ralphmelton

Savannah Trip with Pack Up + Go

A few years ago, I read an article about a travel agency named Pack Up + Go. Their special feature is that they plan a three-day weekend for you, without telling you where you’re going until you’re ready to leave. We were intrigued by the idea, but wasn’t sure whether it was for us. Is this sort of travel pleasant for us? Do they do a good job of delivering on this travel experience?

We didn’t find many reviews, and eventually we decided that we wouldn’t really know unless we tried them ourselves, and we were willing to try the experiment. This ended up with a trip to Savannah January 26-28, 2017. So this report is discussing this trip from several different angles: what did we do in Savannah? Is this model of travel a good one for us? Is Pack Up + Go good at arranging this sort of trip? What should we and they do differently next time?

We had first tried to use Pack Up + Go for a road trip weekend for the weekend before Thanksgiving 2017, because planning for road trips in the Tesla has been just fussy enough to hit the zone in which I was attracted to the idea of offloading the planning work to someone else, but I was confident that we wouldn’t get stranded without power if they weren’t able to arrange Tesla charging as well as they said they were.
But it turned out that on that weekend, we needed to make a planned road trip. So we changed our mandate for Pack Up + Go to say “we would like to take a airplane trip in the winter to someplace warm with a great food culture”. (Pack Up + Go gave us no trouble at all about rescheduling with a couple weeks forewarning.)

A week before we left, we got email with the weather forecast for our destination - high around 60° with a chance of rain – and our flight time - 7am. The flight time gave us some hesitation - we are somewhat late risers, and we worried whether early rush hour traffic might hinder us on the way to the airport. But leaving early in the morning would give us more time to get to our destination. To get to the airport by 5:30, we decided to wake up at 4:20 and try to leave by 4:45.

This led to the first mistake of the trip, and the mistake was ours: even though we knew we would be waking up at 4am, and we planned to go to bed early, the chores of getting packed and getting the house ready for us to leave bogged us down, and we didn’t manage to get to bed until midnight. We would have had a happier trip with more sleep.

We got to the airport with a comfortable amount of time - not enough to eat breakfast, but without any worry about missing our flight. We opened the packet they sent us to discover that we were going to Savannah! (I’m not sure how things were arranged in the envelope, but we fumbled getting the destination card out of the envelope, dropping papers on the floor. We took a video of the reveal in imitation of the happy selfies we saw on Pack Up + Go’s testimonial page, but it’s not something we want to share.)

Savannah was an exciting destination for us. We had been to Savannah very briefly once before - only long enough for an extraordinary lunch at Mrs. Wilkes Dining Room.

The flight (with a connection in Atlanta) was just long enough to read through the suggested itinerary and the Savannah visitor’s guide in the packet. Their suggested itinerary recommended Mrs. Wilkes as our first stop, and spotting that they were open only for lunch Monday - Friday did much to reconcile me to the early-morning flight.

But we didn’t get to go to Mrs. Wilkes. We got a taxi from the airport to take us to our hotel and then to Mrs. Wilkes, and the taxi driver said that Mrs. Wilkes is closed during January. I called from the taxi to double-check, but I got no answer. Alas!

I’ve put a lot of thought about the question of what the Pack Up + Go itinerary should have said about Mrs. Wilkes. On the one hand, guiding us to a restaurant that was closed during our visit was not the best possible itinerary. On the other hand, Mrs. Wilkes is exactly our sort of restaurant, the sort of place we want to be recommended - and since we knew about it ahead of time, I would have lost trust in Pack Up + Go if they hadn’t mentioned it. But I don’t know if it would enhance clients’ travel in general to say “You’re missing out on this awesome restaurant.” After a lot of pondering, I’ve decided that for me specifically, with my strong interest in Roadfood and my broad knowledge of the most-lauded Roadfood restaurants around the country, the best thing to do would be to say “We know that Mrs. Wilkes is right up your alley, but unfortunately they are closed this weekend.” That would have confirmed that they understood our interests and spared us the effort of trying to arrange our plans to include Mrs. Wilkes. But that only applies to the real standouts like Mrs. Wilkes.

So there we were at the hotel with our brunch plans thwarted. And here I made a mistake or maybe two. The possible mistake: instead of calling Pack Up + Go (they had said “please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions at all while you're away”), I fell back on my usual tools of Roadfood and Yelp. From a long-term perspective, it was certainly a mistake - doing the experiment of calling them would have given me more information about whether it’s worth calling them.
The definite mistake: I over-constrained the problem. I was looking for (a) Southern food that was (b) highly recommended and (c) very close to the hotel for the sake of Lori’s legs. (Lori’s been having some knee and back issues that make it hard for her to do a lot of walking.) This made the question too hard to solve when we were both hungry and running on low sleep. I eventually broke the barrier by deciding that we could be more free-spending than usual this weekend and use Lyft to get around and pay for pricier tours.

For lunch, we went to Debi’s, a meat-and-three restaurant made famous for a minor role in Forrest Gump.


I had a good feeling when I saw eleven sides listed on the specials page.


