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good greasy vegan food & low thread counts
Thursday, August 20 2015
location: Rural Hurley township, Ulster County, New York
This morning, I gathered 90 pounds of firewood on the morning dog walk and then began getting ready for yet another August vacation. Gretchen and I would be driving south to northern Maryland to visit with her parents, brother, and their family in the family cabin not far from Camp David.
We loaded up the dogs and started driving in the mid-afternoon, making a slight detour into downtown Philadelphia along the way just to go to a not-especially-health-obsessed vegan restaurant called Blackbird Pizza. Gretchen ordered three different pizzas to go (for the folks at the cabin) as well as an order of seitan "wings" and a couple big greasy sandwiches for us to eat right then. Everything there is super delicious and greasy (I especially like their take on a Philly cheese steak), and the seitan (which they make and then deep-fry themselves) is enough like fried chicken to satisfy an itch that rarely gets scratched. It was no surprise to see that the demographic patronizing Blackbird was at least as obese as the American population generally; perhaps they'd come here with the mistaken (and convenient) belief that vegan food is automatically health food. One further thing to note: the "wings" are spice with habañero sauce and are unusually hot, even by the standard of deliberately-inedible hotwings. I have a strong tolerance for such heat, but it's doubtful many people who order them do; Gretchen, for example, could only eat a trace amount.
After much driving through increasingly-unpopulated regions, we arrived at the cabin at around 9:00pm. I'd been here twice before, in January of 2001 and in June of 2002. My hair is shoulder-length these days, so my mother-in-law said I looked "different." Everyone had already eaten, so the pizza would have to wait for tomorrow. For a time, Gretchen and I helped our little nine-year-old niece as she tried to assemble a bird from a grab-bag of random things that included a couple of paper fans, a stylized three-dimensional human skeleton, and a couple objects that resembled tops.
I went to bed in one of the small upstairs bedrooms while Gretchen and her father stayed up late talking. We were at a cabin in the woods, so I shouldn't have expected luxury, but the sheets on my bed felt cheap, like the kind of sheets my mother would buy. When Gretchen showed up, I blinked my bleary eyes a couple of times and complained about "the thread count" being "too low," a declaration that would give her chuckles for the rest of our vacation. Eventually Ramona showed up, but she was too big of an addition to our one smallish full bed, so we retreated to a pair of twins in another room, ones having sheets with, it so happened, somewhat better thread counts.
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