Food

Another Year Shot To Hell

We had our usual quiet New Year’s Eve planned, dinner with friends early and then returning home to watch “The Wizard of OZ” before getting into bed, before midnight. Dinner was great and if you are ever in Aiken and have a hankering for some fine Italian food you can do no better than Olive Oils. The Wizard will wait one more day, because it turns out “My Cousin Vinny” is on FMC right now, in all it’s uncut and uncensored glory.

Vinny Gambini: What about these pants I got on? You think they’re okay?
Mona Lisa Vito: Imagine you’re a deer. You’re prancing along. You get thirsty. You spot a little brook. You put your little deer lips down to the cool, clear water – BAM. A fuckin’ bullet rips off part of your head. Your brains are lying on the ground in little bloody pieces. Now I ask ya, would you give a fuck what kind of pants the son-of-a-bitch who shot you was wearing?

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 525

Statesboro Blues

Bulloch County Courthouse After fifteen hundred fourteen miles in six and a half days, we are home again.

When we left last Sunday we ate breakfast on the way out of town at Aiken’s New Moon Cafe and as a nice bookend to the trip, our last meal on the road was a quesadilla for lunch at Statesboro, Georgia’s The Blue Moon. While I’m not really ready to call it a theorem, it is definitely a postulate: Moon=Good Food – to wit, any restaurant in the downtown area of a small to medium sized town with the word Moon in it’s name will serve good food in a funky hip kind of style.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 482

50,000 Pieces of Wood

Johnny LawSomewhere just north of St Augustine the Emperor glided past the 50k mark. I guess I was wrong the other day when I said there would be miles left to travel on the warranty when we ran out of time. Just the opposite, the 3 year/50k warranty has expired with three days left.

We drove out of Georgia on I-95, but 36 miles was all we could take. Just after stopping and getting some free OJ at the welcome center, we got off the ugly Interstate and picked up A1A. We then drove the whole way down to New Smyrna Beach following the coastal road. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes tacky, sometimes crowded and sometimes nearly empty, taking the slow road, if you have the time, is the way to go. It helped that it is off-season which kept the crowds way down. The big trouble for us was that the weather was way off-season. Average high this time of year along the middle Florida coast is is 75, but today is wasn’t even 55. Combined with the 10-20 MPH mean that the top was up all day and any ventures out to look at the beach and waves was very brief.

Even though I was running right at the speed limit, Johnny Law shadowed me for a couple miles when we drove through Daytona Beach.

Before dinner tonight we took a walk around a mile and a half circular boardwalk that is at the north end of New Smyrna Beach’s coast. It was a quick walk over about 50,000 pieces of treated wood. The sun had finally popped out from under the clouds, but it was too late to raise the temperature any as it traversed the last 10 degrees of it’s arc before disappearing beneath the horizon.

Food for today consisted of the “deluxe” continental breakfast at the Village Inn, bah. Lunch at another Barbara Jean’s (which turns out to be a mini chain of about 6 restaurants), very good, but finished off any possible crab cake cravings for a month or so. Dinner was at Vincente’s in New Smyrna Beach, a small Italian place whose baked ziti was just the right amount to split and very satisfying.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 471

Pachyderms on Parade

Pachyderms on ParadeAfter a cold start the day warmed up nicely and the top stayed down from Savannah until we got to St. Simon’s Island.

We stopped in Savannah to look at the Roundhouse Railroad Museum. Very interesting place, but definitely a work in progress. Seeing as it only cost $4.25 per to get in we agreed that even though a lot of stuff is unfinished and you can’t get in any of the display railroad cars it still offered more bang for your buck than yesterday’s aquarium.

Lunch was a killer Greek salad and two slices of pizza at The Upper Crust in Richmond Hill, GA. Boy once you get 15 miles south of Savannah it is pretty much trailers and marsh along US17.

Saint Simon’s Island is kind of a quaint Hilton Head without all the golf course/plantation housing areas. It has a charm all it’s own and in what seems it’s best efforts are failing to hold on to it. There are creeping pockets of national chains of hotels and fast food with a lot of 3 story beach view blocking million dollar homes. We are staying at the Village Inn & Pub and it is nice and at this time of year quite empty, there are 5 cars in the parking area, counting the Emperor. With a recommendation to it from a co-worker and the desk clerk here, dinner was a small place called Barbara Jean’s. Good call. Food & service was excellent.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 471

We’re Sorry Rudy & Patti

Charleston AquariumAlternate title: We Drove All The Way Here For That?

We have the week off and the plan is to go see Donna’s sister and family in Palm City, FL for Thanksgiving. Originally we were going to leave on Saturday and take the real slow way down, but then friends from the MMC decided to hold their wedding reception on Sunday (they got hitched in Vegas a couple weeks ago), so we postponed leaving until Monday morning to take the just plain slow way down.

Well, we did OK on Saturday, but by this morning the call of the road was too great. At 7:30AM we got out of bed, by 8:45 we were packed and on our way. Sorry Rudy & Patti, we’ll give you our wedding gifts next week at the MMC Holiday Party, hopefully you’ll be able to end up with them after the swaperoo gift exchange.

Breakfast at the New Moon and then US78 East, destination Charleston and it’s aquarium which opened in 2000 and we have yet to visit. I had checked the SC Aquarium’s web page for times and ticket prices, but neglected to get directions. How hard can it be? Bound to be signs directing visitors to it when coming into town, right? Wrong. After driving around town in frustration we decided to head out of town on I-26 and see if we could find a sign for it or a visitor’s center. Nope. After about 10 miles we got off at an exit and turned back around towards Charleston. Guess what? There are signs directing you to the aquarium if you come into the city on the Interstate.

