The Great Affair

My mother’s friend Dana has very specific tastes. She lives two and a half hours from Baltimore and DC, and refused to stop at any but a handful of specific gas stations whose bathrooms were deemed acceptable, or at least not quite as bad as the rest of ‘em. This is how I became, at a young age, a pit stop snob.

Cleanliness doesn’t bother me. I want food not involving a bun, strong coffee and easy in, easy out. Hard to find all three at once, but I try. We all need goals.

The rules:

1. Any stop without gas is pointless.

2. The Ulster rest stop is exactly as far as I can go if I have a morning coffee in Albany before leaving. They have a lovely summer farmer’s mini-market come June.

3. The Plattekill rest stop is exactly as far as I can go if I have a morning coffee in Brooklyn before leaving. They have hands-down the best food stop on either stretch, a Cafe with a full bakery spread, sandwiches, surprisingly large salads and very thin crust personal pizzas. I haven’t tried the latter, but they look really good, which isn’t something one often says about rest stop food.

4. The Modena rest stop on the other side has a dangerously leaky roof (car-sized puddles so big I wondered if a roof that porous would stay up long). However, the bathrooms on the second floor are only a few feet from the top of the parking deck, the quickest pit stop by far. Very important.

5. The Thruway Web site is no help. Though they do point out a Denny’s in Angola near the PA line I-90, which makes me jealous.

Sometimes we travel for sad reasons. My grandmother passed away last week - she of the Bubby’s Mandlebrot fame. It was a long, lonely drive to Baltimore. My mother and I agree that it wasn’t tragic, thought. She was almost 96, lived all but her last 24 hours in her own apartment (never needing assisted living) and basically went to sleep in a hospital bed with her daughter and her two best friends beside her.

Leaving Baltimore was tough. I found myself dawdling at Panera, finding an excuse to check email one more time, procrastinating getting on the road. Bubby was the last of her generation still in Baltimore. Everyone else lives in the suburbs or Florida now. The city was such a part of family lore. My first car trips as a child were to her apartment. We weren’t natives, but we weren’t tourists either. Now that’s Bubby’s not there to visit anymore, does that change our status?

Bubby took me on my first overseas trip - Israel when I was 15. She always wondered where I got my journalism skills from - despite knowing everyone in Jewish Baltimore and writing copious letters to everyone who was ever related to anyone she knew. She even started keeping journals and memoirs nine years ago. We found some dozen notebooks. I’ll transcribe them this summer, I hope. I know there’s a lovely essay in all of this, probably more than one.

I’ll post more thoughts as they come.

Clean is a relative word on the road.

A baby wipe can feel like a spa on a plane or in the woods.

But I’d feel an embarrassed, grimy mess showering with nothing but on the way to class.

At Eastern Mountain Sports last summer, the kids heading to camp didn’t care about the soap, while their moms fretted about never getting the smell of the great outdoors out of the kids.

The solution: Dr. Bronner’s. It’s an all natural soap sold at camping stores. At home, I probably use a half dozen soaps to clean my hair, face, dishes and clothes, but Dr. Bronner’s claims to do it all. How this works I don’t know, but somehow it does. And it sells, despite a label with terrible design (two colors, all text). Being all natural means it’s acceptable for environmentally delicate areas, such as state and national parks.

I’ve shopped our local coop for years, but just learned they carry Dr. Bronner’s in pump jugs for wholesale refills.

Guidebooks are good for planning where to go, and when if its just about the weather. But every now and then I stumble on something that I wished someone had warned me about but seems to fall between the guidebook spines in terms of practical information. Like tree pollen.

For example, I am mind-bendingly allergic to eucalyptus trees in bloom (or whatever you call it when the pollen flies). I know this because on a trip to San Fran a few years back, a friend near Berkley took me hiking. We drove north on Highway 1, pushing her little “I think I can” to its best Lexus commercial imitation. We planned to walk a few miles near the shoreline, through the trees, starting by the water.

I don’t think I made it half a mile. My chest squeezed. My nose ran. My eyes watered like I wasn’t just cutting onions but grinding my eyes with freshly-cut halves.

We turned back. I showered, napped, and still felt like a cold the size of the entire state had taken residence in my sinuses. Back in the city, I felt a little better, but it didn’t disappear entirely until I was somewhere 40,000 feet over Illinois.

It happened this weekend back home too, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The pollen was epic. Within an hour of pulling into the driveway Michael’s gray car was yellow. The air held a yellow tint. Really. It was a particle fog coloring our view across the street.

They don’t talk about that in the guidebooks.

I used to have a night in Albany where I knew everyone in the pub. The bartender refused to let us pay, so we overtipped him handsomely. Now law and med students have taken over. The owners forces the bartender out after a few too many free pints. It’s not the same.

