Vancouver is a pretty town. This is because it has that whole city plus water plus mountains combination going on:

You can even take mass transit and get a good view:

The mass transit system is also better than most cities I’ve been to. It goes to a lot of useful places, and the ticket checking system is surprisingly laid-back. There are no oppressive gates and turnstiles that you must navigate. Instead, every once in a while there is a nice person checking tickets. It’s a semi-honor system, which surprised me because the transit systems I’ve used in the USA were all much more paranoid about freeloaders and deadbeats perpetrating fraud. This lack of gates contributes to the excellent wheelchair access in the train system. In fact, access all over the city is great:

1. The buses are great.

2. There are a ton of ramp-van taxis.

3. Most of the buildings in the city have flat ground level access. We even went to a dim sum joint out in Richmond, the suburban Chinatown, and had no problems. It was a second floor place with an elevator *and* a ramp in the parking lot. Excellent!

As a matter of record, access in Seattle (and most other American cities) is by comparison a disaster.

All of this access made it easy to wander all over the place and eat cool food. Vancouver has to be right in the running for the best food town in North America.

There is coffee:

This sort of cappuccino can be hard to find in Seattle.

There is Chinese breakfast:

There is Ramen:

There is fancy Northern Chinese food:

There is fancy sushi:

And of course, there is the inexplicably brilliant Japadog:

There is also a ton of dim sum, but I neglected to get a good photo of the best stuff we had. Here is a picture of the second-best stuff we had: the shrimp and pea shoot dumplings at Sun Sui Wah. It was only disappointing in that it was only as good as anything I’ve ever had on this continent.

Later in the week we went to the Jade Seafood Restaurant in Richmond. This place was so good that even the completely clichéd Crystal Shrimp Dumplings were really really good like nothing I’d had before. About two blocks away was another dim sum place called Empire that was the size of two city blocks. The only other place I’ve seen Chinese food on this scale was in Hong Kong.

Ok. Enough of the dedicated restaurant food. Let’s talk about shopping malls. The first day there we took the train to the Aberdeen Shopping Mall. This is just like a typical high-end mall in a more affluent suburb of any major city. Well, except for the fact that you can get hand made Shanghai Soup Dumplings in the food court:

The food court also had Pho, Taiwanese food, Chinese Beef Noodles, Vietnamese subs, and Beard Papa. It also had wireless Internet. Half the dorks in North America could just set up a tent and live there.

The mall also has a fountain and light show on the weekends. Great for the kids!

So that’s pretty much all we did in Vancouver. Eat and shop. Oh wait, no it isn’t. We also took advantage of two fantastic pieces of green space right in the city. There are the Van Dusen gardens:

and there is Stanley Park, where you get a great view of the harbor and the city at the same time.

Oh, and if the outdoors bores you, you can always go to the public library. I think the Vancouver library is probably cooler than the one you have too:

OK. That’s all I got. We will have to go back to find some of the other cooler things there. There is a whole area of the city that is nothing but outdoor stores. There are some sea kayaking tours. There are a lot of bike shops. There are more gardens. And we have to slowly work our way through the Chinese restaurant food awards page and go to every place that is listed there.

Here are a few short thoughts on the proceedings.

Camera Review

The new camera this time was the Panasonic LX-3 point and shoot. I have already expressed my admiration of this small machine, and it continued to please. I probably only took one third as many frames with this camera as my “real” camera, but the percentage that I picked out as favorites was much higher. In particular, the macro mode is great for taking pictures of food which you can then use to taunt the people back home. Thumbs up.

Cars! Cars! Cars!

Spent a lot of time gawking at cars for no reason. Apparently I have some kind of sickness. Lots of hatchback and wagons for cabs this time. That’s great. The Ford Mondeo wagon was the best cab we had. The Fiat 500 is cute. Alpha Romeo makes this two door hatch that is neat looking in red. I can’t believe I never noticed how many hatchbacks there were before. I think I saw more Audi A3s and A4 wagons than I’ve ever seen in my life.

Diet Coke Review

Diet coke in Paris tastes a bit different because they use a different sweetener. It’s also always warm because the French do not believe in adequate refrigeration. Remember to grab the coke from the back of the cooler.

