That’s the concoction on the right. The stuff on the left is just your average lemongrass-infused vodka for a new cocktail I’ll work on for the beach this weekend.
The gin is in its first stage: juniper berries soaking in vodka. What, you thought gin was something other than vodka with plants in it? Pfft.
Of course there’s no one recipe for gin. You can find tons on the intertubes—everyone has a different combination of botanicals they like to use—but they all start with soaking the juniper berries for 24 hours, then adding your other stuff for 36 hours. That’s right, boys and girls, you can craft your own gin in two and a half days. What’s not to like?
My original plan was to use lovage from the garden, but the lovage has been stupidly whiny this summer. Maybe there’s enough to use anyway. I’ll keep you posted.
Otherwise, here are the most likely additions:
Mine’s going to be more spicy/peppery than citrus.
I have not blogged regularly, mainly because the situation in our country is so grotesque that I can’t keep up and I don’t want to spend all my time with my readers picking at the scab that is our Current Embarrassment.
So here’s a post about out of control plants.
You may recall the Dill Plant That Ate Newnan and/or the Cardoon that Couldn’t Be Stopped. Both are now gone, because I ripped them out of the ground and ruthlessly discarded them.
But oh so quietly last year, a delicate little vine sprang up in the side patch where the cardoon was. I gave it a little frame to grow onto (to keep it from latching onto the shrubbery).
This year, of course, it has come back more determined, and so I’ve built it a large frame just to see how far it’s willing to go:
It has responded with enthusiasm:
…although it still seems to be looking for ways to devour the shrubbery.
Why am I allowing an obviously invasive plant to thrive in my garden?
It has these beautiful little flowers. I want to see if I can create a tower of the feathery leaves and brilliant red blooms.
The other day, my Lovely First Wife and I went to the Kroger together, which is not always as rollicking an adventure as you might think. I, as a male-type man, have a list of three items, and so naturally one goes in and gets three items and is on one’s way. She, on the other hand, will need one item—a bag of lettuce, let us say—and yet will push a cart up and down every aisle. One must look and see “what they have.”
On this occasion I was willing to play along, and so we began to mosey through the produce section. It is important for you to realize that we were at the “old” Kroger; in Newnan we have three, the original “old” Kroger in town, the “new” Kroger out a little ways past the interstate, and then the “other” Kroger way out in the middle of the exurban enclaves towards Peachtree City.
In town, we have the old Kroger. We are allowed to call it the ghetto Kroger; those who live out with the “other” Kroger are not.
So there we are in the produce section of the old Kroger, and we are both struck suddenly that we are looking at jackfruit. We don’t know we are looking at jackfruit—we have to look at the tag.
We were astonished. These things are about the size of a football, and the label reminds you to wear gloves when you cut them open, since the alligator-like skin apparently will lacerate you.
Perhaps you have already heard of jackfruit. We had not, and in fact it was only when I went to find a picture—because I assumed that no one would know what it was—that I discovered that it’s a thing now? Serves us right for not being vegans.
So that was weird enough, but this post is not about jackfruit. It was just a symptom. Because the jackfruit had stopped us in our tracks, we paused to see what else was there. We found three different brands of kiwi, and two versions of coconut. Coconuts. In Newnan.
We’ve had this weird feeling before, and I blogged about it before: the options available to us in our grocery stores in no way resembles what was available to our parents. Perhaps your parents—and here, by “parents” I mean “mother”—cooked everything from fresh with amazing ingredients from all over the world, but my mother, faced with feeding five kids, used every shortcut, every canned item, every pre-processed food she could.
I, on the other hand, can wander down the condiment aisle and be amazed by:
Peruvian Aji Amarillo? And what on earth is Shichimi Togarashi? Where’s the Tabasco™ Sauce?
Okay then. We have our choice of aiolis.
Vinaigrettes.
We have choices for finishing sauces. FINISHING SAUCES, KENNETH.
