Motorized ice chests: Part II

Turns out that motorized ice chests, previously given only cursory mention in this blog, can have a useful application:


Unfortunately, it can also have unfortunate consequences: a DUI ticket. And not just in Australia.

So think carefully about where and how you'll operate it before spending between $349 and $1,399 on a Cruzin Cooler.

Leaving New York, yeah...

Yep, evacuating. Seems like a good call. Delta gave one freebie change, and I booked direct to ATL, totally spacing that I could have gone to CT/VT to join J and out niece and nephew to camp and hike.

Detailed photos of the WALK IN to JFK coming soon!

MoMA

Much Madness. Ok, neat museum, it was free for me, but it's a horrific visitor experience. It's jam packed with people taking pictures of random shit, who have no ability or willingness to share space courteously and/intelligently.

At least I took a picture of something good.

Ok, so...

Tasters for a buck. Ok. But tasters for a buck that come in a tiny portion cup? Not ok. J Ryan's: you saddened me.

OK:

Syracuse has its charms. The Erie Canal Museum is actually excellent. Small, but well done.

And right across the street is  J Ryan's , and excellent beer bar with a lovely outdoor patio. Sure, the interstate looms overhead, but it's pretty cool to drink a beer on what literally used to be the Erie Canal.

All the better that that beer is a $4 cask Middle Ages Druid Fluid Barleywine. Say whaaaat? Better get my cheap beer in before I get to NYC tomorrow.

 Middle Ages Druid Fluid Barleywine 

vegan food porn, upstate New York style!

This is the Spicy Tofu Scramble at Strong Hearts Cafe, just down the street from my hotel in Syracuse. The scramble was good, not amazing, the toast came out dry (but fortunately they have a cruet of olive oil handy), and the coffee bordered on bad. I think it was instant: it had that consistency weirdness going on, and lots of semi-tasteless sludge at the bottom. But I'll absolutely return: $6 for a tofu scramble? Cheap, good enough, and I like to support 100% vegan restaurants.

Wow, Syracuse is... kinda boring. I'm actually struggling to fill up the one full day I have here. I think I'm going to go over to the Erie Canal Museum. Yeah. Like, for real.

Fortunately central New York has a pretty solid regional beer scene, so drinking is a real option.

I visited "The 'Cuse" a number of times in the late 90s and early 00s, since E2 went to school here, but we always had a little routine of places to go, and I never had to much think about how to pass a day. Sometime today I'll probably hit up an old favorite, Empire Brewing. Had a nice vegan sandwich last night at Sparky Town, which had RIDICULOUSLY nice people working there. Actually, on balance, the average central New Yorker resident seems to be quite nice.

Tomorrow is a court hearing (not appearance) in a SYR suburb, then flying to JFK.

Vegas airport, redux

Ok, the  Las Vegas airport still sucks, but I have to be fair and update a couple things. The shitty annoying airtrain is only necessary if you're going to D terminal. It's still stupid.

The food options throughout D still suck, but there are two known vegan options: the Baja Fresh Express, and for almost double the price for about half the food, the vegan wrap at Burke in the Box.

The beer is still wildly overpriced, but they do sell it in bigass mugs.

It's oddly slow in the airport tonight. Guess Thursdays when it's 103 aren't big.

Walking out of airports: Vegas edition, baby!

My feelings about the  Las Vegas airport are known, but no airport is too terrible to walk out of , right?

Well, there might be a better way here, but I just walked to the "Zero Level" (fancy code for ground level) of the parking deck, then across the employee parking lot, through a drainage ditch, over a low wall, across a busy road, over another low wall, across another busy road, and BAM: I was on Russell Road heading east toward Maryland Parkway (which, conveniently, is the road UNLV is on.)

The bulk of the walk was quite pleasant, in the high 90s with intense sun.

