Category Archives: vacation

July 6, 2008 · 9:30 pm

Bahstahn, part I

I am unbelievably, and irrationally, tired. As I write this, it’s only 8:30 at “home” and a mere 10:30 here in my borrowed base camp. Under no circumstances should I be as wiped out as I currently feel.

(Excuse me. I was just interrupted by George, a cat who was last seen hissing at me in his best impression of a cobra. He is currently bonking me so hard that his paws are slipping on the hardwood floor. Fickle.)

Okay, so where was I? Ah, yes. Boston. It has been years since I’ve been in Boston, and never for a reasonable length of time. I have an uncle who lives in Boston, and he and his wife have extended an invitation to me numerous times. This time, however, the planets aligned just so, and a flock of friends descended upon them all at once for my uncle’s birthday celebration. Welcome to Tedstock: Three days of peace, music, and Ted. (Yes, my uncle was at Woodstock. 40 years later, a great story came out of it. You should ask him about it if you ever have the chance.)

I won’t download any pics until I get home to my card reader. A more detailed post (and links!) will accompany those. For now, you get:

  • Slushie drinks
  • Lobster and steak
  • Flag Cake and heavenly cheesecake
  • Fireworks
  • Walk around Deer Island
  • Harbor tour on a friend’s lobster boat
  • Slushie drinks
  • Dinner for 34 at La Siesta
  • FOUR pies (and flag cake and heavenly cheesecake)
  • Dim sum
  • Brief walking tour
  • Duck Tour
  • Slushie drinks
  • Big Ass Paella
  • Coconut cake (and four pies and flag cake and heavenly cheesecake)

Yeah, this weekend has been a lot about food. It hasn’t fit in very well with my vegetarian diet, although the lobsters most definitely met my personal requirement of having lived a lobstery life. I met the man who actually caught them, I was able to watch him at work, and while some passengers on his boat were a bit squeamish at the reality of the situation (including, I thought oddly, the two daughters of crabbers), I approve of the general decency and respect that this particular fisherman afforded the creatures involved. I actually felt better about eating lobster after seeing the process first hand. I did feel a little guilty about tossing the more-difficult-to-get-at parts into the trash, until the raccoons broke in overnight and made short work of the remains. I’m glad nothing was wasted.

In closing, I offer you a snippet of Jailbird George’s oral tour from the DUKW boat:

“The Bunker Hill Monument is an Egyptian obelisk in an Irish neighborhood commemorating a battle we lost, and erected on the wrong hill. Heh.”

Tomorrow: Fenway Park. FENWAY FEKKIN’ PARK. Oh yeah, baby.

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Filed under family, food, friends, sports, vacation

July 2, 2008 · 8:41 am

Wonder Wheel, Tillie, and pink popcorn.

While out to dinner with Erin last night (at Bombay Clay Oven, where we sat barefoot in a cozy booth, littered with pillows and enveloped in curtains), she asked about my new header for July. Here’s the scoop, short-story-long:

I’m from New Jersey. That is, I lived there from infancy to the age of 18, and then on and off until I moved to Colorado when I was 24. As a result, summertime reminds me of mosquitos, oppressive heat/humidity, and trips down the shore. Yes, DOWN THE SHORE. Not “to” the shore, thankyouverymuch. The beach I visited most frequently was Seaside Heights (oh please, PLEASE click on the link), though I’d also made trips to Bradley Beach, Wildwood, Cape May, and environs. One beach that I didn’t go to was Asbury Park. At one time a thriving resort, it had become a run-down ghost town filled with derelict buildings and people of dubious moral character. Eventually, my sister moved full-time down to Ocean Grove, the shiny, sparkling, Rockwell-esque town right next door. And started working at the venerable Stone Pony, in good ol’ Asbury Park. On a visit to see her, I finally took a stroll through town. Still derelict, I was able to see first-hand the crumbling remains of what had once been popular beach-side attractions such as the giant carousel and the Palace arcade, complete with the peeling portraits of Tillie, unofficial mascot of the Jersey Shore.

What does all this have to do with anything? Not a helluva lot. I was going to use a photo of Tillie as my July masthead, to honor this most summery of months. But… all of the photos I could find are either too closely cropped to work in my horizontal format, or are too frighteningly run down. So I had to rethink.

Do you know what else is vintage, and beachy, and indicative of summer, especially to this here gal who was born in Brooklyn and spent the “off” part of those previously mentioned age-18-to-24 years there? CONEY ISLAND! Home of the other, original Tillie, also known as Steeplechase Jack. Home of Philip’s Candy (closed in 2001) and their infamous pink popcorn. Home of the Coney Island Aquarium. Home of the annual Mermaid Parade. Home of The Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel.

If you listen to the Wonder Wheel turn, one is likely to hear screams and some sort of rolling sound. That is the devilish charm of the wheel. The Wonder Wheel is unlike most Ferris wheels in that it has eight stationery cars and sixteen that roll along tracks within the wheel’s structure.  In his book The Outdoor Amusement Industry William Mangels said, “In its revolving structure are built-in curved tracks on which small passengers cars operate.  When the wheel is in motion these tracks incline, causing the cars to roll back and forth.”  Each car has two rows of two seats, both facing the same direction.  As the engine turns the wheel, the swinging cars stay stationary until they are a little above the wheel’s axis and then quickly fly down about twenty feet of track until they swing to a stop.