Official Retraction

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece defending the surly service at Brasserie Balzar. I’m going to officially retract that article right now, as when we went this time around they were surly and they served us a well-done steak without asking first. It turned out that the fourth in our party didn’t like the dish she had, but was perfectly willing to eat a well-done steak. So while they insulted us horribly, it all worked out in the end without needing to argue with them more. Avoid.

You should go to Rotisserie du Beaujolais instead. They can also be surly, but at least they don’t serve you crap on purpose. The place also has a nicer view.

Yet More Camera Bag Thoughts

I almost bought a new bag to bring on the trip. Since I was going to the TDF, I was bringing a third lens along, which put a chink in my camera bag routine. So I looked for a bag that could carry three lenses comfortably on a 3 mile hike, be quick to work out of, and maybe take my laptop on the plane as well. I have decided that such a bag does not exist. The possibilities fall into three main categories:

1. Briefcase bags that can hold a camera kit and a laptop.

2. A traditional larger shoulder bag.

3. A camera/laptop backpack.

The problem with the briefcase bags is that the ones that can hold a laptop are too big. And if you actually put a big camera and three lenses in them, you can’t carry the result all day anyway. And you are saddled with a camera bag that is too big.

The problem with the traditional shoulder bag is that the ones that are big enough to carry three lenses are too big, and the resulting load is too heavy.

The problem with the backpack is that while it will be comfortable to carry, it will also be as big as your house. In addition, the ones that can hold a laptop assume that you also want to be able to carry a 300mm lens. So they are even bigger than your house. Backpacks are also hard to work out of in tight situations. For example, it would be hard to change lenses while standing on a ledge between two people while you all crane to see the Tour de France go by.

I conclude that the strategy to use is to never need more than two lenses. Just pick two and take pictures that use those two lenses at their maximum advantage.

I would also like to call a moratorium on people saying things like “I like camera bag A because it doesn’t look like a camera bag” or “This bag doesn’t scream cameras inside.” Here’s a hint: when you take the camera out of the bag people will have a pretty good idea that it’s a camera bag because you took a camera out of it. Get over it.

Anyway, I ended up taking my two lens briefcase shaped bag, and another bag for the laptop. Maybe by the next trip someone will design a smaller camera backpack with a laptop slot in it.

My Crazy Organ Meat Ceiling

We went to Le Violin d’Ingres for lunch. It was fabulous. It is run by the same people that run Cafe Constant, where we had a fabulous lunch on our last trip. Any place that has deep fried foies gras is going to be good. On a perhaps misguided whim, I passed up the roasted lamb, and the beef stew with the lincoln log sized frites, and the pan fried sweetbreads and decided to try one of the last of the classic French peasant dishes that I have not tried yet: Tete De Veau. I’ll let you look it up in Google. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either. The vanilla souffle with salted caramel sauce made up for it. I’ll get the sweetbreads next time.

Airport Review

For this trip we got to take advantage of the new direct flight from Pittsburgh to Paris on Delta. This direct flight lets you avoid visiting everyone’s favorite circle of hell on Earth also known as the Philadelphia airport. That’s awesome. Go while you can. Who knows how long this will last.

The flight also lands in Terminal 2E of CDG. US Airways always landed in the CDG terminal that was an endless obstacle course of uphill and downhill moving walks, clear tubes at impossible gradients and miles and miles of walking with luggage. In Terminal 2E, you walk off the plane and across a wide and smooth and perfectly flat landscape until suddenly you are at the taxi stand. It’s heaven.

Boy I hope this flight sticks around. There is almost no hope that it will though. Really, go while you can.

I just got my DeLorme PN-40 last night. I went for the PN-40 instead of the Garmin because I was lured by the promise of awesome topo maps and easy-to-obtain-and-load aerial photography (and because there was a fire sale on them and I got one at a very good price). There was some criticism on Amazon about the software being not that great. I am here to tell you that criticism is not at all exaggerated.

First off, some disclaimers: I haven’t used the unit in the field yet. And, I am using Topo 7 at this point, rather than the new Topo 8 because that’s what I have. The unit comes with a card to fill out that you can mail in for an upgrade to Topo 8 (DeLorme, apparently, has yet to discover The Internet.)

It seems to me likely that the unit itself is about as easy to use as other units, excepting maybe the iPhone 3G, which is a different sort of thing.

In terms of basic functionality/mapping, the unit came with disks of “pre-cut” topo maps for various regions at 1:100. Loading those was perfectly simple, and should be easy for anyone.

