At closing, Portillo’s, in Fountain Hills, is almost empty.
The eatery specializes in Chicago food, hot dogs, polish sausage and Italian Beef.
The restaurant is gleaming and has checkered tablecloths, old style movie posters and employees dressed in sporty uniforms. It is a place that Vinnie and the boys would come to eat after taking care of their numbers rackets, breaking some arms,blowing up a competitor’s vehicle with him inside it.
There are more employees in the place than customers this time of night, and, as we finish our late dinner, the help is sweeping floors, closing out registers, getting ready to hang the ” Closed ” sign in the front window and go home to late night movies and Chinese take out.
In the parking lot, the bass player, Tom, has backed his car into a close to our table parking space, in plain view, so he can keep an eye on his expensive irreplaceable stand up bass. I watched him slip the big instrument into its custom made case, at the gig, and roll it out to his car like he was pulling a suitcase in an airport terminal. He carefully laid the bass down in the back seat of his small SUV and covered it with a cheap looking Mexican blanket.
Instruments, like your best set of golf clubs, your best operating scalpels, your best culinary knives, or running shoes, have to be kept close.
This world is not without thieves.
Rum has been around for centuries.
Columbus brought the first sugarcane to the new world, and, shortly after, the first sugar cane plantation, worked by slaves, was begun in the New World in the Dominican Republic. A trade route was begun with Europe bringing African slaves to the America’s, trading them for rum, tobacco, cotton and other resources to take back to Europe. A rich European merchant class was built on people working under a hot sun having someone else tell them when they could stop.
Rum is said to increase good cholesterol, combat artery blockages to help prevent heart attacks and disease. Rum is low calorie, strengthens bones,promotes heart health,combats muscle pain,fights the common cold, acts as a sleep aid, extends longevity, reduces the risk of alzheimer’s disease.
Sir Francis Drake gave his sailors a daily shot of rum and pirates drank the stuff instead of water, which was not always available, especially in the middle of an ocean.
The Museo of Rum in the Zona Colonia makes rum on its premises and has a free tasting bar.
I buy myself some coffee flavored rum I hope I can get through Customs and back home, and I plan to implement a daily regimen of rum for all the health benefits that accrue from drinking it.
I will , though, never become a Los Angeles Raider football fan.
Pirates, even Jack Sparrow, are too shady for my taste, even though we both like our rum right out of the bottle. .
This little restaurant is one street north of the D’Beatrice Comida Criolla, another local eating place near my Santo Domingo guesthouse just outside the Zona Colonia.
At lunch yesterday, there was a line here backing almost out the front door and all the tables inside were occupied.This morning, its doors are open and it is early enough to get a good table by a window. It is quiet and a cool breeze rushes through the room, coming from the Caribbean Sea a few blocks to our south.
Regulars are just finishing their coffee, joking, getting ready to go to work, all men in their forties and fifties going to jobs to support their families.
The beauty of the Zona Colonia is that you find new twists every day. As a traveler, everything begins new, and, by the time it stops being new, it is time to board a plane and fly home. When you get home, the travel spirit is still burning inside you and you see your own home with new eyes and a new heart.
Keeping our spirit alive takes a little work..
Having bacon and eggs, I meditate on spirits and hope all of mine get along today.
Keeping your body healthy for your spirits is not an unhealthy thing to do.
Plaza Espana is a popular night spot in Santo Domingo.
There are events and live music here. but, this evening, early, people are just beginning to arrive as the moon rises just above Columbus’s right shoulder.
The Alcazar de Don Colon is closed and there is only a light on in the front entry where a night watchman fixes himself a cup of hot tea before he walks the Palace and talks with ghosts.
Tables in front of the restaurants will be filled before long and waiters wearing red pirate bandana’s will be shuffling out drinks till the wee hours of the morning.
In the old days, this Plaza must have been filled with shrubs, tropical plants and trees with secluded alcoves where men and women exchanged carefully worded letters sealed with wax and lipstick.
Today, through the night, cell phones light the romance way, fingers moving like those of a nervous groom just before his wedding.
The Plaza Espana, this evening, is just beginning to heat up.
Every time I pass, I see customers at this little empanada stand – ordering, sitting in these plastic lawn chairs,visiting, stopping a moment in life, standing, moving away, replaced in moments by someone else.
It is all very random. The process is like those parts of the atom scrawled on our high school Biology board – the protons, electrons, neutrons and all the things not up there that we still don’t know about, and may never know about.
The empanada menu here is extensive and all are less than one U.S. dollar apiece. This morning, for breakfast, my order is a ham and cheese empanada, a pollo empanada and two orders of pineapple juice naturale, served with ice in a dixie cup.
I should have tried these empanadas earlier in the trip but stuff always crowds you on trips, distractions and diversions, side trips and just plain not getting around to it. The point is, there are always places to get a quick bite within walking distance of where you are staying, if you look.
I appreciate fine dining with exquisite tastes and beautifully designed plates served on white tablecloths with a candle and the best silverware, but I always regret having to pay for a meal and then having to go buy more food to feel full.
If I lived here, I would be a regular and D would give me the local price, like anyone else.
At the Jardin Botanico in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, it is lunch time.
On the menu is one part indigenous people, one part Europeans, one part Hispanics, one part black Africans. Combine the European, African, Caribbean and Dominican recipe and you have a spicy melody served up with lots of spirit and joy.
