wender bender: Sep 10, 2010

up and out of the euro motel 6, we need to push across the border and make it to buffalo tonight … and have a couple of things to do along the way.

we stop by a local pasta place. i get a whole wheat penne carbonara, my accomplice gets a chicken parmesan sandwich with a caesar salad; both washed with bottled soda because we can.

we're closer to the border than i realize and i actually have to scramble to get my passport. a few surly questions from the border patrol (who is clearly not impressed, nor happy, about the fact i've driven around lake ontario – and then heading out) and i'm welcomed back to america.

i'm writing this on a jetblue flight, so i can't go back and look at my older posts, please forgive me if i've mentioned this before … one of the nice tricks we've done here is the owners manual is still in the car, so as soon as we hit canada i was able to switch all the gauges over to metric … at the same time i switched the GPS over as well, so the distances and timings have all been clock-perfect against the canadian national signs … as soon as i cross the border i switch 'em back. fairly easy. really nice.

even though we're driving a land shark of a car, we've managed to not burn a whole tank and roll into the nearest station on fumes. we pay a touch over $3/gallon instead of the nearly $5 that it would have been in canuckland.

one of our reasons for circumnavigating the lake – maybe the reason – is to see the thousand islands. but when we pull into the nearest tourist stop to do so, it's clear that things have already ramped down for the shoulder season. the next tour doesn't launch for a few hours and we've got tons of things to do … so we skip it ... the very nature of all you can jet isn't to fret your failures -- it's to look forward to the next success ... and there's a lot left to do today.

we head into rochester, NY to see the strong museum of play.

a place that was started by a woman who was a rich kid … when she'd travel with her parents, she was allowed to fill one shopping bag with stuff, so she learned early-on to get small toys … these items became the backbone of place that's half toy museum, half exploratorium.

we played some games, looked around and burned a couple of hours. mr. crypto would be pleased knowing that i nominated the magic 8-ball to the toy hall of fame – in his name.

there's one activity with a double-sided velcro board. the idea is to build a design on one side and then describe it to the person on the other to have them duplicate it.

my accomplice built-and-described first …

i did my attempt in response ….

and when we compared, it was only then that we realized that our sets weren't exactly the same (one purple parallelogram is a mirror image on the two boards).

we did the experiment again. this time i built and described …

and this is my accomplice's attempt at re-creation.

NOW YOU TELL ME WHO THE WORLD'S GREATEST EXPLAINER IS. (and they said my math degree would never get any use … please.)

they also had a great little garden outside. of course i'm a huge sucker for flowers, so i had to burn a few pixels.

it's late enough for food (as if it's ever too early) and we happen to be stepping into a hotbed of local dishes:

the garbage plate. a conglomeration with beans, potato salad and hash browns on the bottom. a cheeseburger and hot dog slathered with mustard in the middle. and what i think they term “sauce” on the top.
fish fry. this is that catholic-induced thing that some east coast cities have. to a westie it would be indistinguishable from fish and chips.
buffalo wings. those crappy little things that only a godforsaken part of the world could think of to be proud of.

we're going to knock off the plate and the fry simultaneously, but our restaurant choice has been economically down-turned (as have a shocking amount of this area).

{oh god, i'm listening to XM on my jetblue flight and they're playing stevie wonder covering “blowin' in the wind.” i have a lot of time and respect for stevie wonder – i even met him once – but this song is beyond terrible. fortunately i'm able to wash it down with an extended version of the brothers johnson “get the funk outta ma face."}

by sheer chance we drove past nick tahou's the place that invented the garbage plate – so we'll just go to the rich man's first place choice. when we pull up, the place is desolate, weird and rust-industrial enough that i leave the keys with my accomplice in the car and lock it as i exit. i want to make sure that: A) this is the right place and B) i come out alive. for anyone who doesn't know me, i'm not a guy who scares easily, if at all, so that should give you an idea of how gnarly i perceive this place to be. my last words, “if you don't see me in three minutes, drive away from here immediately. then call 911.”

but i take a step in and can see that it's the right place. and it's still scary. like blues brothers scary. my accomplice nailed it and i would just steal the phrase, but it's so good i can't without attribution:

bus station scary

and even though the woman working the place looks like she was a fight-extra for “coal miner's daughter,” she's super-nice. “we're here for a garbage plate. we've never had one. tell us what we want.”

“oh, darlin', you want a combo plate.” i ask for macaroni salad instead of potato salad and no beans. she fussed none and was so upset that she couldn't conjure a cook that she stepped back into the kitchen (actually crossed the magic line separating the register from everything else) and made us the plate herself.

it's a gigantic amount of food. splitting this is easily enough food for two people. the “sauce” on the top tastes strikingly close to the “chili” used in the ohio joints.

i go back to the bad-bad-greyhound quality bathroom and notice that the lottery vending machine at the end of the room still has two credits on it.

hell ya. gimme two quick picks and ten million bucks. i move so quickly and naturally by the machine that i'm certain no one in the joint even saw me do anything there.

back at the table the food is weird. i know this is going to sound like an insult, but it's the only way i think i can describe the taste accurately. now, before you read this, you have to remember that i was a guy who ate only one food at a time on my plate until i was about 25 … so the idea of mix/match in the food world is not my native taste environment. remember that as you read this (and my accomplice has never heard me say this before, so this will be news):

it tasted like vomit.

but in a good way, or i guess in the best possible vomit way. no stomach acid and nothing in there that was poisoning you. so tasty vomit. think about the last time you threw up after eating anything that had potatoes in it. okay, now think about how that would taste coming back up if it was really good – like the best possible vomit. it tasted like that.

i got a re-fill on ice tea.

“how do you like it?” the proprietess/mine worker asks.

me: “it's a full-on assault.”

she nods in complete understanding. “i know. it is good.”

i tip her a dollar. it's really really important to reinforce behavior you like from the rest of humanity. if you do it often enough, eventually the entire world does what you want.

we finish the garbage plate, but we're not done with eating for the night. we track down our third choice for fish fry and get a piece of unbelievably crappy haddock and yet more macaroni salad.

if there's anything living in the bay area for 20 years did to me, it was make me fussy about the fish i eat – but even as an eight year old kid in denver, i would have considered this far less than half assed.

it's getting late, as we roll into buffalo. the anchor bar isn't the best place to get wings, but it is the place that invented them, so we go there.

even at 22:00 they're jammed, but there's first-come space open near the bar.

in the name of not weighing more than 200 pounds due to eating nothing more than crap, i make the smallest order possible – six wings (which in buffalo, apparently means “seven”), medium hot.

the wings are actually really good. best thing of the unholy food trinity this evening -- but let's be honest, the competition hasn't been that stiff.

we go cross town and check into the millenium. they've got a gym (which is actually a bunch of barely functional equipment) and sex-segregated saunas (which are probably actually murder sites) buried in the corner of every-swingers-room-looks-out-on-the-jungle set-up. for $40 for a night, and spitting distance from the airport, it's just fine.

i sweat by force, then sweat by choice, and crash. denver tomorrow. early.

goddamn early.

miscellaneous pix of the day