When it’s been 2 ½ years since you went to New York City, and you live full-time in a place where you’ve got a corn field around the corner and a dairy farm down the road, there’s a lot to forget about what is arguably the world’s most storied metropolis.

A good friend from Vienna was visiting last week, and I offered to take him into the city for a day, since it had been, as mentioned, 2 ½ years for me (last time I went I was one month pregnant and spent a great day at the Museum of Modern Art) and over 10 years for him. There’s a train from here that takes 1 ½ hours to get to Penn Station, which doesn’t seem that long when you consider that you step on a platform in an open field, with birds cheering you on your way, and step off into a thrumming, ever-moving, overpopulated and overheated sea of people.

Unfortunately, the train engine broke down halfway. After 40 minutes trying to fix it, the dispatchers decided the train behind us could push us to our destination but it would have to go local. We’d been on an express. Half an hour later whatever virus was affecting our train proceeded to infect the new one, and the journey – peppered with apologies from the staff – took 3 ½ hours. The conversation my friend and I had involved a whole lot of comparisons with the European train system and how very much like a 3rd world country the United States is becoming. Needless to say we ventured off into the lack of universal health care.

When we broke down the second time and I looked out an open door at a dusty platform with hot, rather resigned looking people scattered around, it reminded me so much of my time living in Soviet Russia that I almost searched for someone selling paper-like cones of soft marozhonoe ice cream.

But we made it eventually, disembarking into the city that I think you have to love with your whole heart if you’re to live in it peaceably.

It was nearly 90 degrees out, and brutally sticky, and so crowded I could hardly breathe. We took a subway downtown, looking for a restaurant near Washington Square Park. That mission failed, as we called the place and found out it was actually in Brooklyn (nothing like “You’re where? That’s in Manhatten. We’re in Brooklyn,” to make you feel like the most idiotic kind of doltish tourist).

So we do what you do in New York: walked around, watching people and the hectic, vibrant, congested life its residents live. In Washington Square Park children (and often their overheated parents) jumped and ran through the fountain to cool off under the beating sun (pictured above). Musicians vied for attention: a bagpiper, a folk guitarist, and a rather good young punk band with a vintage feel to their music.

I couldn’t live here, I kept thinking. But then the thought moderated itself. “I could only live here if I really, really loved it,” I told my friend. “You’d have to love New York heart and soul to put up with all this.” ‘This’ being the heat, the heaving crowds, the decrepit, stinking subway stations, the dusty, overused parks. I don’t love it. I don’t think I can. But there is just enough glimmer of thrill and satisfaction in its residents that I can see how people do fall in love with the Big Apple.

Sometimes it really does pay to check out your own backyard. I am perfectly aware that the Hudson Valley county I live in is chock-a-block with history and stories, but don’t always pay attention. Goshen, New York, is a case in point. Sure, I knew it had some history related to horse-racing, but mostly it was the place where I got my bike fixed and bought decent wine.

That’s changed. While waiting for a quick meeting with our lawyer, my husband, son, and I, along with a visiting friend, wandered around the ample-sized village for about an hour, munching on lunch and looking at the architecture. The place is full of surprises. We stumbled upon this plaque, for example, on a side-street, and learned from it that Noah Webster, of dictionary fame, used to teach here in a two-room schoolhouse in the 1700s. My county’s full of such plaques, mostly relating to the Revolutionary War. I should pay more attention.

I did know, however, that Goshen was home to the Harness Racing Museum & Hall of Fame, one of the most important places in harness-racing history. Harness racing is a horse-racing event in which the horses are hooked to a lightweight two-wheeled cart in which the jockey rides. Basically like a Roman chariot race, as far as I can tell. The horses or event are called “trotters,” which has nothing to do with “the trots,” trust me.

The Trotters Museum, as it’s sometimes called, hosted harness racing’s most important event, The Hambletonian, up until 1956 — think Belmont Stakes. It is still a working racetrack. And, unlike most racetracks, you can walk through the grounds and peek in the stables at the gorgeous thoroughbreds cooling their heels between races. Hooves, I mean.

Goshen is a small place, but pleasant. There is a 9-mile paved biking trail that starts in Goshen and runs to the Village of Monroe. Built on a defunct railbed, it’s popular with cyclists, walkers, joggers, and new mothers in shock pushing their new babies in strollers for a couple hours of outdoor peace (I speak from experience). The Goshen Gourmet Bakery sells baked goods (obviously) and coffee, along with sandwiches and such during lunch hour, and is a popular place to hang out. It’s next door to Joe Fix-It’s, one of the best bicycle stores I’ve ever frequented (and to my husband’s delight it runs a model train shop during wintertime). They’re up the road from the old railway station, now a police station, but still maintaining its original architecture. I usually park there to pop over to High Withers Wine & Spirits for a quality bottle, or some of Doc’s Apple Cider, some of the best alcoholic cider I’ve ever tasted, brewed about 20 miles away.

