Occam's Razor

Business travel is a bit of both bore and chore. The bore part can happen if you travel to the same place a little too often. That’s how it is with Lakewood, Colorado and me. Lakewood is a nice enough city on Denver’s western edge, nestled a few miles from the start of the Rocky Mountains. It has a nice view of the mountains and Denver, many affordable houses, convenient strip malls, a new hospital and the Denver Federal Center, where I hang out during the day. Soon it will have light rail as well. It’s a decent city and might be a nice place to retire to if you dream of retiring to a ranch house and like to bike places. It is quite bike-friendly. Still, there is nothing particularly special about Lakewood, aside from its scenic views. It is the average American city, the sort of place where Dagwood Bumstead would feel at home.

Nick’s Cafe

Business travel to Lakewood usually means sleeping in the same so-so hotels. The TownePlace Suites where we usually stay is very much so-so: standard clean Marriott hotel, just not one of the nicer ones. Calling them a suite is a bit of a stretch. There is a tiny kitchen, but there it is basically one room with a bathroom. There is also something resembling breakfast in the lobby in the morning. Breakfast means a continental breakfast: cereals, milk, bananas, apples and bagels. The closest thing to protein is the hardboiled eggs, which only recently appeared on the menu. The price is right but meal quickly gets boring. You find yourself craving some real breakfast food: like scrambled eggs with bacon, fresh orange juice, pancakes and hash browns. For most Americans this means Denny’s, and there is a Denny’s across Highway 6 about a half a mile from the hotel. There is also a hole in the wall called Nick’s Cafe.

You would be wise to choose Nick’s over Denny’s. Granted, passing this tiny restaurant at 777 Simms Street your first reaction might be to run to Denny’s instead. Nick’s epitomizes the hole in the wall restaurant, and its location in a tiny and disheveled looking strip mall with a liquor store might have you wondering if restaurant inspectors ever come by. Moreover the place is tiny. Your chair might well bump up against a chair of the table next to it. It can’t possibly seat more than two dozen people and when it does it must be with considerable discomfort. There is that plus all the kitschy stuff on the walls, almost all of it with an Elvis theme. Nick, the chef behind the counter, reputedly used to cook for Elvis though for how long I don’t know. Nick’s is part restaurant and part shrine to the crooner, with a dash of Marilyn Monroe thrown in. Rumors of Elvis’s demise may be exaggerated, because at Nick’s he has a parking space awaiting his return.

You can likely get breakfast 24 hours a day at your local Denny’s, but at most restaurants at 4 AM you are out of luck. Not so at Nick’s because Nick is an early bird. He arrives around 4 AM and departs around 3 PM after lunch. Nick is not intimidated that most of us are asleep at 4 AM rather than searching for a hot breakfast. He is there, probably because he’s wide awake anyhow. He knows what he does well which is make great tasting breakfasts and lunches for prices that make him competitive with McDonalds. Unlike McDonalds though you can also get a taste of Greece or Mexico, if not during lunch when his hot and tasty gyros are in high demand, but even during breakfast where if you think your taste buds are awake enough for it you can get the breakfast burrito.

Nick concentrates on the food, not on the silverware, which is plastic, or the glasses, which are paper cups, or the plates which are Styrofoam. You can watch Nick prepare your meal if you want since he is right there behind the window. And you cannot escape Nick, as you pay him, not the waitress, on your way out the door. Tip the hard working waitress of course, but leave your credit card at home. It’s strictly cash at Nick’s.

I eat at Nick’s a few times a year, usually toward the end of my trip when I cannot endure another continental breakfast. I am on per diem anyhow, and breakfast is always cheap at Nick’s. It’s also a short walk across 8^th Avenue, across a gas station lot and up a short but steep embankment. It’s worth the short climb just to have the pleasure of sitting down, enjoying the Elvis memorabilia on the wall, the Today show on the TV (in the morning) and to hear the comforting sound of food frying on Nick’s grill. The waitress is always there, so it is a matter of seconds before you get a cup of water and a menu. (Seat yourself.)

Perhaps it is just as well that Nick’s Cafe is unknown. With a restaurant so small, Nick simply does not need much more business. It’s the sort of place that should have a line outside the door but I have never seen one. This may be due in part to the severely limited parking. It may be small but that does not mean it does not have loyal clientele. They are also friendly clientele, perhaps too friendly. As I had breakfast the other morning, one patron walked in to pick up her usual order of takeout, but stayed just long enough to sit on the lap of a much older patron. Nick’s is apparently the dining choice of penny pinching Lakewood police, two of whom came in for breakfast while I was there.

As much as I enjoy the ambiance of Nick’s as well as its great food, I confess my primary motivation is the bacon. Nick knows his bacon and he delivers thick strips of bacon cooked just right: neither too greasy nor too brown. It’s bacon you can sink your teeth into and ingest with great satisfaction. I haven’t found it served in any other restaurant, probably because other restaurants are too busy making their bottom line to worry about giving patrons thick slices of bacon. At Nick’s there is only Nick behind the counter and a waitress handling customers. He serves what is good, not what makes him the most money. He cannot be in this business to get rich, as he charges so little. I figure he works simply because he enjoys it. He is the master of his own small domain, a cash-only business, and it works for him. He can open his own damn store at 4 AM if he wants and there is no one to complain. And so it goes until the last gyro is sold around 3 PM. If you need to see Nick, he will be back at 4 AM. Count on him.

Someone once told me I could make anything interesting, so today’s challenge is to write something halfway entertaining about this routine flight to Denver. This is going to be quite a challenge and I doubt I can do it. Here goes.

I am at thirty five thousand feet, there is little turbulence but there is this annoying TV screen in front of my seat that I cannot turn off. This at least is new, at least on the United Airlines 737 fleet. You now have the option of DirecTV on this flight, with a hundred channels to choose for the low, low price of just $7.95, but should you not be interested there is no way to turn off the screen. So if United cannot convince you to swipe your credit card for this service, they figure they might as well subject you to annoying ads instead for the full length of this three and a half hour flight. The off button has been conveniently disabled on my armrest. This is all for my pleasure, or something, but of course is really about United’s bottom line. The only way solution is to shut your eyes, which is what I have been doing until my last podcast ended.

On this flight I am trying a few new things to handle the tedium of traveling quickly two thirds of the way across the country. First, I purchased a set of noise canceling headphones. These jetliner cabins are noisy places, eighty decibels or more. You get used to it after a while, but it can’t be healthy. Noise canceling headphones do not deaden the noise of air whooshing across the airframe, but they do make it tolerable. They cancel perhaps twenty decibels of sound, which is good. I can now hear content through my headphones again, not only when it is at near piercing volumes. So both watching and actually hearing movies on my iPad in flight is now a possibility and something perhaps to try on the next trip. This noise canceling technology, while hardly perfect, is making sitting in an airline cabin for three plus hours much more bearable.

I am also trying to use my smartphone for entertainment during the flight. It is in airplane mode, of course, but it still has its uses. I can read books and articles on it easily enough and, at least for this flight, I can listen to podcasts with the nice little BeyondPod podcast app I installed. I won’t listen that much to music, but I can queue up a nice set of podcasts. My playlist is actually a mixture of political, economic and tech podcasts, and I can listen to them or not. Usually my brain is like a sponge and likes to be fed a steady stream of facts and opinions until at some point, like now, I can’t take more input and have to do some outputting, which means blogging. Being that the smartphone is much more portable than even my iPad, it will probably end up as my default electronic traveling companion.

