A Very Unparked Domain

Mt. Washington was founded in the middle of the nineteenth century as a place to escape the oppressive conditions of the city. It was one of the first “street-car suburbs” of Baltimore, and housed some of Baltimore’s finer families, including the “Sage of Baltimore” H.L. Mencken¹, during their summer escapes.

Mt. Washington Village certainly proved a lovely summer escape for us.

Creek running right alongside building in Mt. Washington

Store front garden on Smith Street in Mt. Washington

Colonial-styled water meter cover

Fountain at Baltimore Clay Works

Gaping clay head: every home should have one

Update

For more Mt. Washington pictures, see

1. Mt. Washington Maryland: accidental tourist edition, and
2. Mt Washington Mill in pictures

1. Mencken was quite the man of letters, but is possibly most enduringly remembered for his coverage of the Scopes trial, the watershed 1925 legal battle over the teaching of evolution vs creationism. Mencken famously dubbed the case “the monkey trial”—and, like many other 20th century American cultural battles, the monkey trial is still being fought over and over again today. Several of Menken’s works are available online for free through Project Gutenberg. [↩]

Tonight we were back in Mt. Washington at Whole Foods (a natural food store) where the following conversation took place:

Neil and I are walking down an aisle past two clerks stocking and facing shelves.¹

Me: I always thought grocery store shelves should be built like shelves in a research library, where they can be unlocked and rolled around, so that at night you could push them together and restock from the back.  It would be way easier to reach the back of the shelf and rotate the stock to keep older products at the front and put new ones at the back.

Female Clerk: Me, too! That’s a great idea!

Me: I worked in a health food store years ago, and I used to restock, too, so I had lots of time to think about it.

F.C.: It takes so much time! And it’s so boring!

Me: If it makes you feel any better, ever since then, when I buy groceries, I always face the shelf as I go, and replace the products I’ve put in my basket.

F.C.: Me, too! Oh, can I give you a hug?

Me (used to hugs from total strangers): Sure!

(F.C. hugs me. Silent Male Clerk looks on amused. Neil, also used to me getting hugs from strangers, is completely unperturbed.)

F.C.: Oh, thank you! It is so nice to talk to someone who UNDERSTANDS!

Me: You know, I face my pantry at home when I take something off the shelf, too.

F.C.: Me, too! Me, too!

We then proceeded to bond over the horrors of restocking the freezer case, and of getting locked in the freezer case, with Neil winning the prize by contributing a story about walking in from the rain and getting frozen to the floor of a freezer case.

Getting hugs from total strangers is a genetic propensity I seem to have inherited from my mother.  These sorts of things happen all the time to me. And they make my day!

It was an unexpected treat to get a hug from Whole Foods Girl today.  Thanks, Whole Foods Girl, and happy stocking!

I’m emailing this post to my friends back at Nature’s Fare in Kelowna where I used to work, so I have to ask: how many people here with retail food experience face the shelves while you shop? How many face your pantry at home? And how many of you hug your customers?

Don’t tell me Whole Foods Girl and I are the only ones! Fess up!

Photo credit: “sometimes, a hug is all what we need” by Flickr user kalandrakas, as part of the Free Hugs Campaign

1. The retail grocery term “facing” means to pull products to the front of the shelf. It probably comes from the library practice of aligning book spines evenly on the front edge of a book shelf, which goes by the same name. [↩]

Our current trip is not about vacationing.

We are in research mode, work-from-the-road mode, convalescent rest cure mode, extreme gadget testing mode…but very much not in tourist mode.

It’s something like “a movable feast” transformed into “a movable nap,” with a mad scientist thrown in for good measure.

Oddly enough, I have never been much of a tourist.  I was able to accomplish a great deal of travel when I was young by studying and working in a range of locations, partly thanks to my interest in learning languages.  I found that my experience of a place was significantly different if I was holding down a (local) job, shopping at the local grocery, and living as much as I could in the rhythm of local life than if I was visiting on a one-week sight seeing tour (to state the obvious).

