As I was driving back from a customer meeting the alternator/battery light came on in my car. After a few moments I realized that steering had become more difficult, though possible. I called the place I take my car to be fixed which is over off New Hampshire Avenue. They said it was ‘the belt’, it probably snapped. I should bring it in. I said I would that evening.

SO last night I took the now convenient Intercounty Connector (ICC), Route 200, over to New Hampshire. While driving over there I learned, through experiential data, that when ‘the belt’ snaps, the batter is now being recharged so well. And when you have been driving for a while and your headlights are on (and your radio is on) your batter eventually goes dead. In this case about 1/10 of a mile from the New Hampshire Avenue exit. Luckily I was able to coast to the right shoulder and the emergency blinker worked (which meant I figured out what to push to turn the emergency blinker on).

I called Ellen who was almost at the car place to tell her I might be a bit delayed. And I called AAA to have me towed there. They had to put me on hold for a LONG TIME since they had difficulty getting their system to find me, the ICC being so new, and thus identify who would be assigned to come get me (and my car). It is an unhappy experience to be sitting on the side of a highway with a pretty dead battery, the emergency blinker being the only thing to warn drivers not to hit me, the AAA’s telling me the safest place to be was in my car, and watch the battery on your cell phone drain while listening to a recording of how my call was important to them and they would be back to me as soon as possible.

However, the young woman doing the assignment came back on before the cell phone turned off, the AAA tow truck came before the emergency blinker stopped, and the car place was less than 3 miles away so I didn’t even have to pay extra for the towing.

Which leads me to this morning. This morning I can safely claim, unlike many who do, that I had a very low incremental carbon foot print. I took the ride-on bus from a block from my house to the Grosvenor Metro stop, the metro to Rockville, and then the ride-on bus to two blocks from the office, and got in by 7:30am. As to how I will handle tonight we will leave that to later.

While I am wasting time with youtube, I often will update my various social media connections with a link to a video with a song that I am particularly struck by. A recent interaction that resulted from that caused me to think about the mid-west.

When I was growing up I was always a little bit unclear as to exactly where the mid-west started and stopped.

I knew it began somewhere to the west of the Allegheny Mountains. When I was in Cleveland, I knew I was in the mid-west. But exactly when did I leave the mid-west on the other side?

When I drove around the country with Bill Sullivan in his Mustang, and where has Bill Sullivan gone anyway, in 1975 in an effort to forget my then former college girl friend and find exciting and hopefully inappropriate adventures (sadly, none of which happened), I knew when we got to Los Angeles that we were not in the mid-west anymore but when did we cross the line from mid-west to not-mid-west? A mystery unsolved, at least by me.

By the way, Bill’s Mustang had a very high-horsepower engine, could it have been 390 (did they put that kind of engine at the time in a Mustang?). We got perhaps 9 miles per gallon of gas. On the other hand, I remember driving through Arkansas and seeing gas for 23.9 cents/gallon; which actually says more about the lack of inappropriate adventures that happened than it does about gas prices in 1975.

In Phoenix, Bill and I went to a pretty nice French restaurant. When Bill’s steak came, he caused the waiter to become extremely pale when he asked for ketchup to put on the steak. I guess we were not very sophisticated traveler’s.

Other than how big and beautiful and varied the United States is, which you really cannot appreciate without traveling around it on the ground, the other strong memory from that trip was how we fought over what was to play on the radio. That issue became more and more important as the ultimately two-month long drive came to a close. I had to leave it in Minneapolis since I had to report to basic training for the Army Reserves July 6th (only remembered because of that date’s proximity to my birthday). But, as we say, that is another story altogether.

Well, actually I misspoke above, I actually thought about the mid-west because I reflected on whether I was in or past middle-age. I knew that I had entered middle-age at some point though once again not entirely sure when but was unclear as to the exit point. I suspect that the classical definition of the end of middle-age, assuming there IS a classical definition, may be changing as people have longer life-spans. I read somewhere that 50% of all children born in the US now will live to be 100 years old, a remarkable thing.

