Crestone, Colorado

Posted on November 24, 2025 by admin

North America is vast and contains multitudes. There’s no doubt about it. How else to account for Crestone, Colorado?

Spiritual Travels tells the tale: At 7,500 feet in elevation and ringed on three sides by mountains, Crestone is both beautiful and isolated, subject to extremes of weather, wind, and temperature. It includes an amazing array of spiritual sites: more than two dozen ashrams, monasteries, temples, retreat centers, stupas, labyrinths, and other sacred landmarks. There’s even a ziggurat, a structure modeled on the temples of ancient Babylon.

Beautiful yes, but not so isolated these days: we drove in via two-lane, high-quality paved roads, Including, on the highway Colorado 17, past the UFO Watchtower, regrettably closed at that moment. I’d pay five bucks a head to take a look at that.

Crestone began as a mining town, as so many others did in Colorado. After the mines played out by the early 20th century, the area around the town was given over to ranching. That seems reasonable, considering its location in the sprawling San Luis Valley, though the town itself is hard up against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Spiritual Travels continues: Maurice Strong, a Canadian businessman and United Nations diplomat, and his wife, Hanne Marstrand Strong, purchased a large tract of land in the Crestone area [in the 1970s]. It had been subdivided for use as a retirement community, but the Strongs changed their plans for it after a wandering mystic told them that the land had unique spiritual qualities (a message echoed later by Native American elders).

So the Strongs decided to give free land to religious groups that agreed to establish centers there.

A wandering mystic told them? That’s an incident that could use a little more elaboration. Visiting Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses and even a weirdly masked devotee of Dahn Yoga have all come to my door, but I’ve yet to have any wandering mystics show up, at least along the lines of a sadhu or a strannik or a sufi. That I know of. Maybe one of those home repair outfits who are “doing work in your neighborhood” are really mystics, offering soul remodels.

We arrived in Crestone on September 14 after our visit to Great Sand Dunes NP. Mystical insight is one thing, but we were looking for a late lunch. The town itself isn’t large, with a permanent population of 140 or so, but I’m sure it expands and contracts. Such as during events like the Crestone Energy Fair. We added ourselves temporarily to the population during the tail end of that event on that Sunday afternoon.

We bought a few things at the town’s grocery store, Elephant Cloud Market – small and aiming at what Whole Foods might have been in its earliest days – and I asked the checkout clerk about the Energy Fair. As in renewable energy?

He looked a little puzzled for a moment. “Sure. But it’s more about psychic energy.”

So, wind turbines of the soul, geothermal from the heart. But I’d guess mindful yet small modular reactors wouldn’t be part of the discussion. I didn’t say that any of that, of course. I just said, “Oh.”

Next to the grocery store was a small eatery, the Cloud Station. We’d arrived just in time to order before closing: a couple of most delicious panini. While waiting for the order, I had time to study the rules.

Afterward, we spent time looking around the few streets of Crestone.

You never know what you’ll see. Enough reason to come.

Something not mentioned in the tourist literature: the Crestone Free Box. Leave stuff, pick up stuff, no medium of exchange involved.

I’d argue that in the widest interpretation of spirituality, and Crestone is pretty wide in that regard, the Crestone Free Box counts as a spiritual site. It is, after all, about freely giving of yourself to the wider world. Squint hard enough, and that fits.

As for the other spiritual sites, except for a handful of mainline Christian churches, most of them are not in the town of Crestone proper. Rather, the land grants inspired by that wandering mystic sprawl to the south of the town’s small street grid, along a warren-like network of roads up and down the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Range – mostly gravel roads, if our limited experience is any guide.

I had the idea that exurban Crestone was dotted with temples and shrines and other such places. But as we drove along, and especially as I studied the map, I came the realize that most of the establishments are retreats, such as Blazing Mountain Retreat Center, Chamma Ling, Crestone Mountain Zen Center, Crestone Retreat Center, Dharma Sangha, Dharma Ocean, Haidakhandi Universal Ashram, Shumei International Institute, Sri Aurobindo Learning Center, Vajra Vidya Retreat Center and Yeshe Khorlo USA. The sort of place that might briefly tolerate, but not really appreciate, casual visitors. More importantly for me, not the kind of religious – I mean, spiritual – sites that I tend to seek out.

I will say this for the area, facing as it does the Sangre de Cristo: wow. The Strongs picked a striking setting.

The Stupa of Enlightenment had the advantage of being not that far from town, besides not involving admission to a retreat.

Always good to visit a Tibetan stupa.