Lori had the honey pecan chicken, with sides of field peas (because I talked her into trying them), mashed potatoes, and bread pudding. (The bread pudding made me double-check whether the section of the menu was labeled “sides” or “vegetables”.) The honey pecan chicken was a combination of flavors I just didn’t really appreciate; the sauce was mostly just sweet, and the whole pecans in the sauce didn’t spread much flavor. Neither of us cared for the field peas. But the bread pudding was delicious.


My lunch was the fried fish special, with red rice, Parmesan brussels, and turnip greens. Everything I had was delicious. I was particularly taken with the Parmesan brussels; the Brussels sprouts I tend to enjoy are usually roasted to bring out the nutty flavors, but these were stewed so long that they had lost all firmness and crushed just with my tongue.


Lunch finished with “bonbons”, bite-sized nuggets of mint chocolate ice cream dipped in chocolate.


When we left Debi’s, we met our first of Savannah’s squares. Savannah was laid out on an orderly plan with 24 wards of buildings each ringing a public square. 22 of them are still around, and they give historic Savannah a very distinctive look.


We ambled back towards the hotel through the City Market. We stopped for a picture with an affable statue of Johnny Mercer.


Lori took a nap while I tried to sort out plans. We then took a trolley tour of the city to spare Lori’s legs and get a feel for the place. (No pictures, because the sides of the trolley were shielded by clear-ish plastic and I didn’t think pictures would come out.) The tour was pretty good, with a few short performances with costumed performers among the sights. We particularly remember the performance of Rosie the Riveter working in the Georgia shipyards.

Our first choice for dinner was The Olde Pink House for fancified southern food. But when the concierge called to make a reservation for us, the earliest reservation available was 10pm for both Friday and Saturday. So we decided to skip The Olde Pink House.

Instead, we took one of Pack Up + Go’s recommendations and went to Circa 1875, a French restaurant. (The woman who waited on us had a French accent and a personality that said ‘owner’.)
We shared the pâté as an appetizer.

I had the Cassoulet Maison. I don’t have a lot of experience with cassoulet, but I think it’s possible to do a better job than this. The beans were kind of crunchy in that way that makes me think “undercooked”, and the sausage and sauce didn’t add greater joy.

Lori had the duck breast, and while I think we both felt that she was the clear winner on dinner choice, her meal was not particularly memorable.


Dessert was better, though. I encouraged Lori to get the La Provence cocktail, which involved lavender-infused sparkling wine. This was a delightful drink.


I spotted crêpes Suzette on the dessert list, and I am a sucker for flambéed desserts, so I persuaded Lori to share them with me. Alas, it was not flambéed tableside, but it was still very tasty.


I should note that Lori loved the ambiance and liked the food at Circa 1875 more than I did.

The Pac-man shape of the crêpes Suzette provides a nice segue to our next stop:
from there, we went to a place that had caught my eye in the Savannah tourist guide: The Chromatic Dragon. The Chromatic Dragon is what I’d affectionately call a nerd bar, dedicated to combining food and drink with Dungeons and Dragons and other RPGs, board games, and console video games. I know of a few other nerd bars, such as the Malted Meeple (board games) in Akron, and 16-bit (arcade games) in Cleveland, and I’ve backed a Kickstarter for one in Pittsburgh. It may be that soon I’ll find nerd bars so commonplace that I won’t seek them out when traveling, but right now I feel excited to visit them in an “I’m somebody’s target demographic” way.



The menu was a smorgasbord of nerd jokes, and if you like that sort of thing I invite you to click through to see the large version of these pictures. My favorite dish name on the menu was “Shrimp and Crits” (runner up: “Bean Me Up Scotty”), and I regretted that I was too full from dinner to order any food.


We probably could have joined a game with someone else, but we were feeling tired and not completely social. I ordered a tasty fruity drink called a Skooma (a Skyrim referenced), we played one game of Red Dragon Inn (because it’s a game about fantasy characters in a bar that we could play in a bar about fantasy characters… oh, never mind), we wandered through to make sure we’d seen all the sights, and we went back to our hotel.


Saturday, January 27

We slept late to make up for the early flight.

The hotel’s breakfast was probably just fine, but I had hopes of something more than fine. But we had a time limit before our lunch plans. While Lori got ready, I went out to bring breakfast back for us. My first try was Goosefeather’s, which had been among Pack Up + Go’s recommendations. But the line was long enough that I didn’t want to wait. (Pack Up + Go had said “You may have to wait, but it’s worth it.” But I didn’t think I had time.)

So instead, I stopped at a French bakery near our hotel named Cafe M. They spoke proudly of how all their baked goods were made fresh each morning. I got a couple of croissants, some cannelis, and a breakfast crepe, and everything was delicious.


The reason I was so attentive to the schedule: we had signed up for a food tour with Savannah Taste Experience. (We knew that it would use up most of Lori’s capacity for walking for the day, but thought it would be worth it.) We might have looked for a food tour on our own, but Pack Up + Go’s recommendation certainly contributed.

The tour began at Smith Brothers Butchers, a Savannah specialty food store.