My question about middle-age came about after I tweeted the link to one of my favorite Danny Kaye song’s “Inchworm”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXi3bjKowJU. I got a response to that tweet from a young woman I knew who told me that she really liked the song a lot. BUT she had to look up who Danny Kaye was in Wikipedia. When I asked her if she was kidding about having to do the Wikipedia search, she pointed out that she was only three when Danny Kaye had died.

So seriously it was at that moment that I realized I had left middle-age, but when exactly did that happen?

We were up at 5:15am to get ready to drive to the airport to fly to Florida. Starting with a temperature in the 20’s in Rockville MD, we landed to a temperature in the 70’s in West Palm Beach. We flew there since the first game we were going to see was an away game against St. Louis at Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter.

After getting the car, and returning the unwanted but almost charged for GPS; “No we have two smart phones and two tablets and a laptop, somewhere in there must be Google Maps”, we were off for the game.

One of the great things about going to Spring training, since we are now experts having gone once before, is how close to the field you get and how informal the whole setting is; though I suspect with attendance going up each year for these games like everything it has pretty gotten a bit more formal. Heck, there were even scalpers outside the stadium selling tickets.

We were two rows from the field behind home plate toward the Nationals dugout and literally had the players within an arm’s reach of us. Whenever Pudge Rodriguez came out to hit, one father kept bringing his two year old to the netting and yelled at Pudge to turnaround so the father could take a picture of the two together. One fan yelled that the father should give the camera to Pudge and let HIM take the picture of the father with the son. Neither happened since actually during the game the players tend to focus on the game.

Mike Rizzo, the Nationals General Manager, sat in the row in front of us, so Ellen and I were able to ponder what secret comments were being made between him and the guy sitting to his left about his plans for the team.

The guy who was selling pretzels, who held a large plastic pretzel in his hand, spent his time walking around the stands and shouting things like “If you want the Cardinals to win, you have to buy a pretzel. If you want the Nationals to win, you have to … pray.” Or when Albert Pujols would come up, “Get your Pujols pretzels, only available for a short period of time.”, an inside joke for those who know that Pujols is an unrestricted agent after this year and may move to another team in return for some extradinary contract.

Nyjer Morgan, the Nationals projected center fielder for this year and who had what one might call a mixed year last year with altercations on the field and with fans off the field during games, was yelled at by one of the Cardinals fans in the crowd. Morgan, unlike almost all of the players, actually turned around to look at the guy. “Have your people call my people”, said the fan; to be honest I have no idea what that was supposed to mean, but it evidently annoyed Morgan who seems to flunked any charm school classes the Nationals sent him to in the off-season by then articulating a suggestion which was physically impossible to the fan and unprintable in this blog.

We were able to see the Nationals new “greatest player of all time”, confirmed when a fan yelled out “You are the greatest player of all time” as Bryce Harper came up to hit late in the game. Harper grounded out to second, though he ran very hard to first base after hitting the ball.

We saw why Albert Pujols might be the best player in baseball for now, until Harper gets into the majors, both by how well he did at the plate but also by how carefully he was pitched to.

And we saw some very strange fielding and running plays which hopefully will not be duplicated by the Nationals in the regular season.

Oh yes, the Nationals lost 7-5 but it was GREAT being here. As I mentioned to Mike Rizzo when he sat down, I could see why baseball was such a difficult sport to be part of. Participants have to spend a month each year in Florida starting in February playing a game out in the sun.

In Wuhan, where we watched the eclipse we were joined by an American astronaut, Alvin Drew. Drew at the time was the US representative to the Russian space program and was stationed in Moscow for a year. He had read about our group in an article in the New York Times and decided to join us.

In this earlier blog post, http://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2009/07/23/a-solar-eclipse-is-much-more-than-just-a-visual-experience/, I wrote about the overall experience of watching the eclipse and included a picture of Drew with myself and another member of our group Howard Spero.