I wanted to see the Crestone Ziggurat, deep in the warren. I like a good ziggurat as much as the next guy, and they’re hard to come by in North America. But as we drove along, and up and down the twists, the road crunching and pinging our undercarriage with little stones and kicking up dust, I lost my enthusiasm to find it.

Visible for miles, the Crestone Ziggurat rises from a rocky hill on the southeast edge of the Baca Grande, notes Atlas Obscura. After purchasing the land in 1978, American businessman and father of Queen Noor of Jordan, Najeeb Halaby, commissioned the ziggurat as a private place for prayer and meditation.

Today, the ziggurat is open to the public. Visitors can climb the spiral ramp to the top, which offers stunning views of the surrounding area, making it a perfect spot for reflection and quiet contemplation. Visitors are encouraged to arrange rocks in a personal design at its base as a form of meditation and intention setting.

Note also that the twisty roads also serve a residential population, living in homes suitable (I hope) for a semiarid climate, with many properties xeriscaped to emphasize the point.

The religious – I mean, spiritual – sites of Crestone would take a full day at least to examine, considering the ground you need to cover. Who knows, I might be back. For now, I stand in admiration of the place. It’s easy to make fun of some of the New Age pretentions of the town, and sometimes I give in to that urge (and occasionally, of course, out-and-out cultists show up nearby). But no: Crestone represents fine threads added to the tapestry that is North America and an inspired bit of placemaking.

Alliance, Nebraska

Posted on November 20, 2025 by admin

The highway Nebraska 2 passes through the town of Alliance, as do the BNSF railroad tracks paralleling the highway. During my drive across the Sandhills, I saw train after train headed east from Alliance. Long trains, the seemingly endless sort, even though they’re going the opposite direction you are, so they’re passing by at your speed plus their speed: well over 100 mph probably.

Every single one was a coal train. The industry isn’t what it used to be, but it isn’t dead, and much extraction takes place in the Powder River Basin, with rail from there converging in Alliance and then heading to the markets in the east. For a fairly small place, Alliance (pop. 8,150 or so) has a large rail yard.

Back up a little further, and the region reveals clear signs of circle-pivot irrigation.

In ag terms, most production in Box Butte County – a favorite of mine among county names – is actually livestock, raised on non-irrigated grassland, which you can also see driving in. As for the irrigated places, that’s corn and wheat, with a smattering of alfalfa, beans, sunflowers and sugar beets. Somewhere up north is a rock formation called Box Butte, a name that I understand the railroads were using in promoting settlement this way, before it was ever official.

I didn’t come to town to learn all that, but I did later. Mainly I came to see Carhenge. The weather that day, September 7, was clear and very warm, which inspired some further looking around. First stop, Alliance Cemetery.

“Bury me in old Box Butte County.” There’s a western swing title in that.

Something I’d never seen on a gravestone before: Scooby-Doo.

Go figure. Maybe Richard “Red” Hardy is the one who wanted it on the stone, since he would have been almost 10 when that cartoon premiered (September 13, 1969), and that’s about the right age to get hooked on such a thing. Then again, I was eight — saw the first episode myself — and yet somehow I’ve remained immune to its charms.

As for the Huskers, I saw them on some other stones in this cemetery. Hardly the only example of fandom from the grave.

I’ve seen cowboy churches and I’ve seen cowboy graves.

The cemetery is east of downtown Alliance, but not that far away. The Box Butte County Courthouse is on Box Butte Ave.

Along with a number of other vintage buildings. Newberry’s Hardware Co., once upon a time, which seems to be 1888 and then maybe an enlargement in 1914? Looks like it needs an occupant.

The 1927 Fraternal Order of Eagles Building.

Slacker that I am, I didn’t take many detail shots, but one of this particular building is available (public domain) that shows how seriously the local FOE took its eagles about 100 years ago.

Hardware Hank is a hardware cooperative. New to me, but that only means I need to get out more.

More murals.

Rhoads’ was a local department store. Gone but not forgotten, at least if you read the mural, which looks refurbished recently. The tag at the bottom says it was a gift of the Alliance High School Class of 1962.

An art deco theater. Nice.

A really cheap way to advertise.

You never know when (and where) Dali will show up. Enigmatic fellow.

And who is poor Jerry?

Antique shop within? A simple desultory Google search doesn’t reveal much. Street View puts the sign’s appearance between 2007 and 2012 (Google didn’t come that much to Alliance.) Even the Library of Congress wants to know.

