We found a new (to us) pocket of coolness in Albuquerque, a city we have chosen to ride out February in, living in a half-finished yet lovely adobe-style house next door to dirck’s sister and brother-in-law (who own the house we are bunking in.) The Sawmill District is dominated by the huge and super trendy Sawmill Market, a well-designed and lively food hall in a former, you guessed it, sawmill. I had excellent Vietnamese food and dirck had designer tacos, sitting outdoors in an industrial chic courtyard.
Across the street are trendized warehouse-looking buildings now housing an enormous mineral shop and another made-by-locals place. But we were blown away by the Hotel Chaco, dramatically designed to look like and pay tribute to area pueblos and Chaco Canyon, with a round high-ceilinged entryway, rugged materials and cutting-edge contemporary art by “Native American New Mexico artists.” The top floor restaurant we’re told has spectacular views of the mountains, buttes and plateau.
Today we had fast and tasty middle eastern food at Chello and then walked along the muddy Rio Grande on the dirt paths of the BosqueTrail (Bosque means forest in Spanish) stopping at a pond to bird watch.
We met an Iowa couple in Amarillo who was on a bucket list-trip, driving their sweet new Winnebago van (Iowa-built) on Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica. Now that’s on my list. We don’t have the same goal this trip, which is instead to get to Albuquerque with a minimum of dawdling.
But today we did get off interstate 40 several times to take in the sights on the occasionally nearby parallel 2-lane Route 66. So glad we did. Shamrock, Texas, just over the Oklahoma border, has a spectacular “Tower conoco gas station (found via audio storytelling travel app HearHere) circa 1936 that was restored for a pretty penny. It looks even more remarkable at night when it is illuminated.
Finally reopened in 2021, the station’s U drop-in cafe was closed because it was a Sunday but we could peak in and see it in all its retro glory. (Traveling on a weekend means a lot is closed, including the tourist office in Tucumcari, NM)
In Amarillo, we could not miss The Big Texan SteakRanch, a crazy looking roadside mainstay since 1960, where you get your 72-ounce steak meal free if you can wolf it down in an hour. (Not just the 4.5 pound steak but a shrimp cocktail, baked potato, salad, and roll and butter.) The Big Texan 72-ounce SteakChallenge has very precise rules, worth reading for a laugh. http://www.bigTexan.com. To date, there have been: 86,712 attempts, 10,035 champions. How Texas is that?! If you lose the challenge, you pay $72.
We instead found (thank you Yelp) a fantastic Mexican restaurant tucked under a highway underpass near a car shop that promised “we tow and crush.” El Manantial (named after the Mexican telenovela?) was packed with Hispanic families at 2:30 pm on a Sunday and we soon learned why. We had tiny little pork tacos, perfectly seasoned, and a standout speciality, tacos de Birria, lightly fried tiny tacos with red sauce and shredded marinated beef.
Because we were with dog, we found a picnic table at a nearby school playground (the sweet servers at the restaurant suggested). We crunched our way across yellow grass to the metal table for another January picnic. Like our Kansas picnic a day earlier, this one was in 59 degree weather but warmer. No Kansas wind.
On to Cadillac Ranch, a famous public art installation (free!) way out in a field of corn stubble — 10 Cadillacs driven into the ground, nose-down, their rears (once sporting tail fins until they were vandalized which apparently the artists and benefactor were ok with) sticking up from the dirt at an angle, supposedly akin to the angle of the great pyramid at Giza, slathered in many colors of dayglo spray paint. Visitors-in-the-know bring their own spray cans (or buy at a trailer parked nearby). Several were spraying away, creating big coagulated bubbles of red, yellow, green, blue, black paint. Far out! The Cadillac Ranch is the work of San Francisco “art-hippies” bankrolled by an Amarillo billionaire in 1974. Set against a dramatic backdrop of endless land and sky, it was a sight.
We were surprised by how bombed out Tucumcari, NM looked although there are a few cool buildings including a Spanish-style 1926 train station (now a railroad museum) and a building on Main street with lovely decorative terra cotta. Our HearHere audio made the town sound like it was far nicer than it appeared to us so maybe we or HearHere didn’t look closely enough.
Say you’re driving through the middle of nowhere — or so it seems — and wondering where you are. HearHere, a travel app featuring 1-2 minute (about my attention span) audio stories linked to the places you are driving through, can help with that, as we’ve learned today while driving through western Oklahoma. Who knew that El Reno, OK has an annual Fried Onion Burger Festival? Or Clinton, Oklahoma has a Route 66 Museum (not to be confused with the National Route 66 Museum we chanced upon further down interstate 40 in Elk City) and a well-preserved downtown lined with old red brick buildings. Or that Watonga, OK is home of Clarence Nash, the voice of Donald Duck? We learned a lot too about Native Americans, tornados, wind farms, cattle drives.