Then there’s Topo 7.

While Topo 7 is not, in fact, the worst designed piece of software I’ve ever used, it certainly comes close. The user interface of the thing is so terrible that you have to wonder if it was intentionally designed that way as some sort of sophisticated joke. Much of the UI is “implicit”, in the sense that you use various gestures to navigate around the map and change zoom level, and it’s easy – especially at first – to inadvertently change your location or zoom level without even understanding how you did it. The application is full of what I’ll call “post-modal” dialog boxes. So you click some box or make some choice, and then, a few seconds later, after you’re trying to do something else, a dialog box or some other interrupt will appear related to the thing you did about 5 seconds ago.

The best example of this is in the “integrated” feature that lets you buy maps online. “Integrated”, in this context, means “not really all that well integrated”. In order to buy color aerial, USGS, and satellite maps of a single region, here’s what I had to do:

(1) Find the area I’m looking for in ‘NavLink’ mode.
(2) Click the grids I want to buy for.
(3) Realize that clicking the grid doesn’t do I what I want. Find the “Select/Edit” button, which is mysteriously off to the left somewhere.
(4) Click the grids I want.
(5) Pull the dropdown to “Color aerial”.
(6) Click “Add to selection”
(7) Pull the dropdown to “USGS”
(8) GET INTERRUPTED because 5 seconds later an IE window opens telling me “OK, sir, I added those maps. Could you name them?” No indication of what the name means.
(9) Type “Townname.” Click submit. Window goes away.
(10) Move mouse back to add things to my selection
(11) Get interrupted AGAIN for some confirmation dialog.
(12) Click “Add to selection” to add the USGS maps.
(13) Repeat steps 8 through 12 once for each map type I wanted to add.
(14) Except now I can’t call the next group of maps “Townname”, so I call them “Townname-1″, even though conceptually I wanted all these maps to be part of a single order. Maybe there’s a way to do that. It’s not obvious.
(15) Eventually, I actually get to purchase my maps. That took about another 4 clicks.
(16) Then another 5 clicks to download (find download tab, click checkbox next to each map, then download).
(17) Get interrupted by the download window.
(18) In case I didn’t make this clear above, any time you’re doing anything with NavLink, there’s a delay of a few seconds because presumably you’re talking to a remote server somewhere.

So to do the workflow “buy 4 types of maps for a set of regions,” I would estimate that I had to use about 48 separate mouse gestures, and I’m being generous and not counting the “purely local” ones, like selecting the quads that I wanted.

Adding the maps to the PN-40 is not quite as horrific as using NavLink, but it’s not a bright shining star, either. My favorite part of that moment is when you enter the transfer UI and after you try to begin a transfer a dialog box appears with an entire paragraph of text suggesting that you might want to change the GPS into one of two other modes which might be faster to use. If you change the GPS into those other modes at that moment, Topo 7 will lock up for 10 seconds while the USB bus is reconfigured. But if you try to put the GPS into that mode before beginning the transfer, the transfer UI won’t discover it (or at least, it didn’t when I tried it).

One could argue that this isn’t “hard.” It’s not as if it’s rocket science. But I think when people say that Topo 7 has a “steep learning curve” what they are really trying to say is this is a really incredibly annoying program to use. Put another way: if the amazon.com web site was as annoying to use as Topo 7, they would never sell any products ever. The only reason people are putting up with Topo 7 is because it’s offering something hard to get otherwise.

Now, maybe it’s possible that all of these problems are magically fixed in Topo 8. I’d love to hear from someone who has used Topo 8 to on this topic. But the software developer in me is asking the question “If they couldn’t get this right in the first seven versions, why do you think they’ll get it right in the eighth?”

I wonder if I should take advantage of the 30-day return policy to give up on this now, or if I should stick with it on the theory that loading maps isn’t an everyday activity.

I wonder if I can convince someone at Garmin to send me a unit to try their software and see if it’s any better.

3 floors of open stacks. 9 floors of closed stacks. Books, magazines, CDs, videotapes, DVDs, video games, audiobooks, graphic novels, downloadable books-on-MP3, as well as a variety of other online resources. Research librarians who can answer just about any question. An electric piano that you can play, with headphones. Coffee. A window that looks out into a room with dinosaur skeletons. It’s like someone sat down and specifically designed the building in which I would most like to be trapped overnight.