I found lunch in Alliance that day at Golden Hour Barbecue, which promised (and provided) Texas-style ‘cue. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Same league as Salt Lick, though a little expensive, considering how close the cattle are. Then again, everything seems expensive these days, and it was such a large lunch that I barely needed to eat that evening in my room in Scottsbluff, so that mitigated the upfront cost.

Before heading to the big rocks near Scottsbluff on the morning of the 8th, I took a look around that town as well.

Can’t have too many art deco theaters. When I’ve done image searches for Scottsbluff, the Midwest theater comes up often as not.

A car to match. At least that morning.

Another former small department store, now private offices.

Just outside Scottsbluff is a single grave.

The grave of Rebecca Burdick Winters (d. 1852) She died a faithful Latter-Day Saint, her stone says, on her way to Utah. Officially, it is Rebecca Winters Memorial Park.

“Seven miles northeast of Scotts Bluff National Monument lies a solitary grave,” says Find a Grave. “This site marks the final resting place of Rebecca Winters, who died of cholera on August 15, 1852. Rebecca was only one of thousands of people who succumbed to disease as they made their way west on the overland trails, but her grave is one of only a few that remains identifiable today.”

Prospect Park Ramble ’25

Posted on November 4, 2025 by admin

Put this in the Those Were Different Times file: “In the early evening, I made it to the beginning of the National Association of Real Estate Editors convention. I mentioned to some colleagues of mine, who happened to be Manhattanites, that I’d spent part of the afternoon in Prospect Park — you know, in Brooklyn. Judging by their reaction, I might as well have said that I’d popped over to Outer Mongolia for a quick visit.”

I wrote that my June 2002 visit to New York included, as mentioned, time in Prospect Park. It is every bit a great park as Central Park, and I knew I wanted to return someday for a longer walk. After lunch in Chinatown in Manhattan on October 19, that’s what Yuriko and I decided to do. We took the subway to the Prospect Park station on the east side of the park, and began our wander.

Near that entrance was the Diwali Festival of Bites.

Despite the name, the food tents had a large international variety for sale, not just Indian food. Not important for us anyway, since we’d just eaten.

We headed deeper into the park. Maybe it was a matter of species choice, but there seemed to be more coloration than in Central Park the day before.

The handsome Prospect Park Boathouse.

A popular setting for weddings, and in fact one was taking place when we visited. Two women were exchanging vows.

The Prospect Park Waterfall.

Not a vast torrent, but a pleasant gurgling. It is a slice of the park’s interior waterways. Prospect Park’s watercourse is a beautiful collection of waterfalls, pools, streams and a 60-acre Lake, and is one of the shining achievements of Park designers Olmsted and Vaux’s design, says the Prospect Park Alliance.

The deeper in, the fewer people.

So few, sometimes, to almost make you forget you’re in a metro surrounded by about 20 million people.

But not for long.

Dog walkers and their tethered dogs roamed the park in numbers. Some come to the Prospect Park Dog Beach.

I wasn’t exactly sure where I’d been in 2002, but near the northern edge of the park, we came across what was probably the field, the sort of mildly rolling terrain, open short grassland ringed by wooded areas, that exists throughout the park. A summer Saturday in these fields draws a crowd, but a generally cheerful one, playing volleyball, attending to grills, picnicking, throwing frisbees or just lying around. An autumn Sunday is a little less active.

Fall has a more scattered vibe, but no less congenial than summer to the thinned out crowd.

Kenosha Walkabout, Featuring Franks’ Diner & Simmons Memorial Library

Posted on August 27, 2025 by admin

Always good to see their beaming faces.

The poster is on a window at Franks’ Diner, formerly an exterior window, but with an expansion of the diner many years ago, now facing the added section, where Ann and I had lunch on a late July Friday. Kenosha, home of Franks’, was another stop in our recent rambles around southeastern Wisconsin.

Finding Franks’ Diner was no serendipity. We’d been there, back in 2012. The Stooges, back in 1946. I’ll bet they were playing the nearby Kenosha Theater, which is still standing, but in need of restoration.

Not only is the 99-year-old Franks’ still there, it’s still dishing up dandy diner fare at popular prices. Back then, I wrote:

The place had that diner smell: eggs and meats and hash browns and coffee. It also had that diner sound: the murmur of conversation, workers calling to each other, silverware scraping plates, metal clinking metal, the hiss of the griddle.

It was packed. A row of people sat at the counter, while others were at booths in the small room added to the counter room. A line of people waited for their seats in a long row behind the people at the counter.