I'm thinking about other routes for my return walk this evening.

vegan food porn, grill style

So, here's the thing: in condos in the City of Atlanta, you can't have propane grills (or any other open flame) on your balcony. And when you live in a complex with a ton of other units, using the community grills, no matter how well they're cleaned, just isn't that attractive for vegan grilling.

So we finally buckled down, and bought a small electric grill, this Meco 9300.

Naturally I was excited with the manufacturer's capacity demonstration:


I nevertheless went a slightly different route for the inaugural grilling, with fresh Georgia crookneck squash, tofu steaks, and Georgia banana peppers.


Then some fresh Georgia grilled corn, and tempeh.

Toward the end, I threw on some green onions and marinated artichoke hearts, and we made toast to go with it. Yum!

Airplanes, Peru, food porn, avocados

Pretty excellent comic that's relatively new to me: The Oatmeal. Check this one out for How commercial airplanes should be laid out.

And alright, Apple Juice definitely didn't find me, so it's time for some... wait... FOOD PORN, PERU STYLE!

Here's the summary: I ate pretty well, went through probably 5000-7000 calories in an average riding day, got almost no protein except quinoa, ate a literal shitton of avocados (sometimes three in a meal, sometimes ten per day.)

Peruvian food is... bland. Almost everything you see below required salt and pepper, at a minimum, to be added.

This is the special breakfast I got served three or four mornings at our hotel in Cusco, while my fellow trip members ate scrambled eggs that looked like yellow and white dish scrubbies. Yes, I shared. No, I didn't eat the honey.

The folks who cooked for us on the trip went out of their way to make me special vegan food. Yay! This was a lunchtime salad. Sometimes lunch occurred at 10am.

Breakfast. I told you I ate a lot of avocado, right?

Pizza! We went to this place at the foot of Macchu Picchu twice, and, uhhhh, I got some avocado. I was particularly hungry at this meal: this was when we hiked up Macchu Picchu, and Huayna Picchu, and then A6 (I think he's A6) and I hiked back down on the road with about a million switchbacks, rather than do another set of endless stairs.

Bland food, but you do see a lot of beautiful salad presentations in Peru. This is at the same pizza place as in the previous shot.


Ummmmm, how about more avocado, and more salad?

Okay, how about more salad. And more avocado.

Need more avocado, and more salad?

Fine, sure: more avocado. Good thing I love avocado so damn much.

Most of the coffee in Peru is, in a word, dreadful. I drank a ton of instant, made ultra-strong just to make it drinkable. The brewed coffee in hotels and restaurants was usually thin, bitter, insipid crap.


I drank a decent amount of beer, too. This is Cusquena, the beer that had floating around under the seat in the van for a week, that we drank while driving back from our last day of biking. It was pretty bad. It did provide for one highly amusing (for some) moment: in my rush to toast, I foamed beer all over the trip leader, and A6. They were... not amused. But everyone else was.

Lots of quinoa. Usually bland, usually with bland, unseasoned tiny vegetables in it.

We went back to this place three times. No, it isn't that amazing, but the trip leader really liked it. And after an initial incident with mayonaise, they figured out how to serve me avocado vegan-style. We actually managed to empty their stock of avocados on at least one occasion.

This is a sandwich. Yep, really. This is at the Cusco airport restaurant, but it burned through through nine soles (about USD$3.25) and got some food in my stomach.

The lovely little hostel I stayed a couple nights at in Miraflores, Lima, The Gallery House, had a kitchen. So I ate some more avocado!

I mixed up the avocado with sauteed ONIONS! and asparagus.

WAAAAAAIT. You said you want a detail of ONIONS?!? You got it! Oh, and some garlic playing second fiddle.

It may not look super appetizing, but a terribly exciting find in the supermarket in Lima was dry protein chunks (essentially dehydrated seitan.) They were a little over USD$3, and got some much needed vegan protein into my diet.


On my last full day in Peru, I stayed at a basic but totally serviceable hotel near the airport called Hostal Victor, and took my own picnic dinner (and breakfast, and avocado sandwich for the flight the next day.)

