Archive for Places to go
April 6, 2006 at 9:52 pm · Filed under Places to go
Tonight is our last night before Emma returns. We decided to spend it exploring the “sponge docks” area of Tarpon Springs. In the early part of the 20th century this harbor was a thriving center of sponge diving activity, but in the 1940 and 50s a blight wiped out most of the sponges. Today, the sponge docks area survives as a tourist district.
Normally tourist districts are not our first choice, but this one has a special element which attracted us. The Greek families who were the mainstay of the sponge diving industry are still here, running restaurants and bakeries. We came for a walk, and some serious noshing.
Somewhere behind that hair is Eleanor … (Click for larger image)
Sponges are everywhere here, even though I suspect many of them come from far far away now. You can’t walk 50 feet without passing a display of sponges, a shop selling fancy local soaps, and then a few more sponges. One of the sponge shops hosts a free museum where you can learn much more about sponges and sponge diving than you ever wanted to know. Occasionally you’ll see someone hand-rolling cigars, too.
But we didn’t need any sponges, so we headed right into one of the restaurants for a Greek feast. Stuffed grape leaves, calamari, and gyros … and the gyros were so big we had to get a take-away box for the leftovers. We also got a few fresh pita breads so we can make gyros sandwiches with the leftovers tomorrow.
She’s still hiding behind that hair…
Then it was off to the bakery to get even more stuffed. Take your pick, there are several in town and all of them are good. Let’s see, we got dark chocolate cake, baklava, and Eleanor got a special baklava with an apricot top and a tiny cup of Greek coffee. By this time, nobody wanted to move too quickly, so we hung out and watched a crowd of regulars — nearly all of Greek descent — show up around 9 pm for dessert and chat.
Tarpon Springs seems to come to life at night. Not so much on the street, but inside the restaurants and bakeries. It migrates from being a little tourist trap of sidewalk shops to a sociable late-night community of good food and good friends. It’s a nice vibe and that made it a fun place to be.
Here’s your sign of the week:
April 1, 2006 at 8:42 pm · Filed under Places to go
After a long week at work, Brett, Barry, and I decided to relax with a visit to Ybor City today.
“Ybor?”, you say. “That looks like a typo.”
No, Ybor City is a historic district of Tampa, where the cigars were (and continue to be) rolled by hand. Today Ybor City is a tourist district, but plenty of the original town still exists in the form of old tobacco workers’ homes, cigar factories, and museums. At night, the main street turns into a facsimile of New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, with bars and nightlife.
My two bachelor friends showed up at the trailer this morning, ready to cruise. (That’s Barry on the left, and Brett on the right. Brett is not sneering, he’s squinting because of the bright sun.) Now, technically I’m not a bachelor but I’m solo this week and that’s close enough. So we piled into Brett’s convertible and hit the open road …
… with a stop along the way. The battery was useless. We had to jump start it, so our first destination was an auto parts store for a fresh battery, which Brett installed in the parking lot in about three minutes.
Ybor City is accessible by trolley car from downtown Tampa, but most people just drive right to Ybor and park there. Still, the trolley is a fun ride and worth the short roundtrip if you enjoy historic streetcars like I do.
Cigars are still made by hand all over Ybor. If you want to see how it is done, just walk into any one of the shops and ask. Most will do a demonstration while you watch, for free. If you want to take a lot of pictures like I did, a tip is appreciated.
Lily made about six cigars while I watched, about one every minute. Her hands were so fast and skilled that I had trouble seeing some of the things she did. Even at 1/100th of a second, her hands were blurred in some of my photos.
After a few visits, we dropped in on the Cuban restaurant, the Colombia. Although this restaurant now has six locations all over Florida, this is the original one, and the best. It now spans the entire city block, and it was very busy even at 2 pm. The waiters wear formal black and white, the menu includes filet mignon for lunch, but you can still pick up a Cuban sandwich for $6.95 if you want.
I can also recommend the local historical museum (small but interesting) and just browsing the architecture and historical markers around town. Ybor City has a reputation of being a spot for nightlife, but for those who value the past, it’s a fascinating place to visit any time of day.
I’ve uploaded a few more photos from Ybor City to the Flickr album. Click our “Pictures” link to see them.
