Skip to main content

016-Don & Pauls


Restaurants have a regional feel.  High end places are nice but it comes at a price.  The “normal” places tend to have a similarity that is boring and most low-end places are there for a reason (I never want to go into the kitchen of the Chinese restaurant on 25th street in Arlington next to the titty bar.  Nasty, nasty even though the delivery always tasted good).  But occasionally you stumble across a low-end place that isn’t, although the prices might indicate otherwise.  The fact that the menu hasn’t been updated since 1950 and the place is busy is a tell.

We loved this place.  Ate there every morning our 4 day layover at Waterford NY.  My dad would have loved this place too, he used to go to “Ole Timers” in downtown Rockwall for the same reason we liked this place.  Patron’s mostly seem to know each other.  They would kibitz while we ate.  The place hadn’t seen any investment in years, they were likely just hanging on but they were in the business of building community by selling breakfast.  We all long for community and these guys had it in spades.  And of course, the prices were great too, but that’s really secondary isn’t it?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

046 - Fog Bank a Comin

To all those who insist on paper charts as a backup to electronics, “what good are they in fog?”  What was a surprise to us was the frequency of fog on the lakes, it wasn’t anticipated by us, seemed like a New England issue not a lake issue.  But the water is cold (60s in the big water) and the air is warm which is perfect for dense fog.  We learned at the shipwreck museum that a large percentage of ship wrecks on the Great Lakes are ships driving into other ships, mostly in dense fog.  Radar, GPS, electronics charts and AIS should mostly preclude this cause of shipwrecks.  We expected the number one cause for shipwrecks to be bad weather (think Edmond Fitgerald) but bad weather only accounted for ¼ of so of great lakes shipwrecks.  With far better forecasting today, this too shouldn’t be an issue like it used to be.  But back to our story, without radar, we played our fog horn, set a watch on the bow, watched the AIS for ships (we could see them ...
Post a Comment
Read more

048 - Big Water

The Great Lakes are mislabeled, they are really inland seas.  They are so big that one end can have very different weather than the other end or even the middle.  Waves however don’t really care where they come from and can travel hundreds of miles, reflecting off hard coastlines.  Shallow waters amplify the waves by making for a shorter period; this can create little waves that brings the boat to a complete stop as it goes up and down pounding against a wall of water.  Similarly, one end of the lake may be experiencing 20+kts of wind and the other end could be in a dead calm with waves that originated from the other end.  Makes it tough to know what the conditions are for your journey, so when its good take advantage of it, it will likely change.
Post a Comment
Read more

049 - Currents

I admit the picture doesn’t show much, but this was 5.5kts underneath Peace Bridge near Port Huron.  We were doing 1/2kt against the current.  People on the shore were walking faster than us.  It was impressive.  I’m glad to be on Lake Huron where there are no currents.  The lake does slosh around with wind but I can handle that, I really don’t want to fight 5.5kts of current again, it was taking the boat and tossing it all around like a cork.  I was working the tiller harder than in a following sea.  You can see a bit of an eddy in the lower right but you’ll have to trust me on this one.  The dramatized blurry picture below shows the turbulence and terror of the experience.  It also captures the Loch Huron monster in the middle left – it’s unexplained what that silver hump is.  Yikes!
Post a Comment
Read more