Astute readers will notice that not only are there amazing, fabulous choices for condiments in the ghetto Kroger in Newnan, GA, but these are all store brands. (Full disclosure: we have found that Kroger’s Private Selection items are pretty awesome.)
But even so…
…I have a choice between two roasted raspberry chipotle sauces.
Here’s the deal. I know there are segments of the population who might grumble that if canned potatoes were good enough for Mom (and Tabasco™ sauce for Dad), then they’re good enough for me. But I say huzzah—how wonderful that I have these choices, even in the ghetto Kroger of Newnan, GA. It’s almost as if our nation looked around and decided that there was value in diversity.
Have you ever wished for a plain old dirt path labyrinth?
Me neither.
But that’s what I’ve got:
It’s never been this bad. And I have a group coming to visit on Saturday, a Mindful Walk. I’ve warned their leader that it’s not all green and pretty, and there’s not enough time to plant seed and have it come up—even if it did come up, I wouldn’t want mindful pilgrims trampling it. So maybe next week, after I get back from my jaunt up to the new burn site.
This post contains useless information unless you need it and then omg it will change your life.
First, as all right-thinking people know, the Blackwing 602 pencil is the nonpareil of writing instruments. All the best people use them. When they went out of production in 1998, a nation grieved, but a couple of years ago Palomino revived them and we can all once again write with the same pencil as Stephen Sondheim.
One of the nifty design elements of the pencil is its eraser.
It is held in the ferrule by a little aluminum clip, and the idea is that as you wear the eraser down you can pull it out, move the eraser up, and pop it back in. The clip will hold the extended eraser in its new position.
You can see the theory here:
However, the two little indentations in the clip do not actually hold the eraser in place. Any attempt to erase your mistakes pushes the eraser back down into the ferrule.
So here’s your life-changing tip of the day: take a small nail and dunch those indentations in a wee bit.
Now your clip has actual teeth and will hold the eraser in place as you write the lyrics for the next Follies.
Kentucky is celebrating its 225th birthday, and right in front of us when we parked was a pretty impressive sand sculpture.
Side A:
Side B:
I bought a neat deerstalker cap:
Also pictured, my remaining earring from the Art Gallery of Ontario: small round of black concrete with a smidgen of gold leaf.
The annual crafts festival was going on in Berea itself, but we resisted the urge to get home after midnight and hit the road, after stopping for lunch at Brooklyn Brothers Pizzeria in Corbin, KY. Highly recommended! (We stopped in Corbin to buy some bourbon to go with the bourbon pecan pie kit we got as a thank you gift for the nice neighbor who kept Kitten C for us while we were gone.)
And then we drove home the end.
Cute ending: when Kitten C was delivered back to us, we squee’d to find that in the week we’d been gone, he had turned into a honest-to-goodness kitten: weaned and ready to rumble.
His favorite toy at the moment is my bare foot. This may be a long summer.
—————
[1] Or last nerve. Your mileage may vary. MILEAGE, GET IT?? DO YOU GET IT?
We arrived to pick up our intrepid traveling companions and were greeted by…
He had been standing like that for ten minutes waiting for us to arrive.
Yes, that’s yard art where they were staying. No, it’s not as weird as this:
I was just going to snap a quick one as we slowed down driving past, but there was a truck behind us so my lovely first wife pulled over—just as the lady of the house emerged to get into her truck. She grinned and waved, and we told her how awesome it was. “My husband is very creative,” she said with cheerful resignation.
Have a closer look.
And did you see…
I did not get a photo of the sign at St. Mary’s Cemetery, which I kid you not had some kind of jaunty 70s font. This and other cemeteries have been decorated with solar lights in various fun colors. It’s an odd effect.
As my phone threaded us through Medina on our way to I-90, we encountered this monument:
Perhaps Sue will tell us in comments why she hid the region’s largest concrete apple from us.
