Apt. 11D

Acadia Advice?

It's only May, but I'm starting to plan our August vacation. We're going up to Acadia National Park in Maine with stopoffs in Boston and Portsmouth. Half the trip will be in a hot tub hotel, the other half will be in a tent. I've heard that we have to start booking everything now. 

Any suggestions from the peanut gallery? 

Rate Your Vacation

I'm a pretty heavy user of TripAdvisor  on vacations. I use it with caution, because of the Rate Your Professor effect. People who bother to plug in their evaluations of hotels and travel destinations are either extremely happy, extremely unhappy, kooks, or are sockpuppets. Still, if a place has a lot of evaluations, you can average out all the responses and find something useful. It pointed us to an excellent BBQ joint, when we drove through the Outer Banks this summer. 

Seth Kugel talks about vacationing in the era of TripAdvisor. He admits that it has its uses, but it nostalgic for a pre-TripAdvisor World. 

Why have my most exhilarating trips of the last few years been to those rare places TripAdvisor and the rest of the Review-Industrial Complex have not yet documented? There was that week spent in San Juan Teitipac, a little town outside Oaxaca, Mexico, that I chose on the advice of a bus driver. (Still not listed on TripAdvisor as of late December: a marvelous 16th-century church that still packs in worshipers every Sunday.) Or that 40-mile hike along an obscure stretch of Brazilian coastline that I made using nothing more than a Google satellite map. It was my lack of knowledge and planning that forced human interactions, ultimately paying off in cheap beds, free coconuts and indelible memories.

Punch and Kick

Shoulder Blades

You could cut yourself on this boy's shoulder blades. 

Cattails

Tornado Warning

 

We were having lunch in a restaurant in New Bern, NC, when a tornado warning was announced on the news. I wish I was the type of person who fearlessly gets dressed up and eats lunch alone at a bar with a book. I'm not. 

Goggle Man

Freckles

BBQ, The Social Glue

Last week, we drove down to the lower bits of North Carolina, and then slowly worked our way back home stopping at various beach communities. 

The towns that we visited ranged from swanky to seedy. The last hotel was so worrisome that we flipped over the mattresses to check for bed bugs. 

The drive also took us through some parts of the country where people live in rusty tin shacks in the middle of a corn field. One local newspaper mentioned the fact that 60% of all babies in the area were born to single mothers. Strip malls have check cashing stores and stores that auction off foreclosured furniture. 

And then we come home to the carefully manicured lawns and congested highways. It's whiplash.

We talked to lots of people along the way. Mostly because we like pumping people for information on good, local restaurants. Although, I did have very good luck with TripAdvisor this time around. 

What did all these communities - beach and farm, swanky and seedy - have in common? The love of BBQ. 

Best of the trip: Woody's in Chincoteague and the Pig Man in Nag's Head. 

I think the love of BBQ is so universal that I think I could make a political platform based solely on this food group and get elected to any office. 

Going to the Beach Each

We're on our way to North Carolina. Be back in one week.