I feel for those San Fransiscans losing a part of their city. In their honor, I encourage everyone everywhere to seek out a neighborhood joint instead of the trendy spot and say hey. Where’s the best places we should support in your town? I’m ready!

Thursday night after class I drove to Brooklyn. I’m still working out the best route - and taking suggestions, in anyone has them, for Albany to the far side of Prospect Park. Mapquest suggests cutting through lower Manhattan, but I get so lost it takes an extra half hour at least. I tried another route, through the Battery Park tunnel - except not, because the tunnel was closed late night, I wound up on the FDR heading north, panicked, but eventually managed to take the Manhattan Bridge (after a few illegal U-turns on and around Canal).

I hate NYC driving.

One moment of grace. Before the tunnel closed - before I got all turned around - I landed on the West Side Highway shortly after midnight. WFUV played something like modern lounge music, lilting and jazzy, tinkly and floating, like music out of Lost in Translation but softer and soaring. The lights bounced around the river. The apartment buildings crammed with people fled by, all around me millions of people going about their nights, the warmth of their lives beaming through the illuminated windows. The city was mine, the highway a silent rocket to the future, and the music lifted me above it all. It was a lovely moment, the kind that only comes alone, when a city quiets and you have a chance to appreciate the humanity it offers. Lovely.

Hot Damn. The legal max for bumping passengers just bumped itself to $800. The Dallas Morning News has a snippet. 

I love working the system. I always knew that airlines had to pay people they bumped from flights for overcrowding. Shortly after college I learned you could volunteer. For every flight, I approached the counter and asked how full the flight was. If they said very, I’d ask if they were taking volunteers to be bumped. Flight attendants cull from the volunteer list before they make a general announcement. 

When I lived in San Antonio, I flew Delta home to Baltimore through Atlanta. The Texas to Georgia leg never had enough seats. On Sunday nights, Delta flew three evening planes - a 7:30, 9:30 and 11:30. The 7:30 was always overbooked, but the 11:30 always had room. So I’d book the early one, volunteer to be bumped, take the voucher, and still get home in time to work the next morning.

My vouchers paid for all but $200 of a flight from Texas to Madrid, and an entire vacation flying into Baltimore and out of Boston.

I’ve never been that lucky before or since. In Tel Aviv two years ago, I flew home the weekend before Pesach with, I swear, every American Yeshiva boy in the entire country. My flight was one of the last before the actual holiday. Ben Gurion? Ayza Balagan! Of course, I volunteered - El Al bumpees get a free flight to any El Al destination within a year. But no dice. I was the last to board the plane. I’ll just have to try again next year.

I love listening to radio on long-distance drives. Cars can be so isolating, long drives geographically dislocated. Highways look the same, it’s just the names that change. Night is worse. Flickering radio static  gives a concrete sense of space passing. Sometimes luck shines, and a locally owned and produced station offers a glimpse of color. At home I get WEQX in Vermont, where they toss in Phish a few times a week, because that’s what Vermonters do. From East Texas to New Orleans in the pitch of night every station was gospel or country. I’ve never driven the Jersey Turnpike and not heard Springsteen and Billy Joel. There’s a pretty good local station in north Jersey that plays indie rock and alt-country and yes, The Boss, but it peters out around Cherry Hill. That’s almost Delaware anyhow, close to home and the isolation of the Eastern Shore. 

I forgot the photos!

Meet Sirus. 

She’s our baby. 

A 6-year-old Weimaraner. 

She went to the vet this weekend for her just-in-time for summer checkup. She’s better protected than we are. Monthly flea and tic treatments. Kennel cough vaccination, also a good idea for dogs who hike during the summer. 

Hike? Boy, does she. 

She’s even got her own pack. 

Apparently there’s some debate over doggie backpacks. But I agree with the folks who say larger working dogs do just fine. Sirus has her own saddle pack, and carries her food and water on weekend camping trips. The key is to balance the weight evenly on either side. She also takes her backpack very seriously. This is clearly a job for her, with no time for dilly-dallying among the underbrush like she would without the pack. 

Mountainsmith human bags - hip packs, duffels, car organizers - hold up amazingly well, and have great suspension and extras, like pockets just wear you need them. They make a doggie pack too. I haven’t seem them, but judging from their other bags, and this review, it’s probably a safe bet. 

Other brands make them too. Sirus’s is burried in packing boxes, or I’d mention hers. She’s had it a few years. A cautionary note: they aren’t easy to find. Some Petcos have them, I think. Some REIs do. Amazon has Kelty packs (also probably a good bet), but the Mountainsmith are out of stock. Small online dog-based stores might be the best bet, or a local speciality store.