Those of my legions of readers who know me will be astonished that I visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but they should not be because I didn’t. My companions all did, but I stayed in the lobby and wrote yesterday’s blog post. Yes, I know, I’m a unregenerate dork, but rock music has never been part of my life. I hear it like others hear opera: while I recognize the top 40 tunes, I don’t understand the words and I don’t know the players. I was told I would have enjoyed the costumes, but a context-free experience with loudspeakers was certainly not going to entertain me at this point in the journey. Maybe in my next life I’ll have a normal adolescence.
However, it was refreshing to be in an environment where I was not the only adult male over a certain age with pierced ears.
Then we got in the car and drove to Cincinnati the end.
Today we do the American side, which is smaller and in some ways better organized and enjoyable than the vast Canadian north.
You can compare the views from the two countries, and clearly Canada wins on scale and scope. But there is much to admire from this side as well.
We arrived early and went straight to the Maid of the Mist ticket line and almost literally walked straight onto the boat.
On the Canadian site, all misters wear red ponchos. I have a video from up on the cliff of tourists entering a tent and emerging as blue Minions; it’s very amusing.
What can I say about the Maid of the Mist experience? It’s just overpowering. You are taken past American Falls…
…past the yellow Minions doing the Cave of the Winds thing at Bridal Veil Falls on Goat Island…
…over to Horseshoe Falls in Canada.
You get up to the middle of the arc of the horseshoe…
…where you of course get fairly wet. I chose not to wear my hood because my poncho experience on the other side was not positive. I was fine. Keeping your cell phone dry can be a challenge, but I have more than a few photos of the ride (and a couple of my pocket) and I’ve experienced no ill effects.
You are mesmerized. There’s no other word to describe it. Technically the Niagara River is a strait, a narrow body of water connecting two larger ones, Lakes Ontario and Erie in this case, and what we’re seeing here is a fifth of the world’s supply of fresh water falling over a cliff—and you can’t stop looking at it. It won’t let you look away. It never stops, it’s always the same, it’s ever changing.
After the ride, you can go back up top or you can “visit the Dalai Lama” as we termed it: climb a wooden staircase up to the edge of American Falls with all the other blue Minions:
It’s slow going: everyone wants to stop and take photos, and the stairs are wide enough only for one lane going up and one coming down. Totally worth it:
Pro tip: if you do the American side before noon and the Canadian side afternoon you will always see rainbows.
Finally we took the elevator back up to the observation deck.
See the blue Minions? We were there. (You can recycle your poncho or keep it as a souvenir.)
We got tickets to see the iMax movie about the Falls after I double-checked with the info station that it was in fact an informative and well-made film about the falls and not a lame animated juvenile beaver. With water spraying on me.
It was in fact an informative and well-made movie, although it focused more on the daredevils who braved the Falls more than the geological history. It is nonetheless worth seeing.
From there we drove over to Goat Island, the island that divides the Falls. I cannot explain it, but I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that this island just sits there between two huge cataracts ever since National Geographic used to run regular articles about the Falls. So over we went. (There are no goats, which I found both inexplicable and deplorable.)
We grabbed lunch at the Top of the Falls restaurant, which I mention for two reasons…
…the Old Fort Niagara (vodka, cognac, cranberry juice, grenadine), and…
…”Beef on Weck,” a western NY specialty. It is thinly sliced roast beef on a kaiser bun sprinkled with caraway seeds and sea salt, with horseradish and au jus. It is very very good, and I don’t particularly care for caraway.
Goat Island is undergoing a bit of renovation, and one thing they’re doing is native plant landscaping.
Scotch thistles, my favorite.
Over on the American Falls side of the island, I shot this video at Bridal Veil Falls:
Below you can see the yellow Minions who have gone down to the Cave of the Winds experience. We had that on our list to do, but by the time we finished lunch there were three long lines to stand in under the blazing sun. We had to walk away with much regret.