The motto here is ” Don’t worry – Be Happy. ”
Most who live here try to live up to this motto.
Whether being happy is a genetic accident or learned behavior is a question learned psychologists are still trying to sort out.
I kept repeating the island motto over and over, and start feeling much better.
Much of what we worry about never happens anyway.
Before seven in the morning, a kid passes me on his old bicycle, carrying a five gallon plastic bucket, with bait and tackle inside, on his bicycle handlebars. His fishing pole sticks out of an empty milk container secured to his back bike fender with a long bungee cord.
When the kid, who whizzes past me, makes a left turn towards the water, a block further down, I know for sure he is going fishing and joining another fisherman friend where the water meets the land.
There are fishermen on this jetty every morning, just at sunrise, and sometimes in the evening, at sunset. While you can catch fish other times of day, fisherman tell you exactly when the time is best to bait a hook, cast out, and wait for the fish to bite.
This Santo Domingo park, by the Napolitano Casino, will soon have its walkers and exercise people. City crews are putting down new sod and walkers, taking fresh air on a cool morning, can use a new swing set installed the other day by the parks and recreation department work crew. I watched some of the workers test the swing out, laughing, happy because it was almost quitting time.
At the end of the concrete jetty I am heading for, these two compadres already have their lines in the surf and are watching the sun come up over a not too distant shipyard as a ship steams past us towards the west.
Fishermen are eternally hopeful.
If you don’t try to catch anything, you won’t catch anything.
The kid’s bicycle is laid on the rocks close to him, and, if he is lucky and is using the right temptation, he will take some fish home for breakfast this morning, in his five gallon bucket with his bait, tackle, and pole still sticking out of the milk crate.
Paying high prices for food, that no one but tourists can afford, is not our idea of travel. Our idea at Scotttreks is to find healthy, well prepared food,served in good surroundings, where locals eat, for local prices.
This neighborhood cafe is a six minute walk from the La Puerta Roja Guest House.
At the intersection of Calle Santome and Jose Gabriel Garcia, this neighborhood eatery has no flashing lights, not even a sign on the outside of the building to identify it. I didn’t know it was alive until I looked inside open doors and saw people eating, spotted the sign above the cash register, saw that Google maps said I had arrived by flashing me an arrow.
Next trip back I’ll try some of the potato dishes, cole slaw, beef, plantain, and other Dominican Republic specialties. This trip I’m sticking with rice, chicken and okra cooked like my Dad liked it.
To my south is George Washington Avenue that runs south of the Zona Colonia and is one of the toughest streets to cross in the world because there are no stop lights and I don’t trust people to stop for me in the walkways.
The Caribbean water sparkles in this afternoon sun and the palm trees remind me of Los Angeles, Padre Island and Belize.
I have my favorite places.
Most of them are warm, by an ocean, and in the Caribbean.
The map on one of the Starbuck’s walls shows several continents.
When you spread the world out, pin it to a wall, you take out all its bumps, contours, unknowns, inconsistencies.
When Columbus laid out his world map on the sturdy table in his Captain’s quarters his map didn’t show him his crew’s fears, terrible ocean squalls and rolling waves taller than the three little ships in his expedition, stacked one atop the other..
When John Glenn walked on the moon, the maps in NASA headquarters didn’t tell the consistency of the sand that he hit his golf ball off of.
This world map focuses on longitudes and latitudes best suited for growing coffee, just one of Starbuck’s many products.
Our world has knitted together so tightly that we can enjoy foods from far away, foods that Kings used to have difficulty procuring. Now we don’t have to travel to a coffee zone to enjoy fresh coffee.
This little girl is talking to her mother on her Apple wrist phone. The only person on the planet using wrist communication devices when I was her age was the newspaper comic strip hero – Dick Tracy. Kids have come a long way since the 50’s.
What new technologies will come true in this little girl’s lifetime?
This morning I’m reflective.
It is good to have children in our world but they have to grow up quicker than we did.
The LaFonda Hotel has been a fixture in Santa Fe going back decades.
The current hotel was built in 1922 on a downtown site where the first Santa Fe hotel was built in 1607 when Spaniards came to town. It is on the register of the Historic Hotels of America, was once owned by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad, and from 1926 to 1968 was one of the famous Harvey Houses that took care of train passengers riding from back East all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
In the 1900’s this was the favored haunt of trappers, soldiers,gold seekers, gamblers and politicians. The hotel, in the 1920’s, was designed by Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter and John Gaw Meem and is still a favored watering hole for New Mexico state legislators and government officials who populate Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, affectionately called ” The City Different” by those of us who live in our state.
Santa Fe itself has long been a refuge for writers, artists, movie stars, and the local newspaper, ” The Santa Fe New Mexican ” is the oldest continuously operating newspaper in America. The world famous Santa Fe Opera is close by as well as Canyon Road with a gallery every other mailbox.
Up to Santa Fe for the day, Joan suggests I visit Boston. I’m thinking the Boston Tea Party Ship and Museum would be my cat’s meow.
While the LaFonda Hotel is super comfy, charming,historical, quaint, revolutions always ring my bells.
Joan misses some ambiance, on the phone, fixing who is watching her kids , and when, with an unaccommodating ex in Boston.
Fortunately for me, I haven’t fought in these kind of revolutions, and divorce and wedding bells, remind me of cannonballs whizzing by my ears.
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