The amazing thing about the Carnegie, to me, is that whenever I feel the urge to look, I find some resource they have that I didn’t even know existed before.

My latest folly

On the way to the stacks this weekend, I saw a set of shelves off to one side, with a modest collection of what looked like scores. But why were they off to the side? I went to investigate.

They were indeed musical scores. But not on paper. Instead, they were folders containing scores on CD-ROM; for example, I’m looking at the moment at a CD-ROM that contains the complete violin parts to 81 orchestral pieces by Mozart and Haydn. This is part of The Orchestra Musician’s CD-ROM Library.

Now, true, there is nothing about this collection that is technically specific to the library; you can buy these sorts of things at Amazon, and presumably have been able to for years. If anything, it’s yet another indication that I’m ignorant of many, many things. But the point is that the library is where I learned these things exist. The library is a nexus of serendipity, a building created to allow happy coincidences of discovery to occur.

It is an amusement park for the mind, and I am madly in love with it.

(Part 1 of this article explains my rationale for answering the question “How hard is it for a Canon shooter to go Nikon?)

Conclusion

I set out to answer the question “can a Canon shooter go Nikon?” The best answer I have for this question is a personal one: in writing this article, I’ve been packing up the D300 to send back to Nikon, and I’m mentally tallying up my bank account to see if I can come up with the cash to buy one — and the 17-55 f/2.8, and an SB-800 — for myself.

This is not to say that one can’t get good results out of a Canon. Rather, having decided to address the “what should I upgrade to?” question squarely, I can’t unring the bell. The D300, with the accompanying lens, is a combination that, out of the box, made composing and exposing compelling images practically effortless. When I last used a Nikon — a D70 — I felt like I was quite literally fighting the camera tooth and nail in order to get an image of acceptable quality, an image not overwhelmed by unpleasant ISO noise. Those days are gone.

Are there things I don’t like? Yes. The camera is a just a bit too large, and, with the 17-55/2.8, a bit too heavy. That’s the most serious complaint, since if you don’t carry the camera with you, you can’t make the shot. My other complaints are mostly errata. The focus mode switch on the body is in the worst possible place. I don’t like that the CF card slot door requires me to flip a fiddly little switch to open it, instead of just being a friction door. I don’t like that the icons on the camera body for exposure modes and focus modes are practically indistinguishable. And although I’m willing to learn to thread the camera lenses the other way, God and Rene Descartes intended minus to be on the left and plus to be on the right, which means the exposure compensation controls work opposite to the way they should.

But all of these are minor complaints, and instead of a thousand-word counterargument, I’ll just use a picture:

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Geoff and Matthew at Nikon for their help in setting up this test. I’d like to thank psu for providing a guide to the perplexed when I stubbornly refused to look at the manual, and Ian McCullough for loaning me his SB-800 and various lenses. I’d like to thank our models, Jill, Christina, Aimee, and Katie. I’d like to thank KatKat B. — who takes much better photos than I do — for helping manage the lighting on the riverwalk shoot. And I’d like to thank those of you who commented on drafts of this article, which was a great help.

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Thanks for reading.

Coffee

First things first. Seattle has this reputation for bringing “good coffee” to the rest of us barbarians in the rest of the country. I don’t know about that but I do know that the last time I was there you couldn’t get a good cappuccino. All you could get are what I will call “Seattle” cappuccinos all of which involved some super hot coffee at the bottom of a foot tall column of milk foam.

Happily, this has all changed. Just toddle your way over to Victrola Coffee Roasters and get one of these:

Not only do they have some espresso blends that are as good as I’ve ever had, they also know how to make a cappuccino. They do have the arrogant temerity to call it a “traditional” cappuccino instead of a “canonically correct as God himself intended it” cappuccino, but I will forgive them this for the quality of their coffee. They have nice mugs too.

The Uptown still has better girl/boy watching though.

Ramen

After your coffee breakfast, you should head over to the International district via the REI store and go directly to Samurai Noodle. All you need to know is this: at this place you can get a bowl of pork broth filled with noodles. That by itself would be perfect, but then you can top it with pork slices and green onion, then some extra pork slices, and on the side, pickles, an egg, rice, and more shredded pork. If there is a better definition of heaven I don’t know what it is.

They have some other stuff too, but I was too mesmerized by the pork to notice what it is.

