Land of the Pines

The fortuitous timing of a federal holiday last Monday and some spontaneous thinking last Thursday night combined masterfully. I was afforded a chance to pack up the ol’ Camry and head on down to South Carolina without having to miss a day of work, and there was simply no way that opportunity could be missed. The meatball was waiting!

That was what I kept reminding myself, at least, on the 530-mile slog from Baltimore, the first two hours of which were frustratingly spent in traffic on one of this country’s worst rush-hour commutes, the I-95 corridor between Baltimore, Washington, and Fredericksburg. Believe me, when the highlight of a drive is stopping for a jalapeno-filled pretzel with nacho cheese dip at Sheetz in Smithfield, North Carolina, the less said about that experience, the better.

After arriving at 12:30 AM and heading straight to bed like the old soul that I am, I woke up Saturday morning feeling refreshed and ready for a day of adventures. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to come down to Columbia, so there really hadn’t been time to obsessively and compulsively plan anything, as is my usual modus operandi, but it was nice to just go with the flow for once.

Gina and I had a nice morning stroll around The Horseshoe on the university campus, stopping at Barnes and Noble (as we do) to pick up Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, one of the most acclaimed new fiction titles of the year so far, which we’ll begin reading together soon. We walked from campus to the capitol building of South Carolina, the State House, where the Confederate battle flag has been proudly displayed on the grounds since 1962. While there, we bumped into an old friend of mine from middle school and high school and had the most pleasant of times catching up. I hadn’t seen Janie in at least 6 or 7 years, but the graduate school at South Carolina has an asset in its Public History program. One of life’s most underrated pleasures is the art of conversation, and I was glad to spend some time renewing acquaintances with an old friend like no time had passed.

The South will rise again?

After that, we walked up and down Main Street for a bit – for a state capitol, Main Street in Columbia really isn’t much to brag about, though it does seem to have up-and-coming restaurants and apartment buildings – before grabbing sandwiches at Groucho’s in the Five Points district. Formula 45 sauce: delicious. Yes, it was annoying to pay 25 cents for water in a Styrofoam cup that broke and spilled everywhere, but you can’t win them all.

We fulfilled a long-standing quest of mine that afternoon by going bowling with a few of Gina’s friends and roommates. I’ve been pestering her for weeks, if not months, to go, and as is the case with most of my requests, she puts up with me heroically, despite having every reason to be nothing short of annoyed. Seven of us played for a couple hours, and when the alley turned its lights off for a bit of cosmic action, it was on.

Aw, her tiny feet

Gina, Emily, and I capped the night by going to a dueling piano bar in the fancier part of Columbia, such as it is. We may have been the youngest people in the place by about a decade, but it was still a fun time. We stood on the balcony, drinking our beers and taking part in one of the more entertaining pastimes in life: people-watching. Our favorite was unanimous: a couple in their 60s, at least, dancing and having the best time of anyone there that night. When “Shout” by the Isley Brothers – a song everyone knows, young and old – was played, both the man and woman were literally laying on the floor on their backs dancing. When I’m their age, I’m sure I’ll be lucky to stand and walk without debilitating hip, knee, and back pain, so watching them channel their inner teenagers was heart-warming. “Wagon Wheel” by Darius Rucker was also played; the second time in two days I had heard that song after going months without hearing it once. Sigh, country music.

There was lots of laughing later that night, not to mention cheese and pepperoni Bagel Bites and Ben and Jerry’s chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. Gina and I had made bourbon-glazed salmon (thank you, Publix) for dinner with broccoli on the side for both of us, as well as penne with raspberry vinaigrette dressing for me and a sweet potato for Gina, before we went to the piano bar, so we were allowed to cheat a little. Right? Right.

We woke up Sunday with a more relaxed day on the docket. The morning got off to the best possible start with several episodes of Parks and Rec, and we went on a long walk by the Congaree River in the afternoon. See, we made up for those Bagel Bites. Despite it being nearly 60 degrees, the River Walk was filled with college girls wearing oversized, baggy sweaters as if Columbia was sub-Arctic in climate. This inexplicable choice of wardrobe, which not coincidentally was combined with full makeup and huge sunglasses, amused me tremendously.