We sampled brightly colored beet dip, three flavors of very tasty sausage (andouille, Tuscan, and blueberry), and housemade pickles.


Next stop: Wall’s BBQ, which has been serving up barbecue in the former woodshed of a house since 1963.


The sample they offered was half a pulled pork sandwich, and it was outstanding - some of the best barbecue I’ve had. This had been on Pack Up + Go’s list of recommendations, and it was an excellent suggestion. This might be my second favorite restaurant experience in Savannah.


The tour guide explained that the rule at Wall’s is “When you can read it, you can eat it.” Side items on the menu are scrambled at the beginning of the day, and unscrambled when they become ready to eat. I have not yet ben able to unscramble everything on this list.

Our next stop was a mini picnic in Crawford Square, where our tour guide brought back sandwiches from Zunzi’s, a South African-inspired sandwich shop that Pack Up + Go had called “the best sandwich you may ever have.” The sandwich was the Conquistador, chicken baked en papillote on French bread with a zesty sauce. It was tasty, but I wouldn’t call it the best sandwich we ever had.


From there we went to Our Daily Bread Cafe, a bakery with a connection to the nearby church that I no longer recall precisely. The official sample was a little pimiento cheese croissant which was a pleasant dainty bite. I also ordered a pecan pie square that turned out to be a cloying disappointment.


We stopped around the corner at Nuts About Savannah, a roasted nut and popcorn shop with a vivid Christian faith.

Penultimate stop: Savannah Seafood Shack, which shares space with a rolled ice cream place named Below Zero. I ogled a Low Country boil, but it was on someone else’s table so I didn’t take pictures. The tour sample was a bite-size piece of crab pie, which tasted clearly of crab and a whole lot of cheese.


The final stop on the food tour was Cha Bella, an upscale farm-to-table restaurant. The pear bread pudding was good, but I’d much rather go to Wall’s.


I was happy with the food tour. As usual with food tours, it was much more expensive than it would have been for us to visit these places on our own, but the small samples and the explanations from the tour guide provided a lot of value. We also bought a copy of Savannah Food: a Delicious History, written by the folks who run the food tour, and I’ve really enjoyed that in-depth treatment of Savannah’s restaurant scene.


After the food tour, we had another tour planned: the Freedom Trails tour of black history. (In a van, because Lori’s legs were screaming.) This was important to us, because we know that Savannah is rich in black history, and we know that we’re prone to overlooking that history. But the tour was a bit iconoclastic. Instead of the fancy trolley of Friday’s tour, this tour was driving around in an unlabeled grey van that was showing its age. Lori and I were the only two passengers on the tour. And we sometimes found the guide’s accent difficult to understand and his tales rambling and unclear. (TripAdvisor reviews seem very mixed about our guide - many found him excellent, but a fair number have had bad experience or had him not show up at all.)

There was a usual succession of historic buildings to drive by - I didn’t take pictures through the van windows. But there were three stops where we spent a lot of time. The first was the Beach Institute, one of the first African-American schools in Savannah, now home of a gallery of African-American art. The largest section of the museum was dedicated to the woodcarvings of Ulysses Davis, a self-taught barber and whittler from Georgia in the 1950s.


Our second stop was at the Savannah African Art Museum. The art was fascinating, but I felt it was only scratching the surface of presenting many different African cultures.


The third long stretch of the tour was a drive through a Savannah cemetery that had once been a plantation. I remember some markers of slave burials, a whipping tree, and the grave of NAACP activist W. W. Law, but much of it has blurred out of clear memory.

I’d give such a tour another chance, but it was far from a complete success for us. Part of that is just that I didn’t have enough of a framework of African-American history to easily incorporate the details that Johnnie Brown gave us, but it’s also true that Savannah doesn’t express African-American history in its geography as much as white history.

For dinner, I yielded to the impulse to be an out-and-out tourist: we went to The Pirates’ House. We’d heard about The Pirates’ House several times on our tours because it’s the oldest building in Georgia, and it was usually described as good food, but touristy enough that locals didn’t return often. But why not be a tourist when that involves pirates?

Thoughts of piracy led to thoughts of rum drinks. And I wasn’t driving; drinks were an option.
So I sampled the Chatham Artillery Punch, because we’d heard it mentioned on Friday’s historical tour. According to the legend, George Washington visited the Chatham Artillery in 1791 and was honored with a banquet, and there was confusion over which officer was supposed to spike the punch, so they all did. According to the Pirate’s House menu, it involves tea, white rum, gin, whiskey, brandy, and red wine, as well as other flavorings.
It turned out to b a delicious drink. It was fruity, but the tea kept it from being overly sweet.


For an appetizer, we had fried green tomatoes, made fancy with smoked gouda pimiento cheese and chipotle aioli. I’ve had fried green tomatoes several times now, and I have yet to find any that I’ve found particularly tasty. I think I’m at the point that I don’t need to try them any more. Even without the chipotle aioli, they were too spicy for Lori.


