It was a business trip, so many of my expenses were paid, and I was there for seven full days and nights, which gave me the sort of opportunity to experience the city that I’d never had on any of my previous half-dozen or so visits. Indeed, I went into the week with a very, very sketchy mental map of London, and now have a very clear one — at least of the central and eastern parts where I spent the most time, Mayfair to Hackney or thereabouts.

I vastly preferred the bus to the Tube — the Oyster card works the same on both, maps and signage at the stops are exceedingly clear, every stop is clearly announced, and from the top of a London bus you can actually see what you’re passing through. (Only once in the week did I see a single bus stop without a full complement of maps; entertainingly, it was when waiting for the night bus with a group of logic-impaired drunks, who took forever to decide whether to walk in the direction of Old Street or Shoreditch High Street. Shortly after they left, their bus arrived.) And London is proof that clearly marked bus lanes (separated or not), enforced with lane cameras, make the bus an efficient choice even in heavy traffic. Londoners complain about
TfL, but it seems exceptionally well-managed to me. I even got to ride the East London Overground line, which has barely been open six months.

Most of the week I was at our office, in Clerkenwell, with some limited tourist time in the evenings — which I mostly spent shopping and orienting myself with regard to the central landmarks, though I didn’t do much in the way of touristy things — but I spent the Sunday and the Saturday roaming from Soho to Islington to Brixton trying to see things a bit off the tourist path. I spent a lovely afternoon in Stoke Newington with my new friends Graham and Keri, eating gourmet fish and chips and sipping espresso beside a neighborhood high street. And I took myself to Brixton, expecting — well, I’m not sure what I was expecting, but what I got felt more or less like Flatbush, only with a well-stocked Marks & Spencer and vastly better transit connections. Here’s a map of my Saturday adventures.

If you want more of this (God help you), including dozens of photos, take a look at my Twitter feed for the week of 13 September.

In a stroke of great good fortune, I get to go back to London next month, so I’m sure I’ll have more to say.

My mother was born in Santa Monica, about 5 miles from here. My father came here with his parents in a bassinet, on a long boat ride from Seattle (or was it a train?), before he was old enough to talk. In fact, three of my four grandparents grew up in places that, from the vantage point of some New Yorkers, might as well be suburbs of Los Angeles (those places being Oakland, Seattle, and Spokane).

All of this is to say that, despite a long absence, my roots here are deep. Indeed, I’m part of a small minority in my family who have left the West for any extended period of time, and one of only two or three who have stayed away long enough to establish permanence somewhere else.

And that makes Los Angeles a place I return to with a sense of eager familiarity, even excitement, but also with trepidation. The experience is so thick with memories (most of them happy, or at least ordinary, but still, very, very present), so teeming with people I knew and places I used to go, so colored by choices made that forestalled other choices, overshadowed by alternate lives foregone in favor of the actual life I’m living now, tinctured with family obligations and disappointments and resentments and old scores — you know, so heavy — that, for all my pleasure in returning, it’s hard to stay too long, or to come too often.

Every visit starts the same way:

I walk out of the airport into that bright, bright sunlight, with billowy clouds overhead and the white concrete viaduct along World Way, and palm trees and the Theme Building. And I’m excited! It’s not gray here, it’s bright and the air is dry and clean and, even by the airport, the air carries a bit of honeysuckle and eucalyptus (the fragrances of my high school and elementary school, respectively) and the faint odor of beach sage and the sea, along with the jet fuel and car exhaust. There’s usually a breeze.

And I wait for the rental car bus, and it takes me to Budget, which has been in the same place, in the same configuration, for at least the 25 years I’ve been renting cars at LAX. I’ve been renting there forever because of some faint vestigial memory that, at some point decades ago, Budget was cheaper and had better cars, neither of which is true anymore — although it’s still a quick exit onto 96th Place, and a quick drop-off from Airport Boulevard when you’re dashing for a flight, so that’s something. The bus takes me around a ramp that was built in the 1980s but that I still think of as “new,” past the Radisson (which used to be the Hyatt, back when I used to know people who worked there and answered the phone “It’s a beautiful evening at the Hyatt at Los Angeles Airport, [name] at your service” on penalty of being written up if they diverged from the script), past Lot C where my father parked for every business trip he ever took.

