The Travel Bug

I've been bit, I think, and it's not going away any time soon.

After having a long conversation about potential places to visit in Europe last night and poking around on Atlas Obscura, I feel restless. Just as I had been feeling like the "weird"-flavored places were starting to dry up in the area, I have a whole new database to poke through.

Anyway, since I'm reading about interesting places and sights anyway, I figured I'd compile a little list with descriptions, for my own reference and for (hopefully) the benefit of my reader. Readers? No, probably the former!

• Northlandz - a collection of model trains that is apparently second-to-none. It features thousands of train cars being carted around by engines, over eight miles of model track, a forty-foot bridge and a thirty-foot-tall model mountain. Last I checked it costs $13.75 per adult to get in, but from the sound of things it's well worth it. Open until 5:30pm on Saturday and Sunday. Located in North Jersey. Driving distance from home: 74 minutes.
• Monument to the War of the Worlds - in 1938, a broadcast of the War of the Worlds by Orson Welles on CBS radio sparked controversy and set a few people into a panic, thinking the Martian invasion to be real. The first landing of the alien crafted was reported that night was in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. Erected at this supposed landing spot is a monument to remember the occasion, a rock slab featuring one of the tripod landing craft. Located in North/Central Jersey. Driving distance from home: 50 minutes.
• Fonthill Museum - a castle constructed at the turn of the century for the collections of Henry Mercer. It's filled with artifacts from the everyday lives of those living in the area in the 18th and 19th centuries. Costs $9 per student to get in, and it's open Monday through Saturday from 10am to 5pm. Located in Northeast Pennsylvania near Doylestown. Driving distance from home: 56 minutes.
• The Land of the Lost - a bunch of dinosaurs built out of car parts created by Jim Gary, who died in 2006. He is the only person to have a solo exhibition displayed in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. The dinosaurs are located scattered around a yard in Central Jersey near Asbury Park. Free. Driving distance from home: 71 minutes.
• The Holmdel Horn Antenna - a twenty-foot aluminum antenna that was first used in the 1950s and 1960s to discover the origins of the universe itself: the Big Bang. The antenna is retired and is now mounted in the middle of a field and is open to the public. Driving distance from home: 86 minutes.
• Popcorn Park Zoo - a home for rescued animals in the New Jersey pinelands. Apparently it's fairly unusual and has a lot of exotic animals you wouldn't think to find here. It costs $5 and is very near the town of Double Trouble, New Jersey. It's open until 5pm every day. Driving distance from home: 80 minutes.

If we hit all of them, it'd take about six hours and a little under $40 admission. Sounds like a fun Saturday to me!

An Historic Meal

I really just named that post that because I wanted to write "An Historic." Though this is pretty historic, nonetheless.

After realizing that sorbet was out of reach last night, I went out today and acquired a few new food processors - a blender and an ice cream maker. Yes, I'm really getting fancy now, it seems. I prepared a couple things pretty much simultaneously:

Strawberry Banana Smoothie

Ingredients:

Two bananas

Ten strawberries

3/4 cup of milk

3 Tablespoons of sugar

6 ice cubes

Wash and rinse the strawberries and cut their stems off. Toss everything into a blender and use the ice crush setting until the ice disintegrates a bit, then blend it all together nice and smooth. Easy, quick, and tasty!

Raspberry Sorbet

Ingredients:

Three cups raspberries

One cup sugar

Half cup water

One Tablespoon lemon juice

Put the water and sugar into a sauce pan and put it on a low simmer until the sugar melts. Stir it to allow the sugar to melt and dissolve into the water, and remove from heat to allow it to cool.

Throw the raspberries into the blender and puree them until they're reasonably smooth. Pour the result into a mesh strainer and crush the contents through the strainer into a bowl - a potato masher is probably best, but a measuring cup did in a pinch for me. Juice a single lemon for the juice and combine it with the raspberry juice, stirring it up a bit.

Get as much juice out of the raspberries as you can!

Combine the water and raspberry/lemon mixture and put it into the fridge to cool off. After it was reasonably cold, pour it into the ice cream maker and let it mix it up a little, and put the results into the freezer until it's nice and firm.

Finally, was dinner! We decided to make US Senate Bean Soup, famous for the fact that's it's been on the US Senate cafeteria menu for over a century. Unfortunately, apparently all the groceries in south Jersey seemed to be out of ham hocks, so we had to improvise.

US Senate Bean Soup

Ingredients:

Half a bag of navy beans

A dinner ham

Half a tablespoon of black pepper

A tablespoon of salt

Three stalks of celery

One small onion

One medium-sized potato

7 cups water

Two chopped cloves of garlic

A pinch of parsley

First of all, combine the Navy Beans with the water in a large pot. Heat it to boiling and then remove from heat. Leave the beans for an hour to let them soak.

While waiting for the beans to soak, chop up the celery, onion, potato, and garlic. Combine them all in a bowl with pepper and salt. When the beans have soaked enough, place the ham into the pot and put it over a simmering heat.

