Category Archives: Travel

2024, Family, Food, Gatherings, holidays, Travel

Macaroni Conundrum

39 Comments

The last time I was with my whole family for the holidays was 1978.  Some years they gather without me, some years they don’t gather at all.  So when I announced that I was visiting Nonny two weeks ago, they decided that January Christmas festivities would be a grand gesture.  By the time I got the first text the week before my trip – the plans were so far down the road there was no turning back.

It was a potluck at Nonny’s little condo (truly the best choice considering the options) and all the obligatory dishes had been claimed.  My baby sister had three things on her list and since I knew she would be starting a new second job that week, I volunteered to do the macaroni and cheese.  She immediately sent me a recipe that is apparently my nephew’s favorite. 

Now I’ve made many a dish of mac & cheese over the years, using many different recipes, but looking at this one made me put my head in my hands.  It was two fully-typed pages and included four kinds of cheese, two kinds of pasta, garlic, green onion and quite a few spices.  In addition to the fact that Nonny has next to nothing in the way of kitchen utensils or baking dishes, I wasn’t even sure if she had the spices.  (I mentioned this last week when I was thinking of taking the spices in a bag in my luggage.)  I confirmed my suspicions – no big pot for pasta, no casserole dish to bake or serve it in, no grater for the four kinds of cheese.  In a funny turn of events, she DID have all the spices.  We could purchase an aluminum casserole, a grater and all the ingredients, but unless we also sprang for a big pot, I’d have to make two batches to have enough for everybody.  Not to mention the cost.

That’s when I remembered that YA had purchased macaroni and cheese from Costco for our Thanksgiving gathering and it had been pretty good.  I know there is a Costco about 5 minutes from Nonny’s place so the day before the party, we headed over there and picked up a pan of the stuff.  I doctored it up with some garlic powder, onion powder and paprika.  Via text that morning YA kept asking me if I had told my sister I was buying instead of making the mac & cheese.  I know my audience.  If I had fessed up that I was going to get it from Costco, my sister would have thrown up her hands in exasperation and said “Fine… I’ll just do it.”   One of my mottos has always been “it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission” so that’s the route I decided to take.

Turns out my sister didn’t care at all…. but my nephew did.  He kind of made a big deal about the fact that I should have let them know so HE could have made it. Of course, when we were divvying up the leftovers, I noticed that he heaped quite a bit into their Tupperware!  But I was happy to have not gone to too much trouble and Nonny was happy to not have more utensils in her teeny weeny kitchen.  And truth be told, the macaroni and cheese was really good.

I expect it will have to be another gathering for us to buy it again – it’s way too much for two folks, even folks who like macaroni and cheese as much as YA and I do.  But now I aware it’s there, you never know!

Do you have a favorite pasta dish?  (Either made or bought…)

2024, animals, holidays, Mysteries, Travel

Risky Business

21 Comments

A 22-year old from Taiwan was apprehended at the Bangkok airport before Christmas after he was found to be carrying two Asian small-clawed otters and a prairie dog.  The man has the critters in socks, taped inside his boxer shorts; security officers were suspicious of the big bulge below the man’s waistband.

If I were a man, I’m not sure I’d put anything with claws and teeth (much less three of them) in my shorts.

I noticed this because I was just thinking about taking a small bag of spices with me to St. Louis last week.  I needed to recreate my sister’s mac and cheese recipe while I was at Nonny’s and was pretty sure that Nonny might not have all these spices.  I didn’t want to buy whole jars of them in St. Louis.  Putting spices in a ziplock made me think about another time I had spices in my suitcase.

About twenty years ago, my bag was the very last one to arrive on the luggage belt after I had come home from Thailand.  The sniffer dog did not alert on my bag but the fact that I had stood there so long waiting brought me to the attention of the sniffer dog’s handler.  Of course this was the one time I ever had something a little suspicious in my bag.  I had purchased some spices at a road-side stand while in Thailand… just baggies of powder with no labels.  Luckily none of them were white and one of them was filled with whole nutmegs, so it was easily explainable.  I was very glad I had the nutmegs and had not purchased anything even remotely white!           

Have you ever transported something you probably shouldn’t have?

animals, Art, Mysteries, Travel

Helping the Javelina

51 Comments

This is the last post about Nashville.  I swear.