That’s exactly the same as our July visit, except that people waited outside, since it was summer instead of winter and (of course) prices were higher. Once seated, I had the Garbage Plate. I’d skipped it last time, and I wasn’t about to miss it this time around.

2012: The star of the show is its Garbage Plate, a concoction of hash-brown potatoes, eggs, green peppers, onions, jalapeños (if you want them), and a choice of three or fewer meats (or including no meat). The thing is seriously large. The standard Garbage Plate has five eggs.

The restaurant also supplies some reading material.

After lunch, we went a few blocks away and parked the car in the shade of large trees in Library Park. Ann waited in the car with the windows down – it was very warm, but not too warm for a few minutes of that – while I wandered around the immediate area, including a couple of streets of storefront retail in vintage structures.

Houses across the street from where we parked.

The nearby St. Matthews Episcopal Church.

The inevitable welcome mural. The 1970 Gremlin is an unusual touch. But they were made in Kenosha, so not that unusual.

At the edge of the park, a seated Lincoln. Sculptor Charles Niehaus (d. 1935) did the work. Just one of many that he did all over the place. The president has been sitting there since 1909, centennial of his birth, with restoration work done in more recent decades.

Nearby in the park, Kenosha’s Civil War memorial, called “Winged Victory” on electronic maps, a name that gets right to the point.

It’s Library Park because of the Gilbert M. Simmons Memorial Library, a branch of the Kenosha Public Library system, dominating its side of the park. It has a little more heft than most municipal branch libraries.

When it opened in 1900, the building formed Kenosha’s main library. Daniel Burnham designed it.

The Civil War veterans have their memorial outside. Great War vets are honored inside the library.

We’d happened on the Library Park Historic District, surrounding Library Park. The park itself goes back to the early years of Kenosha, when the land was a New England–style town commons. Forty-two properties, built from 1843 to 1930, form the district. A diner and an historic district: just the thing for a warm summer day stroll.

Downtown Waukesha

Posted on August 24, 2025 by admin

The other day I wondered how long it would take to count a million dollars’ worth of nickels and dimes a million times. That’s one of the dream images from “Minnie the Moocher.” Not just a dream, but an opium dream. After all, no sooner does Minnie learn to kick the gong around, does a vivid dream of wealth begin, all shiny and metallic, ending with:

She had a million dollars worth of nickels and dimes

And sat around and counted them all a million times

Let’s say half the dollar value is nickels, half dimes. That would be 5 million dimes and 10 million nickels. So 15 million individual coins. Let’s also say it takes a second to count each, just to keep it simple. That would be 15 million seconds, or 0.475 years (roughly, I shaved off a few places). Counting them a million times would thus be (roughly) 475,000 years.

Of course, if it’s an opium dream, the niceties of time and such don’t apply. Still, it sounds like a hellish task of a Sisyphean kind. But maybe it would be a heavenly task, if you have no sense of the passage of time.

I didn’t sit down to figure all that out until I was at my desk, but the question came out of nowhere during a short interstate drive just before the end of July, up in the southeast corner of Wisconsin. One destination that day, a Sunday, was downtown Waukesha, an outer suburb of Milwaukee, but a place with a distinct history of its own, where people came to take the waters once upon a time.

We spent some time near the five-pointed intersection of Main, Broadway and Grand, focal point of a handsome streetscape.

Now this is a set of buildings.

The Almont Building, whose original name was the Robinson Block.

“The core of the downtown, prior to 1856, consisted of freestanding wooden frame buildings, but a new era began after a massive fire nearly destroyed this northern section of Main Street,” the Waukesha County Historical Society & Museum says. “The Robinson Block was built in 1857 with fireproofing in mind and is the first Five Points building to use Waukesha limestone.”

The Nickell Building, as it looked recently, and long ago.

“Built by Addison J. Nickell, local businessman and jeweler, the first floor housed the U.S. Post Office from 1902-1914,” notes the WCHS&M. “The work of Waukesha architect C.C. Anderson, this Queen Anne displays a projecting oriel and corner turret capped by a domed roof: both are covered by pressed metal.”

Being mid-day, one bit of business to take care of: lunch. We soon found the friendly joint called Joey’s Diner.

Joey likes Betty.

Joey’s is next to an Italian restaurant, similarly casual, that I think was owned by the same fellow. He was everywhere at once all the time — running a restaurant is nothing if not busy, and he seemed to be running two — but toward the end of our meal, asked how it was. I answered enthusiastically to the positive about my simple but also delicious hamburger. He responded by giving us a slice of chocolate cake, on the house. Thanks, Joey.

