Emery Leger Beach, New Brunswick

Adam and Chris finally got their annual beach day when we were in New Brunswick in August. It's so gratifying to see Adam with Chris. His face literally lights up when he even hears Chris' voice or sees him on Skype. In person, they can be even geekier together. Johnny and Sarah (with baby, Noah, who has yet to make his appearance) came along too. Babu dug himself a big bed in the wet sand. I 'read' (actually, I think it was more sleeping than reading) on Chris' batik blanket.

Incredible day.

Other People's Weddings

Other people's weddings are so much more fun than your own. ;-) Congratulations, Lukey. Adam was so, so happy to see you with your beautiful bride. Mary is perfect for you. Abram is perfect for a zoo.

Two Kinds of Cake

Cake I - As per my request, Adam ordered my birthday cake from the baker who made our wedding cake. Same flavour, too (vanilla cake with lemon butter cream icing). Knowing me well, he asked for the cake to be decorated in a 'funky and modern' way. Check out those stripes!

Cake II - Adam's little/middle brother, Luke, got married in August. His bride, below, the groom and their baby boy, Abram. Cake was vanilla with white chocolate between the layers. Tasted gorgeous. Wedding was in their own backyard.

Gillian Allison

Once, I was best friends with the coolest girl at Carleton North High School. Gillian had thick gorgeous hair, infectious enthusiasm and loads of compliments for everyone. Consequently, she owned the heart of literally every man within a ten mile radius and only dated varsity athletes. And, to my occasional envy, she lived in a pretty person's bubble and got away with all kinds of murder.

Now Gillian lives with her studly geek (similar to mine) on the North side of Fredericton. At least four rescued cats live with them and their two dogs. Their spare rooms are often occupied by a changeable roster of siblings and freeloading friends. She's still overly generous and still completely hilarious. And she designs sweet upcycled leather bags from her kitchen table for her business, My Old Bags.

Photo courtesy of D-Rex. P.S. Gillian, I like this shot because 'we really look like friends.' ;-)

I still want her to be my BFA.

Lucky, I got to stay with her a couple weeks ago in New Brunswick. She blew up balloons for my birthday and dug up a fan for our bedroom and let me feed leftovers to her dogs and served me tea in fancy, hand-thrown pottery.

I guess if there's one person whose more of a diva than Gillian, it's me.

Marion & Chilihowie, Virginia

During our long planning sessions, Adam and I decided we wanted to finish this journey with real fanfare!

That in mind, we booked a table at Townhouse, a small restaurant in Chilihowie, Virginia, a tiny town north of the Tennessee state line. Finding no place to stay overnight, we reserved a room in nearby Marion, a small town notable mostly for its former glory days. We stayed at the General Francis Marion Inn, critically-acclaimed for sleeping, dining and original art-deco staircases, but found the main street obviously lacking in stores, restaurants and actual human beings. Sagging from the heat and feeling the fine dust of desperation settling on our skin, we decided to hole up in our hotel room until dinner. I eased into a steaming bath in the gleaming white tub while Adam napped into late afternoon, tossing and turning in the room's creaky four-poster bed.

What kind of a bang is this?

Well, it might not sound like much, but to be honest, we were there for that little restaurant I mentioned above.

Town House has a short, but storied history, involving small-town restaurateurs who wanted to do more with their kitchen. They found a young couple (John Shields and Karen Urie looking to run their own show and hired them on, telling them to take whatever risks they wanted, push things toward their own vision.

So smart. Just trusting them to do their thing(s). They drew on their training for the fundamentals (Shields did time at Alinea in NYC and they met working at Charlie Trotter's in Chicago), but their inspiration is drawn from the Appalachians in which Chilihowie is nestled.

In not too much time, the pair were making a name for tiny Chilihowie where Town House is located. A writer from the NYT gave them gold stars and suddenly, people were driving from all over the country to try delicate tubes of shaved vegetable 'minestrone' or chewy, broken 'chocolate' made from cocoa-infused meringue.

No detailed review from this writer. I'm still off-duty. But it was lovely, quirky, surprising and fun. Parts were incredibly delicious. For me, the highlight was a 'deconstructed gazpacho' that clearly channels Michel Bras' iconic natural wonder of a 'salad.'

And it was our anniversary dinner.

Asheville, North Carolina

You want to go to Asheville, even if you don't know it yet.