I fared better with my shrimp and grits. I had only had shrimp and grits twice before, and neither time had been particularly good. So this try had gotten to the point that this was risking a strikeout of the entire concept. Fortunately, this was very good, with a nice Cajun cream sauce.


Lori was much less happy with her crab au gratin, which tasted mostly of cheese.


Overall, the Pirates’ House was not as gimmicky as I thought it might be, and I enjoyed exploring the place and reading about the subterranean passages. But although the drinks were very tasty, the food was good but not awesome.

Afterward, we took one more trolley tour, this time a ghost tour. We usually enjoy ghost tours, but this one really failed to gather my attention. I don’t know whether it was tour fatigue or the fact that this was a trolley tour instead of a walking tour, but the stories didn’t engage me. The one nifty thing I remember is a couple of performances from costumed performers, including a creepy one from a doctor in the midst of a yellow fever epidemic.


Sunday, January 28

I chose breakfast from the Roadfood website: Sisters of the New South. I liked the Roadfood description, and it had a good local reputation - the Lyft driver who took us away from there afterward said “That’s the place where, when your mother can’t cook for you, you go there.” But our experience was not that good.

I had the smothered chicken, rice, and a biscuit. The rice was amazing, full of dark, flavorful secrets. But the smothered chicken and the biscuit were both kind of dry in a lonely-on-the-steam-table kind of way.


Lori chose a pancake breakfast because she feels a need to start her day with breakfast food. It was pedestrian.


St. John’s Cathedral had been on Pack Up + Go’s list of recommended sights to see in Savannah, and Lori prefers to go to Mass when she can, so we went there for services. It really was a beautiful cathedral, with mosaics everywhere.




Nearby Lafayette Square.


With a little time left before we had to leave for the airport, I felt we ought to see a little of Savannah’s river and port. So we went down to the riverfront, which has been developed as a tourist zone.

Soft mist really dresses up the industrial site across the river.


This African American Monument was very moving.


Our last lunch was at Vic’s on the River, which we chose mostly because it had a river view, a short walk, and available seating. It turned out very nicely.

It started with biscuits with orange marmalade. There were perhaps not my quintessential biscuits, a touch denser and cagier than my ideal - but I think that’s a local style.


The menu didn’t have a lot that stood out to me as truly local. My fancy was caught by a dressed-up shrimp and grits with smoked cheddar grits, bacon, and rosemary barbecue sauce. I don’t have a lot of shrimp and grits experience, as I’ve said, but this was sumptuous and outstanding.


Lori chose the fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, which was also delicious.


For dessert, Lori talked me into the praline basket with ice cream.


And with that, we were off to the airport to return to Pittsburgh. The taxi driver who had taken us from the airport had offered to bring us back and had sent us a text to confirm - this worked out very nicely because it allowed us to ask her to pick us up at the restaurant instead of the hotel.


Final Thoughts

So, how do we sum this up? What do we think of Pack Up + Go?

- We had a good time.
- Savannah was a great choice of city for us. It was very scenic and had lots of good food.
- The recommendations for things to do in Savannah were generally on point.
- The price was reasonable, I think; although I carefully didn’t check the prices for flights to Savannah, I think the price we paid (at the lowest tier for a flyaway weekend with Pack Up + Go) was reasonable for two round-trip tickets and a nice hotel. They may have gotten the tickets more cheaply, but that’s fine - they deserve to have some profit margin. (I’m still not certain that I’d find the value in a driving vacation, but I’d give it a try.)
- Their minimum price is not particularly cheap. We felt we got what we paid for, but that price point is not for everyone and not for us all the time. (And their price options quickly climb into “I can’t imagine spending that much for a weekend” territory.)
- An unforeseen benefit: Pack Up + Go makes a great conversation topic. When people asked us “what brought you to Savannah?” and we answered “We went to the airport and discovered we were coming here”, it sparked a lot of pleasant conversations.

Pack Up + Go is certainly not for everyone. In particular, some people use a different budget for their travel, and some people enjoy the planning part of the travel. (Sometimes we are those people, and we won’t always use Pack Up + Go.) But we had a good time, and we would certainly give Pack Up + Go another try.

In February, I posted about my preliminary results with Virulent Strain. After 100 games with four players and five Epidemics with Virulent Strain, my win rate was nearly the same as without Virulent Strain. Was this a lucky streak, or a sign of something else?

I've now played 500 games of 4P5EV. My win rate for 500 games has been 84.0% +/- 3.2%; my win rate for 586 games of 4P5E without Virulent Strain was 84.1% +/- 3.0%.
Some times I look at stats and think that with some more games to narrow the confidence intervals, it might develop into a statistically significant difference. This is not one of those times. To my eye, these stats give no basis for any belief that I win less often with Virulent Strain than without.

But it's obvious that Virulent Strain is harder. (Obvious does not necessarily mean true.) The Virulent Epidemics add ways to fail and don't add ways to succeed.

So maybe Virulent Strain turns easy games into hard games? Not really.
Percentage of easy games: 37.5% +/- 3.9% without Virulent Strain vs. 39.2% +/- 4.3% with Virulent Strain.

