Eatin' My Way Down 17A #2

Another episode of “eating my way down 17A”.  Barbecue is a great find anywhere but particularly in the south and no place better than Moose’s Famous BBQ.  Situated in a nondescript cinderblock building on the  outskirts of Moncks Corner, SC, Moose’s serves up the best barbecue I’ve ever tasted.

When you walk in the place I get that down home friendly feeling even if I have to stand in line.  I HATE standing in line! But, not at Moose's!  I don’t mind waiting to give that elderly lady my $11 and get my styrofoam plate and plastic fork. I wish they had paper plates though.  I think that styrofoam affects he flavor of the barbecue meat. Kinda takes some of that smoky flavor away.  Then I feast my eyes on that buffet, and my saliva glands shift into overdrive. Before me, under the lights, are the veggies I grew up on: corn, green beans, potatoes, and okra.  But after them come the meats.  As you look at the meats notice the sign which says, “If you don’t smell smoke, it’s not barbecue!”. There’s chicken fingers and barbecue chicken, but the king of the buffet is the pig meat. There’s pulled pork, and pork loin.  I really believe in barbecue pulled pork, but my cap’s off to the brisket. Moose’s  brisket is the most tender, tastiest, I’ve ever tasted. They slice it right in front of you! Ask how thick do you want the slices and how many. Pour on your choice of sauce, and you have a meal fit for a king or maybe too good for a king. The only thing missing from the buffet are ribs; kinda like having a church without a steeple. But I’ll get over it. You can add on a dessert of banana pudding, peach cobbler, or sweet potato soufflé.  Get that sweet iced tea from that big dispenser yourself in that big styrofoam cup. (Red Solo cups are not available.)

PIG OUT!

Put your trash in the big plastic trash can on the way out.  Be careful going to your car if it’s after dark.  There are big potholes. Kirby Johnson from Kingstree lost his Datsun pickup in one.

National WWII Museum

We flew into New Orleans in the late afternoon and took a quick taxi ride to our hotel in the Garden Quarter.  At check-in I saw a brochure for The National WWII Museum ,and I knew I had to see it.  It's not that I'm super patriotic or a great history buff, but museums about warfare are filled with "guy stuff", and I knew that this would be no exception.  The Museum was actually opened in 2000 as the National D-Day Museum, but in 2003 Congress designated it the National WWII Museum. Friday morning Claudette and I would be there when it opened for the day.

After a short walk from our hotel we entered the Louisiana Pavilion part of the museum.  Its fifty-foot ceiling has a C-47/Gooney Bird/Dakota/Skytrain airplane hanging from the overhead along with a US Navy fighter aircraft of the same era. The C-47  in its olive drab paint job appears to have just returned from a recon mission from war-torn Europe of the early 1940's.  At ground level are a half-track (one of my favorite vehicles combining the tracks of a tank with the front wheels of a truck), a small tank, and a deuce and a half truck, as well as a jeep and a landing craft.  Another very interesting piece was the M1  75MM Pack Howitzer.  This artillery piece was designed to be disassembled into three pieces to be transported by pack mules.  One sour note though. There is an Allison aircraft engine on display that is painted glossy black with red detailing and chrome plated exhaust pipes. Obviously not an artifact of the war.  We climbed the stairways  to two upper levels with overlooks of the main lobby.  These areas have smaller displays of Navy memorabilia.  We had overlooked the main display area. It was on the ground level to the right after the entryway.

The major display area is divided geographically into the European and Pacific theaters.All the displays are extremely modern, and there are many mini-theatres where a half dozen people or less can enjoy a film portraying an event in the war.  These were usually original films shot on location.  This museum provides a lot of information if you read all the signage and watch and listen to all the audio-visuals.  Many artifacts are displayed under Plexiglas, so they can't be touched by little boys and guys like me.  There are many stories about individual soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen.  One that caught my eye was the display of a Japanese katona, a GI's helmet and an American pistol. Reading the captions I find that a Japanese officer had hit the American over the head with his encased sword, denting his helmet.  While falling, the American pulled his piston and dispatched the officer. The museum is full of stories of the undaunted courage of the American fighting man. There is a mock up of a glider used to ferry tops in to France on D-Day very similar to the one at the Airborne and Spec Ops Museum in Fayetteville, NC. The fantastic displays of weapons and machines of warfare are a testament to mankind's technological ability to find ways to destroy his fellow man. 