Cameras

Full of ramen, you can hop a bus over to Glazer’s Camera shop. Here you can play with all the hardware that you can only look at pictures of on the web. You can see if that EOS 5-d will fit in the Domke 803 bag comfortably (answer: yes). You can go through all of the Gitzo carbon tripods and open and close the legs to see how they feel (answer: sticky). Finally, you can fondle the Leica M8 and think about what it costs (answer: as much as an EOS-5d outfit plus a custom road bike).

I also looked at the new Canon G9 point and shoot. This thing handles nicely, although the time between “point” and “shoot” is still a bit high. The more exciting thing about the camera is that somehow Canon have figured out how to get decent high ISO performance out of the shitty small sensor. Or at least I think they have, from the limited number of sample images I tried.

Tea

Tired from camera browsing, you can hop a bus back to the Ballard area and sit down at Floating Leaves for an hour or so and linger over a couple of pots of tea. This place has a wide assortment of great Chinese tea and others that aren’t as good (OK, I’m kidding. OK, really I’m not kidding). I like the House Oolong a lot. It’s a green oolong and is fragrant and velvety smooth. Yum.

Oysters

After tea, you can head back over to Happy Hour at Elliot’s Oyster bar. This is something of a tourist place, being on the waterfront and all. But it’s a bar with about two dozen different kinds of oysters plus a big and foofy drink menu. We got a couple dozen oysters and chatted up the shucker for a few more free samples. Go go gadget Baywater Sweet. I also got a sickly sweet girly drink that they call a “rum sidecar” which Pete informs me is really a “daiquiri” in the same way that I sometimes sneer at him and inform him that jesus, the running is in Madden 2006 is much easier than Madden 2004.

I can’t say whether the drink was any good, but it was sweet enough for Karen to drink some and not spit it out. I suspect it was too girly.

Pike Market

There is not much to say about Pike Market except that if you like food you have to walk around this area. There is food everywhere. There are Russian meat pies at Piroshky Piroshky. There are French pastries at Le Panier. There is the lovingly crafted cheese and such at Beecher’s. There is Uli’s sausage, the fresh salmon, the smoked salmon, the crabs, the fresh donuts at Daily Dozen, the oyster omelet for breakfast at Lowell’s, and finally, surprise of all surprises, real Chinese pot stickers at Mee Sum Pastry just outside the market. I could go on all night.

The best time we have in Seattle is taking advantage of the East Coast jet lag to walk around the market as it gets set up. As the sky turns from dark maroon to blue, the Chinese women put out flower arrangements and bok choy, fish go out on ice, rounds of cheese are stacked in tight columns, the guy at the Chukar Cherry stand puts out the samples and the grills and fryers start to fill the hall with the odors that will tease and tempt the throngs of tourists and locals in a few hours. You can watch it all unfold for a while and soak it all in, then head over to Lowell’s for their homemade corned beef hash and go into a carb coma. No better way to start the day.

Camera Review

A few months ago I bought a shiny new Nikon D200 mostly to bring on this trip. I was hoping it would help out with some action shots that I had missed on my previous trips. In many ways, the D200 is the digital camera I’ve been waiting for. The viewfinder is great. Unlike the D100 and D70, you can actually evaluate focus by eye. The controls work well and are fast. Dedicated buttons and switches make setting many operations that were tedious on the D70 quick and easy. There is a nice B&W mode. Finally, the camera is fast. The D70 was generally fast enough, but had a small memory buffer that tended to fill just as you wanted to squeeze off one more shot. For me, the D200 can essentially shoot as many RAW frames as I’ll ever need in a continuous 5fps burst.

In every way, the D200 is essentially a Nikon F100, or N90s, or 8008s for the digital age. It’s the smaller, lighter alternative to the full on pro body that does most everything anyone ever really needs. Smaller is always better. Unfortunately, the D200 doesn’t quite take this principle far enough. My only real complaint is that it’s too big. For some reason, the body is noticeably larger than either the N90 or the 8008s, even though it has a smaller viewfinder and has no need for a film transport. I’m not sure why this should be. So while I’m thrilled with the AF and the handling and the speed, i found myself looking longingly at all the tourists with their D-Rebels and their Nikon D40s, wishing my camera wasn’t so large.

