Year: 2018

Bagels For Breakfast

We like bagels and really miss the ones we used to get when we lived in New Jersey for those two years. After living in South Carolina for several years we adjusted to just live with the ones from Dunkin Donuts. Whenever we would travel we would seek out a shop that sold “real” bagels, so now we have gotten kind of snobbish about them and will only eat those.

For a while we were satisfied from the one we got from a chain called Bruegger’s that had a store in Lexington, SC a mere 50 miles away. These were fine until we discovered a place called Joey’s NY Bagels in Hendersonville, NC on a trip to see my sister. The bagels from there elicited memories of those from Jersey, so we have stopped going to Bruegger’s.

A hundred mile round trip to Lexington and back for bagels wasn’t bad, but a 330 mile round trip to Hendersonville and back would be nuts. So we started looking for someplace closer that had “real” bagels. We found a place in Greenville, SC (a 220 mile round trip) called Greenfield’s Bagels & Deli. It is really too far away for frequent trips to just get a bagel for breakfast, but we’ve combined it with looking for some Motoring Challenge points and have been a couple of times.

Yesterday we decided it was time for some bagels this weekend. We were planning another Greenville trip, but I decided to look around for something else in the state that might be closer. Charleston and Hilton Head on the coast had promising bagel bakeries, but they were both further away than Greenville. Then I found a place called Corner Bagel Bakery & Deli in Anderson, SC. This place is a little under a hundred miles away one-way, not that many miles savings over Greenville, but Anderson is a much smaller town so traffic will be better and we won’t have to get on the Interstate at all.

We each got a toasted bagel and one each in a bag to go at the Corner Bagel Bakery & Deli. I thought it was not too bad, but Donna said it was barely Bruegger level. “Well,”I volunteered, “Greenville and Greenfield’s Deli is only about 30 miles away. You want to go there?”

So that is what we did. Because we had our own bagel in Anderson, we just split a toasted one in Greenville and then also got a couple more to go. I told Donna that I thought that this bagel was better than our previous gold standard, the Joey’s in Hendersonville. She informed me that I was nuts, Joey’s was better. “You know,” I said, “Joey’s is only about 40 miles away?”

“Let’s go,” she said. So we did. Here we split another toasted bagel and had them bag up a couple more to go for each of us. While eating in Joey’s NY Bagel’s store Donna decided that just maybe I was right about which one was best. We brought home at least one bagel from each place, so maybe we will have to figure out a way to do some back to back blind taste testing…

The triptych above shows the interiors of all three places we ate a bagel at this morning. From left to right: Corner Bagel Bakery & Deli in Anderson, SC, Greenfield’s Bagels & Deli in Greenville, SC and Joey’s NY Bagels in Hendersonville, NC.

TDTVS Redux

Well it is happening again, we are catching up to the episode of The West Wing Weekly that Hrishi & Josh discussing. They posted 5.09: Abu El Banat last Wednesday and we have now finished 5.06: Disaster Relief. We have been watching an episode a night and they are covering an episode a week, so it was inevitable that we would. There is no way we would start over again for a third time, so we have decided to just watch one episode a week. Each new podcast episode is released on Wednesday, so we are going to watch our The West Wing TV episode on Tuesday night.

If we do that, what are we going to watch the other six nights a week? There are very few TV shows that we both enjoy and wouldn’t mind watching all over again. And it would be nice if there was a podcast for the show to listen to the following day to mirror The West Wing experience. Then, in an brilliant bit of internet serendipity, I happen on an article about Evangeline Lilly talking about being cornered into filming a nude scene on the TV show LOST. She had given an interview discussing it on a podcast called The Lost Boys. Ooh, ooh, LOST was a show we really liked back in the day.