It seems that if you have to travel by air, early December is a great time to do so. This plane is about three quarters full, which means I have the luxury of an open middle seat next to me back here in economy class. Also empty were the airline ticket counters early this afternoon at Washington Dulles International Airport. Two Ethiopian dudes speaking behind the counter seemed really animated about their topic of the day, not that I have any idea what they were saying in Ethiopian. This is another example of the weird multiculturalism around here, but has become so routine that I hardly notice it, other than the language is different. There is no line at the TSA baggage check, and only a couple of people ahead of me at the TSA credentials check. Note to self: try to travel more in the off season and schedule flights that leave in the middle of the afternoon. This no hassle way is the only way to travel by air.

You know you travel too much when you get sloppy at the airport. Today this meant I never bothered to check my concourse and gate. Concourse C, I figured, since that is where I usually catch these United flights. I stood for a few moments before the subway to Concourse C before I thought to check my boarding pass. Oops. My flight was out of Concourse D. No subway for me; instead I had to take one of the old fashioned mobile lounges to my gate. Washington Dulles seemed as close to dead today as it can get in the middle of the afternoon. No lines at the Starbucks of Subway sandwich shop in Concourse D. The stalls in the restrooms were even spotless. All of them!

We passengers on Flight 1160 are an apathetic and self-absorbed bunch. Mostly people are not bothering to look out the windows, but instead are focused on their tablet computer of choice. Tablet computers and eReaders are everywhere on this flight. Hardly anyone can be bothered to get up out of their seats and walk the aisles. With kids in school, there are no crying children to distract us or ratchet up the noise level. One lady across from me is studiously writing in longhand in a spiral bound notebook, which suggests she is at least forty something. Increasingly, cursive is not being taught in elementary schools. In fifty years will anyone remember how to read cursive? Ah, there will be a Wikipedia entry on it.

Off season also means the plane is relatively clean. This makes a nice change of pace for United, where they go through the motions of cleaning the cabin but you can usually find trash under the seats if you look or sometimes crammed between seats. I flew on two regional jets with United recently that were disgracefully unclean. Not only was it filthy, you could barely see out the windows they were so caked with grime and what looked like encrusted saltwater. Today, there is a dirty stain or two on the carpet, but at least the carpet looks vacuumed. This is high quality for United Airlines. Instead of rating the flight the usual C- perhaps I will give it a C+. The best news of all is at the rear of the plane: no lines at all at the toilets! This is very unusual and for once I can ponder the possibility: do I want the starboard or the port toilet? Decisions, decisions.

I figure that since 2004 I have made at least twenty trips to Denver, mostly on United Airlines, which means roughly forty flights between Washington Dulles and Denver International. It’s a mostly featureless flight, but usually there is a bit of excitement on approach to Denver. Denver International (DIA) consistently gets strong crosswinds coming off the Rocky Mountains, to the point where I expect them on approach and to encounter a bit of a bumpy landing. A smooth landing is the exception at DIA.

Once deplaned I know what to expect: I will be in Concourse B, probably need to use the restroom, then take a smooth subway ride to the terminal. On the ride there will be the annoying recorded announcer with a fake cowboy voice on the PA system. I will claim my bag at Carousel 12, and take a shuttle to rental car row, a few miles from the airport. Thence will commence a substantial drive from the airport in far northeast Denver to Lakewood in the rental car, where the local Towneplace Suites awaits, our hotel of choice for the last four years or so. It feels like my second home now. While I have a rental car, I will likely walk down to Jus Cookin’s for dinner instead, a one of a kind family restaurant where everything on the menu is home style, cheap and delicious. Tomorrow there will be the continental breakfast to greet my tummy, and three days in a conference room at the Denver Federal Center.

With luck on Friday I will be on an on time return flight to Dulles, arriving toward dinner hour. My spouse is likely to whine about her boss. My cat will be complaining that he is starving even though he will have been fed. In February I am likely to do this shuttle circuit again.

It’s boring business travel but at least this time of year, unless there is a premature snowstorm, it is at least predictable. For that and the empty seat next to me, I am grateful.

Last week, business travel definitely put a damper on my blogging. While traveling on business gives me a chance to see parts of the country I would not ordinarily see, it mostly involves business. It started daily at 6:30 AM when my alarm went off. I hustled to shower and shave, and then grabbed a quick breakfast in the hotel’s breakfast room. In this case, it was the breakfast room in the Fairfield Inn in East Greenbush, New York. There the accommodations are clean but modest, the scrambled eggs taste powdered but coffee, decaf and tea are available twenty-four hours a day in the lobby. Each day ended around 8:30 PM when our bloated bellies staggered back from our evening meal after a day in a conference room, punctuated only by brief breaks and running out for takeout for lunch.

By 8:30 PM I was exhausted and ready for bed, not blogging. Some in our group were party people, anxious for more time together, a night on the town and various activities from karaoke to Frisbee golf. The business week meant scuttling from place to place with a few others in a rental car, long and tedious discussions on various projects under consideration and near the end of the day searching Trip Advisor for good places to eat. It meant a lot of dining out, principally in places serving pub food and locally made beers. It meant morning stops at Starbucks, not for myself, but for my traveling companions. It also meant some technical glitches: my laptop inconveniently died on Monday morning and left me keyboard-less, until a tech at the place we were hanging out gave me a loaner laptop to carry me through the week.

Still, I did get to spend some time in these triple cities: Schenectady, Albany and Troy, about two hundred miles north of New York City. They are clustered within about twenty-five miles of each other. My principle interest was in Schenectady, the city of my birth, which I saw briefly in 2004. After we landed early Sunday afternoon I managed to convince two coworkers to join me for a few hours in Schenectady and Scotia. Schenectady has the dubious privilege of being the city in New York State with the highest crime rate. It did not feel particularly unsafe during our brief visit, but like much of upstate New York it had seen better days as most of its manufacturing had left decades earlier. There were some abandoned houses but there were many houses just somewhat neglected: decks deteriorating and siding or trim in need of repainting if not complete replacement. Still, even in Schenectady there were charming areas. Parkwood Boulevard, where some of my family lived briefly in the early 1950s, retains a fading charm, enhanced by the glorious autumn leaves and cool autumn breezes. Downtown Schenectady, under remodeling back in 2004 during my last visit, was still a work in progress, with its streets torn up, steel plates on the roads and kidney-punching bumps in the road.

The Village of Scotia just across the Mohawk River was of more interest. This was where I spent the first six years of my life. I found it curious that I could still sort of navigate around Scotia without my GPS despite being in kindergarten when I had left. We wandered into Collins Park, where I was hit by a baseball in the bleachers as a child, and where baseball was underway as we visited. Clouds had settled in over Scotia. The geese honked noisily on Collins Lake in the park.

