Shuffle Off To Buffalo, and Beyond

    The Buffalo, Vermont, Toronto, etc. trip of May, 1999 went well enough.  This took place Thursday evening, May 6th to Thursday afternoon, May 13th.  A "normal" trip is bound to be too action-packed to allow time for proper sleep, and the way Amwrek runs trains east of Chicago did not help!  Their eastern single-level trains are loaded at Chicago so that each car has people all going to one or two destinations.  My car was full, and everyone was going to either Buffalo or Rochester, so no chance of having the seat to myself.  Never was one to snooze well sitting up, so at best I took a total of 2 hours of short naps.
    Being in effect an independent contractor, Susan gets no paid days-off.  She had a cleaning job come up for Friday morning, so our departure for Vermont was delayed.  We would not get started east until afternoon "rush hour", also about the time a short but nasty line of thunderstorms blew through.  We somehow survived both, but with all the above, we had to take the New York Thruway (aka I-90) cross-state to make any time, yawn.  Did make good time, though, getting to Albany about 9pm.  I had that in mind as a dinner stop, as I knew a decent, cheap Italian-American place just west of town.  "Knew" is the proper word, as the place was no longer there...the strip was now, for the most part, upscale franchise restaurant and hotels.  Not even many fast-food places!  We made do with an IHOP, then on to Rutland, Vermont for the night.
    Rutland was the choice for several reasons...I wanted to make some recordings of "Radio Free Vermont", it was a city Susan was curious about, and there were several area motels in a coupon book frequent Vermont visitor Bob Masked Bandit Nelson had passed along.  I rarely get to stay at a Ramada, but with the coupon this place was competitively priced (for Vermont, an expensive lodging state like any which relies too much on the tourist $$), and included breakfast...cereal, muffins, toast, juice and more.
    "Radio Free Vermont" is a very listenable big band-standards pirate station, on 96.5 somewhere in the Rutland area.  They oughta call it "Radio Free Rutland" as it does not go much beyond the city except up into the hills to the east.  Their web-site claims the station is perfectly legal, as it does not cross state lines...not true, as the FCC licenses all broadcast radio within the United States.  However, you won't see me turning them in.  I recorded 4 hours of them, any or all available for trade.

    Another little-sleep night, as we got in so late, and had to take off early Saturday morning to run up to Montpelier for Susan's state weaver's guild meeting.  I had a couple hours to explore the city, but first a stop at the library to read the Montpelier and Burlington papers from cover to cover.  15 minutes later, including a study of the job and housing ads in each paper, I hiked up, down and around the Montpelier streets.
    I forget why I did not tour the Vermont capitol building last year?  Made up for it this time, though being an off-season Saturday, it would be a self-guided tour.  Vermont is a good state for marble, and it shows inside.
Baldwin St. west of the capitol is lined with modest former homes, now all offices for the various state agencies.  The street is only 1½ blocks long, dead-ending at a stairway leading to a fancy red arch.  Looked like a park, or perhaps an old cemetary beyond, but I would discover a dirt trail leading up to an old mansion...which was now the Secretary of State office building.
    Back to the capitol grounds, where I found a certain raccoon disguised as a humanoid from a suburb several towns north of Boston.  We drove west and north up to Stowe, with a stop at a cider-pressing factory.  It was out-of-season for live demonstrations, though they did have a film to watch while sampling free, cold, tasty  apple cider.  They are located just up the road from the Ben & Jerry factory tour, which being a "been there/done that" from last year was passed up this time.  Besides, for some reason their parking lot was far more crowded on Saturday that it was on a Friday.
    Stowe is, alas, a tourist-trap town with cutsey boutiques and over-priced eateries...did get a good grilled cheese sandwich, but it BETTER be good for $3.50?!  On the other hand, they do have a nice hiking & biking trail.  For me it was near-perfect hiking weather...about 65º and cloudy enough to minimize sun-glare.  On days like this I would normally cover 12-15 miles.  Bob is normally a more sedentary creature, so we compromised at 5 miles.  Besides, time was short.  About 2 miles into the hike, we came upon a tired-looking golden retriever loitering beside the trail, only to then follow along with us!  Not quite follow...we came upon a busy street and halted, but the dog kept going!  Fortunately, the cars stopped for the dog, but I could not help thinking those drivers were muttering about us idiot owners.  The retriever retrieved us on the other side of the road and continued following along, but when the humans reached the 2.5-mile marker and turned back for the car, the dog just kept going.
    The trail was significantly busier on the return hike, with more than a few of those @#$% roller-bladers.  One couple was especially bothersome, as they haunted us for most of a mile.  The guy was experienced, so kept racing ahead, only to have to come back for his novice girlfriend.  She could handle flat straightaways well enough, but add a road-crossing, a curve or the slightest downgrade and look out!  I imagine her rather shapely behind wound up as black & blue as her jeans from several uses as a "break", ouch!