Camera Bag Review

Because the camera was too big, I bought a new belt bag to try on the trip that can hold the camera and another lens. The ThinkTank Photo Changeup is a shoulder/belt/chest bag that is designed as a compact way to hold a body and a couple lenses or just a few lenses if you have the body out all the time. The bag is a top notch design and very well built. I could get the D200 (with an L-bracket tripod plate I never used attached), 18-70, 12-24 and a flash into it and walk all day without much trouble. It only suffers from one problem: I hate belt bags. You can’t really say this is ThinkTank’s fault.

My problem with belt bags is the belt. It’s always too tight or too loose. If too tight, I can’t spin the bag to get the camera out. If too loose the bag hangs down on my ass and bounces as I walk. I hate the feeling of the bag sitting there on my hip bouncing up and down as I walk. Somehow the bag in the same place hanging down off my shoulder is not as annoying. The belt on this bag had the same problem, and it was made a bit worse by the fact that the shoulder strap was too skinny to really work well.

I think I’ll go back to my Domkes, or maybe I’ll try and rig something up in my North Face backpack.

Food Reviews

We found out this trip that one of our favorite local eateries, Les Fontaines had changed owners and no longer had the same great menu of meaty traditional French dishes. This made us sad. On the other hand, it also meant we had to try lots of new places to find a new place to go for meaty traditional French dishes. This turned out to be a fun task. We tried several new places this time around, and they were all winners. Here are the highlights.

1. Chez George. This place had the best steak ever. It was the subject of an NYT feature on steak places in Paris. Perfectly cooked and tasty meat combined with great fries combined with a wonderful old school atmosphere made for a great time. Karen also scored a language coup here, correctly using a past imperfect verb conjugation to win us some fraises du bois, the wonderful little wild strawberries that were in season. This illustrates the first fundamental principle of eating out: you always get better food if you can speak the language.

2. Bistro de l’Olivier. We ducked in here on a rainy day for lunch and had a great time. Nicely prepared provencal dishes, suprisingly friendly service for clueless tourists, and a winning chocolate fondant cake. It also has a cool looking bar.

3. Cafe Constant. This place is close to the cheese shop. We got there early for lunch on sunny afternoon and watched all the locals stream in ordering the special of the day: grilled fresh langoustines. This was the best seafood I have had since the first time I got steamed live shrimp in a Cantonese seafood joint in L.A. We remarked to our table neighbors that these were actually better than the fancy langoustine ravioli I had gotten at Joel Robuchon for much more money a couple of nights before. The nice old French man knodded and said that this was called, in English, “value for money”.

Wine Review

That aformentioned trip to the Robuchon restaurant also provided us with the mystery of the trip. In the past, we had never been much for ordering wine. There are various reasons for this that are complex and boring. This trip we made an effort to order at least a glass with every meal. We got a red wine at Robuchon called “Coteaux du Languedoc, Chateaux Sergnac.” It was awesome. If anyone can find it for me I will obtain some illegal Camembert for you the next time I am in Paris.

Mustard Review

We got four jars of Amora Dijon mustard. They cost 0.85 Euro each. They are better than any mustard I have bought in the U.S. at any price.

Airport Review

PHL has improved a bit since the last time I was there. Now it’s merely horrible instead of a being a spinning vortex of unbearable suffering. I still felt sorry for the couple traveling with the two toddlers and a double stroller though.

I think that just about covers the whole trip. The gardens and cafes and the rest of our normal haunts were their normal wonderful selves. I even took up a new photographic hobby: taking pictures of people taking pictures of themselves in front of famous things:

Maybe over the next ten trips I’ll shoot enough of that sort of thing to make a book.

This is a shame, because there are things in both places that are eminently worth experiencing. One of the highlights of getting out of town a little bit — especially in the autumn — is the fairly large number of small farms and orchards where you can find great locally-grown produce at reasonable prices. Today, I’d like to tell you about one of them.

Before I get into details, I want to talk a little more about the travel issue. It’s not solely an urban/rural divide. The region seems to have this psychological trait where anything over 15 minutes away is “far.” This is odd to me, because where I come from the threshold is one hour. If a destination is 65 minutes away, it’s “far.” If it is 55 minutes away, it’s close. Here, if you suggest going somewhere more than about 15 minutes away, people look at you kind of funny. “Isn’t that an awfully long way away?”