Neil adds that he is likewise not fazed by changing places. Having grown up in an Air Force family that moved about a great deal, he gets his bearings quickly when he wakes up in a new place—just as quickly as “at home” in any rate.  As you can see, for both of us “home” is a flexible concept, and that’s part of what makes this trip both possible and comfortable.

Our current trip so far is much more like my previous experience of extended contracts abroad.  Except of course that the majority of people around us speak English, no one knows on sight that we are outsiders (they do seem to figure it out rather quickly though), and Neil’s job isn’t in a local place of business so we don’t have a built-in social network of local people.

Neil adds that we are “temporary regulars.”  I agree.  This echoes my experiences abroad, as well. Rather than passing through, we “live here,” wherever here is at the moment, even if we might not live here next week.]

We were on the phone with my parents last night, and another question we’re finding hard to answer is “what have you been doing lately”: because what we’ve been doing tends to be what we would be doing if we were at home, only we’re doing it somewhere else.

Of course, one of the main objectives of this trip is to play-test new locations to live.  The best way to find out how we’d enjoy living somewhere is to replicate our daily life.  Fortunately, we are very good at this and bring years of experience to the task.

The saying goes that a change is as good as a rest, and we’re certainly finding that transposing our regular life to random locations around the country is a lot of fun, and seems to be doing us a lot of good.

At the same time, with the exception of my papaya breakfast earlier this week, this trip hasn’t really felt so much like a trip at all, partly because we are fairly flexible, but mostly because we haven’t been especially touristy.

As the weather cools down towards the fall, as we build up a bit more health and energy for me, and as we fall into a new rhythm of “our life on the road,” I expect we will have much more energy and interest in excursions to museums and historic sites rather than just to natural food stores and vegetarian restaurants—in the same way that when the weather cools down and I have more energy when we are “at home,” we tend to get out and about a lot more.

(When you suddenly notice an upsurge in reports on tourist attractions and adventure tours, you’ll know that either my health has drastically improved or the temperature has dropped. (In a venn diagram, those two circles tend to overlap closely.)  In the meantime, we’ll try to make our gadget reviews and experiment reports as useful and interesting as possible.)

If any readers have experience with working on the road, extended periods away from home, or other types of non-tourist long-term travel, we’re very interested in your stories and advice.  The travel advice we come across seems designed for backpackers, or short term vacationers, or there-and-back business travelers, but not so much for people like us who are in a car, living on the road, and working full time (in Neil’s case).

We feel, ironically, like we are on the road less traveled, and without a map.  If you have milestones or shortcuts, we would really love to hear about them.

We are always happy to ask other people for directions, if we can just find someone else who knows where we’re going.

A friend of mine just recommended that I read “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America” by Bill Bryson:

“A real pleasure read makes me want to hop on my Harley which ain’t there no more and roar again across America.”

Now that’s a recommendation. I’ll definitely be tracking down Bill Bryson. (Thanks, PN!)

I’m really interested these days in books about travel, as well as books with a strong sense of place. I’m especially interested in books that come in ebook editions so we can load them onto our ebook reader, and in historical travel stories that are available for free in the common domain through sites like Project Gutenberg.

What other “travel” books, fiction or non-fiction, do you recommend? I care a lot less about “great books” and much more about “books you love.”

What road stories do you love to read on the road?

We had to navigate new towns regularly when I was growing up moving from base to base in an Air Force family. Mom would grab a map, a phone book and a kid, and get to wherever she needed to be. Mom drove, the kid would figure out where we were by looking up businesses we were passing in the phone book to grab the address, and then tell her what turns to take. (It is a great, low-tech system if you are driving with a good navigator.)

Cram those three elements (map, phone directory, kid) into an electronic device, and call them routing, location-fixing, and voice-navigation, and Mom may very well have invented the precursor to GPS navigation—albeit a grits-fueled version.

In the decades since, I have tried out several GPS navigation systems; I still own two versions of the DeLorme EarthMate, including one from when it was still the TripMate, plus their gorgeous world atlas.

Fast-forward to this spring. For my father-in-law’s birthday, we picked him up an in-car GPS system to replace the GPP system he had been relying on (Global-Positioning Patricia, aka my mother-in-law). Pat herself came up with the idea; we’re not sure what spurred it. We researched different GPS models and settled on a Garmin nüvi. After several days of the in-laws taking deliberately wrong turns, just to try and confuse the device, we all agreed that it was a very well-designed unit.

