A Grand Beginning to the Trek

Mountains to 3000 feet, plains, valleys, rivers, fields, national monuments, even the fin of a brand new windmill (the French call them eoliennes), you can find them all on America's roads. Yesterday was one of those gorgeous days, the weather was great, the roads not overwhelmed with traffic, which made the drive easy. We tend to forget that magnificence of the Appalachian Mountains with their rolls of hills, each one higher than the previous until you reach the Eastern Continental Divide.

Without haze we walked to see rocks 340 million years old in one of the cuts made in the 80s at Sideling Hill for the interstate. Bends of rocks, pressed by the pressures of the earth. A few minutes later we saw the unfinished work of a madman building the newest ark to take humanity, and one assumes two of every type of roach, bug, snake, deer, rat and elephant when the floods come.

Yesterdaywas four states and DC, 420 miles and a bit less than eight hourson the road—mainly because we tend to stop every two hours: Coffees at the Queen City Creamery in Cumberland, Maryland, lunch at a picnic table made of leftover smoked chicken, courtesy of Wally McClain with some cottage cheese, and gas at $3.99 a gallon in Ohio.

Ohio is quite different. Instead of mountains, it's plains. Columbus sticks up in the distance, a collection of newer architecture rising like the Emerald City. Broad wide streets, Victorian neighborhoods with brick four-squares, and sprawling suburbs of garden apartments and 60s spilt levels, very low rise.

Our BnB is in the Short North district, about a mile north of downtown and a mile from the Ohio State campus. At night High Street is lighted by arches of chromoscope lights that change color every few seconds to give a changing view of the six lane wide street...almost a boulevard. Clubs and shops that make it an urban scene.
Terry, Ben's sister, outdid herself with dinner last night. Her friends Lorraine Levesque, a retired nurse who travels and cooks extensively, and Janet Rife, volunteers manager for six downtown theaters in the city, and who runs a sex toy business on the side, made for fascinating conversation. Never let it be said you can't have good crab cakes 500 miles from the Chesapeake Bay. You can. And a Volcano Red wine from the Big Island of Hawaii, made from grape juice and jabotica berries in honor of Pele, the Hawaiin goddess of volcanos and fire. www.volcanowinery.com/.

Janet kindly gave us a ride back into town and we learned the ins and outs of her business. Today she is taking us on a tour of the theaters, many of which date back to the 1920s and 1930s. Columbus has six of them, still operating as venues.

We pack!

Ah, yes, the Great Western Trek: With two days to go till departure we are busy packing clothes for five weeks, deciding on cameras, collecting gifts and readying the house for closure for June. Busy, but fun. The fridge is virtually empty. The car is serviced, washed and vacuumed. The maps collected. The big gray book of reservations and schedules complete. And Wednesday at 9AM, we're off to Columbus.

A little theater

Memorial Day weekend: the star of the long weekend was Friday's performance by Chita Rivera, who is appearing at the Signature Theater in a newly staged musical production of Kander and Ebb's The Visit, based on the play by Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt. Rivera plays an old lady returned to the town of her birth where she is feted as the rich old woman who will restore the faded and depressed German burg to its full potential with a massive injection of money. She does offer the money, 10 billion marks, but the quid pro quo is the murder of her teenage lover who spurned her for the daughter of a well-to-do shopkeeper. Rivera, now 75, starred in the original West Side Story in 1957. She dominates The Visit, even though the cast is superb. She actually does dance. It's a good performance, incredibly heavy in its grotesqueness. You hope for a reprieve. There is none.

Ten Days to 6500 Miles

We have ten days to go till we venture out into 22 states and four Canadian provinces on a 6500 mile trek across the plains and prairies to the Rockies and the Great Lakes. We've been planning this trip since December when we made reservations at the lodges in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks to make sure we could stay in the national parks. We've added a few days in Columbus, Ohio, to visit Ben's sister, and a couple of days in Illinois to visit with old Brown University friends Phil and Bobbie Barry--and see a few Frank Lloyd Wright homes too.

We look forward to reporting our finds along the main and back roads of North America. Some days will be long, but others will be delightfully short. We'll go through little known Rocky Mountain passes in the Uintas, we'll boat on two Great Lakes, we'll wine taste in Ohio and Ontario at least, and we'll check out Saskatchewan foods in Regina. Of course we'll attend concerts--at the Winnipeg Jazz Festival, in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, and who knows in Toronto.

