The Northern Trek Goes to Conclusion

We arrived in Baltimore this evening, deciding to eat at the hotel.  We've done a lot of traveling and it will be good to get home tomorrow.  Since our trip to Block Island, we've maneuvered around the Northeast through seven states to reach here.  In the days after Block Island we spent one day doing little in Bristol, except seeing half Brit-half Yank flags hung in honor of a British automobile parade on Hope Street--the site of the oldest, possibly, and biggest, possibly, Fourth of July parades in the country.  We also lunched with our friend Elaine at one her favorite places in Warren, Rhode Island, Eli's Kitchen, where we had an eclectic menu before us.  John chose a Cuban panini, and Ben had a portobello mushroom and goat cheese panini.  Both lived up to Elaine's superb recommendation.  Then on Friday we headed headed north for a weekend in Dorset, Vermont.

Our travels took us through Worcester, Massachusetts, where we found a very suitable coffee shop-cum-bakery in an old textile factory in the Canal District.   The Birchtree Bread Company did a very good coffee for Ben and the pastries, which John avoided, just oozed "eat me!"  The textile factory, probably close to 200 years old, has little charm, but lots of interest.  Thousands of people worked in them and now they are being turned into offices, condos, and yes, bakeries.  

From there we headed across Massachusetts to the Connecticut River and headed north in to Vermont.  We stopped for lunch at the Putney Co-Op, just north of Brattleboro for a meal that John found organic but rather boring.  Not much of a spice in the organic salami of the Italian sub he had.   We found coffee later in the afternoon at a crossroads named Rawsonville, where Ben learned the history of the barista--she was an equestrienne and horse trainer partnered with an animator.  They lived in New Zealand while he animated parts of the Lords of the Rings trilogy. They gave this up to settle in Vermont with their children to roast coffee and open a coffee shop.  He also continues to do freelance animation.

At last we arrived in Dorset, a lovely, quaint Vermont village with grassy greens, a village center and an old church that had a carillon.  Just a magnificent little place for our friends Joe and Howard to settle in their maison secondaire.  Their home was built in 1860 but completely redone in the 1990s.  It sits on the bank of a stream where waters on one side drain south to the Atlantic and on the north side drain to the St. Lawrence in Canada.  A home on a continental divide.   We enjoyed meals at home from the caterers in Manchester of chicken, various Chinese dim sums, salmon and fresh local asparagus from the farmers market.  We spent very pleasant times discussing food, preparation, locavore eating and organic farming.

We left there on Sunday for Connecticut and a night with John's brother and family and friends at his friend's home at the beach on Long Island Sound.  Much fun and conversation. Then a ride south today.  

All in all a good two weeks!






Next to Oregon after visits from England and then from Australia!   

The Northern Trek Continues

On Tuesday, June 9 we headed south for the day in Newport.   We had had cocktails the night before with Rhode Island friends, Bill, Julie and Nan, all of whom pushed a visit to Rough Point, the home of the late Doris Duke.

The weather on Tuesday was dreadful so the idea of being inside was very appealing.   And Duke's home is truly appealing.  It's not as nouveau-riche as the Vanderbilt mansions in their gaudiness.   Toward the end of Duke's life it was her home for many months of the year till she died in the 1990s.   It has a 270º view of the Atlantic Ocean from the point, impressive with its own private way to the beach, under a bridge below the public Cliff Walk to the water where she swam daily privately amidst the rocks.

Duke collected stray dogs, but toward the end of her life came back from a visit to the Middle East to purchase a Boeing 737 that came with with a collection of three live camels (who outlived her).  Camel models are now visible throughout Newport, probably as a note of thanks for all the work Duke did to restore the city's colonial past. There are camel topiaries on her Rough Point house grounds. She bought many of the nearly derelict decaying 17th and 18th century homes for the Historical Society through her own foundation and restored them.  They are now rented.  

The house itself contains a grand collection of art from Rembrandt to Van Dyck, and a large collection of Louis XVI furniture.   A visit to mother-of-pearl bedroom reveals an inner shine-loving character!

We lunched at Annie's, a breakfast and lunch place with a very rich, full clam chowder, in the buildings of the Tennis Hall of Fame.  Then we walked Thames Street in the sometime fog down restored side streets and finally returned to Bristol for dinner at Le Central on Hope Street.