It came as a welcome surprise to find that Garmin sells a variation of the software as a downloadable application that runs directly on the BlackBerry. Garmin’s software version is not exactly the same as the Garmin GPS device; the Garmin software is an Internet-connected application, rather than a self-contained one, but that has more good points, in practice, than bad ones. Garmin offers their Mobile BlackBerry app for $99 for life. The downside to the ‘for life’ clause is that it reportedly won’t transfer from one phone to another, which is going to bite for us, since we purchased it two weeks ago, and now our BlackBerry is going to be replaced with a work-managed version.¹

There is a seven-day trial available. We originally came across it on a 30-day trial, which was enough to get totally hooked. 30 days is nice, because you can set it up when you go on a trip, and have a few days to get used to it, beforehand, and still have enough time to realize you don’t want to travel without it. At the same time, the interface is very simple and intuitive, so picking it up as you go isn’t difficult.

The software is rapidly becoming essential on this trip—not completely indispensable but it has proven its worth repeatedly.

Pluses

• Since the Garmin software is Internet-connected, the maps are as up-to-date as you can get. Today, it even accurately mapped us on a stretch of road that was still under construction.
• Garmin routes us around traffic. On Google Maps, you can show traffic information, in real-time. Garmin for BlackBerry actively routes you around trouble areas. Heading into Atlanta, a while back, the software took us off the highway about 10 miles before we were expecting to exit (the restaurant we were looking for was about two miles off the highway). We took the exit the Garmin told us to…just before the highway became a parking lot. For me, that was worth the cost of the software. With the Garmin nüvi, you can purchase a receiver that will pick up traffic-band and accurately use the information, but on the BlackBerry, it’s in the palm of your hand.
• Turn-by-turn voice navigation, with well-designed and timed prompts.
• Garmin knows the price of gas at many gas stations around you, and it shows them to you in the search results.
• Garmin the company has been extremely pleasant to deal with. There was a problem with our bank not accepting our billing address when we purchased the software, which took several calls and emails to track down. Everybody we spoke to at Garmin was knowledgeable and friendly and went out of their way to be helpful.

Minuses

• Since the Garmin software is Internet-connected, it’s as reliable as your cell-coverage. The GPS unit (which, like all GPS is only a receiver) will work from anywhere you have line-of-sight to the geostationary satellites—so pretty much anywhere, although cities, tunnels and such cause it trouble. The maps and directions, on the other hand, are downloaded from the Internet on the fly. So we probably wouldn’t rely on it to find our way home from the middle of nowhere. Although, anywhere it doesn’t have a signal probably doesn’t have so many roads to choose from.
• Something disconnects the data stream (to be fair we don’t know for sure that it’s the Garmin software). The problem seems to manifest itself mostly when we try to look for directions and have an insufficient signal—sometimes it errors and loses connectivity right there. We have no empirical evidence showing that it is the Garmin hitting an error and cutting the connection vs the connection dying and the Garmin raising an error, but it happens now and then. Walking into the open and rebooting clears it up every time.

The pluses of the minuses

• While the BlackBerry may not be the hiker’s best friend, we find that in-city it’s extremely accurate. It even navigates well among tall buildings, in our experience, even in areas where we were expecting to lose the signal.
• The connection loss is so intermittent that it hasn’t even turned into an annoyance. And we stress that we don’t know for sure that the Garmin software is the cause. It’s also the worst thing we have to say about the software.

Things we haven’t found, but would be nice if they were there

The option to set the default zoom level. I find that one-zoom-in from the default is where I always put it (the 3-D view at that point is remarkably similar to real vision).

It would be nice to be able to send an address to it, from other applications, similar to how you can click on a phone-number in BlackBerry emails. Hopefully, the application supports parameters, in which case it’s just a matter of writing some plug-ins.

It would be nice to have something like a user-tagging taxonomy (since the BlackBerry, unlike other GPS units, is a two-way device), or to have some more filtering options on the places searches. (For example, we tend not to eat at chain restaurants, and we do look for vegetarian places. There’s not currently a way to do filters like that that I’m aware of.)