The street has other (many other) examples of places found here and nowhere else.

Been a while since I’d seen a joke shop. Closed.

The last one might have been Uncle Fun in Chicago, which closed some years ago. Too bad about that, but at least Jest For Fun Joke Shop, which has been at this Waukesha location more than 40 years, is keeping the retail tradition alive.

Rockville, Indiana

Posted on August 19, 2025 by admin

Now I’ve seen it: the grave of Batman.

George W. Batman, that is, who died in 1897, so he never lived to see his surname put to the other uses we all know so well. Variants of his name include Bateman, Battman and Baitman, meaning that Batman really isn’t that odd. Except it does look odd on that large stone, but only because of recent conditioning by a particularly successful fictional character. George W. happens to repose at Rockville Cemetery in Rockville, Indiana, and I happened to visit early one Sunday morning in late July.

A pleasant graveyard, founded in 1824 — same year as the town itself — and well marked by upright stones, but not overly landscaped.

A few memorials reach upward, but not that far.

A few mausoleums denote formerly big fish in the small pond that is Rockville, seat of Parke County.

Mostly modest stones populate the cemetery, presumably for regular folks of the past.

It isn’t too often that you see veterans of the War of 1812 (but not never).

Numerically speaking, there just weren’t that many compared to later, greater wars, and probably many of their graves aren’t marked as such. Nathan was near the other Adamsons, and indeed two of them (per Find-A-Grave) are his children.

Not too many blocks from the cemetery is the Parke County Courthouse. We encountered it on Saturday afternoon, soon after arriving in Rockville (pop. about 2,600), when temps were about as high as they would be that day. Sweaty 90s.

The courthouse is a grand Second Empire pile with some Beaux Arts added to the mix, completed in 1882, during the golden age of U.S. courthouses. Designed by T.J. and Brentwood Tolan, a father and son team. They did a lot of courthouses.

The giant dartboard isn’t something you see too often on courthouse grounds. Could it be the Dartboard of Justice? That’s how sentencing is done for crimes that call for one to 20 years in the jug; a toss by the judge, or the jury foreman.

No, a small street festival was being set up at that moment, though not up and running yet. It was too hot for that anyway. But not for a quick look at some of the buildings ringing the courthouse, most in good shape and mostly tenanted.

G&M Variety has the soul of a five-and-dime, but a more accurate classification these days would be a five-and-ten dollar store: a step above a dollar store, the love child of a convenience store and a standard grocery store, with a souvenir shop added to the mix. Roaming around its aisles was pleasant, for a look at the sometimes unusual merchandise, and the AC.

Drinks on sale that made me recollect sodas from my mid-60s childhood.

Frostie! Nehi! Triple XXX! Dang? We didn’t have Dang. Butterscotch root beer?

Pangs of nostalgia weren’t enough for me to spend $2.49 for an ordinary-sized soda, though I was a little thirsty.

More courthouse square.

The Old Jail Inn & Drunk Tank, now a B&B.

I returned to the square on Sunday morning, after the cemetery, for a further look when it wasn’t so hot.

Memorial Presbyterian Church and its freestanding bell tower.

It isn’t a Presbyterian church any more — its cross conspicuous in its absence — though a Presbyterian congregation meets there sometimes. These days it counts as an event space, with music performances, recitals, meetings, and other gatherings there, according to Billie Creek Village, more about which later.

Next to the former church.

Museum? I’m a little skeptical.

Southern Road Food ’25

Posted on August 12, 2025 by admin

I’m no Guy Fieri, but I don’t really need to be to find road food. Besides, he has a staff. I just have Google Maps and my experience and instincts, which sometimes fail me, but more often guide me to cheap, local and delicious. That and word-of-mouth recommendations have led me to a lot of tasty dishes over the years.

On my recent Southern jaunt, I arrived in Sumter, SC, around lunchtime, and found my way to Korner Shack II. Not that you could tell the name from the sign over the cinder block shack.

I’d happened on a Southern chicken joint, true to that tradition, take out only, and during the few minutes I waited for my order as people came and went — for it was a popular place — I noted I was the palest customer. I ordered a box of chicken livers and fries that I ate partly in a nearby park, and partly in my room that evening. Mildly spiced and well fried, the boxed livers reminded me of the satisfying livers that a Chicago-area Harold’s Chicken would serve. Korner Shack sold me one of the best meals of the trip.

Back in Myrtle Beach, Yuriko and I breakfasted one morning at Winna’s Kitchen, who offers patrons some sunny advice on the wall.

