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Good is subjective.

Newfoundland, Canada (2022)

Many years ago, my cousin got married in Italy. I went there, danced until I had sweat doubles of Negroni completely through my suit blazer, and then got the best shave of my life. On the flight back, I saw St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada on the little back-of-seat map screen, I've wanted to go since. People will tell you that Newfoundland is a bizzaro Ireland. People will tell you that St. John's is mainly notable for alcoholism and as a stopover for the US Air Force where the aforementioned alcoholism leads to foolishness. This is what I knew going there. And it's all true.

There were many small, nice things about this trip. Porter Airlines (we referred to it as ‘Old Mate Porter') is a small turboprop airline that services St. John's. You get a free tallboy each leg, there's two legs between St. John's and Newark, and thus I got blitzed off the bat, drunkenly marveling that they still make propeller planes that big for commercial flight.

St. John's is by far the largest city and population center. The town offers a stretch of bars and clubs on George Street for the youth, and a more conventional Main Street lined with nice restaurants and stores that closes to cars for pedestrian traffic on the weekends. The surrounding hills have old-world fortifications and cannons, and the rolling hills, whistling high grass, and rocky, windy cliffs did does invoke “Ireland.”  Speaking of which, every third person has a permutation the Irish brogue in some varting strength.

Any tavern in St. John's will Screech™ you in. A ritualistic process in which you kiss fish, drink rum, and get caned by an elderly barkeep with a thick Irish brogue for eating bologna too fast and getting very odd sailor phrases wrong. It is a high point.

Newfoundland stretches about 9 or so hours coast to coast. It is built like a barbell. The coolest nature is on the West Coast in Gros Morne. The city, the people, and the history is on the East Coast with St. John's. In between are a few towns on the long stretch, including Gander, famous for taking in thousands of people from flights redirected during the 9/11 attacks.

The rules of the highway are very simple. No cops, only moose. They police the road. You hit one, you die. Typical situation: you hit one doing a buck fifty (km/h), the car kneecaps the 1,000+ lb behemoth, it falls over on top of your car, and you become one with the headliner. Everyone knows someone who's done it.

Gros Morne is the worthwhile national park on the western coast of Newfoundland. While 95% of Newfoundland is already in spirit a giant nature reserve, Gros Morne has spots where the Earth's mantle is exposed, (false) fjords to tour with former cod fisherman selling folk music CDs, and the final, northern most mountains in the Appalachian range, which travel under the ocean just to be the backdrop to you drinking Labatts and eating pickled hotdogs.

Newfoundland lived and died with cod. Overfishing caused a moratorium on cod in the 90s. Everyone lost their job. Entire communities only accessible by boat and disconnected from the road networks lost their purpose and commerce. Everyone used to fish cod. Now they run shanty hotels in towns with names like Cow's Head (Population: 30) and give fjord tours in Gros Morne. And those disconnected communities without road access on the southern coast are fully geriatric, and resettlement programs are taking route as no young people stay and everyone needs increasing amounts of comprehensive healthcare. It is a shared experience by nearly all Newfoundlanders. ‘Aye, I was a cod fisherman, and now…’ is as common as alcoholism, which I suspect these two quirks hold hands.

For years I thought of going to Newfoundland. I thought it would spark catharsis. That I'd sit down at a harborside cafe in St. John's and watch stevedores move crates onto freighters, and things would click. The past would be clean, I'd breathe new air, I'd break loose from the mud I'd got caught in, and stop putting myself through hell because I wasted years of my life and disappointed people that I loved. That the phone would ring, and I'd make amends to those I haven't spoken to in years.

Instead, I danced at the George Street clubs until I sweat Screech rum completely through my shirt.

Bar Harbor, ME (2021)

We picked up our buddy from Portsmouth, NH (unremarkable), and saw every major lighthouse on the Maine coast. I was on a mission to buy a stuffed moose head, and we offered to buy the static moose display at a flagship LL Bean store. The joke was, my friend had an absurd amount of cash on him, around $3500 in bills, and every time someone would go ‘Oh it’s not for sale,’ we’d whip out the wad and say assuredly ‘..It’s for sale.’ I never ended up getting a moose head, or any part of a moose for that matter.