    We got back to Montpelier in time for another batch of rain.  Bob went on straight to Rutland, to try getting a room at the same motel, while Susan and I checked a record store and a book store, then on to Middlebury.
Whose college of the same name is amongst the most expensive in the US.  Lots of boutiquish stores downtown, though all already closed for the day?  Also a number of expensive restaurants...so much for this being our dinner stop!  Had a nice walk anyway, including some small but impressive falls on Otter Creek.
    We got back to Rutland just in time for yet another rain-blast, which made tracking down our meal-stop a bit tougher.  Bob had indeed gotten a room at the Ramada, but did not wait for us for dinner...went to some steak place which looked interesting but crowded.  Susan and I settled on a place called "South Station", in an old streetcar barn not far from our south-side motel.  A bit pricey, but tasteful decor, a small but varied, tasty salad bar, and by far my largest-ever chicken parmesan.
    In the same complex is Annie's books, which both Susan and I had heard of before but we did not know why?  Was closed for the night, but was thus easy to find the next morning.  Annie's has both new and used books, making it extra fun to walk through.  I even bought a couple books!  George Will's Bunts, in a way a follow-up to his Men At Work, is made up mostly of baseball articles he had written over the course of 20 years.  Enjoyable, and the perfect kind of book for when I get most of my reading done (work breaks, lunch hours and bus rides to/from work).  Am still reading Our Dumb Century, a collection of parody newspaper covers produced by The Onion, a weekly paper with a combination of satirical, mostly humorous news stories, and semi-serious movie, music and club reviews.  Most folks outside Wisconsin, Chicago and Denver would know it most from their web-site?  This book was written as if The Onion has existed since before the beginning of this century.  With all the fine print, it's taking awhile to get through it all!
    Oh yeah, to get into and out of Annie's, you have to pass through Rutland's representative in the Ben & Jerry's empire.  No fair!  While waiting for Susan to finish her shopping, I checked out the Onion book while trying not to drip "Coffee Coffee BzzzBzzzBzzz" on it.
    Downtown Rutland has not quite suffered the full effects of the gentrification and/or tourist-mania evident in many Vermont cities.  Some of the old buildings still have normal, useful businesses, though being Sunday few were open to check out.  There was a good newspaper stand, were Susan picked up what seemed like every Sunday paper in the state.  And I went slumming by taking advantage of the Sunday New York Post being only 50¢...and by poking my nose into that double-rare bird, a Wal-Mart in a downtown, and in Vermont?!  Was hoping to stock up on cassettes and batteries, but I noticed the selection of both have dwindled, and the prices worse since when I used to shop Wal-Mart semi-regularly on the road.  On the other hand, they did carry a good supply of my preferred work pants (Dickies last a long time, and are still inexpensive...when you can find them?), even in green which I hadn't seen in years, and I was curious enough about the huge packages of orange-pineapple (flavored) sandwich cookies to risk buying one.  Even the check-out clerk looked at them funny, but they weren't near as ghastly as I'd guessed, and the package was so big it lasted me until deep until June.
    Next stop, Bennington.  We passed several inviting restaurants riding in on Route 7, and settled on the Blue Benn Diner, a 40's-vintage diner trailer with the tight booths and counter seats.  Their large menu reflects the city's combination of blue-collar workers and Bennington college students.  If the menu is not enough, there are also many different "specials" on pieces of paper taped to the walls.  Our waitress, noting our being overwhelmed, suggested focusing only on the papers directly in front of us, and she made no denials when I guessed all the odd-ball dishes were thrown together from whatever leftovers were in the fridge from yesterday.  I wound up with eggplant parmesan stuffed with mushrooms and feta cheese, with a side of angel-hair pasta...good lunch!
    Alas, it was back to New York State.  We stopped in downtown Albany long enough for me to snap a couple pix of the state capitol...though it's hard to tell as it lacks the granite & dome look of the standard capitol building.  Could not tell you the style, but it looks to me like a fairly large and fancy city main library.
    Just before sunset, we made it to Rochester, as Susan wanted to stop by her boyfriend's place on the way home.  He has a loft in an old warehouse in a crappy post-industrial section west of downtown.  Albert was not home, so we went to one of his two likely hang-outs, Gitsi's restaurant in the slightly more "hip" east side.  This is a standard-issue urban 24-hour diner-restaurant.  He wasn't there, but did meet us there after his dinner at the other place...had actually read about the west side "Nick Tahou's" in some off-the-beaten-path type guidebook, a grittier, grungier restaurant such as one used to run into on Maxwell St. in Chicago.  Albert described their big dish, the "garbage plate"...globs of cole slaw, potato salad and whatever meat dish you choose and/or they have available that night.