March 21, 2006 at 10:28 pm · Filed under Places to go
As I mentioned in the last blog entry, it has been a challenge lately to keep up with the blog. Both Verizon and Sprint seem to have little cellular service anywhere in the panhandle. When “roaming”, we can’t get online.
Monday we left Port St Joe and dropped by nearby St George Island, which is a white sand strip of barrier island not far east. St George is a rare thing in Florida these days: a beautiful barrier island that is not sinking under the weight of thousands of condominiums. It seems to have somehow been bypassed by the rabid development that has ruined so many other barrier islands in Florida.
There’s still plenty of housing on St George, but large sections of the island have been left relatively undisturbed, and toward the eastern end there is a large state park which we visited. The park is mostly closed due to damage from Hurricane Dennis, so presently you can’t camp there. But when the park re-opens (scheduled for October unless another hurricane comes by), it will be well worth a visit. Eight miles of wide open, white sand, protected beach! Herons and pelicans and snowy egrets and much more. The sound of numerous birds singing in the pines, and the views in every direction. We loved it.
We put the Airstream in the overflow lot and walked a short distance to the beach. Kids were playing in the water, surf fishermen were catching red snapper, and the air was filled with salt spray and the roar of waves. We wanted to stay longer but without a campground, we had to make the stay only a couple of hours. After lunch in the Airstream, it was time to continue east.
(This marked the first occasion we had to use the outside shower that came with our trailer. It’s handy for washing off sandy feet. )
Around this time it became clear that Eleanor had a case of whatever was affecting Emma the previous few days. Her headache intensified, giving me even more impetus to find us a place to settle down so she could catch up on sleep. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out well. Park after park was full, and we eventually ended up once again crashing at a Wal-Mart in Chiefland, FL.
Poor Eleanor. Although our parking spot was quiet, she had a miserable night with a long episode of nausea. In the morning she was still so sick that she couldn’t face riding in the car for hours, so we towed six miles over to Manatee Springs State Park and paid $4 for a day pass. There, she was able to nap in the trailer while Emma and I explored the massive spring that bubbles from the ground here.
Mantee Springs
Manatee Springs, like Blue Spring in central Florida, is a first-magnitude freshwater spring. That means over a million gallons of clear 72-degree water per day rises to the surface, forming a tributary to the Suwanee River. The manatees swim here in the winter to stay warm, but there were none in evidence when Emma and I donned our snorkel gear and paddled around in the water for 30 minutes. Still, we saw some mullet, a couple of turtles, and a school of colorful little fish about 1/2″ long.
With snorkeling, lunch, a couple of episodes of “Between The Lions” (a PBS reading program), and another walk along the river, Emma and I managed to stay out of Eleanor’s way long enough for her to get about a couple hours of sleep, which made all the difference. She awoke feeling somewhat better, so we dumped the tanks at the park’s dump station and made the final two hour drive to Tampa.
With the overloaded parks and Eleanor being sick, it has been a real pain getting here. If I hadn’t had to get online for work, we would still be back in the panhandle somewhere, waiting out the illness. That’s one of the unfortunate aspects of having to work while full-timing — sometimes we have to move even when we really don’t want to. But still the compensations are there. We managed to snatch a few good moments out of a few days that were otherwise full of disappointments, and sometimes that’s the best you can do.
Tonight Emma and I left Eleanor alone in the trailer to relax, and we joined our local friends Barry and Brett for dinner out. When we got back, we put Eleanor to bed early. I hope she will wake up tomorrow with this bug behind her.
We’ll stay in Tampa a couple of nights, catching up on work and health, and then on Thursday we have reservations to camp at Ft Wilderness (Disney). There will be a caravan of three Airstreams heading there … unless you would like to join us!
March 2, 2006 at 5:46 am · Filed under Places to go
Apparently it’s a rule that you can’t come to this part of the country and not visit the Dr Pepper Museum in Waco, TX. So being good visitors, we took the afternoon to drive 30 miles down I-35 and check it out.
The Dr Pepper Museum is a must-see for people who love vintage Americana. It’s also a fun stroll through the past if you remember some Dr Pepper commercials from the 50s and 60s (primarily), and interesting for the person who likes factory tours. The museum is not actually part of any Dr Pepper facility today, but it is located in the first Dr Pepper plant in downtown Waco, and they have a nice collection of antique syrup-making and mixing equipment.