Le Central is a favorite of our host, and ours.  We go there on our visits for fine steak-frites or good French fish.   Ben had sea bass, Elaine and John at steak-frites.  John began with local asparagus done with onions and parmesan, whileElaine and Ben had soupe de poisson, made with a lovely lobster broth.  A good Hautes Côtes de Beaune red completed an excellent meal.

Bristol is in the midst of painting the Hope Street traffic stripe red, white and blue for its annual grand Fourth of July parade.  The trucks and the work limit street movement after 9 PM as the stripes are repaired.

Wednesday, June 10.  It was a magnificent day for travel.  We decided to spend the day on Block Island, about 18 miles off the coast, reached by ferry from Point Judith.   It's about an hour from Bristol over three Narragansett Bay bridges to get to Point Judith and then an hour on a ferry.   The island is worth the visit.

After the exquisite cappuccino at Persephone's, a three-day old business making a superb coffee and very good frittata, we rented bicycles for the afternoon and took off to the old South Lighthouse.  It's two miles up, and up, and up to the top of the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic to this old 19th century operating lighthouse.  It's been moved from its original site because of erosion of the cliffs, last time 22 years ago.  Nearby are 160 steps down the cliffs to the beach.  There was a grand view from the top.  We don't know about the bottom.

We continued our bike ride through the countryside of this island, where half of the land is in a conservancy.  Back to the harbor, mango-lemon ice and a seat in the sun before the trip back to the mainland.

On land, dinner was a collection of Rhode Island style dishes at George's in Galilee.   We ate outside as the sun began to set, beginning with steamers (small clams steamed in broth with drawn butter) and continued on to snail salad (that's the Rhode Island name--it's really conch salad, but with local sea creatures).  It's mixture of chopped conch with chopped onions, celery and spices in a vinaigrette, served over arugula.  Ben had, and John tasted, a Portuguese style monkfish with chorizo, mixed rices and steamed zucchini as a main.   John splurged on a mango cocktail, like a frozen daiquiri.  

Then in the car and home across the three bridges as the day darkened to Bristol.  The lighted bridges are very impressive between the mainland and Jamestown, Jamestown and Newport, and the old Mt. Hope Bridge between Portsmouth and Bristol.   Narragansett Bay is magnificent.

Our First Northern Trek of the Summer

Thursday, June 11  --  Family called us North at the beginning of June, for a few days of play and visit.  Last week on June 1, we began with our long drive of more than eight hours behind the wheel, ten hours of travel total, for our 450 miles between Washington and Boston.  It's a long haul, but we have broken it up into pieces with various stops for coffee, shopping and lunch.  It makes the trek for more interesting.

We began early from our home on Capitol Hill at 8:15 AM, running into a bit of slow traffic between Washington and Baltimore at the tail end of that rush.   From there it's an easy run nowadays to Delaware where we head into Christiana Mall to have Ben's special cappuccino at the Nordstrom's coffee bar.   From there it's the New Jersey Turnpike, then over the GW Bridge in New York.  We found lunch at the Sherwood Diner in Westport, Connecticut, where we enjoyed a couple of good sandwiches.   It gave us a respite from the 65 mph ka-thump ka-thump of the freeway in the pouring rain.

From there it was a short run to New Haven and our special coffees at the Blue State Coffee house near the Yale Medical School.   Wired, we continued into Massachusetts and arrived in Boston about 6 PM to a house full of family and grandkids.

The rest of the week was finely spent with the kids, coffees and lunch at Kickstand Cafe in Arlington, Massachusetts, brunch at Madrona Tree, and walks to the park.  We managed a visits to Ball Square Wines for some aglianico reds from Italy that we had encountered in Pittsburgh in May but not found in Washington.

We left Boston on Monday for Rhode Island.  We enjoyed Blue State Coffee in Providence at their Thayer Street operation near the Brown University campus, and walked the East Side and the Brown campus.  Brown's campus is one of the prettiest Ivies.  It doesn't have the size of Harvard, nor does it have the spreading magnificence of Princeton, it does compete favorably with the "all of a piece" Yale campus and the urban situations of Penn and Columbia.  It's not rural, of course, like Cornell or Dartmouth.

There are art installations throughout the campus, though not all are permanent.   One we visited that made us stop and look closely was a piece by Tom Friedman called The Circle done in 2010, a large piece made of stainless steel that looks like aluminum foil cooking trays, modeled on the The Dance by Marc Chagall.

Never having been in the John Carter Brown Library on the campus, we decided to visit a small show of colonial era books and manuscripts from mostly Spanish colonial sources describing the mining and metallurgical work the Spaniards undertook in Chile, Mexico, and Peru.  We found it an interesting exhibit.  