Of the half dozen or so major aquariums Donna and I have visited this one ranks at the bottom. It was nice and all, but the big tank wasn’t that interesting and all the side exhibits didn’t really flow right. Everything seemed small, except for the gift shop, and some of the best things about the aquarium were the outside overlooks facing the new Cooper River bridge and the USS Yorktown at Patriot’s Point.

After our aquarium visit we walked the 6-8 blocks down to Market St and the main touristy section of town for a late lunch. The first place we came to was the Noisy Oyster and in we went. The food was good and it might b worth another visit if we ever get back this way just to see if they can get the food uniformly hot.

Our drive out of town was similar to the drive in as we made several wrong turns before finding our was back to I-26. I could have sworn Donna said she wanted to see the Citadel…

Started down, went up, back down, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 469

Weekend Wrap

Burning TreeOn the way home from Saturday’s lunch at the Stoplight Deli and much to the chagrin of my wife I drove onto the median in the historic district to take a picture of the car near this small bright red tree. I have had my eye a one with bright yellow leaves, but someone was thoughtlessly holding some sort of party or wedding reception at the house on the corner nearest the tree and there were all kinds of cars and such in the way. A backup was spotted a block away and Donna was only mildly uneasy until I got back in the car and moved it a few feet to try a different angle, then, well…

Driving Miss Daisy Later that afternoon was the MMC‘s semi-annual Elmcroft Senior Drive where we go over to a local Assisted Living, don’t call me a nursing home, Center and take some of the residents for a little drive. We had 7 cars and seven riders, so we took a nice 35 mile drive up to and over the dam at Lake Thurmond. We had one Miata with a Porsche Boxster kit and a rep from the local dealer brought a 3rd gen Miata (unfortunately not the retractable hard top version) for us to use if we needed.

NBRIEDLater that evening was another MMC event, Game Night. A dozen of us gathered at the Butler’s to played games and eat finger foods. Four of us played a game of Scrabble while the other eight, in 2 groups of four, played dominoes. After a few games or so, a call went up to play something that all of us could partake in together. A couple people voted for charades, but two people, one of which was me, vowed to go stand outside in the rain rather than play that. We ended up playing Trivial Pursuit, the original Genus Edition which caused quite a few of us to have to relive the 80’s.

Yellow TreeToday we started our day with a leisurely breakfast of bagels at the Atlanta Bread Company followed by grocery shopping. We then drove over to Augusta because you can buy stuff earlier there than you can here on Sundays. We bought a wedding gift, some Christmas gifts for siblings that need to be tweaked and mailed around the country later and just shopped, not bought, gifts for a 3-year old who will be spending the holidays in a family shelter. He is one of several kids that people from ASCO are going to help out this year as we usually do. We then got a chicken salad sandwich to go from the Atlanta Bread Company that we ate overlooking the same dam I passed over yesterday. On the way home I passed by my yellow tree and the photos I took were kind of disappointing, not at all like I envisioned them. For the record we ate dinner at home, not the Atlanta Bread Company.

Started up, went down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 460

48,000 Leaves

OverlookThat is the average leaf count on a mature maple tree* and coincidentally, the mileage the Emperor passed on the way to to meet the participants of the MMC Leaf Peeping Expedition. Over 400 miles and 11 hours later we are home and just a little tuckered out.

We had pretty much the average turn out for our club on an event recently, 3 cars. I threatened to cancel if at least 4 cars didn’t show up, but that was an empty boast as my navigator told me that even if we were the only car we we going on the run. The six of us devoured enough breakfast at the Cracker Barrel to sustain us for a week in the Amazon before setting out in search of chlorophyll challenged leaves. The first 11 miles were Interstate, but after we got to two-lane blacktop 2/3 of the tops folded down. The sun was just beginning to peek over the tree tops and the temps were in the low 60’s so the windows and wind blockers were still up.

After our first pit stop and because one couple had yet to experience them, we made a stop at the Georgia Guidestones, AKA the American Stonehenge. The journey then continued up the eastern edge of Georgia. A quick dip into SC before ending up at Black Mountain State Park back in north Georgia. Two years ago when we did this trip with the Club we were about two weeks late and the vistas were of a uniform brown. This time we hit at just about peak and the mountains were very colorful.

Lunch was at the renown Dillard House just up the road from the state park. The six of us devoured enough food at lunch to sustain us on a circumnavigation of the globe. After eating we took a winding road to Highlands, NC where we lost one car to shopping in the downtown. Donna and I, along with, the appropriately named Autumn and Dave, gassed up and headed down the mountain and back into SC.

Highway 28 from Highlands back to the flatlands is a great Miata road full of twists and turns and all manner of decreasing radius bends. I won’t mention any names, but one of this crew really regretted the amount of food they consumed at lunch. About halfway through the good stuff we came up on a Mazda Tribute (the mini-SUV) who obliviously didn’t get zoom-zoom memo. He was going around the turns so slow we could have passed him on a skateboard. With no place to really pass and with two cars to boot we played whip with him for about 20 miles, alternately slowing way down letting him get a “big” head start and then charging back at a more appropriate Miata speed.

Awesome trip, but a long day, so I’m glad we only do it once a year.

* Oh yeah, I made that leaf count statistic up so it would fit the car’s mileage.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 436