But the museum is rather small. A $5 admission brings you through two levels of exhibits that you can skim in about 30-45 minutes, or browse in-depth for maybe an hour or more if you stretch it. We spent nearly as much time in the restored soda fountain shop, trying the “original” recipe for Dr Pepper which uses Imperial Cane Sugar rather than corn syrup.
Does it taste better? You decide!
Along the way north on I-35, you’ll pass Exit 353, where there is an abundance of Czech bakeries. It’s one of those little ethnic settlements that can be found in unlikely places in Texas. We dropped into “Little Czech Bakery”, and came out 30 minutes later with a pile of boxes filled with interesting things to eat: buns stuffed with various meats and cheeses; pastries variously filled with poppyseed, cream cheese, and cherry. That, plus a little of Eleanor’s leftover Mexican corn salad (added to tomato soup), made up dinner — easy and delicious!
Today, regretfully, we are departing NTAC. The people here have really rolled out the red carpet for us, giving us dinner, courtesy parking, high-speed Internet, local information, and little gifts. For example, I returned to the trailer yesterday to find this rock on our doorstep:
… so of course I turned it over. Who can refuse a rock that is so polite?
Sign of the week!
February 24, 2006 at 6:46 pm · Filed under Places to go
In my essays on Gather (see link to the left), I talk about how our form of travel allows us authentic and personal experiences that rarely happen when you’re on a typical vacation. We were lucky to have one of those authentic experiences today, in Taylor, TX.
Taylor is a quiet place about 30 miles northeast of Austin. The land is flat and open out that way, covered with corn fields and Southern Pacific rail lines which run right through the centers of each town. It’s far enough off the beaten path that you wouldn’t expect to see many tourists there, but on weekends, the knowledgeable ones head to downtown Taylor to experience exceptional barbecue, in an area that is already known for great barbecue.
Shanta Kuhl, one of the local town boosters, invited us to drop in for lunch at Louie Mueller’s, one of the two great barbecue spots in Taylor. So on our way north to Cleburne, we pulled the Airstream right up to the side of Louie’s and stepped into one of the best culinary experiences we’ve had since we started traveling.
The first thing that struck me about Louie Mueller’s was the character of the place. The décor is simple: square wooden tables sitting on a black wood plank floor in a high-ceilinged box of a room that looks like an old warehouse. There’s a bit of neon and a corkboard covered with hundreds of old business cards stained brown with years of grease. An ancient jukebox sits in the corner. At 11:45, the parking lot is filled with pickup trucks and the tables are filled with men wearing baseball caps.
The back half of this large open space is filled with black barbecue equipment, looking like an arrangement of steam locomotives, and attended to by a small crew of confident-looking people who start their secret processes at 3 a.m. every day.
There’s no table service. The menu is short and to the point, written on paper tacked to the wall: you can get barbecued this or that. I didn’t see any salads or salmon fritters. When you line up at the kitchen counter with your tray, the friendly staff quickly tosses a thumb-sized bit of barbecue beef on the paper liner for you to sample while you’re waiting.
Emma wanted ribs, so Eleanor ordered three ribs, expecting those skinny things you usually get at chain restaurants. The crew looked at Emma and explained that their ribs are BIG ““ about a pound of meat on each one. They look like they were taken from a brontosaurus. She got one and there was plenty for Eleanor and I to sample, with leftovers.
One thing you should know is that there is no “one” way to make barbecue. Every place is different, which is why sampling the different restaurants is so much fun. You never know exactly how it’s going to taste, but you can be assured it will be darned good, especially out here in the midst of barbecue country. I could see spending a couple of weeks touring this area and dropping in on a different local barbecue spot every couple of days. If that interests you, check out the Texas BBQ Trail website.
Shanta also took us down to a hidden spot by the railroad tracks, called Taylor Cafe hides in one of the oldest buildings in Taylor, literally a corrugated tin shack that you would never think was a restaurant from the outside. You’d also never think it was the souce of one of the top 20 best dishes served in the USA, according to a New York food writer. Ah, but it is “¦ and some fine food comes out of there.