It’s a blast to bike around Acadia and then settle down at the pubs in Bar Harbor for the evening - anyone who’s done it knows it. There’s a university on the island with barely anyone in attendance, and a waiter we had described them as ‘crunchy.’

Next time, I’d like to indulge on the camping trip LL Bean runs in Acadia.  Looks pretty cool.

We saw three weddings. Took photos of two.

The first one, I waited 20 minutes for the kiss to happen at the altar. Once I got it, I rushed into the car and we spun out the tires. The bridal party had been watching me on and off, so I gave them a good story.

The last one was an older couple in Bar Harbor who were traipsing about, giddy and free in their bride and groom getups. Right before snapping the photo, I made a joke saying “I’ll tell my kids this is what my grandparents looked like.”

If you notice, there’s a twinge of extreme spite coming from the bride. Sometimes you put your foot in your mouth, but I think I went up to the knee there. I gave them a bad story.

On the way back, I bought a gaudy purple coat and a bunch of junk jewelry to help make Pickle

Rapid City, SD (2021)

Short and Sweet

It is 2004 in Rapid City. Casinos everywhere. Transplants who find it more ‘undiscovered’ than Colorado. Flip Phones. Carl Jr’s. Agriculture Conventions. Diners that sell the penile bone of raccoons as marital aids. Bison and stuffed bison Industry. Dinosaur statues standing above the horizon on the hills surrounding the city, silhouetted by the morning and evening sun. Presidents on every corner, standing in still-life, and making you paranoid when you’re on an empty stomach at 1AM on Thursday night, trying to find food in single digit temperatures. You think you’re gonna get mugged, but it's only Ronald Reagon. Maybe it’s 2006 now, given the time passed.

The only major thing I’d say to do is go out and hike around the Black Hills - definitely the highlight of the area.

Stuff to do:

In Rapid City

• There’s bars and arcades and giant stuffed bison emporiums. Just enjoy it. I’m sure there’s a dinosaur museum we passed by. Just kind of a neat place. Lot of stuff you’d find in any city, nice place to return to and ‘homebase’ out of for any trip.

West / SW / NW of Rapid City

• The Black Hills - Hiking, Camping, Caves, ATV and sled rentals, Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse Memorial. Drive through the Black Hills, stop somewhere, walk into the woods, climb a mountain, encounter a cryptid horror as night falls on descent, something that isn’t you but looks like you returns to your family.

• Deadwood - Town where the aesthetic of the old west, pioneer gambling town is very alive. At the north end of the Black Hills

East of Rapid City

• Badlands Nat’l Park - Aliens took a salad mixer to earth. Strange place.

• Wall - Basically a South Dakota mecca. Near the Badlands, and signs everywhere across the highway to go there. Like 40 Cracker Barrels and their cousins having a retail jamboree.

• Minutemen Nuclear Sites - Bunch of museums regarding nuclear weapons and silos. Really cool anecdote about how the underground monitoring station was essentially a tomb in case of nuclear exchange.

The Full Story

I went here for a job. A year of despair had beset me, butting heads with my father as we worked the farm, watching friends succeed in getting their careers off the ground where I had not, and generally being totally bored from not using my brain, instead exercising rote movements to haul dirt, stone, and trees from point A to B. Any suggestions to ‘engineer’ better farm processes were not accepted.

In the midst of this, a Rapid City based military surplus retailer announced a gig: They wanted to start making their own homegrown patterns of kit for government bid, and they wanted a mechanical engineer to slap the work together. I had bought numerous things from them over the years, drowning my closet in musty splotches of green, browns, reds, tans etc.,  so naturally I applied and decided to take a vacation / ‘feel-em-out’ tour to see if I wanted to board their ship.