And here is a picture with Drew, myself, and Miriam and Tamar:

Drew was selected to be a member of the current visit to the Space Station, the last visit, http://www.nasa.gov/.

It was an honor to spend time with him talking about the space program and a thrill to actually have met an astronaut who has now flown in outer space. He even let us put on his special multi-million dollar sun glasses, a great guy.

Now if they would only bring back Firefly with new episodes, http://www.whedon.info/Firefly-Reruns-Join-The-Sci-Fi.html.

Ellen and I decided that we would do our 30^th anniversary ‘stuff’ later this year. Not everyone would understand this reference but this is not dissimilar to many American Jewish families who don’t like the time of year their son or daughter’s birthday is for having a Bar or Bat Mitzvah event so they just move it to another time of year.

It occurs to me that all of this may have begun when we moved historical events to being celebrated on Mondays regardless of when they occurred that year and how this shows our modern culture isn’t willing to deal with the problems they face and would rather deal with the problems they chose to, but I digress.

In any event, as part of my mantra to do whatever Ellen wants in order to continue to encourage putting up with me, we decided to go to a Bed & Breakfast in Harpers Ferry over the President’s Day weekend, tying accidently into the Monday holiday thing.

Oh, I need to mention one other thing before actually getting to the Monday breakfast and the subject of the entry. On Friday, February 18^th, I appeared on the Francis Rose In-Depth show talking about the three stories I thought important relating to Federal IT that week, http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=17&sid=2276999. Other than noting that Francis is still another person who has played APBA baseball for many years, why I bring this up will become clear shortly.

So that is why the morning of February 21^st, Monday, Ellen and I found ourselves at breakfast with two other couples around a table at the Jackson Rose B&B, http://www.thejacksonrose.com/, no relation to Francis. The Jackson part comes from the fact that Stonewall Jackson used the building as a headquarters part of the time during the Civil War, the Rose part comes from a reference he made in a letter to his wife referring to a pleasant rose that grew there.

One note at this point, I pretty carefully do not express any opinions about the backgrounds and/or the political positions that some of the members of the other two couples in my description below. That does not mean I do not have them or in some cases might not agree with them. It is merely because I wanted to focus on something else as will become evident.

To my right was a couple from Richmond VA. The wife’s family came from Armenia. Her grandmother was pregnant with her mother when Turkey forced the family, among other others, out of country. From there they went to Beirut Lebanon and then to the US. She has been very active with the American Armenian community interested in publicizing what they call the Armenia Genocide, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide.  They were there because they came every year to visit.

Between that couple and we were a relatively young couple. The pregnant wife was from Palestine and is an employee at CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, http://www.cair.com/.  Her husband had come to the US some sixteen months ago from Egypt. During course of the breakfast, he said that he recognized me. We realized that on Friday while I was at the radio station, he had walked by and said hi. He worked there supporting the IT infrastructure. They were there because, amazingly, the Egyptian husband had developed a fascination with the American Civil War and was in the process of visiting all of the local Civil War battlefields. Harper’s Ferry was one of the last one’s on the list.

And of course, there was Ellen and I, American Jews whose families had come from various locations in Europe. During the course of the breakfast we discussed the recent events in the Middle-East and the viewpoints on a variety of topics including the homelands of each of the couples. Ellen discussed a recent play we had seen at the Theatre J, located in the Washington DC Jewish Community Center, called Return to Haifa, http://www.washingtondcjcc.org/center-for-arts/theater-j/on-stage/10-11Season/return-to-haifa/ with the Palestinian wife.

The play, written by an Israeli, was based on a novella written by a Palestinian. It tells the story of two couples and a child associated with both. One couple were Holocaust survivors who emigrated to Israel and as part of being given a house to live in were asked to adopt and raise a child left behind when Palestinians left the house in the chaos of the departure. The second couple was the family that left. The child became an Israeli soldier. The play went back and forth between the past and the present telling the complicated narratives that represent the difficulties in coming to an agreed to peace in the Middle-East today.