We began the trek back to Medina, stopping at the Whirlpool State Park. All that water that comes over the Falls? After it turns the corner from Niagara, it all enters a very narrow gorge, and the rapids there are Class VI, unnavigable. About 4200 years ago, as the Falls eroded their way upstream and chewed their way through the escarpment, the river intersected with a loose sedimentary layer and catastrophically washed it all away. (Truly, they think it may have happened in a couple of hours.) It left a large, circular pool that the rapids empty into with some violence.
Here are the rapids:
And the whirlpool:
The Canadians run a cable car over the thing and have since the early part of last century. Oy.
The park itself is your basic overlook, part of the Niagara Gorge Hiking Trail. Again, native landscaping:
Once we made it back home and freshened up—including a groundhog sighting in the back 40—we set out to explore the nightlife of Medina. You might very well snicker, but we had a great evening.
First up, 810 Meadworks, a small meadery that’s fairly new. The owner/brewer, Brian, welcomed us and talked us through our sampling. My lovely first wife does not care for mead, but the rest of us did, and we ended up with three meads each to sample and share for a total of nine meads. And Brian’s wife makes craft chocolates to pair with them, and I strongly advise you to go for that option.
Behind us is the complete brewing equipment. In fact, we entered through that room.
Here’s my tasting flight:
l to r: Raspberry Mead (wildflower honey w/ raspberry); Jewel of the Newell (wildflower honey w/ pomegranates & oak); 21-Bean Salute (clover & buckwheat honey w/ vanilla beans & coffee beans)
I failed to record the chocolates, but they were delicious on their own and perfect complements to the mead.
Since some may not be very sure what mead is exactly: it is fermented honey. You would be forgiven for thinking that such a think would be unpalatably sweet, and some meads are, but these were not. Brian had dry, semi-sweet, and sweet meads. These three were all semi-sweet.
Yes, we ended up with a bottle each of Jewel of the Newell and 21-Bean Salute, which oddly the LFW liked.
So if you’re keeping track, that’s a bottle of vodka, a bottle of gin, three bottles of NY wine, and two bottles of mead. But who’s counting?
We asked Brian for a restaurant recommendation; without hesitation he recommended Zambistro over on Main St, which would have been our first choice via Yelp anyway.
There the food was amazing. No photos, alas, but it was the equal of anything we’ve had in Atlanta or on the Danube, for that matter.
After dinner, we crossed the street to Fitzgibbons, an Irish pub that opened in January.
The decor is amazing—I wish I had gotten a photo of the wall to the right, all carved wood. More Bree than Dublin, it was a fun place. We had a quick whiskey before heading home.
The red star is where Sue’s cabin is. Sue grew up in Middleport, and so we got in the car and DROVE ALL OVER WESTERN NEW YORK, KENNETH! We had to go pick up our intrepid co-travelers in Oak Orchard, and then we were off.
We went to the cabin that Sue’s parents had when she was a small child, now renovated by a nice lady (Priscilla) whom we met after trespassing into her back yard. (We had thought no one was home.)
The view from one’s seaside yard is simply incredible…
…BUT it’s treacherous. When Sue was a child, there was a road in front of the house. The lake has taken about 30 feet of shore since then, the road with it.
Which makes people like this…
…extremely hard to understand. Sue said, though, that those cabins had been there since she was a child.
Sue insisted that we see the Shoe Tree—entertainment possibilities being limited in western NY—which is out in the middle of nowhere at the intersection of three roads. As it turns out, it’s perfectly charming.
The story is that a while back some teenagers were out one night—entertainment possibilities being limited in western NY—and decided to toss their shoes into the tree. Knowing that the townsfolk would be double-plus unpleased, they convinced all their friends to do the same, there being safety in dilution of culpability. Then they invented the excuse that if you did this, you could make a wish.
Extremely limited.
Western NY is almost entirely agricultural, mostly subsidized corn for ethanol and cattle these days. The large manufacturing plants—GM, Heinz, etc.—are long gone, and with them the comfortable union jobs.