I flew there with my dear friend, El Greco. Within twenty minutes of meeting my would be employer, who picked us up from Rapid City Airport (callsign KRAP) in a busted up gold Toyota Landcruiser with a (seemingly fake) snorkel, we were doing donuts in a snowy parking lot in downtown Rapid City. These guys were cowboys, if manifest destiny was the hypothesized future balkanization of America. Much was heard, said, seen, done, and thought, and ultimately I did not take the job, but the memories remain.

According to the locals, Western South Dakota has a specific, dry climate unlike the rest of the state due to the (nearly ever-present) eastbound wind from Wyoming pushing all the humidity of the Missouri River east, splitting the state into dry in the west, and wet in the east. They experience typically "sweatshirt" weather in the winters and I'm told the -5F high of the day temperatures they had experienced that winter were unusual. Speaking of winter, much is closed in the region at this time of year, be it the bear sanctuary, the reptile gardens (who allegedly have a tic tac toe playing chicken), or the Spearfish fish hatchery.

We AirBnB’d a place in the Black Hills. The Black Hills, where it's not unusual to see towns with populations in the single digits. The Black Hills, which from satellite view, appears like a wild mole on the face of the Earth. The Black Hills, known as Paha Sapa, of which ongoing disputes continue as the US Court system has determined it legally belongs to the Lakota as ancestral lands (of whom, the Lakota had conquered it from other tribes as ancestral lands (namely, the Arikara), who had conquered it from other tribes as ancestral lands, and so on). Of course, nothing has changed. 

The AirBnB host cautioned us against using the satnav on the rental car, since it gets lost. Despite printing her exact instructions, we followed the satnav (stupidly). It took us twenty miles north of our necessary exit on the highway, putting us on a sand road, snowpacked and sheeted with ice. Tire tracks dwindled as local residents and campsites thinned, and we found ourselves following a single set of tracks up a narrow road that disappeared high into the Black Hills, some forty minutes of travelling later. The intrepid rental couldn’t give any more traction, and we found ourselves stuck, at midnight, on an isolated road, with no cell service and temperatures at -11F, in the middle of the Black Hills. It was awesome. We dug ourselves out some twenty minutes later, and reversed all the way back down the hill, where if we broke traction and slipped, you’d be basically jumping off a cliff into a pike formation of trees. El Greco said he thought we were gonna die up there. That possibility made us both feel quite alive. Come to find out later that if we had succeeded in following the satnav, we would’ve end up in a seasonal logging camp, and been forced to cross an iced over stream just to maybe end up near the north side of town. Google mapping showed basically no roads whatsoever further up the route, just barely etched out trails wide enough for a truck to go through under pretty extensive growth.

We got back on the highway, followed the paper notes, and found our proper exit. Sand packed and ice covered, but properly traveled. Ten minutes into this at around 1am, El Greco criticized the music choice (Led Zeppelin). I told him to can it, and immediately hit a rut that sends me into the roadside ditch, where I am completely stuck. It took an hour for the sheriff to come out and breathalyzer me (drunk on life, but not alcohol) and another hour and a half for the tow truck to come down from Lead to yank us out of the ditch. We continued to the AirBnB, arriving at 4am, where we found an extremely cozy cabin, but the idea of commuting back and forth in between there and Rapid City made us think twice on staying the entire time. We worked something out with the owner the next morning, and stayed at the Hotel Alex Johnson, which while haunted, was a beautiful place.

We did a couple things in the Black Hills, including Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse, and hiking.

Mt. Rushmore is smaller than you think, and sometimes you wish they had done more work. The facility and welcome center for viewing is actually really cool on its own, and the museum really helps pull the feat together in perspective. Definitely a cooler visit than you’d think.

Crazy Horse is a continual project, with hundred year timelines. They are making progress but it feels like they are unsure themselves if they are a grift or not. Neat, nonetheless.

We did a few hikes through Custer State Park and Wind Cave National Park, which we enjoyed a lot more because they really showcase the appeal of the Black Hills. We also climbed up Mt. Coolidge which was mundo nice, really lets you soak in the region with the Badlands being visible nearly 60 miles away, appearing like an alien's distant attempt to strip mine the earth with a salad mixer. It was really beautiful up there. Very fond memories.