Maybe Virulent Strain makes it harder to get Eradications?
For Eradications per successful game: 0.52 +/- 0.06 for 4P5E vs. 0.83 +/- 0.08 for 4P5EV. That's a statistically significant difference of more Eradications with Virulent Strain.

Down at the nigh-anecdotal end of the scale, I got 4 four-Eradication games in 500 games of 4P5EV, compared to none in 586 games of 4P5E.

In my last post about Virulent Strain, I described three possible explanations:
1. I've been having a lucky streak, and am likely to get slapped down soon. This is the most likely possibility.
2. Over the thousand-plus games I've played since my 4P5E games, I've honed my Pandemic skills a bit.
3. The actual increase in difficulty from Virulent Strain is much smaller than it seems.

The 'lucky streak' hypothesis is less plausible now after 500 games.

The 'I've improved my skills' hypothesis has some appeal. I'd like to think that I could improve my skills incrementally over a thousand games, and I can think of ways that I've improved my skills.

And there's a point in favor that Virulent Strain does cause me to lose some games, so I must be making it up somehow. Here's some additional data about how much difficulty Virulent Strain adds:
After the first 100 games, I started recording games in which I felt afterward that I had lost because of Virulent Strain. This is necessarily subjective, and some of the games that I lost because of Virulent Strain would have turned out to be losses even if I had not been playing with Virulent Strain. But with those qualifications, I recorded 21 games out of 400 lost due to Virulent Strain, or about 5.25% of those games. In 3 of those games, I recorded that I thought I would have lost anyway. But still, that suggests that Virulent Strain was the difference between failure and victory in at least 2 or 3% of my games.
But the final victory percentage was almost identical, so I must be making up those games - which seems to suggest an improved skill.

But here's the counterargument: if we hypothesize that I improved my Pandemic skills while playing 500 games of 3P5E and 700 games of 5P5E. It seems obvious (again, not the same as true) that if I improved while playing 5P5E, I would particularly improve at 5P5E. Although I have not done a rigorous analysis, I did not notice any improvement at my win rate with 5P5E over the course of those games - my overall win rate drifted slightly down as I played.

The data shows pretty clearly that with four players and five Epidemics, I win as often with Virulent Strain as without. It's very perplexing, and I don't have a good explanation.

After posting my results about 2000 recorded games of Pandemic, I've now recorded 100 games of the Virulent Strain challenge.

For those who know Pandemic but don't know the On the Brink Expansion, the Virulent Strain challenge replaces the Epidemic cards with Virulent Epidemics that each make one of the diseases progressively worse. For example, the Complex Molecular Structure card has the effects of a normal Epidemic, but adds the additional effect that it requires one more card than usual to discover a cure for the Virulent Strain disease.

It is obvious that this makes the game more challenging. When I started experimenting with this challenge, I wasn't trying to determine whether a Virulent game was harder than a non-Virulent game; I was only trying to determine how much harder it would be. I expected that adding Virulent would add about as much difficulty as adding an extra Epidemic, and I thought that would be a more interesting comparison.

My results surprised me. My win rate for four players, five Epidemics, without Virulent Strain (4P5E) was 84.2% +/- 3.0% (p <.05, n = 582). My win rate for six Epidemics (4P6E) was 58.1% +/- 17.4% (n = 31). My win rate for five Epidemics with Virulent Strain (4P5EV) has been 84.0 +/- 7.2% (n = 100). This is a statistically significant difference between 4P6E and 4P5EV, but so far, 4P5E and 4P5EV look practically the same.

These results are consistent with some of my other measures. The percentage of easy wins is nearly the same, and the average number of Eradications is actually higher with Virulent Strain (though not to a statistically significant degree).

What's going on here? I know there have been games that I lost due to Virulent Strain. I see three non-exclusive possibilities:
1. I've been having a lucky streak, and am likely to get slapped down soon. This is the most likely possibility.
2. Over the thousand-plus games I've played since my 4P5E games, I've honed my Pandemic skills a bit.
3. The actual increase in difficulty from Virulent Strain is much smaller than it seems.

I've envied my friends with a record of their reading, but I've had trouble getting started with it.

#1. My Tesla: A love story of a mouse and her car, by Joan C. Gratz
A children's book of one woman's story of Tesla ownership. (It was a stocking stuffer.) It was cute, but the protagonist is not always gracious about her Tesla ownership.

#2. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, by Dorothy Sayers
This was a reread. I'm terribly fond of Dorothy Sayers; she may well be my favorite mystery author. This is a great example of why; Lord Peter Wimsey deftly manipulates the situation to expose a secret murder, then teases out the thread of the crime with a subtle understanding of human relations. One thing I like about the Wimsey stories: the story doesn't end with the solution of the crime, but carries through to the resolution of the situation. I'm not totally convinced that the murderer would show the ethics after confrontation that this murderer did - but perhaps that's part of the book's interwar charm.

#3. Tesla Model S: Best Car Ever, by Frank von Gilluwe and Kim Rogers
Another Christmas gift, this one is a Tesla fan book for adults. I enjoyed reading it and learned a few things about the Tesla that I didn't know. Even though its copyright is 2014, much of the information about options and software is now outdated.