We thoroughly enjoyed our visit, but in our last hour it was inundated with high school students. But I did get some good photos.

Our New Travel Book is Finished, Finally...

Claudette and Tony's Bonne Journee by photographs by Tony Young | Make Your Own Book

A Busking We Will Go.

We strolling down La Rambla toward Barcelona's harbor where Christorpher Columbus watches over the harbor from atop his lofty pedestal, and bouys look like little boys, when I clutched Claudette's arm in disbelief.  On the sidewalk was a huge creature  with wings and golden horns.  Except for his horns and the whites of his eyes, he was completely black.  There was a forked tail and boney fingers with long nails.  The muscular black arms  held a pretty English girl in shorts and halter top, while her boyfriend took their picture with an iPhone.  This demon was one of many street performers on the street that day.  We enjoy the street performers where ever we encounter them. There are a variety of acts.  Perhaps the newest is the person representing a statue.  One of the first I saw was a trumpet player in silver.  Every inch of him was covered in silver paint.  He sat motionless in front of his tip box. We've seen many different "statues", but the most interesting  was in New Orleans on Royal Street. He was unpainted, looked like a regular construction worker climbing a ladder with a six-foot length of wood on his shoulder. He was motionless, balanced on his latter about three rungs off the pavement.  I did hear of a "statue" that was not a "statue".  It seems a clever young man posed a well dressed and made-up manikin in front of a tip jar.  He would place the manikin on the street in the morning  and check the tip jar during the day. At the end of the day he would collect his earnings and manikin.  Probably one of the most famous street entertainers is the naked cowboy of Times Square.  Although not quite naked, he wears a cowboy hat, boots, BVDs, and plays a guitar, he his quite entertaining. There are quite a variety of performers on the street.  We've seen opera singers, string quartets, folk dancers, performing marionettes, glass players,  fire eaters, and musicians of all kinds.  Another memorable sight was the fire eater near the Eiffel Tower in the early evening. I've always been fond of fire eaters ever since a shipmate filled his mouth with lighter fluid and ignited the stream he squirted from between his two front teeth.  The event took place in a berthing compartment, after taps, aboard the USS Intrepid while steaming in the South China Sea. He was reluctant to repeat the performance. We were on the train from Paris to Vernon when we were entertained by an impromptu performance in our car. At one of the stops a man with an accordion boarded the train and began playing standing just inside the entrance door. At the next stop he was joined by a sax player, and at a later stop a clarinetist joined the group.  We enjoyed some great music until they disembarked before Vernon. The pretty girl sitting across from us never woke up.  Must have had a late night.

intr.v. busked, busk·ing, busks To play music or perform entertainment in a public place, usually while soliciting money.

It seems to be a romantic lifestyle: performing whenever and getting paid for it. But not necessarily so. I recently talked with a busker on New Orlean's Royal Street.

Street musician who wished
to remain anonymous.

"Playing on the street must be the life," I said.

"Not really," the bearded musician said.

"What could happen?"

"Lots of things. Well," he added with a sigh,"there's the weather. If it's raining, you can't work"

"But you get a lot of sunshine here."

"Yeah, but there's other things." He seemed reluctant to continue. "You have to claim your spot."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Sure, sometimes I have to get up and be here at 5 a.m. just be sure we have a place to play.  Location is everything.  This is a numbers game; the more people that see you the bigger chance someone will put something in the tip jar."

"Do you need a permit?"