On a different day, we did a northern trip to Deadwood. Gambling palooza, kinda boring past that. Every drive you take within the Black Hills  is scenic and nice. It's beautiful country. The drive across the plains from Deadwood past Sturgill (of motorcycle rally fame) is less scenic, more just plains and farms, but totally different than what you see in New Jersey.

Going east for a day, we putzed around the Badlands which offers great vistas of places to Thelma and Louise your car into a ravine. There's a lot of nice trails and built paths where midwestern families marched with their children, as if the park was under military occupation by platoons of tiny soldiers adorned in neon parkas, guarding expanses of ‘Prairiedogvilles’ and bison.

Wall was interesting, kind of a self-aware joke, and conveniently right there on the eastbound highway out of Rapid City.next to the Badlands. Get a haircut, buy a stuffed jackalope, eat jerky. Kind of a fun little sideshow.

The Minuteman sites were really cool. Really made you appreciate and understand the lives involved and the attitudes of nuclear armageddon The Badlands, Wall, and the Minutemen Museums are prime to do in a single day.

This is a neat trip for about a week. But past that, you’d be scratching your head unless you were really doing some extensive outdoor activities in the Black Hills. Would be a great stop if doing a more extensive sweep across into Wyoming or Colorado (at which point, you’re not staying in Rapid City anymore).

Edinburgh, Scotland (2023)

The best restaurant in the city is called “The Alchemist.” Novelty drinks with “magic effects” and chicken and waffles so well done that it would make a Tennessee native blush (our companion from TN certainly did). We ate here three times in a week because it was that good. If you take away nothing else from these long, wandering ramblings, go to The Alchemist.

Scotland was the highlight. Of the week in England and the week in Scotland, Scotland was better. Are you drinking alone in a pub? No you’re not because some old feller is gonna start chatting to you because you’re obviously not Scottish. Are you hanging alone in a club? An arborist and all his friends will adopt you and have you karaoke Weezer and add Siobhan Miller to all of your spotify playlists. Do you need help or directions or want to know more about something? Everyone is overwhelmingly friendly. Genuinely.

We stayed principally in Edinburgh, and it was awesome. BEAUTIFUL city. Absolutely gorgeous, walkable, easy to bus around if not, and just a great experience. Some shops can be shabby and it isn’t primped and preened like a London square, but the London people were colder, more atomized; to a notable few, you were a hindrance in their way, they had to be somewhere and you inconvenience them by being proximal - that familiar but unfamiliar NYC brushoff. Here, people were nice.

My friend and I bought matching flat caps, one in white, one in black. We were called salt and pepper (SAHLT, AN PEPPAH, per pronunciation). We had a red and yellow jacket. We were KETCHUHP, AN MUSTAHD. It was very funny. Great time.

One night we all went out drinking. We were at the Royal Mile (the big strip where bars, clubs, and touristy shops are abundant), blitzed at a place locally known as Frankie’s. The night wrapped, and my girlfriend who was largely sober was designated the shepherd to bring the inebriated back to our lodging. “We’re almost at the bus stop” she would keep saying. “Almost there, a few more blocks.” Slowly each of us caught on all except for the two most wasted. They’d ask “where is it, where are we” and she’d say “we’re going to one with a short wait, don’t worry” or “just wait, almost there.” It wasn’t until we arrived a block from the flat where a very distinct veterinary clinic with a strange name was come upon that it became apparent she simply marched our drunk minds the 45 minutes home through the Edinburgh suburb in the dead of night. Even with the world sideways, it was a splendid walk.

Overlooking the city is an ancient volcano nestled with ponds and hilly ridges called Arthur’s Seat. It overlooks the city, and is a really fun little hike up. Pretty vertical, rocky, slippery, etc. but certainly manageable and plenty plenty fun. Great views, and you get to slip down the mountain (the wet grass and steep incline will put you on your rear, almost guaranteed) and you can walk five minutes to a pub and get a pint and sausage. I cannot say truly how much I loved the city.