So I wait in the Budget line, and get my car, and head up Airport Boulevard (past the Sheraton Four Points, which used to be the Renaissance, where I attended a memorable party in 1992), and I slow down for the dip at Manchester because in 1981, my taxicab-yellow 1971 Mercury Cougar XR7 bottomed out in the dip and a crack appeared in the windshield, from top to bottom, that I couldn’t afford to fix for a year. We called that car “the Beast,” both because its license plate had 666 in it and because the passenger-side door wouldn’t close right and because, really, who would paint a car aftermarket taxicab yellow? I bought the Beast out of a classified ad, after my mother’s transmission caught on fire climbing the Masonic Avenue hill in San Francisco and she took her old car back from me, from a guy who had an office in the same building in Encino where Councilman Marvin Braude kept his district office. He’s the same councilman I wrote a letter to in the second grade, in 1973, telling him that the “walk” cycles of the traffic lights on Ventura Boulevard were too short for old people and children to cross. And he actually answered me, establishing my faith in citizen action to change the world. (That letter he sent me, on the ornate letterhead with the embossed Los Angeles City Hall on it, is probably at the bottom of some plastic tub in my storage unit in Jersey City).

So I take the right onto La Tijera, passing 98th Street (where, in 1993, my friend Annie and I met every morning at 8:30, and one of us left our car in front of a random house and piled in with the other, so we could shave half an hour off our commutes by riding the carpool lane down to Costa Mesa where we were learning the fundamentals of direct response marketing), passing the new post office on the left (built on the grave of the Marie Callender’s, where my father and I used to stop for pie on the way to drop me at the airport to visit my mother in San Francisco), passing Pann’s, the Googie diner at the edge of Inglewood, still run by the same Greek family (and I can confirm that it’s the same family, four months ago the Boon Companion and I were eating at the counter at Pann’s and the elderly matriarch was puttering around behind the counter and we talked to her) after, what, sixty years, which opened around the time my father decided that being an optometrist in Inglewood wasn’t doing it for him and he wanted to go to medical school. And Pann’s is still there, and it still serves excellent burgers and milkshakes (not to mention coffee and pie), and I still stop there on the way to the airport, almost every time.

And I turn left onto La Cienega, pass Slauson and the oil wells and hit the downhill straightaway where I got a speeding ticket in 1990, and suddenly there it is in front of you as you go down the hill, the whole city, with the towers spread out right to left along the Olympic-Wilshire-Santa Monica corridor, from downtown to the sea, with the mountains behind. Right at the bottom of the hill, on the left, there’s a Target, which used to be Fedco, where we shopped back when you actually had to be a public employee or union member to get in — a little rattier than the Fedco in Van Nuys, but also bigger and more authentic. That was the place to get a deal on a TV, or cheap but well-made underpants, back in 1975.

See what I mean?

We’re now barely 15 minutes from the airport and I’ve typed a zillion words and I’m already exhausted, and you’re probably exhausted from reading it. And we’re nowhere near the parts of the city I actually lived and worked in yet. I grew up 15 miles away — imagine how loud the memories get once we cross over Sepulveda Pass! And it’s like this the whole time I’m here. It never stops, the rambling monologue in my head, until I get on the plane and go home. And, if I can, I spend the first 48 hours back in New York in my apartment, just reading, or listening to music — doing something quiet.

No wonder I’m spending tonight shut up in my hotel room (admittedly a nice room, in a nice hotel, the kind I like, not too expensive but with some personality and a very good restaurant, and where the valet brings the car out in 90 seconds if you call down), reading news from home (by which I mean New York). There’ll be time for more L.A. in the morning, and I have a long day ahead; I’d better rest up.