There is still baseball in Collins Park, Scotia NY

Our old house on North Holmes Street looked in good shape with an American flag proudly blowing in the breeze on its stoop. The street did not look as sad as it did in 2004, and the sidewalks were fixed as well. Driving north several blocks toward the high school, the houses turned from occasionally shabby to charming. The houses on Broad and Seeley streets felt out of Norman Rockwell. The church and kindergarten I attended on MacArthur Drive got several pictures but raised no particular memories. Much more memorable was Lock 9, a few miles up Mohawk Turnpike by the bridge to Rotterdam, which allows barge traffic to traverse what used to be the Erie Canal. As children it was a frequently weekend destination. We would sit there over the lock and watch the water be raised and lowered and ships went through the lock. Not only did we learn much about hydraulic engineering, but it also gave my poor, hassled mother a couple of hours a week free from the otherwise ceaseless din of children. Today, the lock is private property so I could only take pictures from the road. In the autumn the Mohawk River looked serene, except for the water cascading over a dam under the bridge. Overall, Scotia satisfied my limited nostalgia for the area. It is a pleasant and walkable village where a car is not a necessity and life proceeds at a simpler pace.

Lock 9, on the Mohawk River near Rotterdam, NY

Sunday evening found us in Albany at a brewpub near the capitol. Albany was bigger and with buildings much taller than I expected, but sleepy on a Sunday night. The New York State Capitol itself did not fit the mold of state capitols: no dome but spires, and looking more like a cathedral than a center of government. The whole Capital Hill area looks a bit strange, but strangest of all is The Egg, an egg-shaped building used as a performing arts center on the capital’s mall.

I found it strange that just across the Hudson River from Albany there was so much undeveloped country. To be fair there is the city of Rensselaer, but drive over the Hudson River on I-90 to the highlands of East Greenbush where we stayed and you had undeveloped country with a commanding view of Albany, with both the capitol and The Egg easy to see just a few miles to the west. There are more people than you think, as evidenced by the traffic on Troy Road around eight o’clock in the morning. Our destination for the week was an office in Rensselaer Technology Park a few miles up the road, but in the evenings were usually spent dining in Troy.

Troy is a bifurcated city that can’t decide if it wants to be ugly or grand. The grander parts are in the hills to the west of the city. The more ugly parts are its downtown areas. Troy too is trying to do some urban revival of its downtown with mixed success. Along with the brew pubs there are also bums, as well as excellent dining. I am part Polish, but until last week I had never dined at a Polish restaurant. Muza in downtown Troy offers excellent Polish dining. One of my coworkers said he had the best meal there he had had in many years. If only the road had not been chewed up for repaving and a panhandler was not aggressively pushing for “just seventy five cents” as we wended our way back to our rental cars.

I am confident that I gained weight last week. There was virtually no time for exercise but lots of opportunities for sitting and restaurant dining. I was glad to come home on Friday and glad to leave the powdered eggs at the Fairfield Inn in my rear view mirror as well.

If home is where your heart is, then my heart is in Endwell, New York instead of Ormond Beach, Florida. I spent nearly ten years in Endwell and they were during my prime developmental years: ages six through 15. No wonder I feel bonded to the area and its climate. In contrast, I spent only three years in Ormond Beach, at least if you are counting continuously. I spent nearly seven years in Florida altogether, but about as many of them were spent going to the University of Central Florida in nearby Orlando. By mid 1978, degree in hand, I was out of Florida and glad to put the state in my rear view mirror.

Ormond Beach, Florida

Florida and Ormond Beach never quite felt like home. My friends were seven hundred miles away and there were few prospects at my public school in Daytona Beach that looked friend-worthy, as they struck me as a class to be vacant and intellectually incurious. Florida’s climate was completely different, as was its terrain. For months I felt the need to wear sunglasses; Florida was just so darn bright all the time. In general things felt sticky, hot and harsh in Florida. For most of the year going outside meant being smothered in a hot and wet blanket of air that only blessed air conditioning could relieve. Giant armored rats (okay, armadillos) lived in the woods and were occasionally pancaked on the highways. In New York State I rarely saw a cockroach. In Florida even the nicest houses had them and they were huge, black and hiding pretty much everywhere. I had a visceral loathing for them. They showed up in the least expected and grosses places, like inside my shoes. Even the grass felt unnatural. Bermuda grass, if you were brave enough to walk on it, felt like walking on razor blades. Yes there were palm trees and beaches but there were also flying roaches, snakes, alligators, fire ants and love bugs.

So perhaps it was fitting that as my rental car pulled into Ormond Beach, after a lapse of twenty-six years between visits, that I would be greeted by lovebugs. Plecia nearctica is their official title and these insects only join together for a few weeks at a time, at most. They must really love their mates, so much so that when they join they fly together glued at their butts. This and their black bodies make them easy to distinguish. They hang in the air and are generally harmless, but they become a huge nuisance to drivers. They smash into windshields, die messily and clog radiator vents. Getting their carcasses off the windshield is a challenge too. Ordinary windshield washer fluid and wiper blades won’t do it. Coca-Cola works, but that got expensive. Anyhow, September must be their mating season because they were out in force when I exited my rental car in Ormond Beach to visit the local Catholic church where we prayed for a few years.

Visiting Endwell, as I did last month, was an easy decision. I could easily spend a week getting reacquainted with my hometown. For Ormond Beach, a few hours were plenty. I never stayed in the city long enough to feel rooted to it. Curiously, I had stayed long enough to find my way around easily. I didn’t need a map and always knew just where to turn. Unlike Endwell and its surrounding towns and villages long in decline, the same was not true in Ormond Beach.

The good news: Ormond Beach was looking up: much prettier than it was in the 1970s, and starting to look kind of quaint. The City of Ormond Beach agrees. South Ridgewood Avenue, which I knew well from innumerable bike trips to school and work across the Halifax River on the peninsula, now has signs calling the neighborhood historic. That’s pushing it for an area where the houses were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s, but even forty years earlier when I first arrived there, tourism was its cash crop. In the intervening years the city simply has gotten better at presenting a good image. The strategy has largely worked, although the U.S. 1 corridor on South Yonge Street still looks a bit stressed, as does my old neighborhood and the house we lived in.

Where had the blacks had gone? There used to be a clear color line nearby between Ridgewood Avenue and South Washington Street. Perhaps the neighborhood got too pricey for most blacks. Lots of places in Ormond Beach now looked upscale. The old Bowman’s Care nursing home down the street where a couple of my sisters worked is still there, but is now a spiffy managed care facility with a new name and likely corporate overlords. The nearby recreation center is new to me too, and looks like a mini water park.

Hard to believe I lived here (Capri Drive in Ormond Beach)

I had no desire to hang out on its beach, or the more famous Daytona Beach to its south, although I did drive on it, which is still possible in 2012. Even if I had wanted to, the weather was not cooperative. Oversaturated clouds periodically spat rain at me. I ended up taking pictures of our old house on Capri Drive from inside my car. By the time I made it across the peninsula to Seabreeze Senior High School I just had the oppressive humidity to deal with. My alma mater also looked spiffier and modernized. The signs told me to register at the visitors’ desk, but as it was after school hours when I arrived and the campus was empty, I felt empowered to tour the campus without official permission. No one stopped me and I walked the vacant hallways alone.

Daytona Beach, Florida

In the 1970s most of the school had no air conditioning. The school was amply named because you generally stayed cool from the sea breeze, if it deigned to come into your classroom. Back then half the students dozed at their desks, the women wore halter tops (no bras) so thin the outline of their nipples were clearly visible, and students actually brought surf boards to school, the beach being a short walk across Route A1A. Now there is a chain link fence with no easy way to get to the beach or the nearby McDonalds. Nor is there a whiff of marijuana in the outdoor hallways and I am sure the lockers are now inspected regularly for contraband. The 1970s was a much more laid back decade, at least in Daytona Beach.