We have gone to one address for a business that had closed down. It would be handy if one could flag it as a defunct business for everybody else.

It would also be nice to have the Garmin software optionally weight searches to the direction you are traveling (e.g., if you are on the interstate going South, a coffee shop 20 miles South is better than one 5 miles North)². Even better would be an option to search for things by proximity to a route you are already taking.³

Would we recommend the application?

We recommend the Garmin GPS softwware for BlackBerry unreservedly as a street-routing application, especially if the alternative is having/bringing kids. (Your mileage may vary.)

If you have a BlackBerry, and you are navigating around cities/towns, the real-time nature of the Garmin’s information is hard to beat. If you are off-roading, or playing geo-cacheing games, it might not be your cup of tea (and Garmin would be thrilled to show you their other GPS units). But our tests on a spring road trip from Richmond to Miami, and now our current trip from Richmond to Baltimore, have proven the Garmin software it to be extremely capable for on-roading.

Update

• We recently experienced a GPS caching glitch on our BlackBerry. Here’s how to fix BlackBerry GPS caching issues on BlackBerry using BlackBerry maps. (Updated 2008.08.15)

1. It didn’t bite. I emailed tech support, and they indicated they can transfer to the new device one time, over the phone. One quick phone call, and it was done. I’m happy; I consider this to be very fair on their part. [↩]
2. Search Results do show you the direction for each result. It’s pretty much just a matter of checking the map to see what direction you are travelling before you search [↩]
3. Just a few minutes ago we found this. By selecting a search while you are already on a route, it gives you the option of seaching near your position, your route, or your destination. That just rocks. =] [↩]

We discovered the charming Baltimore, Maryland suburb of Mt. Washington completely by accident on Saturday. What started out as a simple grocery run turned into a delightful afternoon of walking around in the sunshine.

We took a wrong-turn (despite our GPS unit) on the way to Whole Foods, and wound up driving down multi-coloured street Sulgrave Avenue.

Who could resist an electric mandolin player? Not us!

We stopped for a late lunch of marvelously decadent crêpes at The Crêpe Du Jour.

I ordered “La Napoleon,” a savoury crêpe filled with sauteed mushrooms, artichoke hearts, and melted brie; and Neil completely indulged himself with the “Oriental Crêpe Merguez” generously overflowing with lamb and beef sausage (presumably the eponymous merguez) with cumin, paprika, and oriental spices, along with Swiss cheese and egg.

When it came to the tempting desert crêpes, the spirit was willing, but the flesh was plumb filled up with lunch.

(Chef and Co-owner Moustapha Snoussi generously shares his crêpe recipe on the Crêpe Du Jour website if you have a hankering for êpes and you’re not close to Mt. Washington.)

We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around Mt. Washington in the sun, trying to walk off the crêpes, and all in all we had a glorious day.

(Yes, we did ultimately find the grocery store, too.)

Update

For more Mt. Washington pictures, see

1. Mt Washington Village in (more) pictures and
2. Mt Washington Mill in pictures

The lush green trees and bushes that line the highways of the mid-Atlantic states are absolutely beautiful: oak and sassafras; white ash and black cherry; yellow poplar and red mulberry; winterberry, inkberry, chokeberry, and sweet pepper bush.

Japanese friends once taught me a phrase that translates back to English something like “bath in green¹,” meaning to go out into a beautiful verdant place and immerse yourself in nature.

Somehow, magically, the Transportation Departments in Virginia, DC, and Maryland have managed to make driving along state highways feel like a bath in green.

Neil and I were both astounded by the vibrant, vital green space that lines major roads in Virginia when we moved there in 2003.  In fairness, we had been living in Texas, where a tree is as rare as a Democrat². When we left the flat, dry, unshaded expanses of Texas we were positively thirsty for trees.

The broad leafy trees of the mid-Atlantic states are just as much a change from the the beautiful coniferous (needle-bearing) forests of British Columbia where I grew up, too.