We took a bus tour up to The Scottish Highlands and to see Loch Ness. Our lorry announcer was an older fellow, who’d speckle every ten miles or so with a story of lore, and every single one would end in “we just don’t know.”

A story would go:

“Lord Macdonough had a card table where rumor says he’d play the devil every night, until he cheated the devil, who raged and kicked the table into the lake next to the manor…”

Or

“The English surrounded the MacGregor clan on their stake in the 1241 conquest through these hills…”

Or

“A scorned wife of a nobleman was said to drown herself in the Loch in a fit of sorrow…”

And then they’d end like:

“… And an old friend of mine, who collects oddities, had the card table, and I looked and underneath and was sure as the sun was bright, a hoofprint. Was Lord Macdonough truly in with the devil and cheated him that night? We just don't know.”

and

“…It was said they fought valiantly, trading blows, and though they lost, many went on to the hills to survive, though nary were they heard from again. Did they starve, were they taken by kelpies, did they live through that winter? We just don’t know.”

And

“…it is said her wails and songs can be heard on the winds through the grass and the thistle on a moonless night when out on the Loch. Is she still out there, crying out in pain from her husband’s betrayal, would she drag ye under into her misery she found you on the Loch? We just don’t know.”

The Highlands itself are a totally new biome that suddenly appears. The folklore and mystery in the region our tour guide espoused fit justly for the barren rolling plains and hills and mountains that dwarfed you in. It feels like a mini-tundra that cribs you in. It feels scraggled, with nooks and crannies and people and villages spackled across earth’s rough texture, some corners never being seen, and the nature being that you could just disappear into the country, fade into the grass or dissolve into the lake, or hide in the rocks, and you feel many did just that since time immemorial. Ruined castles and boat tours abound, the geography and terrain was the highlight, stunning. Especially at a roadside gathering we attended, where bagpipe players tuttled on, their song beating against the wind and cliffs around us, sinking the weight of that place and the whole place into mind.

But whatever you do, go to The Alchemist.

London, England (2023)

You fly in early morning. You take a long tube to the Airbnb. You find out it's actuslly a weird communal hostel and not ready until evening. You've had no sleep. You lumber around, bleary eyed, lugging a suitcase in each hand a bag on your back, the memories malforming in your consciousness as you rear your head around the sights, the etchings of streets and the faces of people passing by rendered ephemeral as you fall into hypnogogic jerks every time you sit for more than a minute. You eventually fall asleep in the park on top of your belongings, six inches away from a mound of goose shit. You awaken, wander into a pub, eat the heaviest food of your life, stumble to the hostel which has no doors that lock, and plummet into oblivion the moment you swan dive onto the sweaty, stained mattress. You awaken suddenly at 2am to drunkards yelling in the streets, clearly heard the through the single pane windows. You awaken again at 4am to street sweepers. You awaken at 5am to garbage trucks with squealing brake pads. You awaken again at 8am. You're alone. All your stuff is gone.

…

RULE BRITANNIA, BRITANNIA RULES THE WAVES

For real though, it’s charming - the tube is very cool and the touristy parts are nice. Everyone and their brother basically says it’s not nice but I guess we were consistently too close to the ‘touristy’ center of London to ever feel like it was anything less than nice. Our favourite restuarant was probably Dishoom.

To be written:

San Juan, Puerto Rico (2024)

Tokyo, Japan (2023)

Osaka & Kyoto, Japan (2023)

Montreal, Canada (2022, 2024)

Future:

San Francisco, USA

Reykjavik, Iceland

Prague, Czechia

Munich, Germany

Lisbon, Portugal

Madrid, Spain

Castillo, Spain

Mont St. Michel, France

Hong Kong, HK

Shanghai, China

Beijing, China

Vladivostok, Russia

Irkutsk, Russia

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Tierra del Fuego, Argentina

Maccu Piccu, Peru

Helsinki, Finland

Copenhagen, Denmark

Malmo, Sweden

Arus, Norway

Helsinki, Finland

Palermo, Sicily

Istanbul, Turkey

Wherever El Greco recommends in Greece

National Parks

Zion 

Grand Tetons

Yellowstone