The tall condos and hotels along the beach have not lost any of their impressive heights, but nearby Belair Plaza where I used to work is stressed. The location of the Winn Dixie supermarket in the plaza where I had my first job is now vacant, although a Publix supermarket has moved in on the south side of the Plaza. The bookstore now contains a Walgreens. The other Winn Dixie where I worked closer to home is gone as well and contains a furniture outlet. I spoke briefly with a lady who runs a consignment shop there. I remembered that part of the supermarket as the stocking area. I remember unloading trucks in the evenings to the sound of blaring rock and roll on the radio. According to the woman sweeping debris near the back of the store, homeless men can often be found behind her store in the morning. That at least is new.

In general, the retail in Ormond Beach is a notch or two higher than when I lived there. Starbucks saw no reason to skip Ormond Beach, in spite of its heat and humidity. I dined, if you can call it that, at a Moes Southwest Grill with all the conveniences of home, including a WiFi for my iPad. The most surprising find in Ormond Beach was the Cheaters Gentleman’s Club that I passed on my way out of town back to St. Augustine. I guess its location makes short work for local private detectives.

I said in my last post that if I had to retire to Florida, I could retire to St. Augustine. Ormond Beach simply does not have its allure. Being forty miles from the city made it easy to visit. There was a reason I had avoided it for more than a quarter of a century: it was nothing special to me. In 2012 it is still nothing that special, just looking nicer.

Judging by St. Augustine, Florida’s East Coast is getting all gussied up. In my memory, St. Augustine has always been a pretty city, but since it has been more than thirty years since I last visited this city (about halfway between Jacksonville and Daytona Beach) my memories of it were dim. Anyhow, whatever it was when I first saw it in 1972, it does not match the tourist-friendly, picture-postcard reality I find in 2012. It is both beautiful and charming.

St. Augustine has a right to call itself historic in a way that no other city in North America can. While a newbie of a city by European standards, St. Augustine can viably claim to be the oldest city in North America. It was officially established in 1565, which is forty-two years before the English got around to attempting to settle North America at Jamestown (1607 for the fort, 1619 for the city) and 55 years before the first Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620. It was the Spaniards who founded St. Augustine. It looked like a good place to place a stake in North America, as it was reasonably defensible due to peninsulas and fresh water could be found nearby. It attracted attention from competing powers, which led to the establishment of many forts that predator nations quickly destroyed. Once Spain decided they weren’t going to budge, they finally constructed the fort that endures today: the Castillo de San Marcos, a huge fort made of over 100,000 blocks of limestone. Should navies want to invade today, it would still be reasonably impregnable. If you had to find shelter in a hurricane, it would be an obvious place to weather one.

Castillo de San Marcos, St. Augustine, Florida

Various nations laid claim to the city over time: Spain, then Great Britain, then Spain again and finally the United States got title to it in the 1830s. If the United States is destined to go the direction of other great powers, then it won’t be the last occupier of St. Augustine either. Whichever nation ends up with it in the future, it is likely that Castillo de San Marcos will still be standing looking relatively unchanged. Meanwhile, the fort remains St. Augustine’s premier attraction, competently administered by the National Park Service, with regular cannon firings to delight the tourists during certain times of the year, as well as a fantastic view of the junction of the Matanzas and North Rivers, with hints of the enormous Atlantic between the peninsulas.

I didn’t have to go far to see the fort because it’s where business has taken me this week. Our meetings were not actually in the fort, but in its administration building. This is good because unlike the fort, it is air conditioned. Given the oppressive humidity and frequent storms in St. Augustine, it’s a wonder that the Spanish did not settle in more temperate terrains. The Spanish influence is not wholly gone. Some of the architecture from their occupation still exists, and much that went up around the city is built in a Spanish style. And you can find still Spanish restaurants here too. We found one with excellent food on Tuesday night on St. Georges Street, a lovely pedestrian-only street that slices through the historical downtown St. Augustine. St. Georges Street is a lovely tourist destination and full of boutiques.

St. Georges Street, St. Augustine

In September the tourists have mostly gone, which is how we claimed a government rate at the famous Casa Monica hotel here. This famous and historic four-star hotel is lovely, comfortable and tries to keep it faithful to its historic style, right down to the high skylight windows in the bedrooms, such as I have in my room. If you want privacy, roll down the blinds. You can’t go a block without running into wonderful restaurants (in fact, the hotel itself has a four-star restaurant), but curiously most of them are not open for breakfast. Those that are tend to open around 8 a.m., which is too late for those of us needing to be ready for all day meetings starting at 8 a.m.  That leaves pricey room service or dining at the Starbucks in the lobby. The closest thing to health food there is their breakfast sandwich, which has plenty of protein (eggs) but it otherwise largely tasteless.

But who can complain with the view here in the downtown area? Flagler College is anchored here, and the private university looks more like a hotel than a college campus, which it likely was. Unsurprisingly, it attracts well moneyed students, mostly white. Their beautiful coeds make me wish I were thirty years younger. Well-manicured lawns full of Bermuda grass, lots of historic houses and brick streets, tall and established palm trees helps you forget the oppressive humidity. The humidity is so high that thunderstorms are frequent. The remnants leave large puddles on the streets pedestrians have to walk around. The city is obviously going for a classy clientele, at least here in the downtown area. The major roads include bike lanes. Many roads are under reconstruction. As a result driving around downtown is confusing, with its narrow streets recalling a pre-automobile era. Yet, while it has a cosmopolitan look, you don’t have to drive too far to be in Florida Cracker territory. Even so, there are plenty of well-moneyed people here. The city has the appearance of being progressive, but the area is dominated by Republicans and conservatives. Romney should not have to worry about winning St. Augustine.

St. Augustine is the sort of Florida I hoped we would move to when my family arrived in Florida in late 1972. Instead we ended up near Daytona Beach, at least then a much grungier, pedestrian and low-brow place. In Daytona Beach in 1972 there was the beach, the bars, the liquor stores, the famous speedway, a Greyhound track, a Jai-Alai center, a lot of suboptimal retail, and little else. But here in St. Augustine, at least in 2012, all is much newer, spiffier and classier. The last state I want to retire to is in Florida, but if forced to retire in this state then St. Augustine would do quite well.

Just how Daytona Beach and my old home city of Ormond Beach just north of the city is doing in 2012, twenty six years since I last visited and where I spent about six years of my life will be the subject of my next post.

Warren, Pennsylvania

After touring New York’s Southern Tier, the final part of our vacation was in western Pennsylvania, principally Pittsburgh where we spent two nights and a full day. Our first night back in Pennsylvania was actually spent in Warren in the northwest part of the state. I hadn’t heard of Warren before, but Warren turns out to be quite charming with its history going back to its founding in 1795. Perhaps it is largely unknown because it is so hard to get to. No major interstate comes near it. Warren is not that different than Corning, New York but perhaps not quite as well moneyed and snooty as Corning. The city has less than ten thousand people but publishes a daily newspaper (except on Sundays), the Warren Times Observer. The city is clean and like Corning full of well-maintained Victorian homes. The charming Alleghany River flows through it. You know a city is doing well when it is hard to find a parking space downtown. My brother Mike was in the area so we connected at the Plaza Restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue, which serves tasty and amazingly cheap Greek food (cash only). Our night was spent peacefully at an almost new Hampton Inn north of the city.