The picture above, of a stretch of Maryland interstate highway we drove down on Friday, may not seem all that exciting to you—my limitations as a photographer are at fault, not the state of Maryland, I assure you. (Don’t worry, your monitor isn’t dirty: those streaks in the picture are (former) bugs on our windshield.)

These green-lined highways are just a pleasure to drive along.  Thank you to whomever’s foresight made all this beautiful green space possible.

[This post is in response to a request from our friend Ian, who emailed me and asked "What does Baltimore look like?" Neither Neil nor I are shutterbugs and we're trying to get into the habit of taking more pictures. In the meantime, if you would like a picture of anything in particular, please let us know! We're happy to take requests.]

1. I have forgotten the original Japanese words for “bath in green”.  Does anyone happen to know what it is? [↩]
2. For our non-American readers, Texas is the adopted home state of Connecticut-born Republican George W. Bush, the birth place of Republican dirty-tricks strategist and Bush advisor Karl Rove, and the testing grounds of a lot of Republican political shenanigans before they are rolled out across the country. Trying to find a Democrat in Texas is a little like looking for an NDP supporter in Quebec, or a Green Party voter at an oil industry convention. Good luck. [↩]

This morning Neil and I shared a big papaya with lime juice for breakfast. That papaya tasted like travel. From the very first bite, it tasted like adventure. It tasted like sunshine and vitality and juicy orange vigor.

Today, more than any other point in our first 19 days on the road, I finally feel like I’m on vacation. The papaya did it.

I can’t account for why or how the papaya worked its magic: maybe because the taste reminded me of previous trips to Hawaii (good) and Costa Rica (bizarre) where I ate papaya every day; maybe because Neil and I haven’t eaten a lot of papaya at home while we lived in Richmond; maybe the luscious ripe perfection of this papaya just shocked me into a Zen moment of lucid recognition of the reality around me like a two-by-four to the head in a Buddhist meditation hall.

Wow! We’re on vacation! This is really cool!

Note to self: start all future trips with papaya for breakfast.

[I should have taken a photo of our papaya, but by the time my brain cottoned on to the papaya's enchantments, we had eaten the whole thing. The gorgeous papaya picture above is a Creative Commons licensed photo by Flikr user L*u*z*a.]

Are there any foods that work this travel magic for you? What tastes remind you of your favourite vacations? Do any foods jump start your “vacation feeling?”

And if you try our magic papaya breakfast trick on your next trip, let us know what happens. (Your milage may vary.)

Building a “road kitchen” for our Mini Cooper that fits in alongside our suitcases and the supplies for Neil’s mobile office has turned out to be a fun challenge on our road trip.  These 3 tips are the best tricks we’ve worked out for making our road kitchen efficient, effective, and hopefully fool-proof.

Tip #1: How to select the right cooler for YOUR trip

No one else can tell you what equipment is right for the trip that you’re taking.  Unfortunately, there’s just no universal answer.  And nobody had a pre-fab answer for us when it came to buying a cooler for the Mini.

The best way we’ve found to research equipment:

1. Make a list of  the constraints or limiting factors. (Including budget!) In other words, the non-negotiable criteria.
2. Make a separate list of features or options we’d like to include if we can, but that are not essential. In other words, the bonus list or negotiable criteria.

(We have great success following these steps for making any kind of significant purchase, not just travel gear.  For big ticket items, we also make sure to get at least 3 competitive quotes.)

Going on a long road trip in our Mini Cooper makes it vital that we use our limited storage space efficiently. Any time we consider buying new equipment for the trip, we measure the utility of the item against how much space it takes up and how much weight it adds to the car.

When we researched which cooler to buy for this trip, the need for low weight, compact size, and high function dictated our non-negotiable criteria:

• Cooler can’t waste space with thick walls or a bulky lid.
• Cooler should “disappear” when it is not in use.
• Cooler should still hold “enough” food to be useful.

We chose up a “California Innovations 36 Can Collapsible Cooler With Easy Access Lid” at the Gander Mountain outdoor supplies store north of Richmond.

• The cooler’s high density thermal insulation makes the walls thin and soft.
• The cooler collapses down to take up about 60% less space when empty.
• The cooler dimensions (13.50″ x 11.25″ x 11.62″) let it fit easily in the well of the hatchback. We discovered today that it holds exactly one paper bag worth of groceries.