Gorgeous day for a walk

The best part of the walk by far, though, was all of the dogs out gallivanting. Never in my life have I seen such perfect pups, of all breeds and sizes. I wanted to take so many of them right there and then from their owners for myself. Owning a husky is something I want badly one day, and there were several showing their stuff on this Sunday afternoon. There just isn’t a more beautiful dog than that.

We watched football on Sunday night (full disclosure: I couldn’t have been more wrong about Andrew Luck and the Colts) and unashamedly took full advantage of a gift certificate Gina had to a nice Mexican restaurant in town. Can’t go wrong with chips and queso, or BBQ shrimp, chicken teriyaki, and chicken pesto tacos. I may not love a lot about the South, but the one thing done better there than anywhere else I’ve been is the food.

Gina and I ran a few errands and had lunch Monday morning before I made the return drive to Baltimore. Thank God for daylight and podcasts, as they made my drive back exponentially more bearable than the slog down there on Friday. Instead of Sheetz, I stopped at a Dairy Queen in Dunn, North Carolina for a Georgia Mud Fudge Blizzard. Thanks to either the incompetence of its employees or a faulty credit card swipe machine (yes, I was going to pay $3.30 with a debit card, and I’ll be charitable and say it was the machine’s error), I even got it for free! Can’t beat that.

I return to Columbia next weekend. If it is half as rewarding as this trip, I’ll be a happy camper. More then.

Montreal, jour troix

The list of ways for me to write about shopping just isn’t an extensive one. I can tell you I bought two pairs of socks adorned with Union Jack patterns on them and a pair of red pants at H&M on our last full day in Montreal, continuing my personal quest to spice up my wardrobe in 2015, and I can tell you that Gina, the hip edgy sk8r gurl that she is, bought a hat at Vans; the truth of the matter, though, is that walking in and out of shops all morning, even on as bustling and energizing a street as Saint Catherine’s is, just doesn’t make for the most fascinating reading material.

We did manage to find the heart of the Underground City on our way back to our new hotel (quick review: very minimalist and modern, with not much warmth in the atmosphere inside and a disappointingly small room. The bathroom was heavenly, though, I must admit.), making up for our struggles in that endeavor the day before, so score one for the Americans. While it really was no different in makeup than nearly every other mall I’ve been in, it has a huge advantage during the freezing winters of Montreal in that visitors can access it from the metro system and don’t need to take a single step in the frigid outdoor air to visit countless retail establishments and entertainment options.  

Hotel St. Paul

The evening’s activities were more appealing to me – namely our Italian dinner at a restaurant very close to the first hotel we stayed in, near Notre-Dame Basilica. Gina did the best she could with her veal parmesan, and I consumed an entire plate of pasta carbonara like the appalling glutton that I am, like I hadn’t eaten a meal since the last time Michigan was good at football, etc etc.  I washed it down with a bottle of Corona, and because Gina is much classier than I can ever hope to be, she had red wine.

We then made our second trek to the Bell Centre in two nights, though this time we would actually get to see a hockey game. After discovering only the night before that the World Junior Championship was being held in Montreal, as we were surrounded by hordes of Canadian supporters on the metro headed to watch their youngsters triumph over Finland on their way to an eventual tournament title, I had looked up the schedule and found that Germany would be playing Slovakia on our last night in town. Tickets, as one might guess for a game involving two nations from central Europe playing in eastern Canada, were very cheap.

The calm before the storm. Too dramatic?

It was actually an exciting game, won 5-2 in the end by Slovakia, enabling the victors to gain a small measure of revenge against their oppressors of 1939. Slovakia would go on to finish third in the 10-team tournament, so it was fun (for me, at least) to get to watch a group of young players that seems to be on the rise and should have a chance to be even more successful as they develop with age and gain more experience on the international stage.