I can’t say whether this is due to geography, or upbringing, or something in the water. But it interests me — is there a word for this psychological threshold? What is it set to in other places? — and I mention it because, if you live in the city, it’s likely that it will take you more than 15 minutes to get to Schramm Farms, or any of the other local orchards. They’re all worth the drive.

There are a number of farms like this dotting the area around Pittsburgh. North of the city you have Shenot farms and Kaelin’s. In Bridgeville, serving the south and west, is Trax Farms. Further to the south, near Elizabeth, PA, you’ll find Triple B Farms (which also has an enjoyable corn maze every fall). Schramm Farms covers the eastern region. These aren’t your only options by any stretch of the imagination.

Schramm’s is a 470 acre farm in Penn Township, but this wasn’t always the case. It used to be located at Ross Park Mall. Or, rather, before there was a mall where Ross Park is today, there was Schramm’s. In 1981, they sold the property and picked up the farm and moved to Penn Township.

Eugene Schramm (enlarge)

I asked Hillary Schramm whether “moving a farm” was as hard as it sounded, and he looked very, very tired. “It took about 8 months.”

Schramm’s has a store that is open year round, but it really comes in to its own in the fall. This is when the apples are harvested. Schramm’s grows a ton of varietals that simply don’t make it in to your local Giant Eagle (or Whole Foods).

“Fall is the biggest time,” agrees Hil’s daughter, Carolyn, 24. “Our regular customers are all from perhaps 10 or 15 miles away. It’s people that want fresh produce, people that do a lot of home cooking, or canning, or things like that. In the summer especially, people will stop by to pick up whatever they know is fresh. Fall is the only time that we get a lot of people from Pittsburgh or further out.”

This time last year I wrote about my late-discovered love for the Northern Spy apple. All the local fruit mongers tell me that you can’t find them in this area. They’re wrong. Schramm’s Northern Spys come in in mid-October, and I’ll be first in line to buy a bushel. If you show up today, you’ll be able to buy Jonathans, Jonagolds, Cortlands, Honeycrisp, various Delicious varieties, Empires, and several other varietals that have slipped my mind. It is a festival of apples. I bought a peck of superb Cortlands for about $8.50. Schramm’s cider is, regrettably, pasteurized — it is not even legal to sell unpasteurized cider anymore, it’s actually easier to find raw milk — but it’s quite good nonetheless.

It’s not just apples and cider, of course: you can find many fruits and vegetables. Since this is Pennsylvania, and not California, you’re not likely to find anything terribly exotic, but what you do find will be very good. Not all of the produce is local, but it’s all clearly marked (“our own”, “local”, or other) so you can decide accordingly. The squash and pumpkins are great right now.

I know enough about farming to know a few things. I know that I would never want to be a farmer, and I know that I’m very glad that there are people who do. Carolyn Schramm says, “The worst part is the 24/7 job that it is — you can never really escape it, because one, it’s a business, and two, it’s farming. The best part is it gets in your blood. You feel connected to the earth, you feel like you’re doing something useful. You feel that your work is worthwhile, and part of the community.”

So when you buy apples at a place like Schramm’s, you’re getting produce that is fresh, interesting, inexpensive, you’re supporting the local economy, and you’re helping real farmers, rather than Archer Daniels-Midland, earn their livelihood. There is absolutely no downside to the equation.

Schramm’s is currently in the middle of their Fall Festival now, all through October, so it’s an especially good time to visit: pick up a pumpkin, drink some hot apple cider, eat a caramel apple, and generally enjoy the crisp fall air. There are activities and a small playgorund for kids, and an enjoyable atmosphere for everyone. Take a drive out east and buy some apples.

Just don’t get between me and my Northern Spys.

Schramm’s Farm is on Harrison City-Export Road near Jeannette, PA, and they can be reached at (724) 744-7320. For more information, visit their website.

The PSO

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in the Jansons era was among the best in the country IMHO. We haven’t been to Heinz Hall that much in the last few years, but I haven’t heard anything to indicate that things are much different now that Jansons is gone. The only thing that keeps this band down is an apparent requirement for unimaginative repertoire. If you have any interest in Classical music at all, you owe it to yourself to go.

The Y Music Society

An excellent series of chamber music concerts at Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland. This is the other major place to see and hear great music.