There are just two of us on the trip, and we’re happy to make frequent provisioning stops along the way.  In fact, we are looking forward to shopping at road side stands and farmers’ markets. One  bag of perishable food at a time is plenty for us.

Our verdict: following these steps to select the right cooler helped us buy a cooler that is “just right” for our needs.

Tip #2: How to fit more food into your cooler

Our cooler is clearly too small to fill up with ice!

When we’ve previously gone on day trips or weekend trips (before this road trip), we’ve frozen plastic water bottles the night before we left to throw in the cooler as ice.  Once they thaw we either drink them up or refreeze them to use again.

The problem is: we don’t have room in our cozy cooler for frozen ice bottles if we want to fit in much food.  And not every place we stay has a freezer, so we may not be able to freeze the water over night. Plus, we’re doing our best to avoid plastic and disposable items on this trip.

Then Neil came up with a brilliant solution:

Cool the food with frozen fruit.

Frozen fruit is essentially edible ice. We buy a pack or two of frozen fruit and throw it in the cooler with the food.  When the fruit thaws, we can eat it at night for desert, or for breakfast the next morning.  And, if we want to cool a drink during the day (we’re experimenting with brewing iced tea in the car), we can just pop in a few frozen berries as ice cubes. Plus the small particles of frozen fruit make it literally more flexible than a gel pack or a frozen bottle of water: we can mold the frozen fruit around rigid objects in the cooler so it wastes less space.

The only drawbacks to this method so far are that we need to make sure we get to local grocery stores before they close at night to stock up on frozen fruit.  And, while it feels silly to buy frozen fruit in the summer when so much fresh fruit is available, we’re making sure to eat lots of fresh fruit, too, and buy frozen fruit that is out of season to increase the variety of our diets.

Tip #3: How to make sure you don’t leave your cooler behind

We really don’t want to drive miles down the road only to realize that we left our cooler behind in the last rest stop (or in the last state).  We can both get a little dopey when we’ve driven for a long time or when we’ve put off eating (okay, I’m much worse for this than Neil is), so we don’t want to rely on memory or luck to make sure everything makes it back in the car.

When we bought the cooler (and our other equipment for the trip, too), instead of looking for “pretty” colours or “nice” designs, we’ve tried to buy things in hazard hues: hunter orange, road sign yellow, danger red.

We really don’t have a penchant for flourescent colours.  (Or for 80′s Euro-pop, thanks for asking.)

What we have is an allergy to camouflage.

We didn’t want equipment that would be drab, or unobtrusive, or similar in colour to asphault or picnic tables or browning lawns.  We wanted obnoxiously bright gear that stands up and yells: “Yo! Don’t drive away without me.”

Fashion statements are all well and good, but we’ll take function over form any day.

Neil is an an exceptionally good load master and he hasn’t left anything behind yet, but we also both prefer to set up systems and protocols to make life easier.  We both like the fact that our bright coloured gear is shortens the odds in our favour.

. . .

To recap, our 3 best cooler tips are:

1. Use rational shopping tricks to pick a cooler that works for your specific needs.
2. Don’t waste space on ice: cool your food with frozen food packs.
3. Choose obnoxious colours so you can’t overlook your cooler.

Will these cooler tips work for you? As with all the advice on our site, your mileage may vary. If you try out any of our tips, we’d love to hear how they do or don’t work out for you.

And, we’d love to hear your best suggestions for making the most of road trip coolers.  Please share!

We arrived safe and sound late last night in the Baltimore, Maryland suburb of Owings Mills to visit our friend Patrick.

We’ll be house sitting for Patrick the next week or so, and actually visiting with him when he gets back from his own travels. But at least we arrived in time to drop him off at the airport today!

The last week has been incredibly busy, and we’re looking forward to sitting down and writing up our most recent adventures now that we have a fixed address for a few days again and a chance to breathe.

Update If you can recommend sights / events / things-to-do in the Baltimore / DC area, or if you’re a long-lost friend hiding here under our noses and you’d like to get in touch, please leave a comment.  We’d love to hear from you!