So come back often. We'll try to post something most nights.

New Places to Recommend in Pittsburgh

A weekend with family and friends, May 1-4

There's a lot to be said for a long weekend away visiting old friends and family. We had not been to Pittsburgh, where Ben is from and I lived for several years, in almost a year. Our friends Tom Czekai and John Fasanini probably were beginning to wonder if we were avoiding them; the family certainly looks forward to our visit and we enjoy seeing them. Considering we used to go monthly either on business or to take care of ailing parents, it seems we seldom trek up the Turnpike through the mountains watching the seasons change as we go higher.

This trip we tried two new restaurants and did a little shopping. My friend Tom and I also attended the dedication of a newly-restored 1917 Pittsburgh streetcar at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum on May 1.

First the restaurants: Both are in the East End of Pittsburgh. They show the continuing Renaissance of the city as it becomes a center of gerontological research and high tech universities. Squirrel Hill now abounds in restaurants and they are now spreading into nearby neighborhoods like Regent Square, part of which is in the City of Pittsburgh. Of course, we still maintain soft spots for our cousins' restaurants, 11, Soba Lounge and Casbah in the Strip District and Shadyside.

Our first venture out was to Legume on Braddock Avenue in Regent Square. It's a small place run by a young couple (30s) who moved back to Pittsburgh from Ohio after working in and around Cleveland. They had got interested in food when at Oberlin. We estimate the restaurant has about 18 tables inside and half a dozen on the sidewalk outside.

While it has no specific specialities as far as we could tell, the seafood was delicious, our friend John enjoyed his duck immensely and our friend Tom had a pork cutlet that looked and he said was very tasty. We started with mussels and fingerling potatoes, leek and goat cheese tarte, and bistro salads. The mussels were tiny and blended with the potato pieces in a light oil and vinegar dressing easily. They easily passed for a Spanish tapa. There were more mussels than potatoes by far. Ben's goat cheese tarte was light, a good variation on a quiche.

Our mains were scallops seared and then served with juliennes of Jerusalem artichokes and red capsicum peppers. John's duck was sauced with a fruit sauce and the pork cutlet was grilled nicely. We finished off with pannecotta with rhubarb or chocolate cake.

What makes this restaurant endearing, besides the excellent cooking, is its reservation and seating policy. If you call in advance you can't make a reservation for less than a table of six, but if you call leave your name you will get the next table when you arrive...it's sort of a maitre D's list, but more advanced. The restaurant does not have a wine list so we arrived with a 2004 Linden Vineyards Virginia Chardonnay and a 2005 French Rhone: a Chateau-neuf-du-pape. Expensive wines but not at restaurant prices.

Our next night with cousin Joyce Diamondstone was at Ma Provence, Murray Avenue, Squirrel Hill. Owned by a Provençale whose chef once cooked at the famous Le Bec Fin in Center City Philadelphia (a restaurant we visited more than 20 years ago but still going strong). Bec Fin has been long famous for its crab cakes. The chef at Ma Provence provides an exact copy! We pigged out on the creamy crab mixed with chopped shrimp in cakes two inches across and an inch high (5 cm and 2.5 cm for our metric readers). Additionally the fish, according to Ben was fine and the duckling for Joyce very good. I began with a full plate of charcuterie. The portions are substantial.

The wine list is fine. Our 2004 red burgundy was lovely. Interestingly the French now list the cépage on the label of wines they export. Our French friend Marcel Leclerc remarks on the internationalization of the French wineries. French people generally do not see it necessary to print the varietal on the label. The creme brulée for dessert is very good with its brittle sugary finish.

Two excellent choices.

The Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, once known as the Arden Trolley Museum, continues to expand. My friend Jack Samuels, a board member, explains that the executive director has aggressively courted grants and governments to grow the place. It now has 25,000 visitors per year and runs trolleys most days on several miles of track during the Spring, Summer and Fall months.

We enjoyed the political speeches and hobnobbing with friends as the museum dedicated a 1917 Pittsburgh trolley, shown here with friend Tom. These cars were the mainstay of the Pittsburgh system from the 1920s to the 1940s. Two remain in existence, both at the museum.