If you stay for a few hours or a couple days, I can highly recommend Dave’s BBQ down on Main Street, which looks a bit like it might be a chain, but in fact serves fantastic Southern-style barbecue, collards, and cornbread (including vegetarian options), made as often as possible from local ingredients and is seriously tasty. You can also check out what I think of as the second ugliest building in America further up the road (the first ugliest is Boston City Hall, built in a similar style but looking a lot like a badly designed Vogon spaceship). It’s the Orange County government seat, where people like me get our driver’s licenses and avert our eyes. The construction style is known as “brutalist,” which is pretty apt.

The main town green is attached to a massive stone Presbyterian church, and is the location for town events (such as Fourth of July celebrations) and the Friday Farmer’s Market, where you can buy everything from produce to pies to pickles. Running out the back end of the church property is a long row of historical buildings built in a variety of aesthetically pleasing architectural forms and known as “Lawyer’s Row,” for the sheer quantities of law offices they contain.

Goshen is indeed a town of history, horses, and lawyers, all of which give it an unmistakable air very akin to a New England village: peaceful, complacent, but very much alive.

When you have young kids, you don’t spend much time at Sunday brunch.

I mean, why lose your mind when you don’t have to?

Now that my youngest is almost 10, however, I’m starting to get a life. 

Threadgill’s is an institution here in Austin, Texas –  there are even two great locations, north and south, so you can have your fill of good food and live music.

My family and I went to the North Austin branch on Lamar Boulevard (“Old No. 1″) for their Bluegrass Brunch one weekend this summer.

In the words of original proprietor Eddie Wilson:

“….the 1930′s through 1960′s in Austin [is] the theme of the original Threadgill’s on North Lamar Blvd….Boasting the bragging rights to owning the first beer license in the county and being the place where Janis Joplin [a Texas native from Port Arthur] cut her teeth in the 60′s and Jimmie Dale Gilmore crooned in the 80′s, Threadgill’s original location offers delicious food in a quaint and comfortable atmosphere….”

The brunch is a buffet with lots of choices, including a wide variety of Southern-style vegetables (a Threadgill’s specialty, as is chicken-fried steak) plus migas and cheese and garlic grits.

Yes, there is such a thing as “Texas Black-Eyed Pea Caviar.”

Yes, I had a Shiner Bock beer with everything, including sweet potato pancakes, if I recall correctly.

I managed to take notes without dumping maple syrup on the paper, but then seem to have misplaced the notepad amongst the singing and picking and eating. (Update – found my notes! Looks like I remembered everything, except that I did write about this drink on the bar menu….The Janis Joplin, made with Southern Comfort and Jack Daniels. “As soft as she got,” said the menu. $6.25/drink. Whoa.)

Meantime, on the small stage in the main dining room was Danny Santos y los Bluegrass Vatos, playing a variety of enjoyable bluegrass and Tejano-tinged tunes.  The audience was a mix of colors and ages including bikers, corporate-looking types and families like ours.

It was a very congenial gathering;  the music and food were good and so was the air-conditioning.  At a time of year when it’s tough to enjoy the Texas outdoors….the triple digit days are never-ending….Threadgill’s gave me an excuse to hop in the car on a Sunday.

(This post will join other entries in WanderFood Wednesday at the Wanderlust and Lipstick site.)

Related posts:

*** Austin Rocks: even the airport is cool
*** A New Year’s hometown discovery: Austin’s ArcAttack
*** Texas temple of gastronomy (The Whole Foods Market flagship store and corporate headquarters is in Austin)

(To learn about Barbara Bonfigli and Café Tempest, feel free to visit any of the following sites. This review is one of many in Café Tempest’s “virtual tour,” hosted by Tell Me Press. To see the complete tour schedule visit the tour site. Find out more about Barbara Bonfigli on her website.)

This mythical memoir is written with a touch that tells you it’s very likely based on Barbara Bonfigli’s own travels, and she could have easily written a travel book about her experiences on a small Greek island. Indeed, Bonfigli is an avowed travel addict and a published travel writer. She says of herself, “Maps are my recreational drug of choice,” a statement that I’m sure has many of us laughing and ruefully recognizing ourselves at the same time.

