early 1700s. All this was interesting, but I found the town somewhat depressing. Since it was advertised as a major piece of local history and the Island’s most important tourist attraction, I expected some vibrancy or at least glitz, but the place had a decidedly dusty and forgotten feel about it. A few shops ringed the main square, but by the time we decided to stop in and browse, it was after 4:00 p.m. and everything was closed. Private houses started a few blocks from the center, and they were the least prosperous-looking we’ve seen anywhere in Bermuda. The large unfinished church, further damaged by a hurricane since construction was abandoned in the mid-1800s, and the ruin of a large house a block away only added to the joyless impression.
One pleasant surprise in St. George was the Bermuda Perfumery. It has been making perfume locally since 1928, and much of the original equipment is still in use. Everything is blended and bottled by hand. We took a tour of the old house in which it is presently located and did the olfactory equivalent of a tasting (a sniffing?) of their products. Their signature men’s cologne, unchanged since the early 1930s, is still made by collecting sawdust from local carpenters who use local Bermuda cedar in their work and macerating it in alcohol in upside-down jars to extract the oils.
About a kilometer from the center of St. George lies Fort St. Catherine, the second largest in Bermuda. It, too, is now a museum. We walked to it in the afternoon and found it completely deserted. We wondered around for a while, briefly looking at the exhibits and taking in the magnificent views of the ocean from the ramparts. The excruciating amount of detail about British naval artillery got very quickly even to me, who is occasionally capable of enjoying that sort of thing, though I must admit that I found fascinating the fact that a cannon originally commissioned in the 1880s was still in use by the Royal Navy in the 1950s.
Your second worst enemy in Bermuda is the food. When I was making our travel arrangements, I was struck by the abundance of cottages and housekeeping units relative to traditional hotels. We quickly found out why when we got there. Restaurants are outrageously expensive – a combination of the local economy and the fact that pretty much everything has to be imported. The cooking tradition is definitely pre-modern British – cook everything to death and serve it with a minimum of vegetables. There is some seafood being caught commercially in local waters, most notably wahoo, black grouper and some species of tuna, but we were not willing to pay gourmet restaurant prices, and lesser places just did not do it justice. The biggest disappointment was Bistro J. in downtown Hamilton (the capital and the only real city). It was a small place, about a dozen tables, quaint, candle-lit, good service, chalkboard menu that changed daily, and an impressive wine list, but the wahoo which both J. and I ordered was drier than a shoe sole. Pubs, of which there is a good number, offer decent food, but it’s not really distinctive and still pricey, though more reasonable than the upscale places.
The one bright spot in the otherwise bleak culinary landscape of Bermuda is the fish chowder, another island specialty. It is ubiquitous – every restaurant serves it regardless of the type of the rest of their cuisine, and it is usually excellent. Dark brown, thick with chunks of fresh and smoked fish and tender cubes of potato, it is deeply flavorful and usually served with cruets of black rum and sherry peppers (a slightly medicinal vinegary sauce) which you can use to doctor up your bowl to the extent you see fit. We’ve had several bowls over the course of the week and loved every singe spoonful.
Another meal worth mentioning was a late lunch at a place called Island Cuisine in Southampton, about 12 kilometers outside of Hamilton, where we stopped after a long meandering bike ride around the southern part of the island one day. Probably the least touristy of the places we’ve tried, it was essentially a Bermudian diner. We had delicious salt cod cakes – a humble version of our own crab cake made with potatoes and bacalao (dried salt cod soaked in milk), the most prominent evidence of Bermuda’s substantial Portuguese community.
One of the most pleasant aspects of the trip was our hotel, the Royal Palms. A little less than a kilometer outside of Hamilton proper, it was an oasis of peace and quiet in a place that was already pretty peaceful and quiet. The 1903 building was clean, comfortable, and in excellent condition, with smallish but impeccably kept rooms. The real treasure, though, were the lush, overgrown grounds filled with palm trees and rose bushes where you could happily while away an afternoon in a lawn chair with a good book. We were shocked that the hotel was almost completely empty -- we saw only one other couple regularly at breakfast, plus a smattering of business guests throughout the week, but on the whole the place was pretty much dead. It does cater to business visitors, evidently, and even political ones – one morning while having breakfast in the giant sunroom, we saw a man in business attire get into a white Chevy Impala with two large US flags flying on its front fenders.
