Here’s a coincidence…

Looks like the Manatee tour is getting more influential.  Looks like one day after our visit to the nasty carp thing, the Wall Street Journal took notice.  (If that link doesn’t work, try this one.)

Day 3 Part 2 – Art Tatum Jazz Festival

We rolled into Toledo at about 6:30, and the Jazz fest had opened at 4.  Parking was easy at “Sports Arena,” a building across the road from the park.  It was a convenient location and oddly empty for a festival day.  The park where the fest was happening was a nice size, and the stage was easy to see form anywhere.  They had a VIP tent set to the side, and actually for VIPs those people had pretty lousy seats.  Those if us who paid 25 bucks to get in could hang out in a huge gazebo/pavilion thing, or sit on the slope with a great view of the stage.  Deech also discovered that we pretty much had the run of the place, which I’ll get into later.  First I want to reiterate that Po Mo’s Ribs are the best I’ve ever had.  Note that I haven’t spent a lot of time in the world’s rib capitals, but in my limited experience this is the first time a rib guy has given me this kind of spicy sauce and in very liberal quantities.  The meat, of course, came right off the bone and I can’t say enough about the beans and potato salad that came with it.

Back to the fest, I want to talk about the security situation.  Early on Jay made the observation that there were tons of cops around.  However, they didn’t seem very busy or concerned about anything.  Deech walked past one to go right backstage, taking a bunch pictures of the open and unattended equipment trucks, climbing up to shoot the musicians and the crowd from behind the stage and off to the side.  Obviously, Deech wasn’t really a security concern, but you just can’t do that in Philly.  The reason, I think, is that the vast majority of the Toledo crowd is just so well-behaved there’s no reason to stop the one or two guys who want to go back there.  Jay went ahead and met up with him, and the two of them encountered locals Ryan, Mark and Mel.

Ryan Marc and Mel were all from the VIP tent, so they were more or less authorized to be wandering on the pier where Jay and Deech met them.  By the time I walked back to meet everybody, they had already covered the local real estate scene, but hadn’t gotten into the discussion of our trip.  Lately I had been telling innkeepers, store clerks, etc, that we were just on our way to Chicago, which is a lot easier to explain than the whole back story and whatnot.  You can see the amount of text that it takes to describe this trip, and I really don’t feel like getting into it with everybody we meet.  But the gang in Toledo was really interested and totally appreciated what we were up to, so it was a lot of fun to talk about it with them.  They also tipped us off to a bunch of local Toledo stuff that we never would have discovered on our own.  There was so much of it that I had to get out my phone and email it to myself.  Most importantly, we got VIP treatment at the beverage station.  We left them with a Bullet Points CD and it was just fun to meet cool people on the road.  It really makes brings a new dimension to any of our various stops when that happens

There’s just too much to describe from the Jazz Fest, but I should mention that we caught Lizz Wright, Trombone Shorty, and Boney James on stage, as well as Jon Cleary and the Absolute Monster Gentlemen who have a gigantic guitar player. (I also remember that Bonnie Raitt allegedly referred to Jon Cleary as “the 9^th wonder of the world” and apparently he’s in her band.). Deech also accosted Shelley something, the local news anchor who was MC-ing the event, because he wanted to have his opinion heard about the proposed Art Tatum monuments, one of which will be built in Toledo.  They actually had a nice little chat, but ultimately he was told to contact the Toledo Arts Commission Director, and they handed him a business card for none other than Mark, the guy we later met on the pier.  (I mentioned in an earlier post that I didn’t know if he was Mark with a ‘c’ or ‘k,’ not thinking that we had his card on us.)  Anyway, now that we’ve met Mark, Deech doesn’t need to call his office, and I’m sure Mark will be happy to unilaterally short-circuit the voting process and enact Deech’s will by fiat.  The system works!

OK, well, that’s about all I can type about the Jazz Fest at this point, because I also have to mention that on the suggestion of our local advisory board, we went ahead and got “Frito Pies” at the Hi Level Café, a 24-hour diner.  A Frito Pie is a bed of Fritos with chili and raw onions stacked on top.  I was already stuffed with barbeque, but what could I do?  We each ate one and split a double order of tater tots.  By that point I didn’t want to touch another bite, but I was still OK for beers back at the room, which went on until 2:30 or so while I blogged and Deech was uploading his pictures.