We are going to rewatch TDTVS. Thursday night we watched Episode 1.01: The Pilot – Part 1. Friday we listened to its corresponding The Lost Boys podcast episode. Hmmm, this is not as satisfying as The West Wing Weekly podcast. The premise is cool, it is one fellow’s 1st time watching the show and the other’s 7th time, but I’m betting it is a language thing, these guys are speaking English. They are in England, so it is the King’s English and one is slightly harder to understand than the other. Both of their voices are kind of similar too, so that doesn’t help either. We have now watched the first 6 episodes of LOST and still only listened to just the one of the podcast. We should probably try at least one or two more episodes of the podcast before giving up entirely. Maybe tomorrow.

In Russia, Photo Manipulates YOU Redux

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of my discovering a website called PhotoFunia and my glee of finding it still up and running here you go:

28,000 Gross Vehicle Weight Rating

As I’ve mentioned a bunch of times before here, we always park way far out in parking lots, for both the walk and to avoid door dings. Trouble is, that more times than not, we will come out and find that someone has parked their very large truck right next to us blocking our view for pulling out of the spot.

Today when we pulled into Kroger’s to pick up a couple things, I noticed this large truck parked way out with nobody else around it, so to give one of the them a taste of the same sort of inconvenience, I parked right next to them.

I think I made my point.

Somewhere on our shopping trip drive the Angry Ladybug crossed the 28,000 mile mark.

Miata Maintenance Day

Seeing as the CTBNL hit the 65,000 mile plateau on Saturday, the other day when Donna went off to the gym, I jacked up the Miata, rotated the tires and changed the oil.

I was going to give the car a bath too, but after eating lunch I didn’t want to go back outside. Besides I did not want to violate Russ’s Rule for Retirement. To wit: Do one thing a day. You have all sorts of things you need to do and have been waiting until you more free time, there are all the things you want to do for yourself and then there is all to things your wife wants for you to do. It can overwhelming, so pick one thing and do just that one thing, don’t try to do too much.

Now you might think that changing the oil and rotating tires is two different items, but to me, I have always combined them. This is because to only real easy way to get to the oil filter in the Miata is to remove the right front wheel. And while I guess quite possibly you could jack up that front side and remove the one wheel, but then you would need to make sure the car is level to allow all the oil to drain out. That and you are now already 1/4 of the way to rotating the tires anyway…

65,000 Something or Other Things

One of the challenges for this year’s Moss Motoring Challenge was “Monster Truck.” We had a bead on a place in Chesterfield, SC that is called Monster Truck Ranch that gives rides in one. I have the address saved, figuring we would drive up and see if they’d let us take a photo, but we have never made the effort to take the 2-1/2 hour one-way drive up.

Last Friday Donna found an event that included Monster Trucks at a drag strip outside Orangeburg (about 50 miles away) that was for Friday and Saturday. We decided to go on Friday early and hopefully beat the crowds. We packed a lunch and figured we pay the $25 entry fee and see if we could get close to a Big ‘Ol Scary Truck and maybe watch some dragsters. Online it said it started at 9:30 and we timed our arrival perfectly. Except the gates weren’t open! All that was in line was one car, a motor home and the port-a-potty suction truck. There seemed to be no activity at all and after a few minutes we just turned around and came home.

On the way back on the outskirts of the thriving metropolis of Kitching Mill, SC the CTBNL blinked by 65,000 miles on the odometer.

On Saturday afternoon we were bored, so we took another drive to Orangeburg. Turns out there was another option to possibly get a picture of a Monster Truck in the very same town. This was a make-up event from a rained out May Spring National Monster Truck Showdown and was at the Orangeburg County Fairgrounds.

On our way to that show we passed right by the drag strip where the other event was, so we popped in to see if we could see anything from outside. Bingo, the results are above.

Even though we now had a picture for the challenge we opted to drive the extra 10 miles over to the fairgrounds. First we cheated a bit and followed a road that took us around the back of the fairgrounds to see if we could get a better “over the fence” picture than the one we already had. No dice there, so we drove around to main entrance to see we could get a decent view that way. Nope again. So we came on back to Aiken.

6 hours + 250 miles = 3 points.