There as a restaurant at the hotel, Ascots – reportedly one of the best on the island – but it was completely unaffordable. The bar, on the other hand, was very inviting and no more expensive than a moderately classy place in the US would be. We stopped there at the end of almost every evening to wind down over Bermuda’s signature drink – the Dark and Stormy, equal parts of black rum (Gosling’s is the locals’ favorite, though the volume producer is Bacardi, whose world headquarters are in Hamilton) and ginger beer. They were absolutely delicious. The spicy sweetness of the ginger beer which regular ginger ale lacks made all the difference.
Despite being thwarted in our attempts to spend time on the water, the week passed quickly, though by the end I felt like we were running out of things to do. If we were to go back, we would definitely rent a place with a real kitchen well outside of town, rent scooters (there are no car rentals in Bermuda) and do some research on where to get fresh fish directly from the fishermen and Bermuda onions (some are still grown on the island) from the farmers. If you can cook your own food, it’s a great place to relax.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Philadelphia, Day Two
Our second day in Philly was low-key, and centered around brunch. We slept in a bit, stashed the bags at the hotel’s front desk, checked out and headed for Morning Glory, a gourmet diner on the edge of South Philly. The weather had turned dramatically overnight – it was now in the 30s with buffeting winds – but we decided to walk nonetheless. I was reminded how much I liked the character of the city. It’s very walkable, and the neighborhoods flow right into one another. Colonial-era townhouses intermingle with utilitarian International Style high-rises. This might strike some as unfortunate – the beautiful historic architecture being polluted by the worst that urban renewal of the 50s and 60s had to offer. To me, however, it spoke of the city’s vibrancy and its preoccupation with the present at any given moment in its history. It was a sign of a desire to make a place where a wide variety of people could live and function.
The walk was long but largely pleasant despite the weather. We arrived at Morning Glory to find a crowd of intimidating size waiting for tables. Our friend C.S., who suggested the place, warned us of this, and recommended going early, which we didn’t. But it wasn’t as bad as it looked – most groups were large, and we were seated in a little less than a half hour. The brunch was well worth the wait. I had an amazingly delicious egg scramble with smoked salmon, sautéed onions and goat cheese. In addition to the usual choices of bread for toast, olive bread was on offer. It was excellent – fresh, seriously crusty, and chock-full of moist, salty black olive slices. J. – the world’s biggest lover of pancakes, I think – ordered the version that came with granola and bananas. They were very good as well. Even the coffee was top-notch, and came in metal mugs.
After brunch, we walked around South Street a bit, stuck our heads into a couple of shops, then walked back downtown to claim our bags and take the subway to the train station. The subway proved to be much nicer than the street car – quieter, cleaner and more spacious. Our train was late, but we did eventually make it home in time for a late dinner at the neighborhood Vietnamese noodle shop, happy to have got a change of scenery, but sad that we couldn’t stay longer.
The walk was long but largely pleasant despite the weather. We arrived at Morning Glory to find a crowd of intimidating size waiting for tables. Our friend C.S., who suggested the place, warned us of this, and recommended going early, which we didn’t. But it wasn’t as bad as it looked – most groups were large, and we were seated in a little less than a half hour. The brunch was well worth the wait. I had an amazingly delicious egg scramble with smoked salmon, sautéed onions and goat cheese. In addition to the usual choices of bread for toast, olive bread was on offer. It was excellent – fresh, seriously crusty, and chock-full of moist, salty black olive slices. J. – the world’s biggest lover of pancakes, I think – ordered the version that came with granola and bananas. They were very good as well. Even the coffee was top-notch, and came in metal mugs.
After brunch, we walked around South Street a bit, stuck our heads into a couple of shops, then walked back downtown to claim our bags and take the subway to the train station. The subway proved to be much nicer than the street car – quieter, cleaner and more spacious. Our train was late, but we did eventually make it home in time for a late dinner at the neighborhood Vietnamese noodle shop, happy to have got a change of scenery, but sad that we couldn’t stay longer.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Philadelphia, Day One Continued -- Pumpkin
Showered and changed (and recovered from the torrential thunderstorm that caught us as we walked the last four blocks to our hotel), we caught a cab to head out to dinner. Our original plan, on the recommendation of our friend C.S., was Mattyson, but apparently it is the hot place in Philly right now, and was completely booked up by the time I called. We settled for Plan B, which was a restaurant just South of downtown called Pumpkin. We had gone to Pumpkin on out first trip to Philly four or so years ago and had an amazing meal, so I did not hesitate to go back.