Day 3 Part 1 – “African” Safari and Marblehead

It may surprise you to discover that you can go on an African Safari in Ohio. Well, don’t be surprised, because actually you can’t. I’m not saying it wasn’t fun – it was great – but it was not particularly African. They did have a bunch of little deer-like animals that might be of African origin, but they don’t do much and they get old fast. There are also a few wildebeest, giraffes, zebras and camels, but those are fenced in so it’s not as exciting. I guess they figure the African animals are exotic and therefore the biggest draw, but I think they’re pushing it when they sell t-shirts with lions and tigers instead of animals that they actually have onsite. Plus, it detracts from some of the other stuff they have.

There are some cool animals of North American origin, like elk and bison, and they come right up to your car and stick their heads in. You get a free bucket of food when you come in and those animals know it. Deech lost our whole bucket to an elk attack that happened almost immediately when we got in the gate. However, even before that we got to see a pig race, which is just about as silly and pointless as it sounds. I got a video of the thing, and Deech found himself quite attracted to the young lady designated as the pig handler for the event – I only mention that because I thought you all might enjoy making your own “pig handler” jokes about it while you peruse the safari photos.

After we left the Safari, we headed out to Marblehead, where you can sit on the rocks at the shore of Lake Eerie and tour a light house. I say “you” can tour the lighthouse because we couldn’t – it wasn’t open yesterday – but it was relaxing to just hang out there on such a great day, and I used it to get some much-needed chronicling done while Jay did some sketches and Deech shot some photos. W also stopped at “Cheese Haven” a pretty big cheese, meat and BBQ shop that also sells beer from Cleveland, so we picked up some beer, jerky and pickles as well as some chocolate-covered almonds that were good until we left them in the car and they melted into a blob, which is probably just as edible, now that I think of it.

Also somewhere in the neighborhood was something called the “Oddity Barn” but it was closed, too, so a potential opportunity was missed there. Even so, it was a good idea to chill out for a bit because we were headed to Toledo to catch the Art Tatum Jazz Festival, and that turned out to be one of the best stops on the tour to date, and a long night as well.

Day 2 Part 2 – Heritage Duct Tape Festival (and Laser Fireworks Show)

We got in to Avon a little later than expected an took a little rest in the motel before venturing out. By the time we took off for Avon it was about 8:00 and the festival closed for the night at 11, so we figured we’d check it out, have a few beers and then call it a night and go whole-hog on the festival Saturday morning. We found, however, that three hours was just about enough after all.

Don’t get me wrong, it was definitely a festival, all right, it’s just that we’d all been to festivals before and what was supposed to set this one apart was the duct tape. This may prompt the question of why would we be excited about duct tape? We’re not, but that’s really the point. We really thought that someone who was excited about duct tape may be resourceful enough to put together a festival that could really be something different. In other words, I couldn’t have done a better job myself, but this was really a plain old carnival setup with a few tents devoted to Duck Brand duct tape products. You can see for yourself through Deech’s lens. (Don’t miss this shot.) We were just about to be disappointed when the laser and fireworks show started.

This show was exactly the kind of head-scratching spectacle we were hoping to discover on this trip. It has already started by the time we got within sight of the thing, and by then Neil Diamond’s Coming to America was blasting out of the speakers and lasers were projecting flags and spelling “They’re coming to America” in a variety of scripts. The next thing you know, we were treated to The Devil Went Down to Georgia, with projected devils, fiddles, etc, and fireworks at dramatic intervals. Following that was some anthem to the working man that I didn’t recognize, although it was apparently quite moving to some of those in attendance, but not as much as the laser-infused presentation of God Bless the USA that followed. Of course, people were singing along and while Jay and I nudged each other in bemused confusion, Deech was out walking around. He had hopped a fence and was working his way through the crowd; we weren’t sure he’d make it back.

The laser show had fulfilled the night’s odd requirement, so as we waited in the jammed traffic out of there we were pretty sure we weren’t coming back. The Manateemobile did suffer a bit of a scrape in a negotiation with a chain link fence, but that’s what bumpers are designed for so we don’t think much of it. Deech was driving but taking my directions – now he knows better. I will say that I was erring on the side of scratching ourselves on the fence rather than scratching the big pickup on our other side, and I stand by that prioritization.

In any event, we followed up the festival with an absurd mission to try to locate some beer, which is a lot easier in Ohio than in Pennsylvania, but apparently not quite easy enough for us to accomplish in under an hour. We did eventually make it back for some South Park in our room and we slept in then next day. I should mention that as I type the “next day” is actually yesterday, which means I’m catching the blog up on our hijinks. I even have half of yesterday written up already, but the difficulty of getting Internet signals in the middle of Indiana may prove challenging if my experience to date is any indication.

