The Big Country

Eureka Springs Eternal

You can find my story on Eureka Springs, Arkansas here.

As much as it's possible, Eureka has a healthy sense of competition with nearby Branson, Mo. Many visitors swing through one en route to the other. I had several conversations with locals that started with "Well, we don't have the glitz of Branson..."

Shell Shock

My story on the Southern Maine coast and how towns there are a bit antsy (but not too antsy) about the summer season can be found here.

Kentucky Wordy

My article on Berea, Kentucky for the New York Post's 50 States series can be seen here, but did everyone have to act so shocked that I was in a dry county?

One Sentence Review: Stogo

Stogo: I still prefer regular ice cream to the vegan variety--and I'm lactose intolerant.

One Sentence Review: Vinegar Hill House

Vinegar Hill House: Like Freeman's, but with better food, and like Freeman's, you're better off ignoring everyone else there on a weekend. 

Buenos Aires Recap

Buenos Aires has a vocal population of cabbies. Unlike New York, where the cabbies are vocal mostly in their hatred of pedestrians and Mike Wallace—I had a cab driver last week who mocked the 60 minutes correspondent for being “120 years old”—in BA, my drivers all wanted to chat with me, at length, in Spanish.

A word about my Spanish: Koko the Gorilla knew more words than I do. She probably knew more words in Spanish, actually. I can count, I can order steak medium rare, and I knew how to say my hotel’s cross streets. Everything else ventures into hand gestures and nodding territory.

Still, cabs were the best way of getting around BA. As a New Yorker, there’s something about taking a cab that feels spendy, or dare I say, amateur. I was repeatedly warned off the Subte in BA, so I hopped cabs to a nabe and spent the rest of the day wandering there. It’s too bad, since unraveling the mystery of a new subway system is one of travel’s great pleasures. When I was in Tokyo for 24 hours, I even mastered one line, but then again, it ran in a circle.

In my cab from the airport, we had a long discussion about the air conditioning and when exactly it was going to kick in. I said “Frio!”, or possibly “Fritos” and nodded, smiling like a moron. En route to the hotel I also received a brief tour of the historical buildings of note in San Telmo, complete with rolling stops near the most important ones. Not that I realized that until after we passed them; I was trying to figure out if there was something wrong with the gearbox.

As my driver weaved through side streets in Palermo after dinner at Standard a few days later, I was quizzed on what I had to eat, which then morphed into a discussion of Obama and George W. Bush’s relative merits. The driver used both hands to gesture about the two presidents, steering with his knees. When I grabbed the seat belt, the entire strap came off and fell limp in my hands like a dead snake.

Winding through San Telmo near the Moreno after dinner at Cluny the next night, we passed some kids on the street. “Los niños,” muttered my cabbie with a shiny pate and a whiskey-soaked voice. “Bestia!” Those boys didn’t scare me as much as when I came to the railroad tracks separating parts of Palermo earlier in the trip. At night with no one else around, I got an antsy feeling. Then the train whooshed by and I nearly peed my pants. The blood on the ground didn’t add to my sense of safety, so I doubled bar towards a bar. I mentioned it to my contact the next night. “Oh yeah,” she said, “my friend got mugged and stabbed there the other month. He only needed one stitch, though he keeps making a big deal about it. What a baby.”

The next afternoon en route to Recoleta, we drove into demonstrations and throngs of people marching on the Plaza de Mayo. The marchers left a trail of graffiti, like slime behind a slug. Every few blocks we would try, unsuccessfully, to get around them. Later I asked at the front desk what, exactly, the holiday was. “It’s hard to explain,” the concierge told me. “It is a day for remembering. I don’t remember what. I do not think there is a word for it in English.” He sighed. Maybe all the graffiti was to make sure no one forgot exactly why they were marching?

Packed and ready for the security and immigration lines at Ezezia, the last cab of the trip was stopped in traffic waiting to merge onto the highway. That would be a three-lane artery that functions as a five-laner, thanks to judicious use of the "in-between lanes". Very improvisational. A vendor selling ice cream sandwiches out of a cooler strolled past and a wave of pleasure washed over me. Window-to-window ice cream didn't seem weird but wholly natural instead. Wouldn't you want that option?

I didn’t mind seeing Buenos Aires from the window of a cab at all. It gave me a window into the city just the same.

One Sentence Review: Baoguette Café

Baoguette Café: Banh mi, even banh mi with mayo, are that much more delicious when served by a man in a paisley shirt. 

One Shining Moment, Bad Restaurant Edition

Zora O’Neill’s post about out-of-the-way restaurants, and the disappointments therein for guidebook writers, reminded me my clunker meals last summer updating the restaurant section of Fodor’s Prague. There’s a moment when the first course arrives at a restaurant and you take that initial bite. It's fraught with peril, shot through with make-or-break qualities. In a great restaurant, it’s transportative; you’re taken to a location, back in time, into a reverie or a memory or even into your special-happy-schnitzel place.