When I did the blog last year about Henrietta (my stuffed javelina) going to Madison, it was kinda funny and I enjoyed it.  So I thought it would be fun to do it again on my trip to Nashville.  What I didn’t expect was that others would take on the cloak of silliness with me.

My friend Pat was absolutely obsessed with getting a photo of Henrietta wherever we went – zoo, Strawberry Café lunch, shopping, pizza place, the winery.  You’ve already seen the photos at the Goo Goo Cluster store and the Moonshine distillery and the breakfast place.  But she wasn’t the only one concerned that I get a good photo with Henrietta. 

A complete stranger at the zoo volunteered to take a photo of me and Henrietta with some flamingos that we out doing “meet & greet”.  Is demurred, not too sure how close I wanted to get to a huge (they are much bigger up close than you think) strange bird.

The woman working the bookstore at the Belmont Estate also noticed Henrietta in my bag and asked about her.  We were waiting for our tour to start so Pat was happy to go on and on about all the places that we had taken Henrietta over the past couple of days.  The woman got all excited and led us to a spot we would never have seen on our own… under a staircase on the second floor of the mansion.  There was a small statue of a pig, complete with a red bow.  This was a photo I couldn’t resist. 

Although it’s been fun, I’m not sure I need to keep it up.  I will probably take her to Tucson in March; it is after all her birthplace (my friend purchased her for me while I was there last year) but I’m not sure she will go to St. Louis with me this month.

Do you take selfies when you travel?

2024, Music, Travel, Uncategorized

Soundtracks For Living

28 Comments

Our drive from Brookings to home on Monday was pretty uneventful, although long. The weather was good, and we had MPR Classical to listen to as we traveled.

We are typically not fans of Strauss waltzes, but hearing the Vienna Philharmonic play at the Vienna New Year’s Day concert was fun. We listened to it as we drove past a large collection of windmills on the Buffalo Ridge, aka Coteau Du Prairies, near Summit, SD. The windmills’ rotations made them look like they were dancing to the waltzes. Even more fun was our arrival in western North Dakota just where the buttes and ravines start. Just as we entered the area, Copeland’s Rodeo started playing. It was so appropriate! We were back in the West with the dancing cowpokes.

Sometimes it feels like the most appropriate soundtrack for my life is Khachaturian’s Saber Dance. I hope for a calmer January, with a peaceful soundtrack, maybe cool jazz. We shall see.

What soundtrack would best accompany your life of late?

2023, Food, Travel, Uncategorized

A Little Tipple

23 Comments

If you don’t count the wine advent calendar, I probably have three or four alcoholic drinks a year.  It’s just not something I think about often.  Even when I’m out and about, I often abstain since I’m usually driving (although YA drinks less than I do and can be counted on to drive if necessary). 

So why I thought I wanted to go to the Old Smokey Moonshine Distillery when I was in Nashville.  A friend of a friend had gone there and mentioned it on social media; when I mentioned it to Pat, she said she’d never been and would like to see it as well.  When she told her son Chad that we were going, he volunteered to drive if he could join us.  Voila, a party of three.

Old Smokey is in a huge building: half large bar and half tasting bar and merchandise.  It was a gorgeous day and there was a lot of outside seating with music as well.  It had not occurred to me that we would be tasting moonshine, but apparently it’s “the thing to do”.  Four bartenders serve the tasting, one takes care of one quadrant of a big rectangle bar, serving 8-10 people at each tasting.  Each moonshine is served in a teeny little shot glass – can’t hold more than a couple of teaspoons – and there were five flavors of moonshine that day: apple pie, peanut butter, peppermint, butterscotch and eggnog.  Then there was also a piece of moonshine pickle and a piece of pina colada pineapple.   The bartenders have their schtick down pat – fairly enjoyable.  I didn’t eat the pineapple and I only had a small sip of the peppermint (it was 100 proof) but even considering that and the tiny size of the offerings, the alcohol went straight to my head.  I was really glad somebody else was driving.

It was a fun experience and the moonshine tasted better than I had expected but it didn’t convince me that I should buy a bottle of my own.  They make a huge variety of moonshine and they have the bottles all strategically stationed along the windows so that the sunshine lights them up.  Harriet enjoyed sitting among bright colors.  She’s underage, so while she could look at the week’s flavors, she wasn’t allowed to imbibe!