Day 2 Part 1 – Toys and Carp

After a refreshing night of hard sleeping, we were ready to hit the road.  Our first stop was the stealth-bomber-shaped Playthings, Etc, a big toy store just out there on the road all by itself.  My only mission was to pick something up for my new nephew, Oscar, who was just born. I’m going to meet him for the first time Sunday, so I figured a big toy store would be a good opportunity to pick something up.  Not that it was my idea – Jay had found the place in one of his roadside resources and it seemed like a fun thing to do.

I have to say when we first walked in the place was pretty intimidating.  Picture a dimly-lit warehouse-looking space with concrete floors and no people.  A couple of sales guys showed up soon enough, including Alan who showed us a bunch of cool things.  Deech and I tried our hands at some pogo-sticks, including a professional model that proved a bit tough to handle but ultimately I managed to tame it.  We also played with Air-zookas, gyroscopes, some Nerf-type weapons and other nonsense.  Finally Alan took us into the parking lot to demonstrate an air-powered rocket launcher that can shoot up to 1000 feet straight up, although the setting we used reached about 500.  I have to say it was a good stop, and I did manage to pick up gifts for Oscar and Annie.

Our next stop was the remarkable and grotesque Pymatuning reservoir Linesville spillway, “where the ducks walk on fish.”  I never got an explanation why, but what happens is that a huge number of carp – no small fish, mind you – gather on the edges of a big reservoir of some kind, and ducks (mostly geese, actually) wrestle with them over the bread that people toss into the water. 

This may not sound like much on the face of it, and I have to say I didn’t have high expectations.  I should note, however, that when I say the carp “gather” I mean they pile on top of each other and writhe in a bizarre spectacle of fish-against-fish struggle, and it goes on for the entire walkable length of the water.  I have no idea why.  It’s an ugly display of ugly fish, but you just can’t look away.  I’ve honestly never seen anything like it, so I took a bunch of pictures and even some video, and Deech has photos, too.  The stills I’ve seen don’t really do it justice, so I’ll post a link as soon as I get the video uploaded.  It  definitely exceeded my expectations, which is good because the highly-touted Avon Heritage Duct Tape Festival really wasn’t as duct-tapy as we’d hoped.

Public Service Announcement

I’m interrupting our trip chronology to advise you that if you ever see this van:

you should drop whatever you’re doing and order a half rack combo (which comes with baked beans an potato salad). I say order it HOT, but Jay’s quote of the day is “even the mild is what you’d expect to be the hot” so if you’re a baby like Jay go ahead and get the mild.

I also want to give a shout out to Ryan (who brings beer to the disadvantaged), Marc (who may be Mark with a “k”) and Mel (who is a lot cuter than my fourth grade teacher, Miss Reid). If you’re smart you won’t try to take Toledo on your own when you can hook up with these three and discover Frito Pies and other local highlights which I will detail later.  Stay tuned for notes from the Art Tatum Jazz Fest, but first I’ll need to post Day 2.

Day 1 Part 2 – Eckley Mining Village and Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub

Eckley is an abandoned mining town out in anthracite country, where the coal company built housing and town infrastructure for 1000 people. You can drive right into the town and it’s definitely eerie. It’s creepy because it’s abandoned, but actually slightly creepier because somewhere in there are still 19 current residents. The effect is that there are a bunch of buildings that are clearly trashed, some that are clearly inhabited, and some that show signs of use, but not exactly civilized. The decrepitude is interesting from a mining history standpoint as well, and we got a bunch of photos of busted up mining cars and this amazing building that we think is a refinery of some kind.

We took pictures of the houses, too, which included some spooky abandoned kitchens and one crawlspace that was left open from the outside. Nobody took me up on my $100 offer to crawl in there and pull out a souvenir, probably because I almost definitely would have locked them in for some period, just like that old prospector in the Brady Bunch Ghost Town episode. Anyway, for an improvised stop along the way, Eckley is highly recommended by Team Manatee, so keep it in mind if you ever find yourself on the road to Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub.