Western Pennsylvania

Trying to get from Warren to Pittsburgh forces you to cross and re-cross the serene Alleghany River along U.S. routes 6 and 62 and pass through a couple of cities a lot like Warren, like Oil City and Franklin. The drive is as serene as the river, which was beautiful and except for a few kayakers spotted near Franklin largely undisturbed by humans. I was glad for the change of pace. Interstates are undoubtedly fast and convenient, but it’s also nice to spend hours on unfamiliar but bucolic two lane roads, pass through a national forest and see farmers’ markets along the side of the road. After a couple of hours of this kind of driving we reached serious highway: I-80, then we scooted south on I-79 into Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh

Downtown Pittsburgh

I had driven around Pittsburgh many times on the turnpike, but had never actually seen the city. We could not have picked a hotel closer to the center of Pittsburgh than the Wyndman, because it is right next to Point State Park, where the Ohio River begins at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. This Wyndham hotel is a very tall three-star hotel that could stand some remodeling (underway near the lobby) and attention to detail (peeling wallpaper in our bathroom, for example). However the view outside our 20^th floor room was definitely four-star, as it gave us a commanding view of the Monongahela River, and the impressively steep hills nearby. Within an hour after dumping our bags at the hotel we had walked across the Fort Pitt Bridge to the Duquesne Incline. For $5 a person you can take a tramway to the top of the incline and back. At the top you can get a much nicer view of Pittsburgh and, if so inclined, dine at a number of very expensive restaurants up there as well. It was cheaper for us to gawk at Pittsburgh from these heights, and wonder how much the pricey condos nearby sold for. (Doubtless they were too pricey for us.)

“The Strip” in Pittsburgh

As with our trip to Philadelphia, one full day merely gave us a chance to sample Pittsburgh. Overall, I enjoyed Pittsburgh, but not enough to want to live there. Still, it has all the amenities of a big city including two outdoor sports stadiums with long established franchises, theater, arts centers, museums (most of them funded by endowments from the late industrial magnate Andrew Carnegie), great restaurants, not so great restaurants, dive bars and most importantly The Strip District, more often referred to as simply “The Strip”. No strip clubs here, but several long city blocks of eclectic shops, about one third eateries and two thirds various curiosity shops, and sidewalks cluttered with every conceivable kind of street vendor, mostly selling wares for the shops they faced. It’s also strange in that it largely closes down by 5 p.m. Most cities have a “strip” but “The Strip” is the real deal, a great tourist destination in itself, except for night owls. We spent several hours on the strip and could have spent more.

St. Stanislaus Kostka Church, Pittsburgh

At one end of The Strip, I found St. Stanislaus Kostka Church, one of these old Catholic city churches that are getting hard to find, with long rows of votive candles, an ornate altar that betrays its pre-Vatican II construction and lovely stained glass windows. It feels more like a mini-cathedral than a church, and the church wisely leaves it open for tourists. Since I so rarely go into Catholic churches anymore, I made a point to drop three bucks in the box and light a votive candle for my late mother, whose spirit wherever it may be I am sure appreciated my gesture.

The best view of Pittsburgh turned out to be not at the top of the Duquesne Incline but by boat. We chose the Gateway Clipper Fleet and its three-story boat for the one-hour tour, which was just long enough to feel like you had experienced Pittsburgh without having really experienced it. Lovely temperate weather, a gentle dry breeze and blue skies full of puffy white clouds made the short cruise surprisingly memorable.

Spending so much time on The Strip left little time for the one museum that we visited, the Heinz History Center near one end of The Strip. Pittsburgh does have a fairly extensive history. What we found most interesting was the fifth floor, with its detailed exhibits and artifacts from the French and Indian War, which few people remember. More would remember it if they knew it was started by a 22-year-old upstart British colonel from the colonies named George Washington. It would turn into arguably the first world war, and take seven years to fully extinguish. Washington’s defeat at Fort Necessity turned into an eventual big win for the British, and subsequently for the United States, after it declared independence and spread across the formerly French-claimed Ohio Valley. We also found the story of Lewis & Clark’s expedition interesting as well, which started in Pittsburgh. Each level at the museum has a theme. Sports fanatics will find levels celebrating the accomplishments of Pittsburgh’s Pirates and Steelers.

Architecturally, Pittsburgh definitely feels major league, with a skyline that rivals or exceeds Philadelphia’s and with many of the buildings downtown looking very new and modern. It has the T, it’s version of a subway system and an extensive bus system as well. At least downtown it is largely clean and modern, except for warehouses and railroad areas near The Strip District. Its smelters are largely gone but lots of steel remains, and what has replaced steel is a lot of clean industries, mostly IT and service related. Black clouds of coal soot no longer obscure the view of Pittsburgh. Today except for occasional haze and high humidity the view is crystal clear.

FallingWater

Sunday we reluctantly headed home, but made one last detour for a tour of FallingWater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterwork house designed for Edgar Kaufmann Sr., a successful local businessman best known for a department store with his name. The house sits fifty miles of so southeast of Pittsburgh and was sort of on our way home. Most people know the house as the house built over a stream, specifically Bear Run, which even in 1936 when construction began was known for its exceptionally clear and unpolluted waters. The stream is so pure that Wright even constructed a natural swimming pool attached to the guest quarters fed directly from runoff from the stream. It’s great swimming if you don’t mind it very much on the chilly side and a little algae in your water. Stream temperatures rarely get beyond the sixties and are frequently much colder.

The house is definitely amazing, in a 1930s way, for how nature and architecture can be melded together to provide living space. Air conditioning was not available for houses back then, but it is rarely needed. However beautiful the house is, it is impractical and ultimately flawed. The foundation maintaining the house says it costs six million dollars a year simply to maintain the house. Ten years ago it underwent expensive restoration simply to keep the house on its moorings. How many of us could afford six million dollars a year in maintenance costs? The inside of the house also lacks modern conveniences: handrails for staircases, staircases that are artificially narrow, and ceilings that are too low (at least for tall people like me). All these deficiencies aside, it is an amazing work of architecture, just not the least bit practical. Our modern houses may be made mostly of wood and drywall, but they are much less costly, much cheaper to maintain and arguably much more comfortable to live in than FallingWater. Without extensive repairs, FallingWater would now mostly be falling into the water, and that would not speak well of Wright’s masterwork.

The next phase of our vacation took us west from Binghamton to a journey along New York State’s Southern Tier. That’s what they call that part of the state just to the north of the Pennsylvania line. Binghamton qualifies as being part of the southern tier, but there are two hundred miles more of the area, stretching westward past Jamestown to the shores of Lake Erie. It is a very pretty area of New York but is an area that is largely bypassed by tourists. It’s their loss because it consists of more than two hundred miles of rolling green hills and occasional surprises. Venture fifty miles northward and you are into New York’s Finger Lakes region, which consists of dazzlingly beautiful blue glacial lakes. The Finger Lakes are also wine country, so if you are into wineries that area makes for a terrific vacation. We spoke to one couple that took in four winery tours in one day.

Anyhow, here are highlights of our two day’s along New York’s Southern Tier. (You can read about my nostalgic return to the Binghamton area here.)

Owego. Owego sits twenty miles or so west of the Triple Cities. It too suffers from rust belt syndrome, which means it is unduly affected by abandoned or rundown buildings. Like Johnson City and Endicott, it hugs the banks of the Susquehanna River. If you can look past the decaying infrastructure, you can see lots of lovely Victorian houses and pretty public parks. If you like village life, less than four thousand people actually live in Owego. But there are better choices if you want to live in the Southern Tier, so keep reading.