What did the bartender say after Charles Dickens ordered a martini?

2023, Food, Nature, Travel

Henrietta Makes a Pig of Herself

55 Comments

I love bakeries – you all know this.  Luckily most of my close friends are also bakery fiends, so I never have to worry about any bakery withdrawal when I travel.

Long before I visited Pat in Nashville last month, she had emailed me a link from a bakery that she wanted to try with me.  Most mornings we made breakfast at her house but one morning we did save for The Franklin Bakehouse.

Franklin is a small community about a half hour from Pat’s home in Nashville.  I expect that the folks in Franklin would bristle at being labeled an outer-ring suburb, but as Nashville has grown, that’s exactly what it has become.  It is the epitome of a small town – lots of little shops, wide sidewalks, picturesque streets.  It didn’t hurt that it was a beautiful fall day in Tennessee, making the drive very pleasant.  There were huge pots of chrysanthemums at every corner of the “downtown” – just gorgeous.

The aroma inside The Bakehouse was amazing and the array of pastries and sweets made it really hard to choose.  I ended up getting a massive cinnamon roll and a beautiful blueberry tart, knowing I couldn’t possibly eat it all (I asked for the to-go container right away).  Pat had the dutch apple pie/bread pudding.  It’s in the picture above and was almost as big as her head.  She also ended up taking some home.  We also ordered coffee and sat at a window table and watched the world go by.  It was a fabulous was to spend an hour that morning.

Henrietta didn’t really make a pig of herself; she actually bristles at the idea as she is a peccary, not a pig!

When was the last time you were able to really relax over a nice meal?

2023, Business, Food, Kids, Travel

Goo Goo’d

33 Comments

One of the places that Henrietta and I visited in Nashville was the original Goo Goo Cluster store – it’s downtown just a block off of  Broadway. For those of you not from the south, a Goo Goo Cluster is a candy bar, similar to a Nut Goodie.  Instead of the maple center of a Nut Goodie, Goo Goo Clusters have a nougat/caramel center.  Goo Goo Clusters are VERY Nashville and you can find them everywhere, even at the register of a pizza place where we ate one night.  I knew about Goo Goos from programs that I’ve run in Nashville – it’s a fun welcome gift and I’ve purchased them for groups several times but had never actually tried one. 

The storefront isn’t a large space – most Goo Goo Clusters are made in a huge factory these days – but they make premium Clusters at the storefront and have some historical photos and old equipment on display.  And merchandise, of course.  Like usual, I sent several photos of t-shirts to YA to see if she liked any of them.  She thought about the long-sleeve cream version but eventually decided against it.  Just as well, because I got one of that design and she probably wouldn’t have been excited about us wearing matching shirts!

I also purchased a couple of boxes of Clusters to take home.  It wasn’t until I was home that I noticed that the Peanut box was mis-printed.  That’s a pretty big fail in my book.  Hopefully no one lost their job over it.  I thought about saving it – maybe someday it will be valuable – but decided against it.  I’ll have photos and a nice t-shirt to remember my visit.  (They tasted just fine despite the misspelling.)

Do you have a favorite candy bar?

2023, books, Mysteries, Travel

Hurry Up and Wait

32 Comments

My mother trained me well.  Get to the airport with PLENTY of time.  My travel career cemented this for me.  2 hours for a domestic flight, 3 hours for an international flight, 1½ hours for a connection – this is my general rule.  Too many variables, too many possibilities for things to go wrong (flights late, long lines for security, people behaving badly, etc.)   I will admit that I do make an exception for flying out of the Humphrey Terminal – usually just 1½ hours prior is OK for me. 

Last week as I was heading to Nashville it seemed as if every employee at Humphrey was in a hurry.  I stopped at a check-in kiosk to get a paper boarding pass (just in case) and when the attendant saw that I had my phone with an electronic pass, she tried to shoo me through (unsuccessfully).  At security, where you normally have to wait behind the line until it’s your turn, they were pushing folks up in line – like social distancing had never been a thing.  Then the TSA folks were practically putting your stuff into the plastic bins themselves.  They did still make everyone take their shoes off (except the man in front of me – not sure he could have stooped down to take them off anyway) but they were gung-ho in arranging your stuff and if it was too crowded, THEY were grabbing an extra bin to accommodate things.

