NY: Sooo, where you from?

July 29 2011
I like having meals with total strangers. You do it on train trips, too – you are arbitrarily seated with people for x number of minutes and then that’s it. So you make conversation, and I, for one, plunge right in. There’s something about the finiteness that makes it easy. No risk, no commitment. Yours is a shared experience, being at that place at that time, and the place is very important and deliberate. You chose, as did they, to be at a B&B in a 400-year-old stone house built by Dutch settlers in the New York Catskills. Relax and enjoy.

The British proprietors had met online; he had sold his internet-provider business to a telecommunications company, apparently for a happy sum, and he and his speech therapist wife had moved to NY from Bristol and London respectively to open a B&B. What is it about this trip – we keep meeting people who are living a dream. It’s either inspiring or depressing as hell. But it’s such pretty country and we are half a country and weeks away from our own lives, so what the heck, let’s just be inspired.

The B&B, the Stone House in Hurley NY, had cut fresh flowers and fresh homemade scones and fresh oat bread, still warm, and freshly whipped cream for your coffee and freshly scrambled eggs and ham. There were several of us at the table, a family from Arizona, a couple from the Netherlands via Atlanta. The proprietor, Sam, had a headful of history of the area he was delighted to share; there were cabinets of artifacts found in the house during its renovation. It was all very pretty but not too, not overwrought as B&Bs can be. And if that’s all too much for you, you can go sit in the cutting garden and access wireless internet.

But so much for that. We decided to burn through to Cleveland in one day, so back on the road we were. 9 hours. I must admit, I was actually refraining from screaming much of the time. I experienced waves of clenching where I felt like I would rather empty my skull with a melon baller than spend any more time in this car. But if you ever wondered what I would look like not complaining (in case you think I can’t), much less screaming, there I was. Sucking it up. Nothing would be gained by me pummeling the car window with my fists hollering “for the sake of my long-term sanity you must let me out of this car”. Although I would like to have given it a shot, just for grins, see if anybody’s listening.

But no, no screaming, so on to our suite hotel in a suburb of Akron we go. It has a kitchen we won’t use but it’s nice to have the extra room. No frills but it’s cheap and clean, although it is deodorized to within an inch of its life and exudes artificial fragrance from every polyester fiber. It doesn’t really matter though – it’s another night of falling into bed, oh so glad to be out of the car for a while.