"Not here.  The cops don't bother you here.  Of course, New Orleans has the reputation for having the most corrupt police department in the country.  I don't care though, so long as they don't bother me.  Some places the cops do hassle you though.  They claim you're panhandlin' or just any thing to run you out of town."

But I noticed that his eyes were always moving from left to right behind the wire-rimmed glasses.

"Been doing this long?" I was curious.

"A few years in a lot of different cities. We took a bicycle road trip last year from New Orleans to Woodstock, NY and earned our way busking. So, I guess we did alright."

"I don't think I could handle this kind of lifestyle," I said.

"It takes a certain kind of person, I guess. I gotta be free!" he said as he picked up his instrument and walked away down Royal Street toward a string band beginning to set up.

Sal's Place

We took the road out of Cadaquez where we had spent the night on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. As we drove through the hills we were searching for the fishing village of Port Lligat.  Driving down from the hills we welcomed the sight of the beautiful Mediterranean  and found a place to park the car near the house owned by the famous artist  Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, better known as Salvador Dali.  Dali, who lived between 1904 and 1989 had bought the small fisherman's house about 1920 and continuously modified it for more than twenty years.  We were anxious to see it.  Claudette had made reservations for a tour at 4P.M. The only way to see the house is by guided tour. We don't care much guided tours much, but that was the only way to see this house. It was about ten minutes before the tour was to begin when we reached the location.  I let Claudette out of the car to insure our place in the tour while i parked the car. A sign in the car park area  announced that the parking fee was three euros but the man at the open air bar said it was free.  I did not question his authority and hastened to catch up with Claudette. 

The house was a unique looking structure just a few meters from the gravel beach.  We were asked to leave any bags in a locker area nearby before going up the entrance stairs to the house.  The female tour guide quickly ascertained how many languages were spoken by her charges before beginning her descriptions of what we were seeing. She was quite efficient and we only heard the same description three times.  Or, at least I presume it was the same.  We were entering the place of artistic genius and, perhaps, a bit of his aura lingered.  You kind of get that feeling you get when you are in those places the famous have been. Places  like where Ann Bolin lost her head or Joan d'Arc was burned at the stake or Elvis recorded "That's Alright Mama".  It was that kind of place.  This house is a happy place, very colorful. It consists of a labyrinth of hallways connecting rooms on three different levels.  My favorite room in the house is the studio/workshop.  The big windows face the sea and it has a very interesting easel.  Dali preferred to work on his paintings sitting and therefore had an easel which moved the canvas up and down into an opening in the floor via a system of pulleys and weights. Fascinating.  Also in nooks and crannies around the studio were props from his works. Many objects that a Dali fan would recognize from his paintings but we were unsuccessful in finding a melting pocket watch. There was an exquisite puppet theatre.The bedroom was interesting in that it had two double beds and was oriented so that the rising sun illuminated the room at dawn. The house has objects d'arte  everywhere but there wasn't time to examine many things closely, the guides  hurried us along. (We were the last tour of the day!)  In one corner of a room there was a large container of walking canes.  I recall  seeing quite a few photographs of Dali with a cane. Throughout the house are many paintings of Gala, Dali's Russian born wife. in various stages of undress.  There is a circular room and other rooms including one small room dedicated to newspaper clippings and photographs of the famous people  photographed with Dali.  

You exit the house onto a terrace which overlooks a garden.  Immediately outside the door to the right is a narrow opening in the wall lake a narrow shallow tunnel.  Claudette was able to squeeze through the opening and discovered a full length mirror.  The house continued to surprise. On the terrace is a sculpture of a giant egg big enough for a person to get inside and a view of Dali's abstract image of Christ made of trash and refuse.  As you continue around to the right you enter the area of the swimming pool. The area is like an outdoor room.  The most notable feature of this room is the sofa which appears as a giant set of lips. Actually, sensuous female lips in brilliant red. 

Dali spent some of his time in New York and Paris but did a lot of work in Port Lligat.   He and Gala were happy here but after her death in 1982, he never returned. 

• A Virtual Tour of Dali's House