While all that is fine and dandy, a real highlight for Gina and I was the group of six or seven young Canadians who sat in front of us during the first period. I’ve never seen such frenzied activity on Tinder – the swipes left and right were coming too fast and furiously for my eyes to process. The girl directly in front of me had actually matched an hour or so beforehand with the captain of Germany, who likely should have his mind on other things – I don’t know, getting ready to play a game, perhaps – instead of being on Tinder in the dressing room, but what can you do? She messaged him, of course, and I hope something works out for those potential lovebirds.

We finished our evening with a couple of outrageously-priced drinks at the hotel bar, beverages that weren’t even that good, and got to bed early as we left Montreal at 7 the next morning to make the 400-mile drive back to New Jersey, where we spent New Year’s Eve catching up for a bit with my aunt and uncle, eating fondue, competing in an epic decorating battle (which I obviously won) to create the best gingerbread man, and watching the endlessly cheesy Ryan Seacrest host his show from Times Square. Talk about balls dropping with that guy, I’ll tell you…

Happy New Year!

My next adventure will be a return trip to Columbia at the end of January. After attending a football game, a women’s soccer match, and a men’s and women’s swim meet on my visits this fall, I’ll make it the quadruple by seeing South Carolina square off in a true battle of the basketball titans against Georgia. I’m already feeling tingly. Until then.

Montreal, jour deux

After sitting in a car for six hours and consuming four delightful courses for dinner the day before, some physical activity that required ambulatory locomotion was essential.

We had three sites on our list to see for the day and mapped out our route in the hotel before we left in the morning, as once we were out of range of a Wi-Fi connection for our phones, we were on our own for directions. The route was relatively simple and circuitous and would take us back to the hotel in mid-afternoon, after ice skating at Parc La Fontaine, taking in the views of Montreal from Parc du Mont-Royal, and walking around the campus of McGill University, in that order.

It really wasn’t too complicated of an endeavor, especially for two people that have been fortunate enough to travel as extensively and successfully in Europe as Gina and I have. Between us, we’ve managed to navigate everywhere from Scandinavia to Iberia, from the British Isles in the west to Poland in the east. Surely another country on the continent we call home wouldn’t be that daunting of a challenge.

Imagine our surprise, then, when we didn’t have much of an idea where we actually were after emerging from the bowels of Montreal’s ultra-efficient subway system, walking down a busy boulevard to the entrance of a large green space, and beginning our gradual climb up the trails of a small mountain for the better part of an hour, There were plenty of other walkers out, a good sign to be sure, but we didn’t see any maps along the way. We had intended to go skating on a body of water that had been frozen over, not an artificially constructed public rink, and when we spotted signs along the trail for the Lac des Castors, we figured we were in business.

The problem was, Parc La Fontaine did not appear nearly as large on Google Maps as the length of the walk we were on, so doubts consistently lingered in our minds. When we saw people climbing to a lookout point at the top of the mountain, we followed Gina’s first rule of travel and headed for where the pretty pictures could be taken. Gina got a GoPro pole for Christmas, making the art of the selfie much easier for people who don’t want to ask other tourists and travelers to take a picture of them, so we did our business overlooking the most picturesque, stunningly arresting view of all of Montreal. Fingers sufficiently frozen in the numbing cold weather, we went inside what appeared to be a visitor center on the summit to warm up. 

Hard to beat this view

We consulted a map near all the brochures extolling the virtues of the tourist sites of Quebec, which we ignored, and were bemused when we saw where we were. We had made a right at Rue Rachel instead of making the left we needed to make to head to Parc La Fontaine, so we’d ended up stumbling on Mont Royal, the triple-peaked hill just west of the heart of the city to which it gave its name. The park on Mont Royal was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, who is perhaps better known for co-designing a little place you may have heard of in New York City called Central Park.

There is no more gratifying feeling when traveling then to discover something new, or to see something when it was least expected. We were going to see Mont Royal at some point that day, but to find it on a complete fluke somehow made it better, in an odd way. We went back into the open air and stood for a while, admiring the skyline of the city and gazing, as silently as a cliché, miles into the distance, including the St. Lawrence River and the Champlain Bridge we’d crossed entering Montreal the day before.