That, and really good food. I had the Whistler – “crispy sausage or bacon, sharp coastal cheddar, a fried egg & lemony-dressed arugula on a homemade bun,” the menu said. With a side of grits.

Superb. Even the buttery grits. At home I usually douse my grits with honey, but butter will do. Experience has taught me that restaurants aren’t always good with grits, but when they are, they can be really good. Winna’s served up some of those really good grits, complementing its really good breakfast sando, though not quite as memorable as the cheese grits I enjoyed at a place in Mexico Beach, Florida, that I believe was washed away by a hurricane some years after I visited in the 2000s.

Also in Myrtle Beach: seafood in bulk.

Not the best I’ve ever had, and a little expensive, but satisfying – especially Yuriko’s desire for seafood during a visit anywhere near the sea, true to her Japanese upbringing.

Didn’t have barbecue in MB, but I liked this sign.

Didn’t eat here either. Call it Schrödinger’s restaurant.

I found barbecue in Georgia. Specifically, Dahlonega. North Georgia Barbecue Co. is a stone’s throw from the Gold Museum and its best advertisement is out front of the restaurant. Good eats inside.

While it’s well and good to support local joints, I’m not a snob when it comes to fast food on the road. Otherwise, how would I know the joy of Mos Burger or have experience with how different cultures interpret something as distinctively American as fast food?

Not long after arriving in Athens, Ga., I spotted a place I associate with Texas. I took a drive-thru order back to the room.

I checked, and the large majority of Whataburger locations are indeed in Texas, but there are others in 16 other states, including 35 in Georgia.

Finally, an old friend among Nashville places: Brown’s Diner.

My friends Stephanie and Wendall treated me to a wonderful homemade meal at their house, so later I treated them to a meal at Brown’s, deep in the heart of Nashville. It is a storied place nearly 100 years old, though expanded since I knew it. I enjoyed a fair number of burgers at Brown’s in the 1980s, but not since, and was a little surprised that it has survived to the present, but glad. I had a Brown’s burger and it all came back to me; and I understood the joint’s longevity.

Tryon Palace

Posted on July 20, 2025 by admin

Talk much about colonial North Carolina and Blackbeard is going to come up – at least when talking with my old friend Dan, who had a fascination with the buccaneer even back in college. An artful storyteller, which surely helped him in his former career as an ad man, Dan can regale you with Blackbeard stories, detailing his short but colorful pirate career, including the fiery display he made of his person to scare onlookers witless. A pirate needs to be known for more than mere thievery on the high seas.

“In battle [Edward] Teach would have a sling over his shoulders that held at least three flintlock pistols and would often stick lit matches under his hat to give a smokey and fearsome appearance,” the Golden Age of Pirates explains, though without the Dan’s storytelling gusto, illustrating Blackbeard’s pyrotechnical flair with gestures all his own.

Dan and his wife Pam recently moved to New Bern, NC, very near Blackbeard’s haunts, including the site of his swashbuckler’s death in action off Okracoke Island. I don’t believe their retirement move from Alabama was to be near Blackbeard, but it certainly couldn’t have hurt during site selection. On the first evening of my visit to New Bern, Dan and I spent had a fine time out on his deck, perched near a small inlet ultimately connected to the wider ocean, watching the stars slowly emerge and talking of old times and newer things but not, at that moment, about Blackbeard.

That was the next day, as we toured Tryon Palace, even though the original structure was built many decades after Blackbeard’s newly severed head wound up tied to the bowsprit of the sloop Jane, put there by pirate hunter Robert Maynard. One colonial subject leads to another.

Tryon Palace is crown jewel of historic sites in New Bern, except that it’s actually a recreation of the 20th century. Somehow that doesn’t take away from its historic appeal.

When you stand in front of it, you’re peering not only back to 1770, when the colonial government of North Carolina completed, at great expense, a structure that looked like this one. You’re also looking at a building completed within living memory, in 1959, which is considered a faithful restoration of the one that NC Gov. William Tryon had erected.

“When the colonial Assembly convened in [New Bern] on 8 Nov. 1766, Tryon presented a request for an appropriation with which to construct a grand building that would serve as the house of colonial government as well as the governor’s residence,” says the Encyclopedia of North Carolina.

“Less than a month later, the Assembly acceded to the governor’s wishes by earmarking £5,000 for the purchase of land and the commencement of construction. The appropriated sum was borrowed from a fund that had been established for the construction of public schools. To replenish the depleted school fund, a poll tax and a levy on alcoholic beverages were imposed.”