#4. Bone, by Jeff Smith.
at Stromberg recommended this to me when I asked for recommendations for graphic novels. Three Bone cousins leave Boneville to avoid troubles with a misguided mayoral campaign party and stumble into a heroic fantasy struggle.
I particularly liked the running thread of humor in the heroic fantasy (as with the quiche-eating rat-man), and the touch of heroism in the humor (such as the reason that Phoney Bone is a greedy scoundrel).
This was published over the course of 9 years. When I read such long-running serial works, I always wonder how much of the story was planned in advance and how much developed during the years of publication. One of the big constraints of a serial work is that you can't revise the beginning once you figure out the end.
Reviews of Bone I've read describe the book as "Tolkienesque", but if this were really Tolkienesque there would be much more backstory about the Bones as a race and culture.

#5. Something the Cat Dragged In, by Charlotte MacLeod
One in Charlotte McLeod's series of cozy mysteries featuring Peter Shandy, agronomy professor at Balaclava College.
I have a deeply ambivalent relationship with Charlotte MacLeod. I've read a dozen of her Sarah Kelling mysteries, and they feature both an engaging literate whimsy of characters and descriptions and appalling plot flaws that leave me fuming. (A warning to those reading the Sarah Kelling books: the first book is much much darker in tone than the rest of the books in the series. Liking one is not a predictor of liking the others.) This one is not terribly extreme in either direction, but it does presume a successful longstanding conspiracy among collaborators who seem ill-equipped to successfully organize a bake sale.

We are planning to buy a Tesla Model S. This is so far out of my usual car-buying habit that I feel a need to justify it.

Our car-buying way (for both my parents and Lori's parents) has been to buy modest, sensible cars, buy them used, and drive them until they are no longer drivable. We even take pride in doing it that way; we remind ourselves that a car takes a substantial hit in depreciation when it's first driven off the lot, for example.

We've done the "drive until no longer drivable" part, at least. Lori's car (a 2002 Honda Accord, bought in 2004) got rear-ended in August by a kid distracted by his cell phone. Lori's father advised us to take the insurance check and apply that to a new car instead of repairing that car. Then, in the month that we were shopping for a car to replace that, the transmission on my car (a 2001 Honda Accord, bought in 2003) went bad, and Lori's father advised us again that we should replace that car instead of repairing it.

My coworker Ryan suggested a Tesla as we started to shop for a car for Lori, because he has one and loves it. But it didn't work for us while we were replacing only one car. We want Lori's car to be higher off the ground, to give her every visibility advantage that we can. We want to have a car we can take road trips in, and the Tesla supercharger network is not yet built out enough to make it convenient to use it for the road trips we've done recently. And we want our road trip car to be a great car for Lori to drive, so if we're buying only one car, it should be a high road-trip car with great visibility.

In 2003, I'd been tempted by a hybrid car, but I didn't feel that the technology was quite ready yet. So when we were shopping in 2015, I had hoped to buy a hybrid – but the hybrid SUVs we found had very small benefits in gas mileage, such that they would take decades to pay for the increased cost of a hybrid drivetrain. We looked at a Honda Accord Hybrid which I rather liked, particularly because it had a right-side camera. But there is no 2016 Honda Accord Hybrid out, and supply of the 2015 model was pretty small. Lori ended up choosing a Subaru Forester, and we're pretty confident it will be a happy choice for her.

So when my car conked out, I was even more eager to try to buy an energy-efficient car. Throughout this, Ryan had been telling me about Tesla and other electric vehicles. (When I mentioned that the transmission had failed, he cheerfully pointed out that the Tesla had no transmission at all.)

The Tesla is very sporty, which is not at all what I've imagined myself driving. In an early conversation with Ryan, I quipped, "does the Tesla come with its own midlife crisis, or do I need to provide that myself?"

But the Tesla has a range of 240 miles, and no other electric car I found has a range above 100 miles or so. I don't have a long commute, so most of my days burn only 10-20 miles – but a range of 100 miles feels pretty limited to the Pittsburgh area, and Tesla's range (plus the network of superchargers, which can charge a Tesla halfway in 20-30 minutes) makes me feel that although it might not yet cover all of our road trip goals, it could take us quite a ways.

And despite being so sporty, the Tesla has a lot of features that are attractive to my staid, boring driving persona:

• I've come to care a lot about not using fossil fuels. This was exacerbated even more because the news of Volkswagen's clean-diesel deception broke while we were shopping. I've become convinced that the future equilibrium point has the world using only a trickle of fossil fuels, and the sooner we can get to that equilibrium, the happier we will be. Now that we've switched our home electricity generation to renewable energy, all of my miles can be powered by renewable energy. That's worth paying a premium to me.
• The Tesla has pretty nice cargo space. The seats fold down for a lot of cargo, and there's a front trunk where an engine would be that holds more stuff.
• I really like the traffic-aware cruise control. It happens often on our road trips that we'll be driving ever so slightly faster than the car in front of us, and we're not really eager to pass but we have to make some sort of manual adjustment. The traffic-aware cruise control can handle that automatically. (This is not Tesla-only, of course; Lori's Subaru has this too.)
• The Model S is very low-maintenance. There's no need to check oil or transmission fluid; the only fluid to add is windshield-wiper fluid.
• Tesla has gotten glowing scores for safety. In addition to complete five-star NHTSA ratings, there are stories like this: The Tesla Model S Is So Safe It Broke the Crash-Testing Gear. There have been some reports of the batteries catching fire, but the ones I've followed through on have been stories like this: "I drove over an L-shaped trailer hitch that stabbed up into the front of the car. The Tesla warned me that there were severe problems and that I should pull over and might not be able to start the car again. So I pulled off to the side of the road and got out. Five minutes later, the batteries caught fire, but I never lost control of the vehicle and the flames never reached the passenger compartment. Tesla then modified the design to add armor to the underside to prevent this from happening again." If you think about what could have happened to an internal-combustion engine in an accident that started with that first sentence, this story is really boring – splendidly, delightfully boring. I am willing to pay something for my accidents to be that boring.
• I like Tesla's reputation for software development. After reading Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway—With Me in It ..., I got concerned about how hackable vehicle computers might be, and I have read that many car manufacturers have an adversarial relationship with security researchers. According to what I've heard, Tesla invites security researchers to probe and pays a bounty for bugs found – and although that might sometimes lead to embarrassment, it's much better for the cybersecurity of the car.

But you and I should wonder whether I'm downplaying the appeal of the Tesla's raw performance. I'm not aware of that being a major attraction for me, but I am certainly capable of lying to myself about such things. I've certainly enjoyed reading stories of the Tesla effortlessly passing muscle cars. And on the day we ordered the Tesla, the showroom loaned us a Model S. The ostensible reason was to make sure that the suspension wouldn't bottom out in our driveway, but they loaned it to us for the whole afternoon. That car was equipped with "Insane Mode", a fierce acceleration that does 0-60mph in 3.1 seconds – and I made sure to try that out a few times. The first time I floored it, Lori said that it made her neck hurt from being snapped back. I'm glad to have tried it, but I ordered the less-powerful model. (Two other anecdotes from that afternoon: (1) In testing the traffic-aware cruise control, I was able to drive from the Parkway near our house almost to Ross Park Mall only using the pedals once. (2) While we were driving up to McConnells Mill State Park, I learned that when AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" plays, it is very hard to keep to a speed that's reasonable for country roads.)

For the staid driver I usually am, the better choice might be the Model 3 that Tesla has in the works. It's targeted at a price point much more in line with the Hondas and Subarus we were looking at. But it's not scheduled to come out until 2017, and that delay is a dealbreaker for that option.

So we've ordered a Model S. I chose a deep blue color that has the sleek sexiness of a movie actor wearing a well-tailored suit. (I said that I wanted a color that was a 6 on a 1-10 scale of eye-catching-ness, and I think I got exactly what I asked for.) It's scheduled for delivery in late November; I just learned yesterday that it's started production.

Lori's mother said that I seemed very happy to order it. I wasn't clear enough on my own feelings to be aware of such happiness, but I trust her judgment on such matters.

There's one more topic about the Tesla that I tiptoe around: the price. There's no denying that a Tesla costs much more than the other cars we would have considered. (There are three other Tesla owners in our office, and all of us are in the same situation of being habituated to a much cheaper car.) We are lucky enough that we can afford it, though we certainly can't afford such an expense often. But I know that many people, including many friends of ours, are not so wealthy, and I don't want to upset them. So far, that has not been an issue; people that I've worried might feel envious have just been excited for us. I hope that that continues.

Last weekend, Lori and I went to Ravenwood Castle for a murder mystery weekend: http://www.ravenwoodcastle.com/2015/06/16/sherlock-holmes-and-the-deadly-hand-sept-18th-19th . It was good fun, with several stories that I will deliberately retell out of order.

~//~

My best story from the weekend could have come out of a mystery novel.

It was just before the breakfast at which all would be revealed. I was staring at the evidence table. (I had failed to identify one of the killers, but she had whispered to me that she was a killer. So I had gone down to the evidence table to try to figure out what clue I might have missed that would identify her.)

Mr. Denham (the organizer of the event) came by and saw me studying the table. He dropped a heavy hint that there were no coincidences at this table.

A few other players from other teams came down. It was time to share knowledge at this point, so I told them what I had found:
- the clue that said “The message is 1 - 98 - 7” had been moved to the evidence table.
- the evidence bag of random detritus from around the scene of the crime contained a 1987 quarter.

As we talked these over, we discovered that another bag contained a metal ring with an inner lip into which the quarter would just fit.

We puzzled over this for a while, and two of the other players left to go up to breakfast.

Then, as Chad was fiddling with the quarter and the ring, he dropped the quarter.
And he said, “that’s not a real quarter.”
Chad, it turns out, is an expert on the sounds of coins; he can hear the sound of a small handful of change dropping and identify all the coins. I am not nearly such an expert, but I had a quarter in my pocket and could do the comparison that showed that he was right.
(Really, how improbable is it that we should have accidentally dropped the quarter in earshot of someone who can recognize the sounds of coins?)