When we attended this was followed by a pretty highly-charged audience discussion with lots of disagreements. Audience members included Israeli’s, Palestinians, and US Citizens of various persuasions.

The Egyptian born husband was the first to remark that he felt that only in America could these three couples accidently come together, in Harpers Ferry of all places at a Bed & Breakfast, and have the conversations we had that morning. On this one point, everyone at the table agreed completely.

Outside the Cows Plant

We took the tour along with a number of other visitors, including four guys who were members of the Harley Davidson club in Idaho Falls, Idaho. They brought along with them their fake snake Chester. It turns out they hold a 50-50 raffle each meeting. The winner not only gets 50% of the money paid into the pot but they also get Chester who (which?) they are obligated to take around with them until the next meeting where they hopefully will not be a repeat winner.

Ellen on Tour

Dan on Tour

Someone a picture of Hell’s Angels didn’t come to mind when talking to four guys on an ice cream tour with one holding a toy snake.

One other product that Cows makes is tee-shirts. They do lots of them with silly slogans. However, even here the conflict between the Washington Caps and Pittsburgh Penguin hockey stars rages on, as the Moovechkin and Cowsby tee-shirts are evidently big sellers.

Second Rate Parody About Second Rate Hockey Player

Moovechkin is the Man, or well, Cow

After the tour and the free sample all tour members get at the end of the tour, we spent the rest of the day wandering around the Eastern part of Prince Edwards Island. We saw many (many) beautiful beaches, almost no stop lights, and little traffic. We had a wonderful lunch at Windows on the Water in Montague, http://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g499319-d710689-Reviews-Windows_On_The_Water_Cafe-Montague_Prince_Edward_Island.html, and spent an hour learning about life on PEI looking through the Orwell Corner’s historical site, http://www.gov.pe.ca/peimhf/index.php3?number=1015696.

At The Historical Site in Orwell

Lunch in Montague

This evening we had another great fish dinner at an Italian restaurant, Sirenella, http://www.sirenella.ca/. Our final event of the evening was to get our last ice cream from Cows and then watch the PEI light show telling the history of the island and the beginnings of the country of Canada; the confederation movement started in PEI, http://www.walkandseacharlottetown.com/pei-sound-and-light-show/.

Tomorrow we head over to Halifax stopping to have a maple syrup and pancake brunch at the Sugar Moon Farm.

For those of you who haven’t read the books (I haven’t) nor seen the TV shows/movies (I only vaguely remember them) it might be a wonder that a fictional character has this kind of impact. I think that LM Montgomery, who wrote the books, was so strongly associated with Prince Edwards Island (all but one of the books was located at PEI) and local pride; there is lots of that we have learned helped.

In the morning we went to the Canadian Parks protected area where the home where Montgomery grew up is located and where they have created a version of the house and farm described in the books.

A vaguely interesting fact is that all brochures there are in three languages. The normal Canadian French and English as usual. And also in Japanese where evidently Anne of Green Gables is a big hit. We had noticed the large number of Japanese tourists we had seen wandering around Charlottetown where we are staying.

The walk around the grounds was fine, everything is well kept. At the end of the Haunted Woods trail, named after a trail in one of the books, is a museum maintained by the descendents of the family where Montgomery grew up. We heard a talk by the young great-<add another great perhaps>-grand daughter about the grounds there.

After that we drove along the north shore of PEI stopping at various beaches to walk around and having great fish and chips at Richards, a stand on the beach just before Dalvay, a victorian house (and associated cottages) where evidently many PEI citizens and visitors get married.

Last night we attended the 45 year old Anne of Green Gables musical, which has been shown pretty continuously since its original presentation. The lead had played the Anne role for four years earlier and had just graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. The actor playing Matthew, the bachelor brother who with his sister Marilla adopts Anne, had many years ago played Gilbert, the hate/love interest of Anne. Having said all that, my quick summary is that the musical was energetic, sincere, and long. I enjoyed seeing it once, unlike others my lifetime count is likely to stay at one, whether I return to PEI or not.

