I decided to go for the Last Cannonball, waking up early and wardriving Nashville’s quiet streets for a hotspot at 6:30 on a Sunday morning. From the parking lot of a Comfort Suites near the airport, I posted a half-asleep road diary, checked my work email and hit the road. 12 hours to Baltimore!

First, last, and foremost: Appalachia is among the most beautiful places Gaia Creatrix chose to adorn her planet with. Green, green hills and wide rivers, sky and sun, rain and clouds. I drove along just loving the view out my window. I have to hike that there Appalachian Trail now.

I had this interesting experience coming up I-81, as traffic dropped from its congenial cruising speed of 80 to an uncomfortable 0 as I came around a bend:

I saw the white smoke up ahead and assumed it was a forest fire. It had been rainy for the whole trip up, but I figured maybe lightning had started a fire. In actuality… it was fog. Or mist or something, in one little valley, that was actually thick enough to stop traffic. We drove through it… no hickory-smoke odor, just rapidly attenuating Stephen King mist. Weird.

As Cannonballs go, this was an enjoyable one. Almost the whole trip was through hills and mountains, with just the last little Washington-Baltimore part being trafficky. I had completely forgotten the fact that it was the Sunday after July 4, and probably should have expected much heavier traffic on the roads. But it was an easy shot.

Baltimore is a place I am thinking about settling. It’s a small city with a pretty good cultural scene, I have a job possibility here, there’s a minuscule but good-enough-for-me light rail line, and one of my closest friends from high school is here and is offering me her spare room. So I’m checking it out, and there’s pluses and minuses: it’s pretty familiar, being culturally similar to Philadelphia where I grew up. On the minus side… it’s culturally similar to Philadelphia where I grew up. But it’s a very cute place – they call it, with sort of double-negative irony/civic pride, “Charm City.”

There is a sort of downtown/main street area near here on 36th Street in the Hampden neighborhood that they call the Avenue – or as a street sign says, the “Aveune.” Lots of cafes, bookstores, little shops, and the one who started it all (according to some accounts): Cafè Hon. A brief description of the “Hon” phenomenon, from the Cafè’s website:

Hon: Pronounced “Hun” 1. can be used as a term of endearment, like sweetie, babe, honey, etc. In Bawlmer, Hon can be heard anywhere, but some neighborhoods more than others. It almost always follows any sentence, like “we’re going down the ooshun… Hon.” 2. A Hon is a person that takes on a certain look and/or persona, i.e. Beehive hairdo with cat’s eyes glasses, leopard print, feather boas, gold taffeta, etc.

The cafè itself is a classic old diner, and the service and ambience is pretty diner-authentic, even if it’s a little self-consciously kitsched up. I ordered the Meatloaf Sandwich, which was advertised as “even better than your Mom’s.”

It was.

Cafè Hon and the Hon Bar are at 1002 W. 36th Street, Baltimore, Md. (410) 243-1230.

I’m staying with my friend this week and then heading up to Boston for a week on Saturday, to see if I find myself drawn to that place as well. But for now… I am a temporary “Baltimoron.”

the trip so far

It’s gotten past the point where counting the miles makes any sense anymore, as I’m more kind of meandering at this point. With all the side trips, I figure I covered 4,500 miles getting from the Pacific to the Atlantic in two weeks. The GTI has performed like a champ, and I didn’t get a single dent or ticket despite all that high speed hands-free driving (h/t Michelle at Bleeding Espresso Christina at The (Mis)Adventures of a Single City Chick). Baltimore was fun, but I still was feeling the road call to me. Boston had always been intended as the furthest point of my journey, and from this point I’ll either stay where I am or backtrack. I’m not feeling called to Maine, or the Maritime Provinces, and I’m really close to the coast here.

I took a side trip up to Philadelphia area to visit my friend M’s sister and take in the old homeland. Philadelphia has changed in so many ways since I left for good in 1989… and, of course, at the same time hasn’t changed at all. I had some forgettable fettucine at Marra’s on Passyunk (note to self: recommendation from suburban Jewish moms may not be the gold standard for Italian food), and stopped in on a whim at the menswear shop a couple doors down. There I met the tailor Pasquale Sciolto, half-Italian and half-hobbit. It seemed like the guy was three feet tall. It turned out that he was from southern Abruzzo, near Molise, so we jibber-jabbered in mixed standard and dialect for a while as M goggled. I don’t know if I got paesanu rate or not, but I did OK for a single-thread men’s shirt, I guess.