Just about the worst kind of taxes when it came to irritating the non-coastal non-elites of the colony, a discontent that eventually erupted as the Regulator Rebellion. Ultimately Gov. Tryon, in personal command of the colony’s militia, crushed the Regulators – untrained men who seem to have been foolish enough to meet Tryon’s trained men in an open field at the Battle of Alamance in 1771. (Which isn’t entirely forgotten.)

We took an early afternoon tour of Tryon Palace, guided by a woman in period costume. She told us about Tryon – no mention of Alamance, however – and his successor, Josiah Martin, the only other royal governor to use the palace. Gov. Martin spent more on furnishing the place, only to be obliged to skedaddle come the Revolution. We also heard about architect and master builder John Hawks (d. 1790), who came to North Carolina from England to build the palace which, of course, is only a palace by canebrake standards of the colony. It is a stately manor house, however.

The colonial legislature and the new state legislature both used the palace for a while, so it counts as the first capitol of North Carolina. That meant I was visiting yet another state capitol, without realizing it at first. A former capitol, that is, including ones I’ve seen in Illinois, Texas (counting Washington-on-the-Brazos as such), Virginia, Florida and Iowa. Abandoned as a government building after the NC capital left New Bern, fire consumed most of Tryon Palace just before the end of the 18th century. Its west wing survived for other uses over the next century-plus.

In the 20th century, along came Maude Moore Latham, a wealthy local woman with a taste for historic restoration. If much of colonial Williamsburg up in Virginia could be restored, so could colonial New Bern in North Carolina. Despite the fact that a road and houses had been built on the site of old Tryon Palace, she eventually facilitated the restoration, made possible (or at least more accurate) by the fact that John Hawks’ plans for the building had survived.

Also restored: The gardens of Tryon Palace, flower and vegetable. Despite the heat, we couldn’t miss that.

After our sweaty visit to the palace and gardens, Dan and I repaired to the restaurant in the nearby North Carolina History Center, called Lawson’s On The Creek, for refreshing beverages and more talk of Blackbeard and many other things. We closed the joint down over beer, at 4 p.m.

Downing a beer was just the thing. That was our homage to those days of yore. In colonial America, beer was no mere refreshing beverage, but an essential one.

RTW ’25 Leftovers

Posted on June 12, 2025 by admin

Summertime, and the living’s not bad. Pretty good, really. But those aren’t as catchy as the actual lyric. Time to pause posting for the summer holiday string: Flag Day, Juneteenth, Canada Day, Independence Day and Nunavut Day. Come to think of it, that’s an exceptionally representative run of holidays for North America. Back around July 13.

The flight from Chicago to Tokyo took us far north, as that flight path usually does. There was more light than I thought there would be, looking down at this moment on the February snows of the Yukon or Alaska; I’ll never know which. I could have been eying the border, for all I know, which suggests that borders are a gossamer fiction at these latitudes.

Japan

It was a happy moment when we ate at Mos Burger. One of these days, I’m going to dig out my paper copy of an article I wrote for Kansai Time Out in 1993 about four varieties of Western-style fast food chains founded in Japan, and post it. Today isn’t that day. But I can say that Mos Burger was the best of them.

As good as I remember it from 25+ years ago, the last time I went to one.

In Enoshima, near the ocean, this fellow hawks soft serve ice cream. Goo goo g’joob. Look but don’t touch.

The handsome Osaka City Central Public Hall, completed in 1918. Amazing that it survived the war and urban renewal 20 years later, those forces that generally gave modern urban Japan the boxy concrete character it enjoys today.

India

A monumental monument in New Delhi: India Gate, which honors more than 74,100 soldiers of the Indian Army who died during the Great War, and a number more in the Third Afghan War a few years later. They did their part. One of the larger relics of the Raj, unless you count things better described as legacies, such as railroad lines, parliamentary government, and the bitter feud between India and Pakistan.

While we were looking at India Gate, a group of about a dozen uniformed schoolboys, who had detached themselves from a larger group, approached me and asked where I was from. They were gleeful to hear “America,” a reaction I didn’t know anyone would have anymore, but I suppose they’ve seen a lot of our movies. A middle-aged male chaperon appeared in short order and shooed them away, while giving me a sidelong glance with a hairy eyeball, though I hadn’t precipitated the encounter in any way. I was just a suspicious foreigner, I guess.

The Taj Mahal has a fair amount of parkland around it. That means a population of monkeys, too. I spotted more monkeys in urban India than I would have anticipated. These didn’t seem to be bothered by the men, the dogs or the motorcycle.