We had dinner at a restaurant called the Globe World Flavours, http://www.dinedrinkdance.ca/. I had a wonderful salmon dinner while Ellen had very good dried tomato risotto.

Interestingly when we asked people in Cape Breton about PEI, they almost always said that it was pretty nice but they rarely visited there. One person described PEI as a potato field surrounded by water which we thought pretty funny. We found when we landed in PEI, the reverse was equally true. There they all said that Cape Breton was very pretty, but rarely went.

For one thing it is free to drive over the very short causeway to Cape Breton. It costs between $40 and $60 to take the ferry, or drive over the bridge, from PEI back to the mainland one-way. It is free to enter PEI. So once there, the trick is to figure out to sneak out and avoid the toll. 

Returning to our day, we started with a nice breakfast at the Inn at Glenyer in Mabou and headed to the PEI Ferry. We dropped by some craft places but found nothing of great interest. The ferry takes about 75 minutes to cross over to PEI.

While on the ferry we saw our first Canadian Mounted Police which do have a striking uniform. For some reason recalling the moose warnings from the Cabot Trail, I kept thinking of Rockie and Bullwinkle, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rocky_and_Bullwinkle_Show.

Once off the ferry, we stopped for a quick lunch at Tim Horton’s which is a chain of quick food restaurants all over Canada. For those who haven’t gone it is a combination of a stripped down subway and a Dunkin Donuts. For example I ordered a chicken salad combination which came with a sandwich, a drink, and a donut. While we both felt this was an important check the box moment in our trip, like our visit to Lik-A-Chik, not to be repeated.

After checking in at our B&B in Charlottetown, Heritage House, located in the center of PEI, we spent most of the afternoon wandering around, and seeing all of, downtown Charlottetown.

I was very shocked to see a remnant of my life from some 20 years ago, a Microage Computer Store.

I was one of the early Microage Computer Store franchises during one of my first entrepreneurial crashes and burns. When your franchisor enters chapter 11 two months after you open your store, it ends up being what we might call today ‘a teachable moment’.

We had dinner at one of the very trendy PEI restaurants, Lot 30, http://www.lot30restaurant.ca/index.php . We both had fish, it was truly wonderful.

Afterwards we attended a show we wandered by during our walk, a local production about the life of a local radio announcer Loman McAulay who broadcast on station CFCY, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFCY-FM, for 44-years. Among other local artists he discovered were Anne Murray and Gene MacLellan. The latter wrote Snowbird and Put Your Hand In the Hand.

It was what one might call ‘very local’. The singers were pleasant and it gave us a sense of the love the residents have for their home institutions.

Tomorrow we explore the north-central part of PEI, the home of the home of Anne of Green Gables, followed tomorrow evening by our seeing the musical Anne of Green Gables. So the question for tomorrow is, is there any other place where a fictional character is so visited outside of a theme park? To avoid the truly cynical answer, perhaps I will limit it to fictional characters written during the last few hundred years.

The Lantern Inn & Hollow where we stayed overnight was on the Atlantic Ocean. That morning, we walked on the beach.

And here a picture of the jellyfish we referenced in the video.

We came on the beach near low tide after jellyfish were left on the sand. As the tide returned, some were then washed back out to sea. For those interested in reading more about jellyfish, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfish.

Ellen wondered whether in some other language, jellyfish were also called well, jellyfish. I wondered whether modern jellyfish have significantly developed over the millions of years since the first one. Neither question was answered in Ingonish.