If one looks east down the Bowery it is easy to spot one of the Wheel’s best pieces of advertising. It is a large neon sign that has the words “Wonder Wheel” on top of each other, and the blinking word Thrills! in the middle of an arrow pointing south to the great wheel. There are only two similar Ferris wheels in the world. The first stands in Yokahama, Japan […] (and the) Sunwheel at Disney’s California Adventure.

While I have eaten a bagfull of pink popcorn from Philip’s, I have never actually ridden on the Cyclone or the Wonder Wheel. Who wants to go for a ride?

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Filed under amusement parks, nostalgia, vacation

July 1, 2008 · 12:02 am

Camping Season

Yup, we got our gear together and went camping! It took no fewer than 80 (yes, I counted) email messages during the week leading up to the trip, plus phone, text, IM, and real-life conversations.

EIGHTY.

Somehow, we all managed to converge on one campground (many thanks to Joe and Megan for taking off work and heading up early to snag two beautiful sites!) and nobody got lost or stuck in traffic. The weather was beautiful, the injuries were minor, the bug bites were only two, and the sunburns were kept to a minimum. We did lose two campers whose dogs were unaccustomed to the cold nighttime temps and had to head home early. Jason dropped his bacon in the dirt. The campfire insisted on periodically becoming a mass of choking, blinding smoke. (My favorite quote of the weekend, from Jason: “I just put my contacts back in. It was like putting campfire IN MY EYES.”)

While Jason and Christine hiked a nearby 14er, the rest of us decided to take a more leisurely stroll. So, 2.5 miles and 1800 vertical feet later (and don’t forget a number of snow-covered paths!) we reached Silver Dollar Lake. The 2.5 miles back to our tents was much easier!

Tossing and turning in “bed” one night, I decided that I was too old and creaky for this shit. Of course, by morning I was already mentally shopping for my new campstove. The next trip won’t be until August, so I have a few weeks to gear up.

Click on the photo for more.

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Filed under camping, friends, vacation

June 5, 2008 · 11:28 pm

The Family Truckster

In 1984, my father, his girlfriend and I took off on our own version of the nuclear family’s summer vacation. Dad strongly suggested that I keep a travel journal.

I didn’t. As a result, here’s what I remember:

We flew into Stapleton in Denver (this was 11 years before DIA opened). We rented a navy blue Chrysler K-car (with great disappointment all around) and spent the next two weeks driving to California along the route that AAA had planned for us in our road-bible, the TripTik. One night, we ate dinner at Fred & Sophie’s in Winter Park, Colorado (it isn’t there anymore). Named for the owners’ dogs, it may have been the first time I’d ever had tortilla chips that weren’t Doritos. We drove through Moab before it was mountain bike mecca, we drove through Winslow and sang “I was standin’ on a corner in Winslow, Arizona; such a fine sight to see — it’s a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowin’ down to take a look at me.” We were in Bluff, Utah on my birthday. We saw dinosaur tracks, petroglyphs, buffalo, Dead Horse Point, the Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, and Canyon de Chelly. We drove through Las Vegas at night, and I couldn’t believe the spectacle that was the Strip. I asked my dad to turn off the car lights, which he did, and it made no difference at all on the road. There was a torrential rainstorm when we drove through Death Valley. We ate dinner at Sonic one night, and I was ill all evening. Every day, we would stop at a supermarket for cheese and a box of crackers (I remember a lot of Triscuits, but we may have mixed it up a bit) and we’d eat a picnic lunch somewhere. Eventually, we reached Los Angeles, and spent a week at the house of a family friend who lived in Pasadena. Los Angeles was completely decorated for us, I mean the Olympics, in festive pastels à la the Memphis design group. We walked past Tower Records, ate dinner at Spago, and fit our hands and feet into the sidewalk impressions at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. We took a day trip down to the San Diego Zoo, and spent an afternoon on Venice Beach

I guess I didn’t need that journal after all.

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Filed under family, vacation

May 16, 2008 · 7:10 am

Frequent Flier Miles

First, a thank-you to the surprising number of peeps who poked around my blog during this past week, even though I wasn’t writing anything. I had a friend in town, and set blogging by the wayside in favor of late-night talks and far too little coffee. ACTUAL reality, folks. It’s the wave of the future.

Back to our regularly scheduled program:

I have a bunch of frequent flier miles. Some here, some there, some with airlines I don’t even fly. United, Frontier, Continental, Midwest, Northwest, whoever Hilton is hooked up with, and wherever I can transfer AmEx points. Not enough to fly to a friend’s wedding in Mexico, but enough to visit a different friend in Minneapolis. That is, I could redeem the miles if the dates I wanted to travel (a weekend in the middle of July) weren’t blacked out. I have been gathering miles for years, because I can’t actually use them. Is there a trick to it?

Okay, okay, I didn’t mean to leave you all in the dark. Back to the beginning: My pal Nick was visiting, and we went to a car show where we met the guy who owns a Cadillac known as Batmobile with which I am familiar, played mini-golf (see above), watched a DVD, and hung out with friends. We ate some, we drank some, we drove around some. I introduced Nick to egg creams at brunch one morning. That right there means I did a good job as hostess.

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Filed under friends, vacation