Okay, enough food porn for now. Gotta get chugging on, uhhhhh.... other stuff.

More Peru food porn

This includes the juice from the  crazy orange juice machine I blogged about in the Lima airport. Looks pretty unlikely that Apple Jack is gonna find me, so I plan to put up more images soon from my mountain biking trip in Peru.

High Museum = lame

I really like museums. Most of you who have traveled with me know this. I particularly like free and cheap museums. Even museums that aren't free or cheap, I can love: I'm a huge fan of the Atlanta History Center, and rank it in my top five or ten favorite museums anywhere (this list include the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, LAMCA: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the British Museum.) I did a significant chunk of my law school studying at the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston.)

We've lived less than a mile from the High Museum, which bills itself as the "leading art museum in the southeastern United States", for over two years. We haven't gone, though, since it's stupidly expensive: $18 for adults. Finally, a halfoffdepot.com coupon and J getting in free through her work enticed us to spend a hot, muggy Saturday afternoon there.

The air conditioning was nice, but on balance, it was an incredible disappointment. Despite a truly stunning (if somewhat disorienting) physical space, it's totally overrated. The curation is ridiculous: it looks like someone went on a meth binge with an art history book in one hand and googled the word "modern" with the other. There was a photography "exhibit" I was excited to see that ended ended up consisting of one room, about 10x10, four photos, and an "interactive" display (where you can put different sizes of frames against a print to see if you would have framed it the same. Whee.) They tell me that John Marin was the most important American artist of his time. Huh? The guards occasionally have to literally yell at the stupid people who touch the art. Yes: yell. As in: "DON'T TOUCH! DON'T TOUCH! DON'T TOUCH!" Navigating through the three major wings and walkways is confusing even with the map. There is all sorts of "art" that is only "art" because the museum tells me it is.

And I'm not the only one who thinks the High Museum is on the wrong track.

It's a kinda long story as to why, but we ended up getting in entirely for free yesterday. I'm going to give away my remaining free entry voucher: it's that uninteresting to me to bother going back in the next two months. Oh, if you want to check it out yourself for free, that famous patron of fine art, Target, is sponsoring free admission on Thursdays in September.

MIA sucks

Yep, it's official: MIA is definitely my least favorite domestic airport (indeed, it ranks near the bottom of all airports.) Stairs, escalators, elevators, and ridiculously long walks plague this dump. I just wanted to check out dinner at a place next to D8, I'm flying out of E9. The walk, done rapidly just short of jogging, took 20 minutes, including a stint on the Airtrain.

Ultimately I didn't have time to risk ordering food and waiting for it. I hustled back (a slightly arduous journey since the ol' tum-tum is on a flight rebellion.) I got to my gate with five minutes to spare, to consider the way the BA 747 dwarfs the Aerolineas Stalinistas 738 I'm flying (can't really complain, though, since I'm in first class, on miles, which is making this whole journey vastly more pleasant.)

In case you're curious, though J and the newly re-coined W already know this: the only close competition for worst domestic airport is DFW (which you might know is also a major hub for Aerolineas Stalinistas. Coincidence? Unsolved mystery? Dear readers, you be the judge.

Oh, and, in case anyone is wondering why I'm prattling about this rather than the wild trip I'm returning from... I have a bet with a fellow trip participant that he can't find this blog by googling me. He has a week, so I'll post images and text soon-ish. Even writing this, of course, is sort of throwing him bone. You listening, Eh Jaay? Yep, this is me!

Crazy orange juice machine

res ipsa loquitor, no?

Peru food porn!

At a nice little hotel, Hostal Victor, http://www.hostels.com/hostels/lima/hostal-victor---airport-hostel/1070, 10 minutes from the airport. Got food, got books, got cheap red wine, got wifi, so all set to post up and get a good night's sleep before my 0430 (ugh) transfer to the airport.