Hot Ham Water

Dana dicin' up the ham

Let this cook for about an hour and fifteen minutes, then remove the ham and dice it into small chunks. Put the diced ham into the bowl with the rest of the ingredients and mix them nicely before dumping them all into the pot with the beans and water. Continue to simmer the mixture for another half hour, or until the potatoes are nice and soft.

After the soup is done cooking, put in a pinch of parsley and a little more salt to taste. Ladle it out and enjoy! It was a lot better than even we expected. I got to eat the same soup the likes of JFK, Barack Obama, and Bob Dole ate! And Mitch McConnell... and John McCain... hmm.

Looks tasty

Anyway, I'd definitely recommend it!

New Culinary Direction

So over the last two weeks, Dana and I have set out to cook more than we have. Well, by that I mean cook at all. A couple of my friends suggested that we blog about what we're making. We've started with some really simple recipes, but hopefully we'll branch out soon enough.

Tonight we gathered some ingredients for raspberry sorbet, but then soon realized our biggest obstacle: I don't have a blender or an ice cream maker. So, we ended up with raspberries, sugar, and three pounds of lemons. So, in a stroke of brilliance, we decided to make some raspberry lemonade!

Needs:

Some large bowls

Citrus juicer

Mesh strainer

Pitcher

3-4 medium-sized lemons

One cup sugar

A dozen raspberries

A medium sized (8-10 cup) saucepan

First, put about six cups of water into the saucepan and mix in the cup of sugar. Heat until it boils for about two minutes, then remove from heat to let it cool. After it's reasonably close to room temperature, pour the sugar-water into a large bowl and put it into the fridge to cool it further.

While you're waiting for the water to cool off, cut 3-4 lemons in half and squeeze the juice out of them with your juicer. Place the mesh strainer inside a bowl and pour the pulp-and-seed-filled lemon juice into the strainer to separate out the juice. Place your dozen or so raspberries in another bowl and mash them up - I used a spreader, but a spoon would probably do in a pinch.

Once the water is nice and cool, pour it into the pitcher and combine it with the lemon juice and raspberries pulp. Stir it up nicely and repeat the process you did with the lemon juice - pour it through the strainer into another bowl. Return the newly seedless mixture back into the pitcher. Add about half a dozen ice cubes and return it to the fridge to cool off.

To serve, we poured about two and a half cups of the stuff into each of two mason jars. We added a couple more ice cubes to each mason jar and a splash of vodka in each just to make things interesting. Anyway, it turned out a nice, pretty pink color:

Voila! It could have used a little more lemon juice (it had a much stronger raspberry flavor than lemon), but it was pretty great. Tomorrow, we're aiming to make some US Senate Bean Soup. Wish us luck!

Delilah

Tonight I found out that an old friend, Delilah Wooldridge, passed away on Monday night. She and I were pretty close back in high school - in fact, she was probably the closest thing I had to a "girlfriend" up to that point. I never met her in person, but we dated for about three years via myriads of IMs, e-mails, phone calls, and snail mail. As with anything, those three years had their ups and downs, and eventually she broke it off to pursue something else. It was pretty soon after that I let it go and forgave her, mainly because I understood that an exclusive relationship with someone long distance was something that was difficult to maintain.

Either way, we reconnected late in 2008 when I got a message from her on Facebook out of the blue. She told me she regretted the way we lost contact, but she would like to reconnect, so we did. We talked a bit about life and kept up with each other loosely, through a once-every-couple-weeks text conversation. She liked to send me pictures of her ferrets, and for awhile there I got one every day, which I liked a lot.

Delilah had changed in the four years we didn't speak, but she still seemed, at her core, the girl that I met back in the year 2001. When we spoke, whether on the phone or online, you really could get a feel for how witty she could be and how much she had genuine affection for me. Life was difficult for her now, I could surmise that much - she had a job that she didn't particularly like and made lots of plans for moving to places that weren't Oklahoma that really never came to fruition. But she trotted along, still hoping, still making those plans.

A couple anecdotes about the Delilah I knew. When we first met, we did so in a chatroom, so we were basically just anonymous strangers. After a couple weeks of talking to her regularly, we steadily revealed more and more about who we were. One day she consoled me when we had to put our cat George to sleep. George was sixteen years old (nearly a year older than me, if I remember correctly) and had been suffering from cancer for an extended period before we took him to be euthanized. Delilah said not to worry, that she'd do her best to make me feel better, and that she could be my new cat. Hence, her nickname, Kitty, since she always hated her name. That's what I called her until we lost contact in 2004.

I remember the loneliness Delilah seemed to have when her family moved to Oklahoma from Oregon. I had never moved, much less to a different state, at this point in my life, so it was hard for me to empathize, but I did my best to try and make her feel better. I distinctly remember the times she would be sitting at school, waiting to be picked up by her parents, when she would call me and we'd talk for awhile. If I helped her even a little bit to grow accustomed to her new surroundings, I'm glad.