And have arguments about what kinds of visits count. Some people say it only counts if you step into the county courthouse. Some people say you have to see the county courthouse, or set foot in the zip code where the main post office for the county seat is located. Some people say it doesn’t count unless your feet touch the bare earth of the county, so changing planes doesn’t count unless you step out of the airport. (Note: That rule is patent lunacy. Oh, and on an unrelated note, I count myself as having set foot in France due to stepping out through border control and back in while changing planes at Charles de Gaulle on the way from Hamburg to Atlanta. I never left the airport, but my passport says I was in France, so I was in France!)

But most people, myself included, respect a looser standard that permits what someone on the list recently referred to as “bipping,” which means taking a detour on a road trip to drive just over the county line of a new county, and then turning right back around and going on your way. (That is how I first set foot in Vermont, back in about 1984, by making a side trip from Keene, New Hampshire, and getting out of the car in the parking lot of a place called Basketville, no joke. It’s also how I first visited Alabama, and I remember finding it funny that the road I was on, in northwest Georgia — in Chattooga County, if you want me to be precise — turned to a dirt track at the Alabama state line. But I digress)

Many years ago I started keeping track of my Georgia counties visited (which, I see, are far out of date at this point — the ones I bothered to tag comprise mostly metro Atlanta and the road to Savannah). I just now filled in my Arkansas counties visited, which you can see by clicking the image above. To fill in the whole US, it’s going to take some time and some reconstruction with a good map that shows county lines in front of me, but I’ll get there. And then I’ll be able to show you a gigantic US map of every place I’ve ever been.

Bonus photos below of the grand public monument that is the Union Station great hall, and of the inside of the “Wireless Freedom Dome” that is currently occupying a portion of that hall, where you can email in a photo to see it whirl around on the ceiling.

My photos will have to wait until later, since I’m typing on the pad, but here’s a brief summary of events:

I arrived at the spanking new outdoor Camden terminal, hard by the back side of Oriole Park at Camden Yards, bought a ticket out of the machine, and crossed the tracks to the light rail platform.

Light rail trip 4 or so stops north into Mount Vernon was uneventful — the system works and the train was clean and efficient, if a little drab (although the signage and street furniture along the route was impressive). It’s clear that there is a lot going on in terms of redevelopment in downtown, and that the light rail line has been a catalyst for it along the western edge of downtown, which looks much more hopeful than it did 20 years ago when I first visited Baltimore, but there’s still way too much abandoned-looking historic building stock.

About 7:30 I walked east along Monument Street, and at this point my phone rang. It was my brother, so I sat down on the steps of a building to talk to him, and I realized I was sitting in front of the Enoch Pratt House, surrounded by gorgeous historic buildings at an intersection that seemed frozen in time in, what, 1820? We finished our conversation in the yellow light of a fading day, with neighbors drinking beer on a nearby stoop and the occasional passing European tourist checking out the buildings, and I continued into the heart of Mount Vernon.

When I’m in the mood for a dense clump of historic architecture evoking the spirit of a time that’s passed, there are few places in the United States I enjoy more than Mount Vernon Place, with the Washington Monument in the middle surrounded by cobblestones and the four greens, and gorgeous mansions and institutions on the surrounding blocks. This would be unremarkable in New York, but it would also be overrun by vendors selling George Washington souvenirs, and there would probably be a Starbucks in the base of the obelisk. Here it’s just pretty and peaceful and exceptionally well preserved by a city that is overflowing with pride in its grand past. And you can hear the clip-clop of imaginary horses as you walk past the doors of these imposing old homes.

The Mount Vernon business district along Charles Street is doing better than I remember. I wouldn’t exactly say it’s thriving, but there are plenty of healthy-looking businesses and there were probably half a dozen restaurants open late, which is better than I can say for my own neighborhood. I opted for sushi (based primarily on proximity to the front door of my hotel), and I ate very well, in a friendly room with a nice late-evening buzz of activity, for noticeably less than I would have spent in Washington or New York.