However, a true memoir probably wouldn’t have included the elements of absurdity and personal drama that form the backbone of Café Tempest. Sarah, the main character, has decided to spend a longer than usual sojourn on the underdeveloped island of Pharos, where she vacations every year. Running away from a failing love affair in London, the thirty-something American theater producer is determined to get herself some peace and an actual writing routine. Her current writing project, an article about mantras for Yoga Journal, adds plenty of self-deprecating humor to the book, as she comes up with mantras and tries them out with different situations and different people, only to wonder at the end if the whole search for a personal mantra is pointless, since, as she says in my favorite line (which might become my own personal mantra), “No one else’s behavior makes any sense.”

Sarah is a determined woman who seems secure in her own skin and—this is an important theme in the book—very comfortable with her bisexuality. So comfortable is she with herself that she brings along an ex-lover to keep her company. She says of the flirtatious sidekick Alex, “If your ex-lovers don’t become your friends, you’re dancing on a dark stage.”

Alex is the woman who prods and encourages as Sarah ping-pongs among three impulses and expectations that Pharos throws at her: there’s her own writing to get done, and in her first week a local doctor requests that she take over directing the yearly production by the Pharos Players, an ever-shifting cast of fishermen, teachers, bakers, and the swaggering sheriff. As Sarah had co-partnered a West End theater company back in London, her experience is invaluable.

For reasons unknown even to herself, she says yes, and finds herself producing Shakespeare’s Tempest, an ambitious project when she is short of people who can act and has to keep both the sheriff and the local baker happy. It’s an increasingly funny situation, with characters who can make you laugh out loud and buffets of food that make you hungry.

Thrown into the mix is the unexpected arrival of Monika, a gorgeous artist who has her eye on Sarah. Suddenly unsure of herself, her future, and her capacity to love, Sarah is drawn to Monika but wary of what level of commitment is being asked of her.

The personal dramas combine to make a tight, compact story set on a tight, compact island. Although, being a travel writer and reader, I might have asked for a slightly richer sense of place, the descriptions of Pharos and its people fit right in with the style of the book and the story. The reader walks away with a head full of cafés serving surprisingly bad food, the shop where it takes all day to make a phone call (made even more tentative by the fact that the fish sometimes nibble the underwater line and break the connection), the cleaning lady who is at war with the pet turtle, and a land of sparkling waters and empty beaches populated by fishermen at odds with the local taxi drivers. Not to mention wondering how the sheriff’s missing Volvo eventually ended up in the sea.

Bonfigli writes in an oblique style that is very difficult to get right—tons of dialogue not always couched within the physicality of a scene, the dialogue full of references by characters that the reader sometimes has to think about for a moment to understand. Fortunately, it seems to be a style she is comfortable with, and she does it well. Although it’s not a style I usually find myself liking, I was increasingly drawn in by the strength of the story and the characters, and enjoying the spare, sharp dialogue.

Café Tempest is a fun, engrossing read, unflinching in its solid writing and depictions of a tight-knit and sometimes ridiculous Greek community. It’s been called an “original, seductive, witty tale of one magical summer,” and I frankly couldn’t say less.

You can order Café Tempest directly from the publisher. Or order from Amazon:

I’m writing this in a room at the Flamingo Resort & Spa in Santa Rosa. Once the hangout of Hollywood stars and movie producers, this weekend it’s home to a group of over 250 wine bloggers attending the Wine Bloggers Conference ’09. Having just started my own wine blog, The Green Wine Guide, which focuses on eco-friendly and sustainable wines and wineries around the world, I thought it would be informative and fun to head to California for the conference. 

So I’m here in wine country, planning to learn as much as I can about wine blogging by some of the best in the country. And while I’m at it, to looks like I’ll be tasting a whole lot of wine (it’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it).  But being more a wine drinker than a wine taster, I keep having to remind myself of the 4S of wine.

See – pick up a lot about a wine by just by holding the glass of wine up, tilting it this way and that, and looking at the color.

Smell – swirling the glass releases the wine’s aroma for you to sniff and try to decihper.

Sip – taking a small sip enough to coat the tongue will allow you to taste all the wine’s flavors. Meanwhile, you should be inhaling through your mouth to aerate the wine.

Spit – the pro’s do it so why shouldn’t you. Spit into the spittoon, usually a bucket or something just as uninspiring. And make sure to pay attention to how long the flavors linger in your mouth.

And that’s all it takes.

Sure would be much easier, though, just to drink it.