Travel adventures
It was 1990. Things were changing fast in the Soviet Union. There weren’t a lot of tourists in Leningrad and there certainly wasn’t much infrastructure for us. Did we stay in a hotel that was mostly brown? Was the dining room full of hookers in the early evening? There was brown bread for breakfast, sour …
It’s a beautiful breezy day when we roll down the hill to Lincoln Park, breezy, not windy, which is perfect because it’s been much too long since I logged any miles on the bike and a stiff wind is going to make it all the harder. Our destination is Alki Beach where it’s car free …
Photo: Waikiki Highrise by Mr. NEV
Well, the draft got eaten, didn’t it? And when I sat down to post, it was nowhere to be found. Forgive the one day delay, kindly, and with no further adieu, here’s the massive link fest that’s The Carnival of Cities!
McMinnville has a darned cute downtown, with brick facades and those tschotke shops your mom likes, and, for some reason, a bronze statue of Ben Franklin – you can sit right next to him on the bench, button your shirt up, ladies, I hear Franklin was quite the lech, but even better, there’s some fine …
In the last month I found myself chatting with two coffee roasters while they worked, one at Mt. Hood Roasters in Rhododendron, Oregon, and one at Java Kai in Hanalei, Hawaii. I did not admit to either of them that the coffee we drink the most of at our house is Trung Nguyen, a mass produced Vietnamese coffee that we buy ground in big quantities from our local Asian supermarket.
We buy this stuff because, well, we like it. I acquired my first package out of desperation. I was in Seattle’s International District and I needed coffee, stat. When I opened the can — it was still in cans then, it smelled of chocolate. Brewed up it tasted very smooth, not bitter at all, and it held that nice deep aroma. It’s cheap, too, really cheap, compared to anything else I like.