travel tales

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Travel Memories in 1000 Pieces

Someone gave us a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas.

Gifting jigsaw puzzles can be tricky.  They vary in difficulty. Not everyone is into spending hours fiddling with a game like that. And then the vast variety of images depicted in their giant tabletop chaos can evoke a feeling that is often a matter of taste, particularly for larger sets that sit there taunting you to build them for weeks and weeks.

Someone gave us a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas and hit the nail directly, squarely on the head.

See, back in November we spent five days in New York City. Specifically, we spent five days wandering around mostly near midtown Manhattan and Times Square.  We did a lot of fun stuff, but my own personal recollections of the time there were punctuated by three specific memories: Broadway, sketching, and people everywhere.

Someone gave us a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas and it depicts a bustling scene of Time Square rendered as a colourful urban sketch of a hundred memories of our recent New York vacation.

Tall colourful buildings.

Taxicabs and street vendors.

People and signs and shapes and shadows.

Lines and hatches and curves and squiggles.

A thousand pieces of a travel memory perfectly encapsulated in a jigsaw puzzle project.

…though it didn’t take us too long at all to get it assembled.

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Camping My Style

December 5 of 31 December-ish posts

I’m no stranger to crazy sleeping conditions when away from home. I’ve travelled far and wide and slept in a thousand different beds, from plush king-size mattresses to wooden bunks in unheated cabins to sleeping bags on the ground with a snow-covered tent just inches from my face.

But somehow 2022 was something of a hotel year.

What do you wish you’d done
less of this past year?

Multiple trips to the mountains and at least a few weeks abroad in 2022 and, if I’m being completely honest, I only spent a single night in a tent.

I mean, sure, they frown on you pitching your own accommodations on the lawns around Disney World, and while I probably could have gotten away with it in New York’s Central Park, I was travelling light and a sleeping bag would have cluttered my carry on.

I joke, but seriously though, I get to the end of 2022 looking back on my travels and outdoor adventures and by random happenstance they all kind of started and ended in reasonably nice hotels. 

We stayed in a pirate themed room in Florida.

My various trips to the mountains included a ski lodge condo, an Airbnb basement suite, renting an entire house with my running friends, and an apartment suite near to the highland games grounds where my daughter was competing that particular weekend.

We booked an anniversary getaway to a nordic spa and I wasn’t going to convince my wife that tenting was a great accompaniment to that adventure.

And in New York last month we were on the 33rd floor of a mid-town hotel overlooking the Hudson river with glimpses of Times Square.

Hotels abounded.

And while we were spoiled for every last one of those trips, I’ve been looking back over two-aught-twenty-two and kinda wish I’d had a few less of those kinds of adventures, and few more in one of our tents.

We have three tents.

Our oldest by far is an early-2000s model backpacking tent. It’s reasonably light, sleeps two, and served us well on numerous hiking trips.

The big tent is our car camping tent, a hefty six person beast that has a full vestibule (into which I could fit either of my other two tents assembled) and it’s what we bought so we could camp as a family with a dog in her kennel everyone on an inflatable bed and yet still keep all the luggage organised.

The newest tent is the three person ultra-compact tent that we bought as a replacement for our first ageing backpacking tent. It’s so lightweight  it practically carries itself up the mountain, and we’ve set it up only four times in as many years, mostly thanks to those particular hiking trails being closed due to the pandemic.

It’s a good thing I cleaned and packed them all so well in 2021 because they didn’t really see much action this year.

Now, I don’t purport this blog to be a camping blog, per se, but there is a certain expectation from even just me that the term “outdoor adventure” comes with a certain frequency of sleeping outdoors. I subscribe to enough other content creators to know that some of those folks are sleeping outdoors on the weekly, and even the local guys I watch truck it out to the coast for the harshest part of winter to keep up their stats.

I checked into hotels a lot this year. And I kinda dropped the ball on the tenting. And I’m actually a little bit sad about that.

Posted on episode 335

Sourdough Bagels, New York Style

It’s been a couple weeks since we got back from our trip to Manhattan. While my daughter loved Broadway, I really got into the food, in particular hunting down a couple good bagel bakeries and sampling their authentic wares.

Of course, this left me yearning for some New York back home, and wondering if I could replicate them in my own kitchen. And, this particular recipe seemed to do the trick:

New York Style Sourdough Bagels

200g active sourdough starter (stiff)
430g cold water (less for looser starter)
30g maple syrup
750g all-purpose flour
10g salt
15g baking soda (for boiling)
15g brown sugar (for boiling)
150g toppings, eg sesame seeds

First, you should know that I use a fairly stiff starter with about 70% hydration. If you have a looser, wetter starter, your measures should calculate for less water. Bagels tend to target a stiffer dough with a hydration of around 60% so definitely account for that in your water percentage or else you’ll make breadier, lighter, maybe-not-bagels. For example, with a wet starter, say 90% hydration, you probably need about 100g less water.

Otherwise, you’re going to mix up these ingredients — starter, water, syrup, salt and flour –into a nice stiff dough that you can rest for a few hours to a couple days. Longer rests are going to develop the flavours better, of course, but work with the time you have.

After you’ve rested the dough, divide into eight (8) equal pieces, rolling these into balls that you can rest for another ten minutes or so. These balls eventually need to get shaped into the bagels which is an effort that involves rolling out a log that is 20-25cm long and then looping and pressing the ends together into that familiar bagel shape.

Because this is sourdough, you’re in for another 6-8 hours or rise time on your freshly shaped bagels, but when they have risen (which because of the stiffness of the dough is going to seem a bit less than you might get with bread) you can set up your cooking assembly line: a pot of boiling water with the baking soda and sugar dissolved, a plate or shallow dish with your toppings, and a cooking sheet with some parchment.

Boil the rings for about 20 seconds on each side, then as you pull them from the water dip or sprinkle on the toppings and set them onto the baking sheet with a little room to rise (so they don’t stick together!)

Bake at 450F for about 20 minutes, or until golden brown.

My results on the first try were fairly authentic from my week in New York. Tasty. Fresh. Firm on the exterior and chewy-soft on the inside. They cut and toasted beautifully.

My biggest problem is that I’m gonna need to go find myself a vat of whipped cream cheese to schmear atop them.

Posted on episode 334

Travel: New York in November

It’s been nearly a year since we left the country last, but after six months of plotting and planning our long awaited return to Manhattan finally rolled into view on the calendar.

Whatever else, it might give me some things to write about here over the coming week or two as I settle back into that post-vacation it’s-snowy-at-home winter blues, but for now I thought it useful enough to kill some time on a six hour airport layover writing that it happened at all.

The trip itself, like so much we seem to do these days, was a make up trip from one that was supposed to have happened during the pandemic. The Kid was paid and ready for a school-run adventure to the Big Apple with her eighth grade classmates back in 2020, a trip that never happened, and one that was rewarded as something of a honours-in-middle-school do-over that came due this past weekend.

The Kid, being a theatre kid, was primed for some Broadway brilliance, so no less than three of our evening and a substantial portion of my October paycheque, bought us a trio of a trio of tickets for The Music Man, Beetlejuice the Musical, and Book of Morman.

Thar was her jam.

My jam was taking a ton of photos, eating pizza and sitting in Central Park on a rock and sketching.

I’ll have more to write about the trip soon, as soon as the trip settles in my writing mind, but for now it’s probably good enough to say that it was an excellent mini-vacation, I’m tired as heck, and I still got most of a continent to traverse before bedtime.