America the Beautiful
Postcards from the road
I know I promised I would send regular postcards from the road and I immediately broke that promise. Being away for most of the past month (for weddings, family reunions, and for work that I’m supposed to call “projects” to make them sound nice and grandiose) took its toll. I’m sorry that I let you down. Do you want to see me grinning like a schmuck outside a problematic ice cream shoppe in Cape Cod? I got you:
Excuses aside, it’s been great to drop in on different parts of the country again, see family and old friends, meet new people, and look in pity at foreign tourists trying to navigate our coffee culture.
Some highlights: I got excellent Italian food on Federal Hill in Providence (ancestral home of the American Chandlers) and excellent Italian Beef at Portillo’s…for the same dumb reason that a lot of other people did. In Hillsboro, New Hampshire, I admired but did not order a Grateful Dead, which has all the ingredients of a Long Island Iced Tea, but is topped with Chambord instead of coke.
I saw the LDS Tabernacle in Logan, Utah, near the Idaho border, and shopped at a liquidation center where expired food and used-and-then-returned appliances from Sur La Table end up for discount purchasing.1
In Mashpee, MA, I saw the ancient fish sinkers on display at the Wampanoag Museum, the tribe to which the Pilgrims owe their survival. The homestead of Franklin Pierce in New Hampshire is in good working order despite him being one of the lousiest presidents of all time.
In California, I got to drink inside of an enormous barrel-shaped bar that harkened back to the roadside gimmicks of early American highway commerce. I also made my first-ever trip to Disneyland, where they were wary enough of middle-aged men on solo trips to make me sit two rows behind everyone else on the “It’s a Small World…” ride.
At a White Sox game in Chicago, there was a $20 nacho helmet, at a Padres game in San Diego, there were Korobuta pork buns. At Walden Pond, MA, literary cathedral to isolation, they weren’t letting people in because the weekend beach crowds had pushed it to capacity and, at high tide one late afternoon at Huntington Beach, a lifeguard shouted that they were stingrays and a rip tide and I should get out of the water. (I’m pretty sure he was in the pocket of the surfers.)
Lastly, in Covina, CA, I met a bunch of old-timers at a car club hang in the parking lot of an In-N-Out.
One member, Gary, who showed up in the Ambulance Red 1970 Nova he bought as a Valentine’s Day present for his wife. He started it up to give me a sense of how loud the new engine was and when the sound system came on “The Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits was playing. That was kind of hard to beat.
Sadly, thankfully, I’m back home and working on catching up on everything.
Thanks to everyone out there who met me/hosted me/gave me good recommendations. And to everyone else, the chances are solid that I may be out your way before the year is out. Let’s have a schnapps?
Love,
Adam
There is a great newsletter by Jesse Hirsch about discount grocers that will blow your mind on a weekly-ish basis.