What was interesting was running into old friend Bill Flanagan, a consumer reporter with KDKA-TV when I was covering business for WPXI-TV in the early 1980s. He still retains a place on local TV but is involved as executive vice president of the Allegheny Conference, a business development group for the region. He gave one of the keynote speeches--by far the most interesting--putting Pittsburgh's transportation into perspective as part of his role in promoting the 250th anniversary of the city's founding in 1758 after the British took over from the French at Fort Duquesne during the French and Indian Wars that preceded the Revolution.


The rest of our trip was a delight of visiting friends: Cousins Milton and Sarita Eisner, and Jodi and Ken Eisner, their daughters Jamie and Carley, as well as Ben's law school chum, Leone Paradise. We all had a good chunner.

Even Samantha, John and Tom's corgi joined in on their front porch.

John

A Couple of Days at
Rehoboth Beach, Delaware

We'd planned for several weeks to take a mid-week drive down to the beach to see our friends Tom and Jim. We went this past week.

Rehoboth is at best 2h30 from Washington. But with a stop for lunch of crab and oysters at the Narrows Restaurant overlooking Kent Narrows in Maryland, the trip took on a leisurely pace. We enjoyed watching the spring come. It didn't hurt that the two kinds of crab soup: a bisque and a vegetable mixed with crab meat, nor the Caesar salad with fried oysters or the crab open-faced tortilla with sauce were excellent.

Our friends have moved into a neighborhood about 10 minutes from downtown Rehoboth Beach, meaning it's easy to get about. The first night there, we went out to Celsius Bistro Restaurant for dinner. It's a bright cheery place with brilliant colored designs on the walls. Unfortunately we could not dine on a prix fixe menu as planned. It had been abandoned, but we had coupons: We really couldn't complain about dinner for four for $100 with tip and one $8 drink (barely passable name-unknown chardonnay). The food was adequate, though we should have received a recommendation to do the appetizers as tapas. The steak diane was a nice snip of beef with good frites. Even though it was only 9h30 when we finished eating, the place was empty and closing down. In season it's mobbed!


Day 2: A little shopping, a look at the beach, good conversation with our friends, and a pleasant dinner at home the second night. We had lunched at a newly reconstructed restaurant overlooking Lewes harbor, the first Dutch settlement in America, at Irish Eyes Pub and Restaurant. The sandwiches were excellent including a pannini Cuban style made with pulled pork BBQ and sliced roast pork. We enjoyed the deep fried dill pickles, but we weren't sure we'd do them again. In the afternoon we ventured into the Dutch-style Zwaanendael Museum in the center of town to hear the story of the foundation of Delaware and how it didn't become Maryland or remain part of Pennsylvania. The museum building looks like it belongs canal-side in Amsterdam--of course, it's in the middle of a flower garden and shrubs.

We returned to Washington on Friday April 18, but are pleased to say that we have found an excellent coffee shop in Denton, MD, about half way between the beach and the city. The Firehouse Coffeeshop on Market Street in the old part of town. Ben thoroughly enjoyed his extra-dry skim cappucino. I sipped a lovely decaf.

An update for the past two weeks or so

We can recommend Dr. Granville Moore's Brickyard Belgian beer pub and restaurant at 1238 H Street, NE where we feasted on moules et frites about two weeks ago. The beer list runs to 50 or so Belgian beers of various levels of alcohol. We tried five of them with our friend Wally. All were superb. Dinner itself runs about $30 per person, including one or two beers. Wally finished off the evening with a raspberry infused beer in place of dessert. Nice touch.

The restaurant itself is in an old town house that was once Dr. Moore's office. Today it is stripped down to the old plaster, open beams, wooden floor and tables along one wall and the bar on the other. It's a primitive setting for the food which is superb. But I'm always a sucker for mussels.

The wait staff and bartenders are very professional and understand their beers.

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We have done a few theater visits since the beginning of the month. This past Friday, April 11, we saw The Happy Time, part of the Kander and Ebb festival at Signature Theater in Arlington. Happy Time was the piece they produced on Broadway that followed Cabaret. It got lost the season it openeed when there were so many outstanding plays on Broadway. It's a fairly standard "coming of age" production, set in French Canada (On ne sait pas la province.) The music is fine, the acting very good and production a pleasant evening.

Deuxième Musica at the Maison Française at the French Embassy about 10 days ago, a short production half in English, half in French, written by Marguerite Duras. It's a two person 'read' on stage of a couple, separated who meet at the finalization of their divorce. Sad, very existential.