We had breakfast at restaurant called Main Street, though to be honest there doesn’t seem to be many more streets in Ingonish other than Main Street. It was very good. I had a Cape Breton ‘standard’ of fish cakes, beans, and eggs. All very good. http://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g499216-d1812400-Reviews-Main_Strete_Restaurant_and_Bakery-Ingonish_Cape_Breton_Island_Nova_Scotia.html

On the way to Baddeck, we stopped at a number of craft places. We bought a beautiful bowl at one and enjoyed wandering our way slowly heading west. We ended up in the Inn at Glenyar, which was a house about 2 miles off route 252 just outside of Mabou. We wandered around Mabou that afternoon, stopping briefing at the Mabou harbour.

That evening we had dinner at the Red Shoe Inn, owned by the Rankin Sisters who are part of the Rankin Family, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rankin_Family. Naturally there was live entertainment, a guitar player. We had a great Halibut dinner, the fresh catch of the day.

After we went across the street to the Mabou Community Center where we attended a Ceilidh. For those who know my love of the TV show Firefly, Ceilidh is pronounced Kaylee. In Mabou there is a Ceilidh every Tuesday night. We were able to listen to some wonderful old time music and see some local step-dancing.

Tomorrow we are off to Prince Edwards Island and by the weather reports, our first rain of the trip.

To finish off a comment on our stay in Baddeck, a lovely community on the shore of a truly beautiful lake, Bras D’Or, our B&B we stayed in called the Water’s Edge Inn, was a great place physically, really nice room, and very centrally located in the town. However, it was pretty ordinary when it came to breakfast. The only juice was Apple, the breakfast consisted of a pre-measured container of fruit-salad, you know with that heavy syrup stuff, a plastic bag with two slices of white bread which could be toasted, and an optional cup of waffle mix which could be poured into the waffle maker. Ouch.

The Alexander Grahme Bell museum was pretty interesting. Perched on a hill overlooking the lake, it told the story of how his life-long focus on helping the deaf came from his father and grandfather in Scotland where he grew up. He ended up marrying one of his students, a deaf teenager from Boston. His work on the telephone derived from that focus.

I had no idea that he was so interested in flight, sponsoring the first manned flight in Canada or boating, he worked with early Catamaran’s, and kites, he made many enormous tetrahedral-shaped kites. And, of course, I was unaware until I came to Baddeck that in his desire to get out of the very pressured life he was living in Washington DC that he established a home in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, where he spent most of the last 40 years of his life. And that his younger daughter married a photographer he hired while President of the National Geographic Society, Gilbert Grosvenor, who went on to become the first full-time editor of the magazine and was the namesake of the metro stop near where I live.

Leaving Baddeck, we went northwest to start our clockwise trip around the Cabot Trail. We entered the Cabot Trail Park at Cheticamp going around 2/3′s of the way by the end of the day stopping at Ingonish.

The drive is beautiful, often stunningly so. The road is an easy drive, whether on the inside or outside contrary to my earlier worries. The views of the water, our hikes into the forest, the walk we took on planks through a highland bog were all peaceful and interesting.

While we did not have the time to linger as much as we would have liked, I can see that if we were to return, staying at a B&B in the middle of the drive, perhaps at Pleasant Bay, and spending more time on the trails would have been a relaxing and enjoyable experience. I suspect that in the fall, the colors would be spectacular.

Standing in the middle of the forest, with almost complete quiet except for the sounds of birds, I was again reminded of the tension between the need to do ‘something’ during our short-time alloted to us versus the sense of place in a much longer and larger surrounding. I suspect that most of us, myself certainly included, do not balance that conflict very well.

We bought stuff at two of the many craft places we visited along the way. At Larchwood, there were many, many wonderful cutting boards, Ellen tells me they are very famous. At Cape Breton pottery, a great variety of beautiful bowls and other pieces. We bought a cutting board at the first and a bird at the second.

We ended up at the Lantern Hill Inn on the beach at Ingonish. We are in the main building in a large and spacious room, though it is only the first B, not a B&B. There are also cottages which are a bit too big for just us, that actually are on the beach. We had dinner at a restaurant called Seascape. The food was both great and beautifully presented.