Logging

Day 4 -  Quick brunch in Woodley Park at a brunch spot down the street from the hotel.  Decent food.  Picked up car from hotel rental car. Baltimore for lunch.  Crab cakes at Faidley's in the Lexington Market.  The Wire was a glamorization.  This area is bad.  Back on the road toward Philly.  Get to town.  Crowded downtown.  Reminds me of San Francisco.  Street names the same.  Pier areas the same.  As if people designing SF just took a copy of the plans for Philly and set it up on the West Coast  Check into hotel - nice place - 4 star thanks to priceline.  Loews.

Walk down to Independence Hall and Liberty Bell.  Foundation of our country.  Head over to Reading Market.  Awesome spot.  Grab roasted pork sandwich from Dinic's - voted the best sandwich in the country.  Was toward the end of the day and they ran out of greens.  Chilled and cleaned up at hotel before taking taxi to Rittenhouse Square and eating profiteroles at Parc.  Decide to walk home because we suspect the taxi driver overcharged the 1.1 mile trek.

Day 5 - Wake up to loud pounding music - literally Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit followed by other ridiculous pop songs including Eye of the Tiger and No Easy Way Out.  Philly.  Look down out our window to see marathon runners taking up the entire street.  Madness.  Who knew.  Luckily, by the time we got going, the marathon was ending, grabbed food at the Reading Market again.  Talked with a guy about starting a deli - as he had given up his job as an engineer to open up a small family deli in the middle of the market.  Walked down to the Mutter Museum - a museum for doctors of all sorts of weird physical ailments and conditions documented since the 1850s.  Such things as gigantism - where a man had a tumor pressing on his gland that causes growth and literally could not stop growing and grew huge before dying at a young age like 23-24.  There were all sorts of crazy other freakish things, like a woman with a horn, a massive skull collection, a man with a gigantic colon because he got a disease that didn't allow him to poop.  Weird, nutty stuff.

Afterwards, we grabbed the car, checked out of the hotel and drove to Geno's to eat a famous Philly cheesesteak.  What's strange about Philly cheesesteak - there is nothing distinctive about the sandwich to Philly.  You can get the meat, the bread, the cheese, anywhere.  Therefore the cheesesteak place down the street on Lincoln Blvd in Santa Monica isn't really any different than the famous Philly spots. I guess they serve it with cheese whiz - if that can be considered an improvement.  Still, we threw one down, it tasted good and then we went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to run up the stairs like Rocky.

Hit the road to Atlantic City.  Never been there before.  Pricelined a hotel - the Sheraton for cheap.  Turns out there is no casino inside, which ends up probably being a good thing.  Get in, rest up, watch some football.  Go out to the boardwalk.  Picture Boardwalk Empire.  Place feels like 3rd Street Promenade with casinos.  Interesting detail: only place I can remember seeing in America where they have guys that'll push people around in wheeled carriages.  Walked out onto the beach, took a picture.  Headed to Tropicana Hotel.  $5 craps.  Wait for later.  $10 blackjack.  Sit down.  Get hot.  Up $90.  Cindy is chilling, looking up dinner spots.  Have premonition, I must quit now or will lose it all soon.  Decide to go get dinner - find an Italian place off the boardwalk.  Eat up.  Get back to hotel to watch the Niners beat the Lions.  Was going to watch at casino bar, but tired and not jazzed about ingesting more crap into the body.

Day 6 - Lousy breakfast at a local bakery.  Get out of AC.  First time in a long time I've left a gambling spot up.  Of course, I didn't play much.  Easier not to gamble when around non-gamblers.  The opposite, of course, is also true.  What's with the toll roads?  Real rip off.  Heading to NYC.  Where to stop along the way?  Find on the internet Mud City Crab Shack in Manahawkin.  Off the road a bit.  Place is delicious.  Order crab legs.  Boiled in salty water.  Yum.  Very clearly a locals spot.

Off to NYC.  Staying at friend's place right near Columbia in the north part of Manhattan, an area I've never been.  Drive into the city, find their apartment, bring in our stuff.  Hang.  Catch up.  Go grab dinner at a Grand Sichuan, which apparently is a Sichuan (spicy) chain in NYC, but wow, was it delicious.  One of the better Chinese meals I've had in awhile.  Walked up past St. Johns Cathedral, one of the most impressive buildings in all of NYC.  Grabbed a drink at a local bar.  Hit the hay.

Day 7 - Breakfast at Kichenette, a little spot near Columbia.  Good biscuits.  Heading off - quick ninja stop in NYC - toward Providence with a planned stop in New Haven to visit Yale.  Unpleasant interlude - car accident.  Getting onto the 95 east in the Bronx and a truck veers into my lane and hits me.  I brake and honk and ram my rim onto the median.  Pull over.  Wait for cops for 2 hours.  Real pain in the ass.  Deal with it.  Towed to a place who does biz with the rental car company.  Rental car company gets us a new car - Dodge Durango.  Insurance company dealing with it.

Finally back on the road.  Rain coming.  Low gas.  Starbucks pumpkin latte.  Fill up the SUV tank.  Don't buy an SUV.  21 gallons at $4.15 a gallon.  You do math.  Make it to New Haven in the late afternoon.  Parking meter gets 1 hour.  Quick walk around Yale campus.  Bigger than I thought.  Crappy food options.  Yale has street meat?  Who knew?  Rain again.  Back on the road.

Providence, Rhode Island.  Biltmore Hotel.  A Historic place.  Could also just be old.  Where to eat dinner?  Try this Peruvian spot with a strangely hit or miss meal:  Ceviche cocktail is amazing.  Arugula salad is no good.  Lamb Shank delicious.  Cocktail too sweet.  Strange.  Meal is enormous - have many leftovers.