No relation to the Denny’s we all know, Denny’s Beer barrel pub is the home of the world’s largest burger. You can’t order the world’s largest burger, but you can order one that is a mere fifteen pounds. They also feature the 96er, which refers to the fact that it’s 96 ounces. If you can all eat six pounds without dying you get a t-shirt. Honorable wall-plaque mentions are available for 2 and 3-pound feats of fortitude, but I hardly see the point in commemorating that kind of mediocrity.

We didn’t take the big beef bait, but that’s not to say that we got off without some kind of novelty spending. They had a card on the table that claimed that you could order one of their specialty beers and keep the glass. You could also order a frozen drink and keep the giant hand-painted burger-shaped glass that it came in. There was also some hand-painted scribbling that mentioned that all “logo” glassware cost extra. Apparently this meant that you had to ask for the burger glass with the drink if you wanted the glass. Deech didn’t realize that until his frozen “Highlander” something-or-other showed up in a different glass, which was also a souvenir. The waitress acted like it was entirely obvious and he should have known better, but if you ask me there’s no way she’d never had that discussion before.

Jay volunteered to drink the first one and Deech ordered another – with the burger glass this time. At that point we discovered that the Highlander thingamajig, was not good – a barely drinkable slushy thing – and as cool a souvenir as it is, Deech’s burger glass is pretty much a monument to his being taken in by roadside profiteers. However, it does make for great pictures.

The two hour drive to our motel got us there about midnight and all I remember is passing out instantly upon arrival. It was a long day that started out sleepy, and though the accommodations were somewhat spartan I was basically unconscious for the entire stay.

Day 1 Part 1 – Hit the Road and Martin & Co.

Since everything got fouled up with Jay’s flight, my 6am wake time was not a happy moment on the trip. Fortunately I had packed back on Tuesday so all we had to do was eat and go get the van. The “Manateemobile” is a blue late-model Dodge Grand Caravan, which drives nicely and seems to get pretty good mileage. By now, we’ve each had turns at the wheel and only suffered minor cosmetic damage so far (another day, sorry.)

Jay borrowed his parents’ GPS, a “tomtom” which for 13 bucks can be upgraded to use the voice of Mr. T. Clearly a sound investment, what you get for your money is such instructions as “Don’t gimme no jibber-jabber! Turn right!” and “Turn around as soon as possible! Don’t disobey me! Don’t make me get out of this machine because I will!” Me, I’ve always done everything Mr. T tells me to do, so I consider it a privilege to have him bossing me around on this trip.

Mr. T does know where he’s going, and although he did drive us straight into some easily-avoidable construction in Lambertville, he also navigated us around a closed mountain bridge that could have taken us hours to figure out on our own. The important thing is that we made it to the Martin & Co Guitar Factory and Museum.

Martin still owns the original 19^th-century factory in Nazareth, PA. but they no longer make guitars there. Instead, it’s a great resource for guitar geeks – a place where you can buy rejected parts from the real Martin factory to build your own. Deech took a bunch of great photos.

Next, we went to today’s production Martin factory, also in Nazareth, where they offer an excellent tour of the entire process. Our tour guide was a fella named Ben who was most remarkable for his hair and such informative quotes as “What we have here are a lot of machines and people making parts” and “Could the person in the back with the camera [Deech] please keep up with the group.” I goof on Ben, but honestly the tour was very informative and Ben’s hairstyle was fantastic. We didn’t buy anything at the gist shop, but they do have guitars hanging around that you can play (if you want to tune them) and Deech took tons of pictures.

After the factory we had lunch and took off for our next destination. The itinerary tells you that this is the Yuengling brewery, but that closes at 4 and we just couldn’t make it. That’s OK, though, because we’ve all done brewery tours before, including Jay and my visit to the Heineken museum in Amsterdam, which is completely lame. Instead we just hit the road heading toward Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub, and along the way jay used our wireless Internet to hunt for more attractions. What he found was Eckley, and it’s going to need its own post.

Day 0 (2 days ago) – Philly and Pat’s, etc

OK, so I haven’t been blogging, but we’re just getting started. The past two days have been action-packed, and getting a signal for the wireless Internet (and my phone, for that matter) have been a challenge, but stay tuned because there’s a lot going on out here. Anyway, here’s what we did before we left:

On Wednesday, Deech flew in basically on time, but Jay and Rebecca were totally late. Apparently the airline blamed thunderstorms in Philadelphia, which would be a decent excuse, except I was in Philadelphia all day and didn’t see a drop of rain.