In Middleport, we saw Sue’s childhood home and some other lovely homes, and the Universalist Church, built in 1841:
The church is closed, with no one particularly interested in buying it. Here’s the interesting feature:
On to Lockport, which got its name because it sprang up at that point on the Erie Canal with the biggest drop in elevation, requiring five locks in a row (the Flight of Five). We were there to take the Lockport Cave tour.
Before the tour, we grabbed lunch at Lock 34, a really nice restaurant. Lockport is a sizable little town with arts and stuff going on. We saw a ballet studio, a community theatre in an old movie palace, a general arts place, and there’s a concert on the lock on Friday.
At lunch, I thought it was important that I have a Mule.
Canal and all that.
The Canal is still there, of course, and modernized. You will remember that we became intimately familiar with lock technology from the Danube, and so we were nodding sagely—if not smugly—as our tour guide explained it all to the rest of the group.
This is the new lock. There’s only the one, and it takes about 20 minutes for a boat to get through these days.
Unlike the old locks, when there were five, each taking about an hour plus a three–four day backup of canal traffic each way. Look at these doors (which have been reconstructed):
It took four men on each gate to open and close them, so eight guys per lock. Here’s the other end of the gate:
Mmmm, wood.
A replica of a boat of the period:
Quick view of the Flight of Five:
The tour group walked on down the Canal to the upside-down bridge:
This is the oldest remaining example of this engineering compromise. The story is that during the Civil War, the supply of iron was being fought over by the munitions manufacturers and the railroads, and one of the areas of compromise (presided over by Lincoln) was that all bridges had to be built like this, with the supporting superstructure underneath the railroad instead of above: it took a third less iron to build it this way.
All along the path, our guide pointed out the locations of several factories which had been built on the canal above us: a fire hydrant factory (invented in Lockport by Birdsill Holly), a ceramics factory, and then this:
This is a pulp factory You floated your logs in the channel in the foreground, then fed them into the holes in the wall, where millstones would grind them to pulp. The pulp was pressed into cups and plates and bowls, but those things were not disposables in the 19th century. Families often used them for as long as five years. (Eventually they decided that stainless steel made for more durable and more sanitary tableware.)
The hole on the right was the exit flume for the “cave,” actually a large tunnel carved through the limestone rock to channel water to power the factories above. This was the design and work of B. Holly, who it must be noted had only a third-grade education. Engineering was different in those days.
And here we are entering the cave:
Cast iron tube, still sturdy after 200 years. Steep climb, leveling off to:
This channel was dug by Irish immigrants for about 2¢ a day, plus whiskey. Teams of two would drill a hole in the limestone by hand, pack in a little explosive, light the fuse, then run away. After the explosion, they would carry the debris out the only entrance, way back where we started the tour over the Flight of Five. They did this one basketball-sized amount of limestone at a time. (This is the same limestone used to build buildings in Lockport and Washington, DC.)
When the channel was in operation, the water would have filled the space to within three feet of the ceiling.
One fun fact, which may or may not be true: embedded in the limestone was gypsum, which was worthless to people who wanted the limestone debris for other purposes. The wives of the Irishmen would take it, polish up little bits of it, then schlep it up to Niagara, where they would sell it to tourists as “solidified mist from the Falls, sure,” made by a technique known only to the little Irish ladies of the world. For a dollar—more than their husbands made in two months.
After the cave tour, which included a boat ride, we went to the Flight of Five Winery and we had a tasting.
All very tasty. We bought one or two. Or three.
Our final stop for the day: The Culvert.
And what is this, I hear you ask? It is the only place where a road goes under the Erie Canal. The Canal goes through a valley here and is actually contained in berms. It made more sense to take the road under it than to build a bridge over it. The road was actually closed to traffic because they’re making repairs right on the other side, but we scoffed at their attempts to keep us safe.
We had plans to do several things before leaving Toronto but we got a late start and had to pick only one. We opted to head to the Art Gallery of Toronto, which was designed by Frank Gehry—who grew up in the neighborhood.
It is in the shape of an overturned canoe. Make of that what you will.
Around the corner is the Design Museum:
The top part is classrooms. (The CN Tower is in the distance.)