In Asheville, girls who look like young Brooke Shields rock tattooed sleeves in the River Arts District. Left-leaning pharmacists drink at microbreweries and invite you to their house for dinner. Your hotel clerk shaves his head and is called simply 'Zeb.' Musicians working in art galleries tell tales about the locals. You come to know, in this way, about the the seventy-year Moroccan-Brazilian painter who starting selling his work on Asheville's sidewalks to support his mother. (One of his pieces, a gift to Gerald Ford, now hangs in the Smithsonian).

Asheville also has cheeky graffiti, free community yoga, cheerful cargo trains, yarn stores, craft fairs, bluegrass, BBQ, an edible public garden, classical music concerts, chocolate lounges, handpicked berries, handmade ukuleles, nine microbreweries (plus one more for kombucha instead of beer), scooters, saxophones, murals, dogs, banjos, unicycles and an amateur hula hooping organization. Walking downtown, you come across a painting of a beautiful jellyfish, done on glass and art deco buildings with painted alleyways, scrap metal sculptures nailed to the brick walls.

For lunch, locals go to Early Girl Eatery, a bright dining room whose clinking flatware and friendly din will take you back to church suppers, the kind in the country with shivering jello and long tables, with grace before eating. The food is even better than you remember. Massive plates of sweet potatoes and sausage, scrambled with farm eggs, hot biscuits with summer berry jam, a wedge of light cornbread, smeared with soft sweet butter. Boiled baby beets and finely shredded coleslaw in ginger dressing, cream three-bean salad sprinkled with chopped parsley, plus a bowl of tart and sweet homemade applesauce and plastic tumblers of cold tea.

Drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway (from either side of the city) and read roadsigns with names like Chestnut Grove and Hominy Valley, Elk Pasture Gap, Buck Spring Tunnel and Fryingpan Mountain. These names alone should convince you that you want to go. That is, if ordering up a flight of suds at four pm doesn't tip you off. Or drinking coffee in a converted double decker bus. Or eating black-eye pea tempeh at Homegrown. Or hiking in the Smokies with thousands of happy honeybees.

Asheville is sometimes (insultingly) called the 'Portland of the South.' Much better than Portland. Much. Trust me. You want to go.

Stone Mountain, Georgia

Atlanta, Georgia

Atlanta's big. A big, beautiful, rough, hip and cosmopolitan beast. Adam has already been here once before for work and he texted me the whole time about all the fun he was having, so you can imagine he was excited to come back.

First stop, an Atlanta Braves game! Dan Uggla was still on his hitting streak and he blasted two home runs out before the fifth inning. Thanks to a promotion at the game, one of his homers netted every ticket holder a free, huge burrito at Moe's the next day, so the fans went even more crazy than usual when the ball went over the fence. Braves fans might be legendarily devoted; I don't really know. But they definitely love to do the 'tomahawk chop,' a simultaneously satisfying and offensive cheer (done while pretending to 'chop' using your hand as a tomahawk).

We took a cab home and had to tip some scam artist who was 'hailing' cabs off the street for people. People have been trying to scam us since we got here and you always end up having to give them a dollar for absolutely no good reason.

Saturday morning, Adam tracked down a sweet farmer's market in nearby Piedmont Park. The park itself was incredible, rolling hills with shade trees, tons of water fountains, dogs, joggers, yogis, sculptures, clean restrooms and even a breathtakingly beautiful public running track. The market was a boon: cold peach tea; iced Blue Donkey Coffee; soft chicken mole tamales; a big apple ginger muffin; and a big cup of hot boiled peanuts.

Fully sated, we strolled to the High Museum of Art for a show by Radcliffe Bailey on what's often called (euphemistically, in my opinion) 'transatlantic passage' of over half a million Africans to the US for slavery. Enslavement is what is condemned and discussed, but the idea that one is not only enslaved, but taken from home absolutely breaks me. Bailey's work is done on a large-scale and he uses sounds of the sea, collage, old photographs and objects of colonialism to respond to this cruel and confusing past.

Other than art and parks, we've gotten to eat more delicious Southern food: lemon peach pie (second-based lemon pie in the world--best is my mama's) at Bakehouse in Midtown; dinner in Atlanta's happening gay neighborhood at The Flying Biscuit; and then a down home brunch in gritty Reynoldstown.

But the rest of our day was spent doing chores. Laundry and rejigging our itinerary a bit. We're tired of moving every two days, so we canceled our campsite in the Smokies and, instead, we'll head to Asheville two days early. Fingers crossed we like it!

'Preying' Mantis

This guy was on the wall outside our hotel in Atlanta. Of course, I was the one who spotted him (possessing the unfortunate talent of noticing every insect within a ten-foot radius).