On display at the Ghandi Museum: a Marconigram. I don’t know that I’d ever seen one of those before. Or maybe there was one on display at the Titanic Museum in Branson. Anyway, that’s one good reason to go to museums: for things once common, now curiosities. Safia Zaghloul was an Egyptian political activist of the time.

United Arab Emirates

In Dubai it seemed like there were more men at work sweeping, mopping and other cleaning of floors and other flat places, per square meter, than anywhere else I’ve ever been. There are worse things to do with cheap labor.

Not sure exactly where this was, except somewhere out on Palm Jumeirah. Must have been a wall, or like a wall, in one of the posh retail corridors winding through one of the posh resort properties amid the poshness of the island.

Note: White on green is common indeed around the world.

Desert flowers. Of course, sprinklers water that bit of terrain at regular intervals.

Germany

What’s Berlin without currywurst? They say it came into style soon after the city was divided.

What would Germany be without Ritter Sport? A giant stack of them can be seen, in their great variety, at the Hauptbahnhof in Berlin. Later, I bought about 10 squares of RS at a discount price at a Netto grocery store near our hotel. Think Aldi or Lidl, but more cluttered.

Views of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, near the Tiergarten in Berlin. It wasn’t there in 1983.

Czech Republic

Not calling it Czechia. Or, if it ever comes to it, not calling India Bharat, either.

St. George’s Basilica. I admired the nearby St. Vitus Cathedral. That’s a grand edifice. But St. George’s has that human scale, and echoes of an even earlier time. It was completed during the time of Good King Wenceslaus.

Vladislav Hall. The site of centuries of Bohemian parties, banquets and balls, me boys. That and affairs of state.

The Dancing House. We rode a streetcar line out of our way to see it, though not that far. It wasn’t there in 1994.

A sidewalk golem in the old Jewish Quarter of Prague. The Sidewalk Golems was a relatively obscure band who sometimes toured with Irwin Hepplewhite and the Terrifying Papoose Jockeys.

This could have been over Spain or Portugal.

The last image of thousands that I took, a staggering number in any context except digital images that take practically no time or effort to make.

Japanese Food

Posted on June 2, 2025 by admin

Take a pork cutlet, a nice thin one but not too thin, dredge a bit in flour, dip in beaten egg, coat with panko, and deep fry in light oil. Serve sliced so that the pieces are easier to manage with chopsticks, and with a brown Worcestershire-y sauce (but better, I think). Add a bed of lettuce, and sides of rice, miso and Japanese pickles.

A modest dish, but there’s nothing quite like a good tonkatsu. It is an example of salaryman food. Of course, other people eat it – a lot in my case, since the happy day sometime in 1990 when I had it for the first time. But in the lunchtime domain of male office workers in dense Osaka, the Kitchen of Japan, tonkatsu is a familiar regular (and in other parts of the country, too). They are little works of fragrant and delicious art whose purpose is to be eaten for the pocket money that their wives allow them for lunches.

Naturally, I sought it out during my recent days in Japan. This one is before the application of sauce. It’s the legacy of a Japanese adaptation of a European, specifically French dish, back in the 19th century. A detail from the Meiji era.

Another popular adaptation in Japan, spotted among the office towers near Osaka Castle. Doughnuts have long had a home in Japan.

Yes. It was time.

Another day, during a solo wander in the streets near Midosuji Blvd., I took rest at a small coffee shop, part of a large chain.

Doutor Coffee has some 1,200 locations in East Asia, with a concentration of 900 or so in Japan and others in Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore. I expect most of them are franchised locations, and many are along underground pedestrian ways near subways or train stations. Mine was so close to a subway station entrance, you could hear the soft beeping of the electronic tickets and the slightly louder clank of the turnstiles if you decided to pay attention.

Mostly, the place was quiet, with people setting themselves in front of their laptops or fiddling with their phones. I joined the laptop users, pecking out emails or parts of whatever article was due next.

Considering the strong dollar (in February, anyway), the tab for milk tea and a warm chocolate croissant came in less than double digits in US dollar terms. But a refreshing beverage and a tasty snack are only part of the deal: you’re also renting a place to sit.

But not a place to smoke anymore. I was a little surprised, considering how consistently tobacco smoke used to linger, or sometimes billow and swirl, in public spaces in Japan 30+ years ago. That shift oddly reminded me of visits to Preservation Hall in 1981 and 1989 (minus the jazz, of course). The first time, the jazzmen played in a room lightly clouded with smoke. Eight years later, the air was clear.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Food & Beverage