Pumpkin is a part of Philly’s vibrant BYOB scene, which alone makes a trip to the city worth it. Why couldn’t it be more widespread? Anyway, Pumpkin is tiny – a single minimally-decorated room that seats 26 if memory serves. The menu changes daily based on the ingredients at the chef’s disposal. Though nominally divided into appetizers and mains, all the plates are about the same size. Our waitress – one of only two working the room – was friendly and knowledgeable, and her service was excellent throughout the meal. I started with the Mediterranean rock octopus (a smaller variety with a more tender flesh compared to the giant “regular” octopus) served with chorizo, fingerling potatoes and romesco (tomato and bell pepper) sauce. It was unbelievable. Definitely the best octopus I have ever had. Up until then, my reference was the giant grilled octopus tentacle I had in Toronto’s Greek Town about ten years ago, but Pumpkin blew it, pardon the pun, out of the water. J., on the waitress’s recommendation with my enthusiastic encouragement, opted for razor clams. They proved to be delicious as well – large and plump and very clammy-tasting.
My second course was the most unusual thing I had had in a while – fresh sturgeon. It came from the Columbia River in Washington. I had no idea there were any sturgeon species in North America. It was excellent – very firm, with a deeply flavored, dense and oily flesh. It had some swordfish and some tuna in the taste, but in the end was its own animal. It was served with brussel sprouts and salsify, scattered with a few corn kernels, and accompanied with a dollop of a creamy sauce I could not quite identify. J.’s choice was the skate wing, which was also very good – tender, with a powerful lemon kick and served with the largest caper berries I have ever seen – they looked like figs. My only complaint, if it can even be called that, is that my sturgeon clashed mightily with the wine we had brought -- a half-bottle of the 2006 pinot noir from Baileyana in the Edna Valley of California. It was crisp, light-bodied and spicy with a pronounced flavor of cranberries on the palate, but the fish was just too, well, fishy for any red, even one as versatile as a pinot noir. That, and the fact that after the two courses, J. and I were too full to have dessert, delectable though it looked.
By the time we left the restaurant, the rain had stopped, and we walked back to the hotel through the rapidly cooling night, past a few inviting-looking bars and restaurants and across Rittenhouse Square. We had initially thought about going to the Apothecary – another happening place and Philly’s outpost of the burgeoning craft cocktail scene, but realized we really were not in the mood to deal with crowds of hipsters, so we got our nightcap back at our hotel’s bar. Situated as it was in the lobby of the hotel, separated only by a large divider, it retained some of the hotel-like sterility of most bars of its ilk. A few small round tables with two deep leather chairs at each helped a bit, and that is where we settled. I must say that the unremarkable atmosphere was deceptive – our drinks were excellent. Our waitress, who looked too young to know anything about real cocktails, looked confused when I asked if they had rye, but the bartender – a middle-aged guy who clearly knew his job and took pride in it – overheard me (the music was mercifully quiet) and nodded. I got one of the best rye manhattans I had ever had. J.’s French 75 – a forgotten classic if ever there was one – was very good as well. We sipped our drinks, mellowed by the long day and the delicious food, contemplating the fact that we were now married and attempting, unsuccessfully, to find some difference in how we felt.
Pumpkin is a part of Philly’s vibrant BYOB scene, which alone makes a trip to the city worth it. Why couldn’t it be more widespread? Anyway, Pumpkin is tiny – a single minimally-decorated room that seats 26 if memory serves. The menu changes daily based on the ingredients at the chef’s disposal. Though nominally divided into appetizers and mains, all the plates are about the same size. Our waitress – one of only two working the room – was friendly and knowledgeable, and her service was excellent throughout the meal. I started with the Mediterranean rock octopus (a smaller variety with a more tender flesh compared to the giant “regular” octopus) served with chorizo, fingerling potatoes and romesco (tomato and bell pepper) sauce. It was unbelievable. Definitely the best octopus I have ever had. Up until then, my reference was the giant grilled octopus tentacle I had in Toronto’s Greek Town about ten years ago, but Pumpkin blew it, pardon the pun, out of the water. J., on the waitress’s recommendation with my enthusiastic encouragement, opted for razor clams. They proved to be delicious as well – large and plump and very clammy-tasting.
My second course was the most unusual thing I had had in a while – fresh sturgeon. It came from the Columbia River in Washington. I had no idea there were any sturgeon species in North America. It was excellent – very firm, with a deeply flavored, dense and oily flesh. It had some swordfish and some tuna in the taste, but in the end was its own animal. It was served with brussel sprouts and salsify, scattered with a few corn kernels, and accompanied with a dollop of a creamy sauce I could not quite identify. J.’s choice was the skate wing, which was also very good – tender, with a powerful lemon kick and served with the largest caper berries I have ever seen – they looked like figs. My only complaint, if it can even be called that, is that my sturgeon clashed mightily with the wine we had brought -- a half-bottle of the 2006 pinot noir from Baileyana in the Edna Valley of California. It was crisp, light-bodied and spicy with a pronounced flavor of cranberries on the palate, but the fish was just too, well, fishy for any red, even one as versatile as a pinot noir. That, and the fact that after the two courses, J. and I were too full to have dessert, delectable though it looked.