Alas, going to two to four restaurants a day, transportative moments are few and far between. Sometimes when that plate is parked the extent to which you are about to suffer—from mal-flavorage, lost time and lost money—is readily apparent from bite one. My clunkers included lamb wrapped in pasty shell quite reminiscent of an airplane entrée, cod and potatoes that tasted an awful lot like carp and potatoes, and paella made in an open kitchen I wished I hadn’t seen before I was served. Or after. Or ever.

Which is why when us guidebook writers go out of our way and have this happen, it feels exponentially worse. It’s a lonely trip back to base camp, stomach rumbling, prickly heat on the back of your neck wondering if the waiter noticed how you just pushed the food around on your plate with eating anything, irritated that the updating process hasn't advanced a whit. Next time, I’m stocking up on Luna bars beforehand. 

Amazing Feets in Air Travel

I’m an experienced air traveler. I hit something like 70,000 air miles last year, and I’ll do a good clip again this year. Heck, when, somewhere over Puerto Rico, the purser came over the intercom to ask if there was a doctor or nurse on board my flight last week, I barely woke up. I’ve done go-arounds, an emergency landing at Gander Airport, flown through a thunderstorm in a Swiss propeller plane and once, I sat next to an actor who had a in part in the movie playing on that flight. It takes a lot to surprise me.

Bearing that in mind, I had a new-to-me seatmate experience on my flight down to Buenos Aires last week. After we pushed back, I snagged a middle bulkhead row of three on our 767. I took the aisle and stashed my stuff in the middle seat. Halfway through our ten-hour flight, a woman moved over to that empty aisle seat in my block. She snoozed in her neck donut for a bit. I dozed. When I woke up again, she was gone.

Or so I thought.

Not quite. She was laid out in between the seats and the bulkhead on the floor, sleeping. Her head was in the aisle and her feet were slowly but surely encroaching into my foot space. I made an area defining kick, and she stopped. Etiquette aside, there is no way I would let my body rest on the floor of an airplane for any length of time.  Just—no.

Are things regressing so much for the flying public that I’ll have to watch my feet for signs of encroaching passengers from this point forward? Chris Elliott’s misreported story about standing room only seats on airplanes is starting to look mighty appealing--at least with those seats I wouldn’t have to guard below my knees.

Return to Blender; Address Unknown

In my other life I was a fact-checker for the past three years at Blender, which died this week while I was in Buenos Aires. In a made-for-my-BlackBerry twist, I was in the Recoleta Cemetery, just steps away from Evita’s grave, when I got the news. Blender, R.I.P.

Blender was an enjoyable place to work--enjoyable enough for me to last three years. I checked good articles, I checked bad articles, I grew to love or hate certain writers based on how pleasant they were to work with and not for the quality of their prose (that was just an added bonus). Fact-checking is a fun gig, in that you get to learn a little something new each issue, though often that something has to do with Lily Allen’s whereabouts for the past eighteen months.

Blender was one of those “secretly good” publications. Judging the book by its exterior, with Kelly Clarkson and terrible cover lines, it appeared god-awful. But inside, they stashed Christgau in the reviews section, put Rob Sheffield to work writing a column that was as good Sheffield got (why oh why was this feature not called Top Sheff?) and occasionally hit on something clever in the front of the book. Alas, Blender’s FOB embodied exactly how magazines are stumped by the transition to online—it’s hard to be cheeky and newsy with pages that take a week to design and another two to ship.

My favorite was the Back Catalog feature, wherein someone (usually Doug Wolk) reviewed every record by an artist or band. It was a bear to fact-check, but what other job would give you an excuse to learn about Jerry Wexler one month and Big Audio Dynamite the next? Back Catalog disappeared in recent months as the ad pages dwindled, but I hope it returns again in another publication. Or at that very least that Wolk scanned his contributions and stashed them on a hard drive.

Beyond the mundane issue of losing some income, it’s jarring to take a step back and see how my own writing career has changed in three years. When I started working at Blender, all those big-name published writers intimidated me, but now I’m the one sending backup to magazines and patiently explaining to researchers what I meant when I described the “poolside” location of some beach cabanas. It may sound small, but three years ago, it seemed like a giant step.

I also wonder if telling my grandchildren I was a fact-checker will sound to their ears as one of those strange disappeared professions like typesetter or stevedore (The Wire excluded) sounds to someone my age. Whether or not the profession continues to exist in the years to come, I hope to keep with me the skills I honed at Blender. For one, I still spell out A-V-R-I-L  L-A-V-I-G-N-E in my head each and every time I see her name written on the page.

Bye, Blender. Or rather, C ya L8r, boi.