Huge courtyard inside, very traditional national gallery space, but with Gehry:
We were there to see the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit, which was of course wonderful. We had been to the O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe back during our Great Cross Country Trip, which was nice but not comprehensive: most of her work is in major collections elsewhere. This exhibit pulled together an overview of her career and was phenomenal.
Here’s a great quote from one of the walls: “Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown behind you.”
Whenever we go to a museum, especially to exhibits like this one, we will pick out the piece that we would welcome as a gift. “You can buy me that one for my birthday.”
Encountering it up close, as one does as one walks around the exhibit, it was just a nice abstract sketch. Later, as I wandered back through, I looked over at it from a distance and was smitten. You can buy this for me. (Contact the O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.)
On the fourth floor was an exhibit of contemporary art which consisted of pieces by either aboriginal or immigrant Canadians responding to the 150th birthday of their nation. There were some very interesting pieces, some of them more political than others, of course.
This is not a drum. It’s wooden.
The pertinent details on this one are hard to see:
The artist has made beaded bacteria and put them into acrylic “water.” The installation represents the contamination found in the water of the reservations of the First Peoples across Canada.
The title of this coloured pencil on paper is Lemming Buttocks are Dirty (2013). I liked it. (Yes, I giggled.)
Then it was time to rush back to the hotel, dig the car out of the subterranean parking lot, and DRIVE TO NIAGARA, KENNETH.
But first, as we blundered our way around Toronto looking for a recommended Thai restaurant that does not seem to exist (what is it with Canadians giving directions to non-existent restaurants??) we came across this:
Oh, Canada.
Your daily inner twelve-year-old alert: The Queen & Beaver Pub, Mr. Softy & Delight, and “hand-pulled noodles.”
Since this is Day 4, travel dialogue was not as jolly as you might have come to expect. There was an extended discussion of oral hygiene involving little brush thingies for flossing that may or may not have involved the phrase “ridged for her pleasure” and devolved from there. Otherwise, we just slogged it to Niagara with the one lunch break. (Harvey’s is a great burger/salad place to stop at.)
Pro tip: going to the Falls on the 4th of July is possibly a bad idea.
And it was a bizarre shock to arrive at the main intersection and see this:
Completely Gatlinburged. Oy.
I jokingly posted this photo to Instagram to wish people a Happy 4th:
The LFW’s original plans were to go on to Medina, NY, then come back to the Falls, but we convinced her it made more sense to stop on the Canadian side while we were there. We were wrong: we arrived so late that there were no tickets to all the things we really wanted to do. However, the views are spectacular:
Then we made the error of deciding that we would go ahead and at least see the movie.
You should understand that at the Grand Canyon, there is a National Geographic IMAX movie about the Canyon and how humans have interacted with it that is first rate and astounding. It would be great, we thought, to be able to sit in a cool, dark theatre and learn something about the Falls in a similar fashion.
Our first clue that this was not going to be the same was being handed a poncho as we entered the theatre. And then there were no seats. We all stood and watched an amazingly lame animation of a young beaver who was being assigned a 200-word essay on the Falls as punishment for some misbehavior on a field trip. A book falls on his head and he’s whisked back in time, etc., etc.
The storyline was choppy, historical/geological context was minimal, and the target audience must be the 8-year-old school crowd.
And the ponchos? After the short cartoon, the doors opened into the next room, where we all went in and stood on a round grated platform, where we were subjected to a 360° film experience that involved water. Oy.
When it was finally over and we were making our way to the exit, I pulled off my poncho and with it the new earring I had bought at the Art Gallery just that morning. I felt it go, and of course it fell straight through the grate into the waters below. We looked for it briefly, but at that point I was over it. Feh.
Then we drove to Medina, NY. It was completely adventureless. Or at least my brain was so dead that I didn’t register anything.
We were astonished. These things are about the size of a football, and the label reminds you to wear gloves when you cut them open, since the alligator-like skin apparently will lacerate you.