By the time we left the restaurant, the rain had stopped, and we walked back to the hotel through the rapidly cooling night, past a few inviting-looking bars and restaurants and across Rittenhouse Square. We had initially thought about going to the Apothecary – another happening place and Philly’s outpost of the burgeoning craft cocktail scene, but realized we really were not in the mood to deal with crowds of hipsters, so we got our nightcap back at our hotel’s bar. Situated as it was in the lobby of the hotel, separated only by a large divider, it retained some of the hotel-like sterility of most bars of its ilk. A few small round tables with two deep leather chairs at each helped a bit, and that is where we settled. I must say that the unremarkable atmosphere was deceptive – our drinks were excellent. Our waitress, who looked too young to know anything about real cocktails, looked confused when I asked if they had rye, but the bartender – a middle-aged guy who clearly knew his job and took pride in it – overheard me (the music was mercifully quiet) and nodded. I got one of the best rye manhattans I had ever had. J.’s French 75 – a forgotten classic if ever there was one – was very good as well. We sipped our drinks, mellowed by the long day and the delicious food, contemplating the fact that we were now married and attempting, unsuccessfully, to find some difference in how we felt.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Philadelphia, Day One
The morning after our wedding in mid-November, J. and I took the train to Philadelphia for the weekend, for a micro-honeymoon of sorts. The trip was largely symbolic – we’re planning a real, albeit much-delayed, honeymoon, this coming spring – we mostly wanted to get away from the over-excited visiting families and get a change of scenery.
The train was a bit late to depart, but once on the way, the ride was trouble-free, and a hair over two hours later we pulled into 30th Street Station in the city of brotherly love. We took the streetcar – one of a seemingly endless variety of public conveyances in Philly, and a gross misnomer, for it spent not a moment of its trip above ground – downtown, checked our bags at the hotel and set out in search of lunch. Owing to the wedding, I did virtually no research on Philly before we left. We had been there once before, but it was several years ago, and we went with our friend C.S., who knew the city really well, so we were content just to follow him and his girlfriend around. This time, we were on our own, and in the absence of any information on lunch-appropriate spots in the vicinity of our hotel, ended up just grabbing a slice of pizza around the corner. It was surprisingly good – very much in the style of the New York’s famous slices, and though not quite that good, it was close. Our friend N. would later comment that she found Philadelphia to be an unfriendly city. I believe it stems from its frustration over its desire to be a New York in some important ways, but never quite reaching that ideal. The pizza was just a small manifestation of that.
Our lunch consumed, we set out for the Philadelphia Art Museum. According to the map we had picked up at the train station, the Museum occupied a location somewhat akin to the Kennedy Center in DC – not that far from anything, but not easy to get to. There was no Metro station anywhere near the museum, and Philly’s bus system looked intimidating even to a transit rat like me, so we walked. The weather was unseasonably warm – it would reach 71 degrees that afternoon – and the walk along Ben Franklin Parkway (more of a boulevard) pleasant.
The Museum is vast – the third largest in the US, after the Met and, I presume, either the National Gallery or maybe the Chicago Institute. There was no way we could see the entire thing in an afternoon, and we would not have wanted to, but we saw enough to make the visit memorable.
The current Classical style building was completed in 1928, though it looks older, and was the product of multiple architects and firms, which accounts for its generic architecture. It is enormous and is more functional than beautiful. Though superficially similar to the Met, it lacks the latter’s sense of proportion, especially when viewed from the front.
Some of the highlights and pleasant surprises we encountered were some early Miro from roughly 1920 that looked nothing like what we think of when his name is mentioned, some late, non-Cubist work by Georges Braque, and some seriously creepy modernist Mexican paintings by artists I was not familiar with. There was also a large gallery dedicated to the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi, which I enjoyed thoroughly, though J. was less enthused. Philly’s collection of Asian art, which we had to see selectively for lack of time, seemed heavy on Chinese artifacts, including, improbably, a complete study of a Chi’ing Dynasty scholar, but we did eventually find the Japanese stuff we were looking for. This included some beautiful ink-on-paper scrolls and some classic pottery. Unfortunately, we had to rush through the decorative arts galleries, but we saw enough to whet our appetites. All in all, a decent introduction to the monstrosity that the Museum is. We’re sure to be back more than once.