Of course it meant we all got through check-in, security and TSA in record time.  In time to sit at the gate for 1½ hours!  Oh well, I had a good book. 

Tell me about your travel habits!

2023, Travel, Uncategorized

Preconceptions About Place

27 Comments

My wife and I love Canada. We’ve visited our neighbor to the north some ten times, traveling through the lower tier provinces from Vancouver Island in British Columbia all the way across to Quebec City in Quebec. Last month, we finally achieved our goal of visiting one of the maritime provinces. Our choice—as you may recall—was Nova Scotia.

When I plan a trip to a new location, I develop preconceptions about the place. Will it be flat, hilly, green, not so green, grassland, have lots of lakes and rivers, a damp climate, an arid climate? Some of those preconceptions you can resolve by looking at maps and reading about the climate and landscape. But there are also preconceptions about the people. Will they “be like us?” What will the demographics be? What’s the personality of the place? (Think tough, urban New Yawkahs vs. small town super-howdy friendlies.)

My preconception of Nova Scotia was one of a terrain similar to the last place on the Atlantic we visited—Acadia National Park in Maine. Rocky coastline, sparse population, flat terrain inland, and a predominantly white Anglo population. I also imagined the northern half—Cape Breton Island—to resemble Cape Cod: flat, sandy, full of dunes, no farmland to speak of, and lots of fishing villages and quaint little towns. I was half right on that, and half right on the whole of Nova Scotia.

We were surprised to find some amazing resemblances to Minnesota. Some areas in the southern part of the province are full-on farmland, like southern MN. The end of one drive from the Bay of Fundy on the north coast to Lunenburg on the south coast reminded me of descending the Gunflint Trail into Grand Marais. We saw many more lakes than I expected. Not as dense as lakes in the Brainerd area, but enough to notice.

 Cape Breton Island was far hillier than I expected. Many roads had grades from 5% to 10%. If you’ve ever driven in the Rockies, you know a five percent grade is common, 7% to 8% less so, and 10% rare. Cape Breton Island pretty much matched that ratio. We actually drove on one 10% grade for a short distance and traversed many 5% to 8% grades.

The Bay of Fundy is awe-inspiring. Low tide must be seen to be believed. Nova Scotia is home to SIX UNESCO World Heritage sites plus two other UNESCO supported sites. There are many wineries in the province. Halifax, the capital city, is as urban and sophisticated as any city in the US. It’s also hilly, with old narrow streets not conducive to car traffic, and has one of the most impressive harbors I’ve ever seen. The boardwalk near downtown is a must-visit. The historical significance of the city since colonial days is well-remembered and preserved. One thing that didn’t surprise me was the quality of the seafood. It was every bit as outstanding as you’d expect from a maritime location that has hundreds of miles of coastline.

Finally, everyone we met who lived and worked in Nova Scotia was as friendly as could be (other than a few stuffy hotel staffers). Even in Halifax, a big city where it’s easy to encounter people who are aloof, mistrustful, and too much in a hurry to chat or help.

I’ve attached a few pictures of our trip. If you want to see more, simply sign up for my website newsletter and you’ll get access to many more. Since I just published my latest missive, I’ll even share the password with you now: ChrisN2021. But don’t tell anyone! 😊

Sunset at Inverness, NS

Halifax boardwalk

Lighthouse at Peggy’s Cove

Chris and his caddie

What are some of your preconceptions of a place that got blown out of the water after you visited there? What places exceeded your expectations in the same way Nova Scotia exceeded mine?

2023, History, News, Travel, Uncategorized

Close Call

15 Comments

The big news in Fargo this week has concerned the fate of a group of 85 local Roman Catholic parishioners, clergy, and their relatives who were on a pilgrimage to Israel.

The group was in Jerusalem when the bombing started, and for some reason they fled to Bethlehem where they holed up for a few days with the fighting happening just 45 miles to the south.

Yesterday they managed to get on three buses and made their way through multiple checkpoints until they were able to walk to safety in Jordan. I can’t imagine how frightening that must have been. They are scheduled to be back home in the next couple of days, many of them facing 40 hours of travel with their plane connections. It could have all gone so much more badly for them.

When have you or someone you know had a close call with disaster? When have your travel plans changed significantly?