Scissortale Park, OKC (the scissor-tailed flycatcher is the Oklahoma state bird)
The only problem: the podcasts can end up making your long drive even longer because they frequently made me want to get off the Interstate and see what the podcast was talking about. HearHere is the baby of actor Kevin Costner. After listening to a few audio stories, we bought a year long subscription for $35.
Here’s the NYTimes write up: When contemplating a road trip, any number of images might come to mind — and Kevin Costner probably isn’t one of them. Yet that may be about to change. The actor and director is a co-founder of HearHere, an app that uses your location and interests to play audio snippets (some narrated by Mr. Costner) about the history, culture and natural wonders of the places you’re driving through. There are morsels about the things you see (like landmarks) and the things you don’t, like the people who walked the land before you. The app, which rolled out last year, more recently announced an expansion, blossoming from road trip stories set on the West Coast to more than 8,700 stories across the United States, including details about the early history of Portland, Maine; the burning of Washington by British troops in 1814; and the first racially integrated housing in Philadelphia. Available only on iOS. Cost: Free for the first five stories; after that, $29.99 for 30-day unlimited access; $35.99 for a one-year unlimited subscription; $69.99 for three years.
The sculpture is a take on the weird tail of the Oklahoma state bird.
Passing through Kansas City en route to New Mexico, we stopped at a favorite bakery in the Quality Hill neighborhood and found it has a new name but the same fantastic bread. Fervere Bakery is now Ibis Bakery. serving up the same great rustic breads (orchard loaf, crusty, chewy, nubby, packed with apricots and other dried fruit) and pastries, including the caramelized croissant I’ve come to adore, even if I can’t spell or pronounce its French name: kouign-amann. We bought one that had a tart blob of cranberry jam in the middle. Yum.
Sadly, on the outskirts of Kansas City today, we saw what appeared to be the makings of a trump rally – a procession of pickups and motorcycles with flags waving, American and Trump flags. Sobering.
It was almost warm enough to picnic, which is our only option besides eating in the car because we are traveling with dog so we found a pretty little Peter Pan park in Emporia, Kansas to eat our bread with other goodies from our fridge. It was 59 degrees, a welcome change from frigid temps in Des Moines and frisbee golfers wore t-shirts and shorts (the temp got to 66 a few hours later on Wichita). We never found the monument in the park to William Allen White, the famous newspaper editor of the emporia gazette and champion of small-town America who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1928.
If I stumbled upon Des Moines’ East Village in another city, I would be all over it, excitedly popping into one interesting shop after another but because this East Village is so nearby, I tend to take it for granted. Big mistake. I don’t shop there (or anywhere) often but when I do I always find something new and worthy, and visit several standbys that have withstood the test of time. So today’s visit was great. We were originally going only to Raygun, our favorite witty-snarky T-shirt shop, to buy gifts, but ended up wandering around on an unexpectedly balmy December day when more stores than usual were open, for a Sunday, due to the holidays.
At Allspice, I used up the gift certificate I received last Xmas, refilling my bottle of fig vinegar and buying a few spices and rubs as gifts. Then onto petal and moss, which was like entering a tiny jungle full of mossy plants (we bought an unusual orangish-pink poinsettia). And we finally tried a “Dirt Burger” at the restaurant of the same name, which specializes in veggie burgers. The dirt burger looked like a meat burger and sort of tasted like one. I liked it. Dirck, the unrepentant meat eater wasn’t quite as impressed. We both liked the crispy pencil-thin fries a lot and I would like to try other menu items. Certainly preferred the place to zombie Burger, which used to be our favorite burger spot in the East Village but during our last few visits we have been disappointed by the service and the food.
We decided to spread our holiday shopping dollars around, beyond the Internet, and found a pleasant outing in the process. Earlham is a small town 30 miles west of Des Moines, with a still viable little downtown, about 2 blocks long and one block deep with well-preserved old one- and two-story brick buildings. There’s also some entrepreneurs, the two best known being RJ Home which used to be a vintage/salvage store and now is also gussied up as a gift shop with reasonably-priced ceramics, furniture and other housewares. It’s only open one three-day weekend per month except in December when it’s open two Friday-Saturday combos. (The last one in December is 10-11; check its website.) And there are two locations, south and north, one on each of the two blocks downtown.
Downtown Earlham, with a Christmas tree in the middle of the street
The other highlight is Beans and Beignets, a sweet coffee shop/cafe in a lovely old two-story redbrick corner shop. The coffee and beignets were good, as was the Cobb salad and chicken salad sandwich. It shares space with another little gift/home goods/floral shop. The breakfast and ice cream options looked good too.
We skipped the Interstate on the drive there and part of the way back, driving on backroads and sometimes dirt roads, past tidy old farmsteads, exurban mansions and, increasingly, burgeoning subdivisions rising from former cornfields.