The hotel itself was so unremarkable that I won’t name it. I would consider staying there again if I found myself in the same situation (quick overnight, by myself, atmosphere counts for nothing, planning to stay in and work), but otherwise I’d trade up. Still, it was clean, adequate, friendly, and one block from George Washington’s obelisk; try that in New York for 89 bucks.

My overall impression of Baltimore: good bones, local pride, great strides in 20 years, incredible potential not quite being unlocked to the degree it might. In other words, same as always. I’ll be back in 10 days for a whole weekend, for the Americans for the Arts Half-Century Summit, so more then.

And so I’m back on the train, this time from Penn Station so I could compare. Bonus Baltimore Penn Station photo below.

A microvacation consists of: having dinner in a nice restaurant in Mount Vernon, coming back to a nice tourist-class hotel (“good value for the money,” say the reviews on Hotels.com) where I’ll sit in the room and do the same work and watch the same TV I’d do in a DC hotel for double the room rate, and having a Commuter Adventure back to DC in the morning.

So far my review of MARC is: crowded, dirty, unromantic. The conductor (a CSX employee) threw the ticket stub on the floor — you won’t find that happening on Amtrak — and the guy next to me is on his second can of beer.

But seven bucks — I’m not sure you could get from Staten Island to Manhattan on the express bus for that. And I’m going to Baltimore, ancestral home of diner waitresses and Pecker … and … and Bromo-Seltzer! And other stuff too. I forget. All I know is Mount Vernon is pretty and I get to have coffee there in the morning before I run to Catch My Train.

This isn’t really the time or place to talk about Fairway the supermarket, other than to say that this small local supermarket chain — the chain is small, not the stores — carries the best combination I know of fresh produce and meat and cheese and baked goods, affordably priced and creatively sourced gourmet and specialty products, and ordinary groceries. I think after a particularly difficult case of weekend shopping exhaustion I once described the Red Hook Fairway (the Brooklyn outpost, full of Park Slope stroller families in their Zipcars on “big weekend shop” excursions) as “imagine that Trader Joe’s had a baby with Ikea,” but that isn’t quite sufficient, because the raison d’être of Fairway is its produce and meat and cheese, which are truly spectacular.

But I digress. Today’s topic is Fairway’s upstairs restaurant, which (like Henrietta’s) aspires to a cuisine that might be called “fresh and honest,” although with the look-how-fresh-and-honest-I-am brassiness of a New York place. And I have to say I’ve consumed plenty of excellence at Fairway Cafe, which shares some of the traits I like about Henrietta’s (starting with the open kitchen, which I neglected to mention about Henrietta’s last night). It makes a steak that is very good indeed, along with great cafe dishes like chicken schnitzel; traditional sandwiches (like egg salad on black bread) are exceptionally sharp and good; the by-the-glass wine list is extensive; the desserts are classics, and much less snooty than the ones at Henrietta’s. Salads are well composed; vegetables are always fresh. It won’t do for everything Henrietta’s will do for (I wouldn’t take a client there, for instance), but it’s the sort of place that I want to want to eat in four times a week.

The food itself, in other words, is steady, in the best sense. The sourcing is not as fastidious as Henrietta’s, but it’s quite good (hello! it’s inside of Fairway — there is no better retail source for consistent fresh food in New York City). And the prices are reasonable.

The problem with Fairway Cafe is that the service is irregular. The staff have their friendly and competent moments, and everyone means well, but there are times when it takes forever to get someone’s attention and another forever to get what you wanted. (At Henrietta’s, all I have to do is look in the general direction of “up” and someone is at my side asking what I need.) Plating at Fairway can be slapdash; I’ve had orders go in a little wrong; and generally the experience just doesn’t feel tight.

