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still can't match a gas-powered chainsaw
Saturday, February 20 2016
location: Room 2008, Palomar Hotel, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
After a morning dog walk in Rittenhouse Square, we again borrowed bicycles (the same ones) from the Palomar and used them to get to our breakfast destination, a kind of vegan bakery cum "dairy" kosher eatery called Miss Rachel's Pantry. There, one could get things like knishes, grilled "cheese" on sliced vegan challah. There is only one table in the dining room, forcing everyone to sit together. So we ended up between a group of mostly middle-aged folks there for a vegan meet-up and a contingent of young adults displaying lots of tattoos and piercings.
Miss Rachel's Pantry has a vintage 50s thing going on, with an old radio from those days somehow playing gentle music also from that period. When Miss Rachel herself arrived, we could see that the place reflected her personal æsthetic. She looked like a 1950s housewife. Gretchen ended up buying lots of stuff to go (in addition to the grilled cheese/tempeh sandwich she had and the knishes I had), and it was a bit of a challenge getting it all back to the hotel by bicycle.
We got back just in time to check out during a particularly-chaotic part of the hotel's day. Checking out took a surprisingly long time as the hotel's computer kept choking. Meanwhile, I was outside with the dogs and all our stuff waiting for the valet guys to retrieve our Prius. There is hardly any place at all that can be used for even brief parking in front of the hotel, so a lot of cars briefly sit in front of the fire hydrant. But even that spot was taken when the Prius finally appeared, so it got stuck in an alley. That was okay for about five minutes, but then a big dump truck wanted to get out and I couldn't see how I could possibly back out onto the busy street. Luckily, at that point Gretchen materialized, and so did one of the valet guys, who directed traffic long enough for us to make an escape. I hadn't had any cash on me at all, so those poor valet guys never did get their tip.
Having missed it on the way into town, on the way out, we stopped at Blackbird Pizzeria. We were still stuffed from Miss Rachel's Pantry, so we ordered everything to go: two orders of seitan wings, several by-the-slice pieces of pizza, and a Philly "cheese steak" for me. We would be briefly visiting Sara Poiron in her gloomy basement apartment, but, lacking internet, I couldn't get the part of our last Facebook conversation where she'd told me her address. I tried going into Blackbird to use their WiFi, but then my computer decided to be unreliable in a way that it never has been in the past. And then it turned out that Blackbird doesn't even have WiFi (though there is some sort of router visible on the wall behind the counter). Fortunately, Gretchen was able to reach Sara on her smartphone and we had the info we needed.
Out on County Line Road near Hatboro, we pulled into the cluster of brick buildings where Sara has been living for years. I'd been here two and a half years ago, and the big change since then is that she finally evicted the man she'd been living with, a scoundrel and layabout who, among many other things, used Sara's son's name to fraudulently obtain credit cards. The house is now less cluttered, and Sara's son is now a young teenager. While we hung out in the living room, he was off in his bedroom with the door shut. It's not just that he's aspergery; that's also a teenager thing.
Sara proceeded to tell us about how things are with her these days. There's always some crisis on the horizon, and one of those is the possibility that her landlord won't renew her lease. Since this is the only residential cluster offering Section Eight housing in the school district, losing her lease might mean changing schools, which would be difficult for her son.
Knowing how much she likes seitan, I left one of the boxes of "wings" with her. It was the kind with the rootbeer flavor, since she is not a fan of the spice. The other box of "wings" was habañero flavored, though I was still hours from having enough of an appetite to eat any.
Our drive back to Hurley was largely uneventful. We stopped at the Sloatsburg Travel Plaza so the dogs could take care of business if they had any. They didn't apparently have any business, but I'd been feeling constipated (an unusual feeling for me) and somehow I was able to rectify the problem in the Sloatsburg men's room (which is at the top of an escalator). After that, I suddenly had an appetite, and I chowed down on a good many spicy habañero wings. Unfortunately, this ruined my appetite for a possible spaghetti stop at the Plaza Diner in New Paltz, something I didn't even think about until Gretchen mentioned it after we'd passed north of New Paltz on the Thruway.
Back at the house, the cats were all quickly accounted for, I fired up the woodstove, got the mail from the mailbox, and fished a finished wetfood can from the recycling and gave it to Eleanor to lick (our cat sitters don't know the value of such things).
By the time we'd left Philadelphia, temperatures had risen into the low 60s. This warmth came north with us and it had become balmy (though not quite that balmy) even in Hurley by the time we arrived.
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