Buttermilk Falls. Buttermilk Falls is a New York State park that sits just south of Ithaca. Ithaca is primarily known for Cornell, its Ivy League university, but Ithaca State is also there and is also a fine school. I had hazy memories from my youth of Buttermilk Falls. Getting to the falls in 2012 turned out to be challenging because only the parking lot near the entrance was open. No park rangers were in evidence either. So hardy souls like my wife and I walked down the road a half a mile or so and eventually found the falls, which are pretty but very modest, and are fed by a lake controlled by a dam at the summit. Walking up to the lake is worth the extra climbing, and a path will take you over the dam as well. You can hope to catch some fish but most of the time you are not allowed to swim. The falls themselves are rather uninspiring, at least during the low flow season, which was when we visited. However, a bucolic meadow near the parking lot and the muted sounds of nature walking the road made the visit strangely positive, as I felt closer to nature than I have in the last few years.

Buttermilk Falls

Watkins Glen. My wife thought Watkins Glen was just the location of a racetrack. So she was blown away when she discovered the actual glen at Watkins Glen. For several miles a modest stream eroding over millennium through shale rock provides a charming and beautiful example of natural forces at their finest. This glen is not for couch potatoes, as there are extensive paths and staircases through the glen, as well as a trail along the rim. Watkins Glen should really be elevated to a national park because it is that special and pretty. In spots, tunnels were blown through the abundant shale rock so that tourists could get inside the glen. There is no swimming in the glen itself, but there is an Olympic size swimming pool in the south parking area, as well as a picnic area and a lily pond. If you are in the Finger Lakes region, Watkins Glen is a must see attraction and available for the bargain price of eight dollars a car for parking. Caution: the path inside the glen is slippery when wet, and it is usually wet. A pair of sturdy hiking shoes and good calf muscles are prerequisites for enjoying the glen. My wife compared its stairs to those at Cirith Ungol (from The Lord of the Rings), only these stairs are much sturdier, and the gorge is spectacularly beautiful, unlike Mordor. No need to worry about orcs here, but it can be hard to dodge all the camera-snapping tourists, because pretty much anywhere you point the camera you are guaranteed to get a great shot.

Watkins Glen

Corning. If you had to pick a neat and healthy city to retire to in the Southern Tier, Corning is the city. It is anchored by the Corning Corporation, so the health of the city goes up and down with the company’s prosperity. Corning is known for glass, and has been a consistent pioneer in glass technologies, including fiber optic cable and shatter-resistant Gorilla Glass such as you will find on your iPad and iPhones. The Corning Museum of Glass is a four-star and unique museum that features equal parts glass art and glass technology exhibits, glass blowing and shaping demonstrations by glass artisans as well as a large gift shop where the items for sale are actually reasonably priced. The city of Corning itself is vibrant and healthy, and the higher wages that Corning pays employees promotes a broad prosperity within the city. There are many lovely tree-lined streets, mostly consisting of old Victorian houses that are well maintained and come complete with back alleys. If I had to retire in the Southern Tier, Corning would be a much better choice than Endwell, where I grew up. Brew pubs and great restaurants line Market Street. Corning is modern, but also quaint and charming. It is also surprisingly youthful and ethnically diverse. You can stay at the Radisson if you want, but we were glad to spend a night at the Rosewood Inn, a B&B on Second Street where we were warmly greeted and enjoyed an excellent room with a large, claw foot tub and a canopy bed. I took my first real bath in years, and it was delightful. Corning is the southern tier at its most livable.

Glass artisans at work at the Corning Museum of Glass

Jamestown. We drove through the Jamestown and did not have a chance for a proper introduction. Jamestown is a decently sized city and at least within its city limits is quite attractive. It is also the home to Lucille Ball and annually throws a Lucille Ball comedy festival. Alas, we were too late for it. The city is located at the eastern end of Chautauqua Lake, a picture postcard pretty lake more than ten miles long and ideal for all sorts of fresh water lake recreation.

Chautauqua Institution. The Chautauqua Institution goes back to the 19^th century and is anchored to Chautauqua Lake. It’s hard to explain Chautauqua but it has many fans, going back to President Ulysses S. Grant. Essentially it is a community of mostly rich white people and their children who seek refuge (mostly during the summer) in a place that values religion, music, learning and recreation. For me, it is a near ideal vacation spot because I value a mixture of nature, which the lake provides in abundance, along with learning (the institution provides fabulous lectures) along with an appreciation for the arts. Behind this large gated community are thousands of people (at least during the summer) who share similar progressive values, are highly educated, highly cultured and are basically happy people. It’s a surreal and safe place but that is part of its charm. It sort of models how society should be but rarely is. Children are especially welcome and seem charmed by the place, riding bikes down paths and streets, going to day camps and playing down on the beach. We took the official tour and found the happiness and exuberance of its residents was overwhelming. Really well moneyed people own very expensive houses on tiny lots in Chautauqua, usually passed down from generation to generation. There are also houses and apartments for rent and hotel rooms available as well. Just don’t expect a Pizza Hut or a Walmart on this campus. The very idea! Expect to walk or bike everywhere, which won’t take long as everything is very close together. Most people have to leave their cars in a lot at the edge of the property. Do expect to be surrounded by very talented people, youth full of energy and talent, and to revel in boating, fresh water swimming, wonderful lectures, seminars, lots of live theater and first class music. I haven’t priced what a vacation costs at this resort, but it looks pricey. I suspect I will scrape together the money somehow. I will be back probably as regularly as I can afford to.

Chautauqua Institution

Can you really go home again if no one is there? Yes, you can, providing you don’t want to live in the space you used to inhabit (for about forty years it has been occupied by other people) and you don’t mind if there is no one really to call on. There probably are people in the Binghamton area who might know me and I might know them, but I don’t know where to find them, they don’t know that I’m here and if we remember each other at all we’ll probably confuse names, dates and facts. So instead former residents like me arrive and leave anonymously, and the closest you come to confessing that you are a native is to the waitress at Christie’s steakhouse in Johnson City, who receives the information with a blank stare.

View of Johnson City and Vestal from Traditions Resort, Johnson City, NY

“The Triple Cities” we used to call them, but Binghamton, Endicott and Johnson City are hardly the only trio of cities in New York State with the moniker. There is, for example, Albany, Schenectady and Troy. I was born in Schenectady and expect to be in Troy in October. Nor are they all real cities. Endicott promotes itself as a village. Endwell, where I grew up next door to Endicott, is part of the Town of Union (which includes Maine to the north) and may be bigger than Endicott. Across the Susquehanna on its southern side is Vestal, neither a city nor a village, but a town. Arguably Endicott was a city in its glory days of the 1950s. Back then the shoe factories lining the railroads were cranking out shoes by the railcar full. The smell of tanning leather was pervasive as you drove down North Street. Then there was also IBM, busy building the precursors to the information age: electric typewriters but also mainframe computers that read programs from stacks of paper cards and saved data to giant reels of magnetic tape.