Taylor Cafe has two entrances, from the days of segregation, one on either side of the building. Although it is obviously no longer segregated, people still tend to stick to one side or the other. The interior is reminiscent of a fishing shanty, with exposed plywood on the walls. A big central bar is where you order. You don’t come here for the décor, you come because Vincel Mares has been making barbecue here for over fifty years. When he decides to make something special, like a batch of pork sausage, you’d better be in line the first day or two because after that it will be gone.
I shook his gnarled hand, obviously crippled with arthritis, and listened to his quiet voice as he smiled and talked about his food. It’s his life. Every day he gets up at 3.am. to cook, and goes to bed late at night, getting only a few hours sleep before he starts over again. There are regulars in this place who come every day to eat his food.
Although we’d already had lunch, Vincel gave us a package of turkey sausage to take with us. It sits in our refrigerator now. Every time we open the refrigerator the wonderful smell is apparent ““ that sausage won’t last long “¦
Taylor TX — a worthwhile stop along I-35.
February 22, 2006 at 8:35 pm · Filed under Places to go
Texans pride themselves on being friendly. So it was no surprise that about a dozen Airstreamers showed up to join us at the Salt Lick tonight for dinner, and they all seemed to have a great time. After some excellent barbecue, there was a cry from the rabble-rousers for me to make a speech, so I stood at the end of one of the picnic tables and did a little Q&A about our trip.
Being mostly retired folks, and all Airstreamers, they were completely in sync with our thoughts and ideas about traveling the country. Again and again I heard “It’s so great that you are doing this with your daughter,” and “The magazine is great — I hope you are doing well with it!” It was a great evening for my self-confidence, and I think Eleanor also enjoyed the affirmation.
We talked for about an hour after dinner, covering homeschooling (everyone seemed to think it was great, even the grade-school principal), magazine publishing, travel tips, lifestyles, and domestic bliss. I expect a similar scene this weekend at the rally in Cleburne, and again next week. I have been invited to speak at the Region 9 Computer Rally next week about our Tour, so it may be time to develop a regular speech. Otherwise, I can ramble on all night!
On another topic, I was up late last night making plans for various projects. There’s a lot happening behind the scenes! For example:
We have lined up Dometic, Shurflo, Zip-Dee, Airstream, Fantastic Vent, Reese, Vintage Trailer Supply, and George M Sutton RV as sponsors of the ’52 Cruiser project, which is tentatively called “Vintage Lightning”. The project is looking good, but we are going to be pressed to have it ready for the International Rally in June. Anyone who might be able to tow it one-way from New York to Oregon this June, let me know! We may need some help there.
The solar system for our Tour trailer is being designed now with the help of Triangle Electric in New York, and I hope to help install it in early April while we are in Florida. Right now we are planning on four 110-amphour AGM batteries, three 130w Kyocera solar panels, a Xantrex inverter, and a charge controller.
We are also working on design of some custom cabinetry for the Safari to hold our laser printer, some Zip-Dee chairs, laundry, recycling, books, and misc. I am hoping to find someone who can build and install it while we are in Florida, but right now don’t have anyone in mind.
I’ve got to put in a full day on the magazine tomorrow but if we can we’ll take the evening to go into Austin and enjoy the new balmy weather and perhaps a bit of live music.
February 21, 2006 at 3:29 pm · Filed under Places to go
Pecan Grove RV Park is a nearly legendary place in Austin these days. It has been described to me as “the place the hippies used to hang out,” but now it is a funky oasis in the midst of the town that wants to keep itself weird. (That’s what the t-shirts say: Keep Austin Weird.)
There are at least a dozen Airstreams here, and several Avions as well. Most of the residents seem permanent, or at least seasonal, and there’s a very friendly vibe about the place. I am sure we will like being here, especially now that the weather has improved.
I have done some more research on the bike thing, and it seems clear that we are safe with a bike rack / receiver hitch mount on the rear. Our loaded weight will be well within what the chassis can withstand, and really it won’t be much more than many people put in their bumper storage compartments.
Some people go a bit further with their frame mounted equipment. Here’s one I spotted recently. I wonder if the owner has trouble towing it in traffic?
And you were worried about a bike rack?
Tomorrow we’re going to look up an old friend of mine who relocated here years ago, and of course in the evening we will have dinner at the Salt Lick BBQ with a gang of Airstreamers. By the way, the Salt Lick calls itself “The last bit of Texas in Austin.” Sounds promising.
« Previous entries ·
Next entries »