I am endlessly giving Fairway Cafe second chances, because when it is good it is very good indeed, and I like the setting (looking out on Broadway from a big second-floor window, left alone to read a good book while I eat a delicious and reasonably priced meal). I keep bringing friends there in the hope that they’ll have a one-of-its-best-days experience and see the magic that I see. They rarely do. Maybe with a little pressure from my millions of readers they’ll tighten up the ship just a bit and it will become the place it deserves to be.

In dozens of small ways, it feels like the management understands what its guests need in order to be comfortable and work efficiently, and this reveals itself over time — you may not completely get it on your first visit, but come back (presumably after visiting some less-impressive hotels in the interim) and you will. Given its location, the Charles is basically a business hotel for people whose business has a cultural or intellectual component, and in the decor and furnishings there’s some whimsy and thoughtfulness (of the let’s-not-get-caught-trying-TOO-hard Boston variety, to be sure, but still). Even the underground parking facility (which is independently run) is a “green garage.”

Besides, in the closet they give you real hangers. You can probably even steal them. I bet they won’t even care!

But what I really love about the Charles is Henrietta’s Table, which I think may be my favorite restaurant in America. That sounds like a wild claim, but I’m sitting here trying to think of another restaurant, anywhere, that I’d be happy to eat in four times a week for the rest of my life and I don’t think there is one.

Henrietta’s calls itself a “fresh and honest” American restaurant, but that doesn’t begin to cover what I like about this place:

Fresh ingredients, locally sourced and thoughtfully prepared. This isn’t the kind of restaurant where the plates are gorgeous (although they often are); it’s the kind of restaurant where you can assume that if there’s a tomato or a beet or a pork chop on your plate, someone chose it for flavor, from a reputable source, and it will deliver. There’s an emphasis on regional and local ingredients, and they report the provenance of ingredients when they can. Tonight I ordered something that in most restaurants would be forgettable or even worth avoiding — a dish of stone-ground grits with fresh vegetables — and it was flavorful and balanced without being gratuitously rich. On my salad plate were probably the tastiest tomatoes I’ve eaten in three years. The last time I was here, I had a steak, and it was the second-best steak I’ve ever had. In my whole life. (The winner: Magnolia Steak in Norfolk, which (alas) is now closed.)

Daily menu, but very little attitude. Most places that have a menu that changes daily feel like they’re trying too hard, but I rarely get that embarrassed “jeez, ratchet it back a little” feeling here — except sometimes when the dessert menu comes, but the desserts are so good that all is forgiven.

Extensive wine-by-the-glass list, many under $10. To do this they need a lot of turnover, which they get (it’s a large hotel, and there is a lot of community patronage, too — another indication that they’re on to something). Tonight I had a Long Island Cabernet Franc that was so good I’d stock it at home.

Absolutely the most reliable, hearty, no-tricks American breakfast I’ve ever had. Perfectly consistent from visit to visit. Eggs cooked exactly to order; gigantic portions of ham and sausage; superb breakfast potatoes (note: roughly 1 lb. butter per lb. potatoes); honest wheaty bread and very good biscuits (second only to America’s best biscuit, Atlanta’s Flying Biscuit). Strong coffee of a quality that’s hard to duplicate at home. Fresh, rich butter; preserves in abundance.

Spacious dining room, with comfortable farmhouse tables and a large outdoor patio in good weather. The place never feels full, even when it is.

The very best kind of service: attentive without ever crowding you, anticipating what you’ll need, backing off when it’s clear you’re enjoying your food and friends.

All in all, Henrietta’s Table is nice enough for informal entertaining (e.g., a business dinner that isn’t too stuffy), but you don’t end up paying as much as you might expect. It’s very possible to get through dinner for under 40 bucks a person, including dessert and a glass of wine. At a restaurant of this caliber, that’s difficult to match. And that’s why I’ll be eating there, what, 6 times between now and Friday?