The abandoned shoe factory eyesores are now finally gone. This is probably for the best, because they were ugly and safety hazards. If Endicott is to have a renaissance, it could not happen until these eyesores were demolished. Still, they should have kept one, prettified it up and sold tickets to tourists to see it. History sells in upstate New York. IBM is also gone, although the huge IBM administrative building still proudly proclaiming its name on North Street is still there, and it is easy to mistake for a high school. The boxy white concrete IBM buildings along McKinley Avenue remain as well. Not much has replaced these employment centers, which has resulted in the predictable result: lots of boarded up storefronts. When IBM left, a company called Huron took over and is now marketing the former IBM campus to prospective employers. Arguably, Endicott would be a great value to any prospective employer. There is no rush hour to worry about, plenty of cheap real estate and there is never a problem with finding a parking space, except as I discovered at the George F. Johnson Memorial Library. Some things are new on Washington Avenue, Endicott’s old downtown, including an “adult emporium”.

In 2012, the Triple Cities are not exactly looking up but they definitely feel less bleak than they did when I last visited in 2000. It was perhaps exemplified by our choice of lodging, Traditions in the Glen, a four-star hotel, spa and golf resort occupying what used to be the IBM Country Club, before IBM vamoosed. The elite of the area, such as they are, seem to hang out here. It is a lovely resort, beautifully restored and feeling much like a scaled down and less pricey version of The Homestead, a huge resort we visited in 2010 in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. In the lobby you can see pictures of the country club at or before I remembered it, with pictures of IBM founder Thomas Watson, Sr. taking the first shot on the then new country club, or Bing Crosby with Jack Nicholson’s trainer swinging away on the course.

Unfortunately, it’s but a short drive of a mile or so from Traditions down Watson Boulevard where you will find suboptimal retail: an ugly old coin Laundromat, a Dollar General store and a Yum Yum ice cream stand that looks like it deferred about twenty years of maintenance. Much of my home town of Endwell is still a sad place. East Main Street in particular is distressed. And yet, there is community along East Main Street. Wander down Davis Drive and onto Stack Avenue, where my friend Tom and his family used to live, and you find a real family community just as nice, if not nicer, than my memories of it from the 1960s and 1970s. Nearby Christ the King Church has been sold to an evangelical faith, perhaps for hard cash to pay off various priest child abuse suits. It is now the Triumphant Life Church, and they must be doing well because the building has been expanded. The old parochial school across the parking lot where I suffered eight years of elementary school under the watchful eyes of frequently tyrannical sisters remains boarded up. Many of the windows are covered in plywood and the blue plastic veneer siding is fading and peels. Catholicism is dying in The Triple Cities, as evidenced by the consolidation of churches and parochial schools, and is being slowly replaced by evangelical faiths like the Triumphant Life Church. A high school in Endicott where I spent a little over a year is still there, but is now a junior high. Seton Catholic High School was relocated to Binghamton.

Yes, of course things have changed back home in forty years, but it looks and feels much the same. Some things are truly for the better. Formerly a community as white as Wonder Bread but with a heavy Greek presence (evidenced by the Eastern Orthodox churches in Johnson City), now real diversity can be found: Asians, blacks and other minorities have moved in, perhaps drawn to the dirt cheap real estate. Endwell is not exactly a city of color but it has become a loaf of spotted Pumpernickel. The local gas station on East Main Street is full serve, and an Asian teenage woman there happily pumped my gas. (Full serve does not mean they check your tire pressure and engine oil, however.)

The houses are newer in Endwell the further north you go. My old neighborhood along Scribner Drive feels reasonably well kept up. What is different is vegetation: lots more of it with forty years to settle in. Our old house at the corner of Scribner and Winston drives has been transformed over forty years. There is a lot of natural landscaping in the backyard and more trees. The garage has been turned into a room, and there is an additional driveway along Winston Drive. Otherwise the neighborhood remains inviting  and a healthy place to raise children, with Homer Brink Elementary (where I went to kindergarten) a few short and safe blocks down the street. Forty years have not eroded the terrain either. The hills of Endwell and Endicott remain steep and challenging, and doubtless it remains difficult to get to houses at the top of the hill after a snowfall. A four wheel drive vehicle is recommended for those homeowners.

For me the heart of Endwell is the intersection at Hooper and Country Club roads. All the retail establishments I recall are gone, but new ones have come to supplant them including  a large community credit union. The firehouse remains. A Dunkin Donuts has moved in as well, and today that chain and Dollar General stores seem to have taken over the Southern Tier. Still, I could retire back to this area because Johnson City has a Wegmans supermarket, and it is just like the Wegmans we have back near our real home. Surely, a community is civilized and shows fortitude if a Wegmans has taken up residence.

There was not time for a proper tour of the area when you arrive late in the afternoon and leave around noon the next day after taking time to do your laundry at an Endicott Laundromat. We merely drove through Binghamton. What we saw of Johnson City looked a bit more hopeful than it did in 2000, although my father’s former General Electric Plant, sold and resold a few times, is now boarded up too. Recent floods caused a lot of damage to an area that was already distressed. The area has been abused and kicked around, but it is hardly dead. It may be on an almost imperceptible rebirth. Its gentle green hills and usually benign Susquehanna and Chenango Rivers give it a peaceful and comforting feeling, interrupted only by the annoyance of swarms of gnats during the summer. It needs some company with bigger pockets than the Huron Corporation to believe in it again. I hope that someday true vitality returns to the community I will probably always consider my home.

Doubtless there are many not so nice places in Philadelphia. Happily, few of them are in downtown Philadelphia, which is good because that where tourists like my wife and I go when visiting Philadelphia. The city keeps the tourist district spic and span. There is no litter to speak of, the sidewalks seem power washed, the buildings are mostly modern and even Philadelphia’s dated City Hall, a few blocks from where we stayed, looked bright, shiny and impressive, this in spite of its diminished stature due to the very tall buildings around it.

Sometimes, like Longwood Gardens, the best travel destinations are reasonably close to home. Philadelphia is about a two and a half hour drive from our home, but we had only visited once before in the early 1990s. Back then we had to accommodate our two year old daughter, so we made it a half day trip and visited the Philadelphia Zoo. Now that same daughter is twenty years older and minding the needs of our feline at home, so we felt we could actually see Philadelphia proper. Unfortunately, we allocated just one full day to see Philadelphia, so we saw maybe twenty five percent of what we would see if we had a few days. The good news is that Philly whetted our appetite for more return visits.

In reality, Philly is a great tourist destination. Its bigger cousin New York City is ninety minutes away by car, but Philly has tons of things to see and do and is arguably less expensive. Granted hotel rooms are not exactly cheap, at least not in downtown Philly. But whereas a decent hotel in midtown Manhattan can cost three hundred dollars a night, two hundred a night is more the going rate in Philly. We paid quite a bit less than that, due to some diligent searching online. The Windsor Suites is a hotel in the heart of Philly’s museum district, a virtual but not quite four-star all-suite hotel that only the pickiest would complain about. Our fourteenth floor room was huge, with an enormous walk in closet, weird bathtub with separate faucets for the tub and shower, and a small kitchen, as well as a divinely comfortable king size bed. Our balcony looked down on the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Peter and Paul and Logan Square. We tried to get into it, but the Catholics had it shut tight.