    Monday, at least until mid-afternoon, was take-it-easy time.  I did run out to one of the Buffalo-area Media Play stores to re-stock my audio cassettes, but otherwise I just read through the many papers and brochures, weeded out old maps, etc while Susan was working.
    When Susan got back, it was whirling-dervish time again...in about 2.5 hours, we drove downtown to drop off laundry at her landlady's other property, and to the ball park to pick up tickets, then north of town for dinner at Old Man River in Tonawanda, back downtown for another laundry load, to pick up by bus tickets for the next day, and finally to the ball park.  Try all that in a major city?!
    Except for its seafood bar being gone, Old Man River is as it was the last visit.  (Like I need any more incentive to track down my MarkTime and APA Centauri zines from the early 1990s?)  I have yet to find a Chicago-area establishment with sweet potato fries, or with their selection of sodas on tap.
    It was an off-night for the Buffalo Bisons, though it was the only night when I was to be anywhere near a ball game?  Being Monday night, and a bit chilly, did not help the crowd.  Is a decent stadium for being modern-style, and would like to get back there for a day gave sometime.
    I needed to get back to get some sleep for the next day, so of course the night was not over yet...one more load of clothes, and we had to return the rental car at the airport.  I may have gotten as much as 5 hours' snooze before I had to run downtown for the bus to Toronto.

    There was a stretch of time in the late 80s and early 90s when Toronto seemed like my second home, or at least 3rd after Chicago and Buffalo, until county-mania began taking me elsewhere.  The city is even more hustling and bustling, and expensive, than ever.  I find one-day visits to major cities a severe challenge...how to fit in favorite haunts, but still get to the new or previously-ignored?  My new-for-me's included the Scarborough light-rail, smallish cars but on a subway-style right-of-way, and after all these years at last I was inside a Canadian Tire store, mostly with the incentive of tracking down any unusual brands of videotape for a friend who collects such things.  My biggest old-haunt visit was to the Ontario Science Centre, where I have still not succeeded in getting to more than one exhibit hall in a visit.  This time, it did not help that the hall I wound up in had computers.  They were smart not to have them programmed to do e-mail...best I could do was stick a couple messages on friends' "guest books".  Lunch simply had to be roasted chicken and fries with gravy at a St-Hubert's, a pretty good lunch deal even in Canadian funds.
    My first stop in Toronto had been at an ATM, as the $7 I have from last visit (I hate to find out how much value this lost in my drawer since 1993?!) only covered my all-day TTC transit pass.  I must have been tired, as I thought $40 sounded like plenty of cash for the day.  I even felt richer, as the "remaining funds" amount on the receipt was about 40% higher than it should have been, translated into Canadian.
    After all these years, I was due for a transit problem.  I'd arrived at Yonge & Eglinton in plenty of time to get to my friend's place near the Univ. of Toronto.  Well, a switch problem meant that trains were not going any further south than Eglinton.  I dashed up to the stall for the Avenue Rd. bus, just missing one and had to wait many a minute for the next.  That bus was also delayed en route, by construction, so I wound up being late, grumble.
    My friend there was insistent upon finding us something to do that night.  The music scene on a Toronto Tuesday night looked like Monday in Buffalo, or maybe having Alanis Morrissette at the rent-a-name arena what replaced Maple Leaf Gardens, plus a Leafs playoff game on the telly,  kept any heard-of acts home or out of town this night?  The best entertainment bet woulda been a "Sex & Violence Cartoon festival", but we had already missed the first part and I would have had trouble digging up the admission price.  I dunno though, seemed OK for being a "nothing" night, including a decent Mex-Can meal at some corner bar, a stop at campus station CIUT to drop off a tape and briefly visit his roommate in the on-air studio, and late-night walks on Yonge and other streets.
    A couple times, I was about ready to crash for the night (my mind was already asleep, eh?) only to have something come up to keep me up.  Such as one of his other housemates, who insisted I see his belfry apartment and try whatever illicit substance he had handy up there.  Not being "into" that sorta thing, and hey my brain was already fried enough from lack of sleep, I did go upstairs but declined the latter.  (My friend's name was omitted to protect the guilty, ha!)
    The remainder of the trip, including the train ride home, was exceedingly uneventful.

No travel stats to note...no new counties!  Top radio was "Radio Free Vermont", the oldies on WJJL in Niagara Falls NY, and WORK in Barre VT gets an honorable mention for a creative ID.


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