We lunched at Julian's Restaurant on Broadway on Federal Hill.   This place started as a food truck about 15 years ago and now is a good sized tavern/pub on Broadway in an area of 1880s and 1890s homes.  It specializes in beers and brunches, so we enjoyed an omelette, smoked onion rings, and pulled duck soup.   Great fun including the collection of model super-heroes in the washroom.

Off to Pittsburgh

Saturday, May 9, 2015

We haven't been traveling much this year, just a few quick trips to Boston with no specific restaurants or hotels to report on, nor much in the way of touristic activity.  Instead, it's been a busy year with activity in local politics instead.

This past long weekend, though, from April 30 through May 4, we traveled to one of our favorite cities, Pittsburgh, for a wedding.   We stayed with friends, so we have no report on hotels or bed and breakfasts, but we did eat in several interesting places and enjoyed walking about the city, and the wedding was lots of fun.

We spent some time in the Doughboy section of Lawrenceville, one of Pittsburgh's neighborhoods.   When we lived in Pittsburgh there was always talk of doing "something" around the Doughboy statue at the intersection of Penn Avenue and Butler Street in Lawrenceville--an old industrial section with a mostly Polish population.   The Doughboy commemorates the soldiers of World War I.  Now, 30 years after the thought of doing something around the nearly 100 year old monument, "something" has happened.

The neighborhood that John remembered from working in Pittsburgh as a place of dying steel fabrication and specialty metal shops, with its poor streets and even less interesting street life, has become a center of specialty restaurants and stores, with occasional boutiques thrown in.  Many new buildings are going up to blend with the mostly 19th century architecture of small row-houses and an occasional larger home, that he assumed were built for the mill managers before they could move out to East Liberty and other more salubrious parts of the city after 1900.  The world-renowned Childrens Hospital is a focal point of this renaissance.  It took took over the old St. Francis Hospital, rebuilt it and added to it.   

Jay's Design for soaps

Of particular interest is a small soap maker's boutique on Butler at 46th Street.  Its window contains a fascinating bathtub, more decorated for Christmas than for a soak.  Inside are soaps in many different scents, shapes and sizes, and for the animal lover, a dog and several cats to either wag tails or beg for treats. Jay's Design, the name of the store, has been there for several years now.  A friendly place, and a great place to buy grainy or not-so-grainy soaps, in scents ranging from grandmotherly lavender to honey and oats.

Closer to the city, a new group of buildings house a restaurant that's been open a few months, run by the former manage at Lidia's, near the Convention Center.   While the restaurant, regrettably, caters to stark wall modernity, hence lots of fashionable noise, that meant it was about an hour into our 8 PM sit-down before conversation was easy, the food was superb.  Strictly Italian.  Ben enjoyed  skin-on broiled branzino, starting with a barley-mushroom soup.   John enjoyed his meal of breast of duck, with a starter of white anchovies.   We ordered a superb wine:  a Campanian Italian aglianico, a find that is hard to find in wine stores.   It's a descendant varietal of Greek vines brought to southern Italy when the Greeks colonized it about 3000 years ago.   In Roman times, Pliny wrote about the wine as "Falernian" wine--the Roman equivalent of a grand cru.   It opened beautifully.  We will try to find it, though it is unavailable at our local Washington, DC store.

We spent one morning exploring haunts around the city, downtown.  We rode the bus to the city center to avoid parking, and found PAT transit on the East Busway not only convenient, but cheap--seniors ride public transport in Pennsylvania for free!  Better than the half-price fares of Washington, DC. 

Union Trust stained glass

Union Trust Atrium

We explored the Union Trust Building on Grant Street.  It's been restored to magnificence--dating from about 100 years ago when it was the home of Mellon Bank.   The inside is an ode to past business glamor, with stained glass and a huge central atrium.   

After our visit to the Union Trust, we lunched at Eddie Merlot's near the Hilton at Gateway Center.  It's an upscale chain and provided excellent soups, hamburgers and salads for us and a friend from when we lived in Pittsburgh.


The only museum that got us was the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, where John spent a happy afternoon with a friend.  The museum has grown by leaps and bounds, and provides a true view of what public transport was like when trams ran down the streets of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

And we did seek out coffees--Ben has fallen for Zeke's coffee in the now revitalized East Liberty, and we enjoyed walking around Bakery Square, where Nabisco used to make cookies and now Google may well be involved in electronic cookies at its offices there.  