Logan Square and nearby JFK Plaza are genuine places for city people to congregate. Some were obviously homeless, but most appeared to be regular Philadelphians just having a good time although perhaps some were exchanging money for drugs. Both parks sported impressive fountains. For us, JFK Plaza was useful because there was a tourist center that provided us with helpful information, particularly the downtown Phlash trolley which continuously loops around downtown Philly and was also not too expensive. It carried us quickly to historic sites like Independence Hall where our Declaration of Independence was signed and our constitution was created. The best show on Independence Mall is not the Liberty Bell, but actually the tour of Independence Hall, where the above documents were argued and eventually agreed to by delegates of the various states. Tour tickets are free at the information center, but you may have to wait an hour or two for your tour. The hall is kept pretty much the way it was nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, and is treated much like a church: no smoking, no gum, no drinks and hushed voices only please.

Independence Hall

If you want a more in depth understanding of our constitution than you get from the tour guides at Independence Hall, the National Constitution Center is a few blocks north of Independence Hall. There you will get a live presentation on how our government was formed and extensive exhibits on the constitution and its various amendments, plus you can vote on the issues of the day. (Bad news for Romney supporters, NCC visitors are voting for Obama over Romney by about two to one.)

Statue of Benjamin Franklin

Seeing the Liberty Bell, like most of the museums on Independence Mall require you to be screened, but the screening is minimal. The Liberty Bell is surprisingly accessible once you make it past security, but is otherwise rather unimpressive. What I found more impressive was the nearby Christ Church Cemetery, particularly the grave of Benjamin Franklin contained inside. You can see his grave from the street without paying admission to the cemetery, although inside the cemetery are graves of four signers of the Declaration of Independence and lots of very faded gravestones. (Hint: make sure you gravestone is in granite, not marble.) Washington D.C. was named after our first president. Really, Philadelphia should have been named after Ben Franklin, its best known and most devoted resident, but very much the first patriot of the United States. I think it should be renamed Franklin City. Franklin was impressive and multidimensional: writer, scientist, inventor, postmaster general, diplomat, genius, author, frequent contrarian, passionate believer in freedom, likely agnostic and shameless womanizer.

By midafternoon we had hit all the highlights on Independence Mall, so we headed back to the museum district. We had time for only one more attraction, and it was irresistible. At the Franklin Institute there was an exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was pricy, but it was well worth the cost to view artifacts from the Holy Land that went back in some cases more than five thousand years. Then there were fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves that you could view with your own eyes, priceless documents recording the history of Judaism, in script so small you were wondering how it could be read at all. There are no fragments of the original gospels, but there are these fragments of the Old Testament written on leather that you can see.

Except for eating some Chinese takeout, this was all that we could stuff into one day of site seeing in Philadelphia. The weather turned out to be spectacular on Monday: blue skies with puffy cumulus clouds, dry westerly breezes and warm but not hot temperatures that climbed into the eighties. By Tuesday morning rain had descended on Philly, so we beat it of town toward New York’s southern tier and for me, a visit home. More on that in my next post.

After a day at Gettysburg, we ended up spending a night at a Park Inn in Mechanicsville, Pennsylvania. You would think a huge motor inn outside Pennsylvania’s state capital would be pretty vacant on a Saturday night, but it was virtually full. Still, I couldn’t complain about the price: $67 with taxes by prepaying in advance through hotwire.com. The room was a little musty but was otherwise three stars. Most importantly, the WiFi worked consistently.

This morning found us driving past Hershey, Pennsylvania to meet two of my wife’s friends for breakfast at a tiny little place called Cornwall. Cornwall, like much of this area of Pennsylvania, is as white as a loaf of Wonder Bread, mostly due to the large number of Germans who settled here. It was strange to sit in a restaurant and see no one of color. The only real diversity was my wife’s friends, a same sex couple that live nearby. It was also surreal just how inexpensive the food was. A couple of bucks could buy you some eggs, bacon and toast hanging off the side of your plate. I smiled at the menu, which highlighted the fact that they proudly served Maxwell House coffee. No Starbucks in or near Cornwall, I guess, and likely none wanted either.

Breakfast started late and ended about the time the menus were changing for lunch. We were pushing noon before we were heading east toward Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Sitting forty five minutes by car south and west of Philadelphia, the borough is known for a couple of things, including the Revolutionary War Battle of Brandywine that was fought nearby but particularly for the amazing Longwood Gardens. There for eighteen dollars you can purchase a day in a garden paradise.

Lily pads at Longwood Gardens

It’s hard to compare Longwood Gardens with any other garden I have seen in my fifty plus years. The closest equivalent might be Versailles, the French king’s “summer home” outside of Paris, and its miles of gardens, all for the king’s enjoyment. While I gazed out on the gardens at Versailles, I did not walk through them. I feel confident though that the gardens at Versailles cannot come close to the diversity of species of plants found at Longwood Gardens. In fact, I would be astonished if Longwood Gardens were not the largest and most diverse garden in the United States.

Flower walk at Longwood Gardens

The garden was the brainchild of industrialist Pierre S. du Pont, who simply expanded and expanded on an arboretum on the property put there by the previous owners. du Pont saw many gardens during his visits to Europe, and stole liberally from all of them. However, he never felt possessive about his garden and opened them up regularly to the public. On his death, the foundation maintaining the garden kept up the tradition. Today, the garden span 1,077 acres. For all practical purposes, Longwood Gardens is the mythical Garden of Eden, an incredible respite for a weary soul available at the bargain price of just $18 a day. Frequent visitors can join their society, come more often and pay only an annual fee.

Longwood Gardens is a visual and odorous ode to the natural world, but it is also very much a creation of man. In the natural world, nature turns out to be inconsistent and messy. A garden should be meticulously laid out, full of diverse species, attractively arranged for the eye, pungent to the nose and wholly inviting to the spirit. You will find this and much more at Longwood Gardens. This is a garden designed to suit man, in his original and sinless state. In brief, the experience is overwhelming, vast in size, and vast in variety. Surely heaven would look and feel a lot like Longwood Gardens. You could see it modeled in the eyes and behavior of visiting children who could be seen playing hide and seek behind topiaries or rolling down soft, inviting lawns. There is a vast arboretum but there is also so much more including an intoxicating flower walk, a large “managed meadow”, walks through a dense forest of old growth trees and even three story tree houses where both children and adults can hear the wind rustle through the trees and see the sun peak through the overhead canopy.

It was just the tonic my wife needed. Three months ago she lost her mother, and much of her life since then has been consumed by grief. A day in Longwood Gardens restored her, at least temporarily, to health and happiness. She could imagine her late grandmother, a constant gardener, touring Longwood Gardens with her. She was infamous for never smiling, and she was sure she would have done her best not to smile visiting this garden. But I believe that her grandmother would find it impossible not to smile at so special a natural space. It is like all of God’s flowering creations were concentrated in one amazing and special location.

Behind these gardens must be hundreds of gardeners keeping the gardens in its surreal state of optimal enjoyment. On a Sunday they were nowhere in evidence, except for one man I noticed in the arboretum watering plants.

In addition to the gardens, there are other delights to the human spirit: large water fountains that regularly provide dazzling water shows, ample chairs to view the shows under shady trees, benches near bucolic spots for contemplating the garden, a couple of Steinway pianos in the conservatory that mostly play piano rolls, frequent weekend concert events, and dazzling evening light shows, usually turned on during Saturday nights.

Longwood Gardens simply should not be missed. Muslims must go to Mecca and gardeners should pay a pilgrimage to Longwood Gardens. It is likely that one trip simply will not be enough. Anyone who feels morose or bereft of spirit should come as well. As I can document with my wife, its healing effects can be quite extraordinary. Please come!