I stopped short and then walked quickly past him. Adam bent down to get a better look.

I turned around and shouted, "It's fake, right? It's just a toy. Right? It's fake, isn't it."

"Yeah, it's fake," Adam replied.

"Egh! I knew it. It's real!" I cried. "You're lying! It's real. I knew it! Ew, ew!"

Adam looked up at me. "Yeah, it's real."

We walked quickly down the stairs to the parking lot together and then Adam decided to go back and take a picture. He put his hand beside it to show the scale.

If you don't want to see some horrifyingly weird photographs, don't Google 'praying mantis.' I did, stupidly. And now I know things about these predatory insects that I can never erase from my mind.

Savannah, Georgia

We didn't seem to know what day it was when we checked into the Thunderbird Inn in Savannah, but according to the counter agent, Bobby, it was Wednesday. Good to know, I suppose.

Two days in Savannah were definitely enough. It's a small town, not really a city, still very old in most parts, well-preserved, but difficult to penetrate, probably especially since it was over a hundred degrees out and nobody was on the streets.

We're both reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, set in Savannah amongst the old mansions and shaded city squares of the historic district. The book centres partly around events that took place in the Mercer-Williams House, and Thursday morning, we took a tour of it, marveling at the original oil paintings, marble busts and a real cheetah skin across the back of the sofa.

The Savannah College of Art and Design's student-run shop is nearby and we took a look, contemplating a wrought-iron lamp shaped like a bomb, hand-painted Kewpie statues, silk screened pillow cases. SCAD is everywhere in Savannah; student work is shown frequently and we saw some great pieces in the gallery across from Leopold's (a ninety-three year-old ice cream parlour that Adam obviously had to try).

The afternoon was too hot to be near cars and concrete, so we drove to Tybee Island's breezy beach and boardwalk. There's even a small science centre where we saw a little baby alligator! So tiny. Such a thrill!

Friday morning, we drove into Bonaventure Cemetery before leaving town. The grounds are nearly two hundred years old old; some of the headstones have cracked and dusty trails of Spanish moss hang parasitically from the branches of hundreds of oak trees. An eerie, forlorn good-bye to the secretive little town of Savannah.

JB's Smokeshack

On our way out of Charleston, we detoured to Johns Island, a mostly rural farming area of South Carolina with a famous BBQ house called JB's Smokeshack. We weren't sure what to expect, given the rustic-sounding moniker, but they were listed in the New York Times as 'the place' to eat in Charleston. And you know how much Adam loves his BBQ.


We're so glad we went. Our lunch there was easily one of the most incredible experiences of our trip.

The actual dining room was small and clean, filled partly with rough wooden buffet tables. At the door, the fresh-faced man behind the counter informed us that the buffet is the best deal. "Is there any other way?" I wondered incredulously.

What we ate...

Country fried steak (thin pork cutlets fried in yellow corn grits); buttermilk fried chicken legs and a pile of pulled pork. Unlike most of the pulled pork we're used to in Canada, this meat was served all on its own, rather than heaped with sugary sauce. JB says "the flavor is in the meat, the sauce is on the side," and he's not kidding. The meat was succulent and smokey with sweetness from the pork and complexity from the rub. There were plenty of sauces on the table: ones based on mustard and vinegar; Mama's Sweet n' Spicy; a smokier version and a mild one. Adam sampled them all, so you'll have to ask him for the winner.

Anyway, I didn't go much for the meat, but for the sides. In the South, many are still cooked with meat, adding richness to collard greens (which you then douse liberally with 'pepper sauce,' a bottled vinegar stuffed with tiny finger peppers that's known around here as table wine of the South), lima beans and black-eye peas. JB's also offers house made sweet potato 'tater tots'; creamy mac 'n cheese with oversize elbow macaroni and a dark caramelized crust; steamed white rice and Carolina red rice; chunky potato salad laced with egg yolk mayonnaise; a pile of vinegar-dressed coleslaw, flavored with plenty of black pepper; a rough Southern version of chopped salad; whole pickled okra; pickled cucumber spears and the jewel in JB's BBQ crown: dark smokey slow-baked beans. Best beans I've ever had (although my brother's and my Dad's are both still up there).

Desserts were homemade Southern specialties we've been wanting to try: banana (or 'nana) puddin' and chocolate 'dirt' pudding. Also eclair pudding, in which Adam put a big dent.

The grand total for all this, plus huge styromfoam glasses filled with ice and all the cold tea you can drink? Nine dollars per person. 

On our way out the door, they said "Y'all have a good day now." We did, indeed.