After descending the stairway from heaven – at least, it seemed that high when we walked up, huffing and puffing and stopping multiple times to catch our breath and rest our aching quad muscles – we left the park and headed for nearby McGill.

McGill has interested me for a while – I looked fairly seriously into its graduate programs in art history – as it’s an American-accredited institution and an English-language university right in the middle of a predominantly French-speaking city and province. It has a strong academic reputation and tradition, having been founded in 1821, and boasts a large number of international students. Its urban campus backs right up onto the base of Mont Royal and is conveniently located near several metro stops and the lively main commercial shopping thoroughfare in Montreal – Rue Sainte-Catherine. I can’t say it’s the most beautiful school I’ve ever seen, though my view is at odds with that of Travel and Leisure Magazine, which named McGill’s 79-acre grounds and its plethora of stone buildings one of the 17 most beautiful university campuses in the world in its September 2012 issue.  We walked around for perhaps a half an hour, and saw everything one could fairly expect to see given that none of the buildings were open due to the Christmas holiday.  

Looking onto McGill's campus

Our final stop while it was still light outside was the place we’d intended to visit first, Parc La Fontaine. Our research before the trip told us it would be an interesting place to go ice skating simply because it was an actual, real pond that had frozen over, rather than going in mind-numbingly boring, endless circles while dodging hordes of little children and teenagers who can’t be trusted to stay upright for any longer than two seconds at a much more crowded, artificial rink.

While the plan was good in theory, we (read: I) made a slight oversight: when we arrived at the park, there was nowhere to rent skates, unlike at one of those rinks I so detest. The park is right in the middle of a residential neighborhood, so while it was a great place for locals, it wasn’t ideal for tourists from America who didn’t think about, I don’t know, needing ice skates. Instead, we made the best of it as we managed to do some skating in our shoes, and had a leisurely end to our afternoon strolling hand-in-hand across the ice while the sun went down.

Nice day for a skate..on shoes

Our plans for dinner were a bit more low-key than our experience at Chez Suzette. Gina wanted to explore Montreal’s famous Underground City, a 20-mile network of shops, apartments, and restaurants connected to the metro system that is particularly beneficial in the winter when the weather is so harsh. As we reached Bonaventure metro station, one of the entrances to the Underground City, we found ourselves surrounded by throngs of people wearing Team Canada hockey jerseys, scarves, and other assorted apparel.

Before our trip, I had checked to see if the Montreal Canadiens were in town for a game when Gina and I would be in town, but when I saw they were away for our entire stay, I assumed there would be no hockey for us. Gina silently rejoiced, praising her good fortune. Somehow I managed to convince her to follow the crowd, who were headed to the Bell Centre, and after a bit of sports sleuthing on my part, we figured out the World Junior Championship was being contested and there was a game in Montreal that night – Canada vs. Finland.

At the box office, I inquired how much tickets would cost and was dismayed (Gina probably couldn’t have been more thrilled) to hear that $66 was the cheapest ticket available, ranging all the way up to $130 for better seats in the 21,273-seat capacity arena. There was zero chance or desire for us to afford that, so we moved on in our efforts to find dinner. Much of the Underground City was closed by that time of night, so it was onto Plan B.

We took the metro back to the closest stop to our hotel, and our proximity to Chinatown came in handy. After peeking in the windows of a few places, we settled on an all-you-can-eat buffet place because we’re just that classy. In addition to food you would rightly expect a Chinese place to have, other options included pizza, spaghetti with meat sauce and/or meatballs, jello, and pudding. What a selection. I opted for fried rice, some type of meat that vaguely resembled General Tso’s chicken, and shrimp that still had the eyes and feelers/tentacle things, attached. Gina did, in fact, take a jello square in addition to her mystery meat and fried rice dish. All-in-all, it actually wasn’t a bad meal by any means, and what I love about us is that we make the most out of every place we go, no matter how fancy or informal.

We still had one more day in Montreal to come, which I’ll write about in my next post. It really is a fantastic city, and despite our directional challenges over the first couple days, we were growing more and more comfortable with the environment and the locals. The next day would bring a change of hotels, but more fun activities. Hockey and shopping – the best of both worlds for us. More soon.