Anyway, Annie picked Deech up while I was still in the office, but after work we met up to go to Pat’s. In case you don’t know, Pat’s “King of Steaks” is the place to go if you’re a tourist looking for a cheesesteak. Some people go to Geno’s, which is across the street, but we don’t blog about those people.

The Pat’s/Geno’s rivalry is one of those things that you have to sort of suspend reason if you want to participate. The way it works is that once you get to Philadelphia, you pick one of the two and from that point forward that’s just where you go. I picked Pat’s in 1995 and I have never eaten a Geno’s cheesesteak even though it’s right there on the same corner. It’s a circular concept – Geno’s sucks because I go to Pat’s, and I go to Pat’s because Geno’s sucks. Honestly, though, there really isn’t any objective standard you can use to compare the two – it’s fried skirt steak, fried onions and cheese, If anyone can really make a cheesesteak that “sucks” I would actually go seek it out because I would want to find out what that tastes like.

Anyway, Deech approves of cheesesteaks, so then after that we went ahead to a couple of beers at Bard’s and some more drinks at the Continental, which we picked because Deech wanted a Cosmo, and it seemed like an appropriate place to go for one. I’m not a frequent Continental patron, but I don’t drink Cosmos either so it makes sense. Apparently, they don’t have any place like that in St Louis either, so we had a good time before shoving off for the airport.

Jay’s original flight had been canceled and he was put on a different flight that was supposed to get in at 10pm, but it got canceled too so he was put on an earlier plane, which must make sense to somebody. With that kind of havok those must have been some “thunderstorms.” Anyway, their flight was scheduled to land at 7:30 or so, but we already knew it was delayed about two hours. When we got to the airport we were 30 minutes early for the estimated 9:30 arrival, but here in reality it was 10:30 by the time we gathered Jay and Rebecca. The big road trip was not getting off to an exciting start, but nobody died, and at least we were all together in time for the exhilarating van rental. to follow.

As I type I’m about 25 miles west of Cleveland, and hopefully things will slow down enough for me to catch up soon. We have already been through almost two days of itinerary, and highlights include Deech’s new huge ceramic burger, pogo sticking in the middle of nowhere, and a GPS device that talks like Mr. T. Yes, I have some typing to do.

Where to begin?

Last year, Jay got married and as best man it was my job to arrange a bachelor party of some kind. Now, Jay and I are not really into what you might think of when you think “bachelor party” and neither of us wanted to go through the motions if it wasn’t going to be any fun, so basically I had to get creative. I wanted to aim high, but I really didn’t want to screw it up, so basically I decided to punt two options to Jay and let him decide how much he wanted to risk.

Option 1 was the one I knew would be fun no matter how badly I planned it, and it was the one Jay ultimately selected. We would just get on a plane and spend a week in Amsterdam. I know what you’re thinking – a bachelor party in Amsterdam! You evil evil men! But honestly, we just did what Rick Steves told us to do, and despite spending the whole flight over listening to what our next-seat neighbor – a Marine on his way to Iraq, btw – would do in our situation, we managed to stay quite out of trouble. I don’t imagine they get a lot of bachelor parties at the Anne Frank House, but let it not be said that they haven’t had at least one.

Option 2 was the “creative” option – the one that seemed like it could be fun and different, but it could also have gone very very badly. If you are not familiar with the works of the great Weird Al Yankovic, this will make even less sense, but the idea I had was to hit the road from either Boston or Philadelphia and drive cross-country until we arrived at the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota. I figured we could find enough points of interest and roadside weirdness along the way to make a good trip of it. The pitfalls included the difficulty of planning such an adventure and the potential for the whole thing to blur into just a big boring week-or-so car ride.

As I mentioned, Jay chose Amsterdam, but it wasn’t as easy to decide as it would be for, well, probably you. It’s tough to describe the significance of Weird Al, but it should suffice to say that Jay liked the idea, and by not doing it there was some real potential for what-if regrets. Fortunately, I was already engaged myself by that time last year, so it looks like we’ve got the perfect excuse.

Looking back on the whole process, I have to hand it to Jay and his prescient decision-making. The truth is that I really didn’t do any planning for the Amsterdam trip, and although it really was fun anyway there is absolutely no way I could have come up with the itinerary that he created for this adventure. Not only do we have an excellent plan, but Jay has also arranged a secret boredom-destroying weapon: We will be accompanied on the trip by the skills of the legendary conversationalist and Weird Al afficionado known only as Deech. The crew complete, we officially head out in two days. This is our dumb story.