We walked back through the warm late afternoon, stopping for a cup of coffee on the way, then checked into our hotel. It being a special occasion, we had splurged a bit and booked a room at the Sofitel, which was far nicer and more expensive than what we normally allow ourselves. There was some history to the place. Though the building looks newer, it was originally built in 1964 to house the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (now owned by NASDAQ). After acquiring the property several years ago, Sofitel did a nice remodeling job, managing to avoid the generic hotel feel for the most part, especially in the guest rooms. Ours was nicely appointed and tastefully decorated in dark woods and bright but not garish fabrics. Far nicer than what we’re used to when traveling. The biggest difference, however, and one that almost made the room worth the high price, was the bed. It was incredibly comfortable. Hands down the best of any hotel we’ve ever stayed in, in the US or abroad, and, to be perfectly honest, better than ours at home. After a day on our feet, it would prove to be a godsend.
The train was a bit late to depart, but once on the way, the ride was trouble-free, and a hair over two hours later we pulled into 30th Street Station in the city of brotherly love. We took the streetcar – one of a seemingly endless variety of public conveyances in Philly, and a gross misnomer, for it spent not a moment of its trip above ground – downtown, checked our bags at the hotel and set out in search of lunch. Owing to the wedding, I did virtually no research on Philly before we left. We had been there once before, but it was several years ago, and we went with our friend C.S., who knew the city really well, so we were content just to follow him and his girlfriend around. This time, we were on our own, and in the absence of any information on lunch-appropriate spots in the vicinity of our hotel, ended up just grabbing a slice of pizza around the corner. It was surprisingly good – very much in the style of the New York’s famous slices, and though not quite that good, it was close. Our friend N. would later comment that she found Philadelphia to be an unfriendly city. I believe it stems from its frustration over its desire to be a New York in some important ways, but never quite reaching that ideal. The pizza was just a small manifestation of that.
Our lunch consumed, we set out for the Philadelphia Art Museum. According to the map we had picked up at the train station, the Museum occupied a location somewhat akin to the Kennedy Center in DC – not that far from anything, but not easy to get to. There was no Metro station anywhere near the museum, and Philly’s bus system looked intimidating even to a transit rat like me, so we walked. The weather was unseasonably warm – it would reach 71 degrees that afternoon – and the walk along Ben Franklin Parkway (more of a boulevard) pleasant.
The Museum is vast – the third largest in the US, after the Met and, I presume, either the National Gallery or maybe the Chicago Institute. There was no way we could see the entire thing in an afternoon, and we would not have wanted to, but we saw enough to make the visit memorable.
The current Classical style building was completed in 1928, though it looks older, and was the product of multiple architects and firms, which accounts for its generic architecture. It is enormous and is more functional than beautiful. Though superficially similar to the Met, it lacks the latter’s sense of proportion, especially when viewed from the front.
Some of the highlights and pleasant surprises we encountered were some early Miro from roughly 1920 that looked nothing like what we think of when his name is mentioned, some late, non-Cubist work by Georges Braque, and some seriously creepy modernist Mexican paintings by artists I was not familiar with. There was also a large gallery dedicated to the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi, which I enjoyed thoroughly, though J. was less enthused. Philly’s collection of Asian art, which we had to see selectively for lack of time, seemed heavy on Chinese artifacts, including, improbably, a complete study of a Chi’ing Dynasty scholar, but we did eventually find the Japanese stuff we were looking for. This included some beautiful ink-on-paper scrolls and some classic pottery. Unfortunately, we had to rush through the decorative arts galleries, but we saw enough to whet our appetites. All in all, a decent introduction to the monstrosity that the Museum is. We’re sure to be back more than once.
We walked back through the warm late afternoon, stopping for a cup of coffee on the way, then checked into our hotel. It being a special occasion, we had splurged a bit and booked a room at the Sofitel, which was far nicer and more expensive than what we normally allow ourselves. There was some history to the place. Though the building looks newer, it was originally built in 1964 to house the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (now owned by NASDAQ). After acquiring the property several years ago, Sofitel did a nice remodeling job, managing to avoid the generic hotel feel for the most part, especially in the guest rooms. Ours was nicely appointed and tastefully decorated in dark woods and bright but not garish fabrics. Far nicer than what we’re used to when traveling. The biggest difference, however, and one that almost made the room worth the high price, was the bed. It was incredibly comfortable. Hands down the best of any hotel we’ve ever stayed in, in the US or abroad, and, to be perfectly honest, better than ours at home. After a day on our feet, it would prove to be a godsend.
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