On day two of wandering in NYC, my favorite city activity, I set out for Fotografiska, the New York City outpost of the famous avant-garde photography museum I loved in Stockholm but the weather was walkable, despite a little wet snow, so I opted to neighborhood wander, this time through Gramercy Park, which I haven’t been to in years. Lovely old townhouses surrounding an elegant gated park. Reminded me of London. I ended up in the East Village where I found more empty storefronts than I’d seen in other neighborhoods, perhaps not surprising. But several little independent shops, including one full shop full of lovely Japanese paper products, have survived Covid, so far. Good to see. I had the six-piece sampler (seared) at Dumpling Man, a hole-in-the-wall spot on St. Mark’s Place, perhaps in the same spot where my London friend Anne had a gift shop, The House of Uncommons (geddit?) in the mid-1980s. (Francine, are you still reading?) My favorites were the shrimp (with corn) and the pork. The spinach-green veggie dumpling with a vague green tea flavor won the “most different” prize.
Do you know Dumpling Man?
In addition to dumplings, another perhaps more unlikely trend appears to be something familiar to Iowans or any visitor to the Iowa State Fair…
Monday was Myra Day, one of my favorite days in NYC (or anywhere else). We met at Grand Central, which looked a bit diminished without its annual holiday market and the Scandinavian food court, both presumably casualties of Covid, but the rest of the city was hopping with holiday cheer. We wandered through Soho and NoLita (north of Little Italy, east of Sogo, primo streets:Mott, Elizabeth), both pleasant backgrounds for our annual epic get-together. I returned to Dominique Ansel Bakery, this time for a light lunch (chicken salad with pistachios on a delicious croissant) and these crazy “milk shots,” little chocolate-lined “shot glasses” made of pastry dough, filled with milk. They got a bit soggy but were a delicious take on milk and cookies.
Masked at Grand Central
The holiday market was ON at Union Square, and full of good gift options, from Scandinavia hand towels to Turkish pottery to Ecuadorian scarves. Dinner was at the very chic Sona, a very different Indian restaurant on 23rd street, with different takes on traditional dishes (and much higher prices.) The butter chicken looked the most familiar and was delicious. The chicken korma was unrecognizable – three conical shaped fried dumplings in a shallow pool of creamy green -colored sauce, served with a cheese-filled naan reminiscent of a quesadilla. The best innovation was the saag paneer made with Swiss chard rather than the usual spinach. All served by attentive staff in stylish surrounds with tables that quickly filled with chic New Yorkers who apparently thought nothing of dropping considerable cash on fancy Indian food on a Monday night. I ❤️ NYC.
P.S.across the street from Sona: a popular new Italian restaurant called Rezdora.
The first thing I saw when I entered Union Station around 12:30 pm on a Sunday was a bride, alone at the top of a white marble staircase, dressed in a sleeveless white dress, holding a bouquet and waiting expectantly. We exchanged smiles through our eyes since I was wearing a mask. This was not what I expected on the Wolverine Amtrak train from Chicago to Detroit (or in my case, Dearborn in suburban Detroit.) I’ve always wanted to ride this train. I love trains, so here I am. For five hours on a cold, grey, damp day with the occasional snow flake.
Very comfortable seats and all seats taken. My only complaint is very dirty window so it’s hard to see beyond it. Also makes a grey gloomy day even greyer and gloomier.
Indiana scene via Amtrak
Apparently for a fee, you can have your wedding photos taken in the grand lobby of Union station, which is what was happening when I arrived, and for a presumably higher fee, you can have your wedding there.
We didn’t do much of tourism note, beyond hang out with our grandsons and their parents. But we did have a good diner-type lunch/brunch (tuna melt, but, Greek omelette) at 3rd Coast, a somewhat hidden neighborhood hangout near my aunt’s on the Gold Coast that somehow I’ve never heard of in the 35 years or so that I have been visiting her.
We also had excellent takeout Szechwan Chinese food from ChengduImpression, in Lincoln park (I think) which made me think of a friend who grew up in that city and still lives there so I sent her greetings and a photo of the restaurant via WhatsApp, which she got a kick out of. And we picked up a sandwich (dolce di Parma) to go Andersonville at Pianto Pronto
I’m on the Metro North Hudson Line train heading back to NYC after a quick but lovely and overdue visit with my old friends Merida and Chip. I’ve been visiting their charming 1840s farm house on a hill overlooking a rolling wooded valley for almost 40 years, lucky us.
The train trip is about 2 hours hugging the Hudson which looked stunning yesterday in the fall sunshine. I got off at the end of the line in Poughkeepsie and Merida picked me up and whisked me off to the country where we took long walks through the woods and pastures, past ponds and streams, tromping in the muddy grass in borrowed Wellies with two sweet white dogs who reminded me of my lab Millie. Chip took me over to visit the rescue horses at 13 Hands equine rescue center he volunteers at on a spectacular hillside overlooking a wooded valley with a sweet white farmhouse.
TakeBetsywithyou 