North Park

North Park is a mile from my house and when I ride my bike at all, two out of three rides start out through the park. While not really a perfect place to ride, it does lead to what IMHO is the best road riding area in the Pittsburgh area. The park itself also makes for a great loop that mixes flat roads with some good climbs.

The Neighborhoods

As a city, Pittsburgh is not so much a sprawling urban metropolis as a loosely organized group of small neighborhoods, each of which has its own character. I like this about the place because each area of the city is somewhat self-contained with respect to activities, food, services, and shopping. You hear the joke about people who live in the area and never leave their neighborhoods, and such stories have a ring of truth to them.

Carnegie Library

A fabulous public library. You should go.

Filmmakers

Filmmakers runs three of the local independent movie theaters in town and in addition it also provides film, photography and related classes for the local universities and colleges. When I got back into photography as an adult, I took the three basic black and white classes that they teach here, and they were well produced in addition to being really fun.

Frick Park

A huge sprawling green-space right in the middle of the city near CMU. Apparently there is a huge cult of people who do nothing but train their dogs here. There is nothing quite like this in other cities I’ve been to. Other cities have parks, but they look like parks. Frick looks like the woods. A particular place of honor goes to “The Blue Slide” playground, with its huge blue slide built into a hill.

Downtown Light

I was working Downtown when I took those black and white photography classes, and I used the area as the subject for the the last portfolio that I did for that class. The city has a great quality of light, especially on cold winter afternoons. This makes for great urban landscape and architectural shots.

One of my favorite pictures is a shot I took just off of Grant Street for the class project. The picture captures the late afternoon light shining down on the side of a building, creating wonderful specular highlights on just the edges of the windows. I had seen light like this in Paris all the time, but could never get it on film. It took an afternoon in Pittsburgh for things to work out. Sorry, I don’t have a scan of the print, so you’ll just have to imagine it.

My House

My house has a huge floorplan and a huge lot and I can ride 100 miles on my bike from my driveway. What more could you ask for? One of the major reasons I will never move to California is because my house in California would cost seven to eight figures, and that’s just stupid.

The Strip on Saturday Morning

Really, this isn’t for the food. It’s just a great place to sit and watch the world go by. Probably the most interesting area of Pittsburgh to just stand in on any given day.

Once you’ve gone a certain distance down Route 837, you’re going to Clairton. There is no escape.

A sign announces your arrival and introduces Clairton, without irony, as the “City of Prayer.” The altar at which much of the praying is done is that of steel. On the edge of the river, sprawling across nearby islands like a metastasized tumor, is the U.S. Steel Clairton Works, the largest coke manufacturing facility in the US. The first indication that you are approaching the plant is the aroma, which weaves itself into your hair and clothes. You will carry the scent away with you when you leave. Next, if it’s night, you’ll see the lights. Finally, you will round a bend and see the plant, stretching for what seems like miles ahead of you and above you.

Next to the plant are two or three nameless bars, concrete bunkers with no visible names, but just a lone Budweiser or Miller sign in the window. Anyone who has ever worked in a plant has also been to one of these bars. The rules are simple: these are the places that will cash your paycheck. They will serve cheap food. There might be a local girl dancing for tips. And if you don’t work at the plant, you are very much not welcome there.

I worked in a factory, long ago. I didn’t go in to the bars in Clairton.

That is the heart of Clairton. The tattered streets lead away from the Works, a network of small appliance repair shops, funeral homes, shuttered hotels, and convenience stores. Up on the hills above the Works sit small houses (median value: $38,500) where the families (median income: $25,596) live. Some men lurk on streetcorners, making oblique gestures at cars that stop near them. The town is overshadowed by the Works. It is an afterthought. It is as if some small mammals have built a nest in a thicket of dinosaur bones.

The juxtaposition of the reality of places like Clairton and the party line that the Pittsburgh region is revitalizing (thanks to Pittsblog for the link) is jarring. Perhaps someday the Clairton Works will be gone, and something rich and strange will take its place. But for now, it is simply industrial carrion. It is a place that was.

There may be residents (about 20% of Clairton’s residents are below the poverty line) who have dear and fond memories of growing up in Clairton.

But to me, it does not feel like a place to live. It feels like a place to drown.

Additional Resources

• Facts and figures about Clairton were taken from city-data.com and Wikipedia.
• Google Maps has an image of Clairton. The Clairton Works are visible in the satellite photo.
• I lifted the title of this article from Nick Cave