Delilah took her own life on Monday, September 12. She was twenty-four and six days old - her last birthday was September 6. I found out tonight when I was listening to music at work and stumbled across an Everclear song. Everclear was the only band she liked when I knew her previously - her musical tastes had expanded since, of course, but I will always associate her with that band. I listened to the song and brought up her profile to post it there for her, and on her wall were the messages that alerted me to her passing.

It's difficult to think very rationally about the situation in the haze of confusion that I feel right now. I wish I could have done something or said something that would have compelled her to get help, but the truth was that I never would have guessed she was depressed or would be likely to take her own life. That seems to be the trope, though, about people who commit suicide - nobody could have known, nobody would have guessed. And the other universal truth? It can never be undone.

I miss you, Delilah. I wish I could have met you before you died. I saw a side of you that was tremendously sweet and beautiful, and I hope that you are at peace.

No Wawas in Mahwah

So what could Dana and I possibly do for a follow up to the gigantic road trip we got home from barely a week and a half ago. Well, for awhile, I've been wanting to go up to New York City to check out the new World Trade Center building. Currently, the building stands at over seventy stories tall, with thirty or so to go before they open. Considering the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks is this weekend, what better time to go up?

Anyway, that was the plan, so I decided to use the last of my Hawaii Hilton points to book a hotel up in Mahwah. On the way up, we had a few stops planned, most of which were straight out of Weird NJ - our favorite! We ate a little breakfast and managed to get on the road before four o'clock to head up north.

Our first stop was Belle Mountain, an abandoned ski hill site. We walked up what was once the ski hill, but the trail was now overgrown. To be honest, it didn't seem very steep, either, the trail only being about a quarter of a mile long, if that. It was a nice little hike to head up the hill and back down, and on the way back down we saw the ruins of the ski lift. The hill was last skied in the late nineties, a victim of the mild winters of that time period and a general lack of interest.

Just down the road was the fabled Lambertville High School. Dana had read about it many times in the pages of Weird NJ, and it looked like a tempting place to go visit. However, the school is now privately owned and the owner doesn't hesitate to bring lawsuits against people who trespass. Additionally, there is absolutely no parking along the single-lane road leading past the school, and I feared for a moment that my car was wrecked after slipping into the sinkhole in one of the roads. So, we took a look at the school on the hill and moved on.

Next up was the Paulinskill Viaduct, a railroad bridge over the Paulins Kill river in North Jersey. For five years after it was completed in the 1910s, the viaduct was the largest concrete structure in the world. Although there are access doors that allow people inside the titanic structure, Dana and I decided to move on since the bugs were starting to get a bit thick. It was an amazing sight, either way!

It was pretty impressive. I couldn't help but notice how high every single river we drove by had crested, considering the rain that had been falling in the area lately, including two massive tropical storm remnants. There were a lot of bridges out and parts of roads washed away thanks to the high crests of the area rivers. In point of fact, this made it difficult to visit our next stop. We budged past a few "RESIDENTIAL TRAFFIC ONLY" road blocks, but ran into a terribly flooded stretch of road that forced us to skip Walpack Center, or so we thought.

Walpack was a town in the Delaware River watershed, its origins dating back to the early 18th century. The town was first mentioned in historical literature in about 1731, long before the creation of the United States of America. The area the town lay in became known as the Delaware Water Gap. In the 1960s, the Army Corps of Engineers obtained the land through eminent domain for the building of a dam. The dam would create an artificial lake that would flood much of the region for hydroelectric power generation. Thus, the federal government kicked everyone out of their homes in the area (save a few stragglers), but ultimately the dam project was never executed. The land was later donated to the National Park Service, with several towns surviving with extremely low populations. Walpack is one of those, with around 16 remaining residents as of the 2010 census.

A pretty interesting story, to be certain. It was about an hour or so to get to the restaurant from here, so we got back on the road. Dinner tonight was at an Afghani restaurant, which strangely enough served some American fare as well. I got a pair of kebabs and some buffalo wings, which oddly enough went very well together. It was a great meal to end a really fun day.

Our final stop was the hotel, another Hampton Inn, a brand which had become very familiar with us. Tomorrow we'll head into the city to scope out some sights, eat some cupcakes, and pay some respect to those who died ten years ago. A good weekend already!

Schedule for Week Ending 9/18

Monday - 10:00 12:00 to 16:00 (4 hours)
Tuesday - 00:00 to 10:00 08:00 and 20:00 to 24:00 (16 hours)
Wednesday - 08:00 to 12:00 00:00 to 08:00 and 20:00 to 24:00 (28 hours)
Thursday - 00:00 to 12:00 08:00 (36 hours)
Friday - 04:00 to 12:00 12:00 to 16:00 (40 hours)

This week is gonna suuuuuuuck.