Our last meal, last Monday night, was a birthday celebration, at the Kimpton Hotel's new restaurant, the Commoner, in the Monaco hotel that has been built into the old Duquesne Light headquarters on Mellon Square.  Once again it was modernly noisy.  The waitress was overly perky and gave adequate but spotty service., We felt the food was lacking in something--something indiscernible.  Our oysters were tiny Rappahanocks, that were not full of flavor, but the romaine salad was superb and John enjoyed his "onion soup burger," a specialty of the chef who moved to Pittsburgh from Washington.   Ben had seafood stew that was quite ordinary. 

The wedding, on the other hand, was not ordinary.  Two friends, Tom and John, have been together for 30 years.  We met them both separately before leaving Pittsburgh for Washington in 1985.  The wedding, now possible because same-sex marriage is now legal in Pennsylvania, was thought out over several months.

First, the venue, the Edgewood Country Club, was an excellent choice,  Getting married in a pavilion overlooking a lovely golf course with the Alleghenies in the background is grand, to say the least.   Then the guests, most of them long time friends or family members, coming from as far away as Chicago, Washington, New York or Tucson, to celebrate with their old friends.  And the cake, surmounted by two polar bears.  Nearby stood the cookie table.  The cookie table is an old-line Pittsburgh institution where the guests come with containers and containers and containers of home-made cookies.   if we were weren't high from the joy of the wedding when the party finished we were high from all the sugar.   Cookies in the shape of tuxes, cookie truffles, enough chocolate to keep anyone up all night.  It was there.  We still have some in our pantry, sealed up in metal cookie tins.  The Lutheran minister with a commanding type A presence, gave a rousing homily as part of an enthralling ceremony.  The kiss was warm and loving, and everyone enjoyed a day of glee.

A Good Trip...

We spent the day quietly around Asbury Park.   A good breakfast and then a walk on the Board Walk and a lunch at Kim Marie's, nearby.  We can look back on a fine 10 days, good friends, good food, good wine and good places.   Home tomorrow.

Gliding above the cold, cold ocean

A bit of eye-can

Party with Long-time Friends

Sunday, August 17, 2014

We partied last night with friends at the house.   Several we had known from previous visits, but thoroughly enjoyed the company of new friends.   Pat put on a spread of a buffet—shrimp Cobb salad, roasted marinated pork loin, spiced turkey sausages, potato salad and a roasted vegetable ratatouille-style salad.  Finished off with mocha ice cream and either yellow chocolate or red velvet cupcakes.    Along with that a couple of New Zealand Sauvignon blancs, a Spanish garnacia, and an Italian Istrian rosé. for a large party of nine.

We had spent the day partly at the farmers market and just relaxing in the near perfect weather.  Ben headed out to Cookman Street for his cappuccino  in the mid-afternoon.    

All in all a good day.  Today, Sunday, it is showing signs of morning showers, but perhaps it will good to go to the beach this afternoon.  Michael leaves for work this afternoon but that leaves Pat, John, and Ben along with Letty, an old friend here.

A Long Drive to New Jersey--and Bear Weekend

August 16, 2014

We had a long trip to New Jersey.   It’s a busy run on a Friday.  Coffee from Blue State in Providence early in the morning (10AM) then through never-ending Connecticut and over the Tappan Zee Bridge to New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway.   Very heavy traffic everywhere.  

Spent a few minutes finding a diner in Northern NJ before stopping at the Six Brothers on Route 46.   It’s a huge Greek place.  John had a good salad of arugula, tomatoes and sardines, though the arugula could have done with another grit-removing rinse and the tomatoes could have been from New Jersey instead of shipped green and reddened in the truck North from wherever.)   Ben’s lox and egg white omelette was decent.   Good soups and the tiramisu were included in the price!

Arrived in Asbury Park about 4 PM, and enjoyed a fine dinner of grilled chicken and skirt steak at home with friends Pat and Michael and their friend Donna, who lives across the street.  

Headed out late in the evening (10PM) to the Cameo Bar, within walking distance.  It was the opening of Bear Weekend in Asbury Park and the place was crowded with gents of a certain hairiness, and often of significant weight.  Let’s face it, said John, a gay bar is a gar bar is a gay bar no matter what.  There were a few attractive men, of course.  Home into bed by 11:30. John woke up about 3 AM to hear a very active party of young ladies going on outside the house.   Appeared to be a group of  high school students who had decided to meet at the Asbury Park High School that’s across the street.   They did finish in time for a complete night’s sleep.