Travelogue time! Here are a few images from Your Humble Narrator's recent quick trip to his beloved home town of Erie, Pennsylvania and environs. The Wife and The Kid took a pass on this trip; The Kid couldn't get the time away from work, and The Wife couldn't bear to leave Stewie in a kennel. But I flew into Cleveland, where I began to luxuriate in the heavenly weather--by comparison to Phoenix, that is--the moment I stepped out of the terminal.
On the drive from Cleveland to Erie, I stopped off at The White Turkey in Conneaut, Ohio...
...to enjoy a root beer float...
Wish I had built time into my visit to go to Conneaut's Lake Erie Monster Fest, presumably devoted to "South Bay Bessie," sightings of whom supposedly date back to the 1700s...
Once in Erie, I visited with various beloved siblings, nephews, nieces etc...
Erie's famous Mighty Fine Donuts were consumed...
...as were Romolo's Chocolates...
I got to join our friends Lory and Tom to see our beloved Erie Seawolves...
...though not, alas, on an evening when they were in their Erie Moon Mammoths persona. They beat the Akron RubberDucks 3-2, and I got a very weird-looking selfie with Seawolves superfan and curmudgeon-in-residence "Red" Laurie...
I got hang out at Coney Island Grill and later at Perkins with two of oldest and dearest friends, Ron Strecker and, for the first time in almost half a century, my childhood pal Mike Wenzel...
...as well as Ron's parrot Kiko, now in his forties...
My pal Stan and I took a road trip east to Westfield, New York, to a marvelous used bookstore there called Mumpsimus Books...
Ever heard of a "mumpsimus," by any chance? I certainly had not. Turns out it's a term dating back at least to the Renaissance--Erasmus mentions it--for an error stubbornly persisted in even after it's been corrected; supposedly it originated with a priest who used "mumpsimus" for "sumpsimus" in the Latin mass and continued to do so after the error was pointed out to him. A great word for our time; maybe the U.S. should be renamed "Mumpsimerica."
Then on Sunday came the Moorhead Family Reunion at the Fiddle Inn in Harborcreek, my Dad's home away from home, where I got hang out with still more beloved family...
...and eat a delicious walleye sandwich...
...while rain poured outside.
It can feel banal to talk about the passage of time, as if you're the first person that ever noticed it. But it really hit me on this trip, everywhere I looked. I kept remembering stuff like the evening in 1975 when I picked up the phone and heard my late brother-in-law, out of breath, telling me about the birth of my nephew, and how strange it was to think that I was now staying in the beautiful home of that same nephew, now fifty years old, and his beautiful wife.
Then back I went to Phoenix, and the appalling heat. I barely got the Romolo's Chocolate home un-melted.
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