I happened to read this while on an enforced coffee “fast” (during my long weekend in the country with a large group, where our sleep/wake schedule didn’t make it convenient to have coffee at the times and in the dosages I normally do). I really, really felt the lack. Consequently I am having a cup of strong coffee now that I’m home, at 11pm on a school night, despite knowing that it’ll put me to sleep late and mess me up in the morning. But it is delicious, especially with these cookies that my houseguest left me as a hostess, er, host gift. Thanks, houseguest!

If you’re new to WaterFire, here’s what happens: after night falls, volunteers in small boats light and tend wood fires in 100 braziers placed in the middle of the three rivers that flow through downtown Providence. Music plays, and thousands of people from Providence and the surrounding area converge on the waterfront to stroll, eat street food, and enjoy the sights, sounds, and scents of a large and memorable public event. At our last visit, we were fortunate enough to be guests in a gondola, which floated past three dozen of the braziers, upriver and then back down again, amid sparks and smoke and autumn drizzle. But even from shore, WaterFire is a thoroughly impressive sensory experience.

I particularly like WaterFire because it’s emphatically not a commercial event; it’s a spontaneous gathering of people from across the community to participate in a cultural happening (with free admission, courtesy of commercial and institutional sponsors, of the City of Providence and the state of Rhode Island, and of the dozens of volunteers who tend the fires, staff the boats, and advise and assist attendees on land).

Friday’s lighting starts at 8:16pm (sunset) and the fires will be burning until midnight. Bring a jacket; the evening will be breezy. If you’re within travel distance of Providence, consider making the trip; and if you enjoy what you see, please make a contribution to WaterFire.

The village. We were staying just outside the village of Pawling, home of Norman Vincent Peale as well as a wartime cryptography school, more recently the home of McKinney & Doyle, the beloved bakery and highfalutin’ restaurant.

The earliest settlers came to Quaker Hill in the 1720s, and the area is still home to families of long standing, along with country-house professional people from the city and the odd plutocrat or two. Pawling village has the sheen of a place that has remained continuously prosperous, despite being a shade too far off the beaten track to attract tourist traffic in volume, and some new businesses have opened since last season. Here are a few photos to give you a sense of the village:

The Stormville Airport Flea Market. I can’t stomach Stormville — the biggest gathering of antique, junktique, junk, and funnel-cake vendors on a dusty plain I’ve ever experienced — more than about twice a year. But a couple times a year, it’s worth it. In my apartment in the city I have nifty midcentury side tables and a midcentury orange swivel desk chair that came from Stormville, and every time I go, I hope for another find.

I didn’t really score this year, although I did pick up this fascinating how-to crafts guide (and I assure you that the inside pages are just as creepy as the cover), sold to me by a very earnest woman:

The real winners were our comic-collector friends, who came along in search of comic books and were not disappointed:

Here are a few more shots I took:

And on a warm evening like this, you get to eat your meal surrounded by a mob of good-looking people — comprising a broad cross-section of New Yorkers of all ages, and a good many of whom meet the qualifications to have their photos posted here — enjoying the pre-summer air.

As a counterweight to all the calories in this post (not to mention the implied lust), here’s some brain food: a bonus Madison Square Park photo of Secretary of State William Seward, the one who purchased Alaska for the United States from Russia in 1867.

The parochialism would grate eventually (as it did when I lived in Atlanta, Washington, and for that matter San Francisco), but then in Philadelphia you’re so close to so many other interesting places, including New York, that I don’t think it would matter as much.

Coming later today: bonus pic of me on a park bench with Ben Franklin.

We stayed in the Liberty Hotel on Beacon Hill, which is built around and into the old Charles Street Jail, closed in 1991. They did a nice job in the conversion — historically and architecturally respectful, accessible, whimsical without being cheeseball. They named the bar “Clink.” How cool is that?

About Montreal, not much to say except that it still rocks, and it’s even more fun when it isn’t all slushy (as now) than it is when it is (as when we were there a year ago).