Saturday morning early I hit the road. What amazed me is how much tolls cost on I-95 up from Baltimore. I spent $10 just on the 100 or so miles to Philly. With the Jersey Turnpike, the George Washington Bridge, and the New York Thruway, I figure I dropped about $25 on tolls alone before I even reached Connecticut. Add to that the most expensive gas of the whole journey ($4.81/gal in Southport, Conn.) and the trip to Boston was a spendy one. Also, sweaty: half of New England was trying to get to the beach towns, and 95 inexplicably runs right along the coast. I definitely won’t go that way again: it was a crawl in humid heat. It took me about ten hours to reach my friend Liv’s place in Ipswich.

The North Shore Boston suburbs are really great. We’re in those thick Eastern woods that sort of make everything dim and cool, even though there’s a fair amount of development. Also, really old homes (like, 17th century old) are not at all uncommon: Liv’s boyfriend lives on the top floor of one. And there’s all this nautical atmosphere around. These communities made their livelihoods from the sea for generation upon generation, and some – like Gloucester – still do. We had a few drinks at the Crow’s Nest, the bar depicted in the movie A Perfect Storm (though it was not set in the real bar). These people have probably all lost someone at sea… like a wild extrusion of the eighteenth century into the twenty-first. Oh, and the drinks are cheap… and strong.

I met J, who I was friends with in San Diego, on a flawless summer Sunday in Boston’s Public Garden yesterday. We both remarked on how much it felt like a San Diego day… and how much nicer it was to experience that kind of day in Boston. In San Diego, it’s just another day, but in Boston, it’s something extraordinary. On the recommendation of both her mom and one of my oldest friends, we rode a Swan Boat through the garden’s lagoon with her three-year-old daughter.

I’m finally starting to feel a sense of having arrived – there’s plenty more to see and to do (that is to say I need to figure out what to do with the rest of my life!) but for now I’m kind of settling down. I’m not sure how long I’ll be here, but I’m putting out tendrils and feelers, and we’ll see what emerges.

I dedicated this trip to all the people who can’t – or think they can’t – just pick up and take off like I did. This has without a question of doubt been the best thing I’ve done for myself since going back to university, and maybe the best thing ever. Please, if you have even the slightest opportunity to do something random, unplanned, and adventurous – do it. The benefits far outweigh the downside risks, in my opinion.

And I speak from experience.

the trip

With apologies to Mister Robert Zimmerman…

I had a sublet all lined up in Waltham for Sunday, but at the last minute, the kid (a Brandeis University student, the little snot) remembered that she had finals this week. Somebody get this brat a fucking day planner! So I spent Saturday running around looking for sublets, but no dice.

My friend Liv’s mom is having company in from Spain on Sunday, and I’ve already imposed enough there. All my stuff, other than a suitcase and some personal items, is in my friend M’s basement in Baltimore. I had been planning the cannonball to end all cannonballs – a twenty-hour boomerang down and back to get my stuff up to Mass. So instead of that round-trip from hell, I came down to Bawlmer for the work week, and plan to go back next weekend.

The drive is truly horrible: from Hartford to New York and from Philly to Baltimore it is pretty much all city traffic. The Mass Pike and Jersey Turnpike were my only chances to go at true freeway speed. Add some rain to that and I was well and truly shot by the time I dragged in to M’s place.

It’s kind of nice to be “whole” again, in the sense of being able to go pull whatever I want out of my crates. And I’m enjoying Baltimore now, with the lower humidity and without the pressure of trying to figure out how/whether I could live here. But I am looking forward to an end to the peregrinations. I’m burning up Craigslist and have a few opportunities for when I go back up. I’m ready to roost, at least for a while.

I found a place in Brighton, but I need to jump on it now. So I’m getting up at the crack of ass, and will hopefully get there by midday – since I have to be ready to deal with stuff by the start of business on the West Coast, at the latest.

But I’m going back! My last trip up the Satan’s Beanstalk that is the I-95 corridor… at least for a while.