We found the narrow line around the edge of the inverse face of the coin.
We still couldn’t figure out how to get it open.
We tried pressing it through the metal ring.
(Cat said, “This is way more exciting than breakfast!”)
We tried prying it open with the lock picks.
At last, I suggested twisting it within the metal ring, and with a few twists, the coin came open revealing the tiny 500-point note within.

We made it to breakfast late but triumphant.

~//~

We got very lucky with our team.

In the buffet line at dinner on Friday evening, the couple just behind us was a pair of women dressed up as the Blues Brothers, and I introduced myself and started to chat. We hit it off well enough to sit together at dinner, knowing that the teams would be determined by who was at the same table. Beesting and Babycakes Blues were very fun and energetic, and Beesting particularly provided an energy that really helped us work together as a team. We were also delighted to team up with Elizabeth and Patricia, who wore beautiful Victorian outfits all week, and Leah and Missy, who were veterans and very helpful to us novices.

The breakdown into teams meant that instead of meeting forty people superficially over the weekend, we were working more closely with our eight-person team. We were able to really enjoy each others’ company and end up as new friends.

~//~

On Saturday afternoon, there was a scavenger hunt. (The ulterior motive was to get everyone out of the castle while the organizers rearranged clues). This was the most fun I’ve ever had with a scavenger hunt.

This was particularly a testament to how much one can achieve with a friendly smile and a polite request.

We decided to get the “picture in an action scene with firefighters” all in one group.
One of the castle staff kindly answered my request for guidance to the fire station, and suggested a station she thought was more likely to be staffed by pleasant firefighters.
The firefighters were bemused by our request, but willing to help us out. They even ran the lights on the fire engine for our dramatic shot.

We split up to pursue different parts of the list, but I set up a group text (with GroupMe). So we were able to stay in contact through text and share our triumphs and cheer each other on. It really worked well!

At lunch, we chatted with the owner of the diner (who looked like she might well be a biker), so when it was time to pay I mentioned the scavenger hunt and asked if she might have any John Adams dollar coins. She rummaged through her box of coins that didn’t fit into a convenient spot in the cash register, and as she was almost at the last coin in the box, she found a John Adams! We were terribly excited to tell our teammates about this.

~//~

On Saturday morning, after the eyeball toss, there was an egg toss, in which an egg was tossed back and forth while under fire from Nerf weapons. Kyle, an athletic man in his fifties, had previously tried to catch the grapes in his mouth when they were fired in the toy catapult demonstration. So Denham offered him two thousand points if he caught the egg in his mouth.
He caught the egg… but it didn’t stay intact.
The sight was well worth it.

~//~

We deciphered the starting clues for the location of the Great Oogle diamond to “INTHESTRAWBERRYJAM”, but the jam jar was no longer where it was. With some hints from Denham, we figured that it had been thrown away - but we thought the trash can was too real a trash can to be hiding a fictional treasure. It took encouragement from Denham to get us to root through nasty trash (with the most enthusiastic delving coming from Elizabeth in the Victorian dress), and then Beesting ended up reaching into the strawberry jam to find the diamond.

~//~

There were a lot of fun moments, but the least satisfying part was the murder mystery itself. I wanted to match wits with the detectives I read about in books (perhaps with enough hints that I could match wits), and this didn’t quite provide that experience.

In particular, I didn’t feel that there was a coherent story of the murder. At the final breakfast, the murderers were identified, and the modus operandi was hinted at a bit, but there wasn’t a clear story of how the murder happened. Clues had said that the victim “...was killed with a two-step poison. The two elements are administered in two different ways.” It’s not clear whether they meant that (a) there were two components of the poison that needed to both be administered to kill the victim, or (b) the unlucky victim got poisoned twice before dying. But either way, there’s a story there that wants more explanation. In the case of (a), there’s a needed story of conspiracy or accident; in the case of (b), there need to be two stories of motive and malice. And no story was provided. (And I keep having lots of Fridge Logic moments about evidence that should have been there. For example, since it was established that the cyanide was administered through paint on the cards that they were playing with, there should have been evidence that the dealer was wearing gloves.)

I think the problem came about with the decision that the killers were among the forty guests.
That made it hard to investigate the crime on the basis of motive, because the guests were equal with respect to the fictional story.
By the same token, there was no way to investigate on the basis of opportunity.
And an investigation on the basis of means was tricky, because in a narrative in which we were using salt to symbolize poison, it was difficult to tell who might have access to something that counted as a murder weapon.
And you couldn’t practically interrogate suspects or witnesses, and searching suspects would be too rude to do.
So the only avenues of investigation were the contents of the evidence table and the out-of-band clues we found.
We had an advantage; we observed suspicious behavior from one of our teammates (once she learned that she was the killer), and were able to find evidence on the table to implicate her. But we didn’t spot the other killer even though she was part of our team, and I think that it would have been very hard for people who weren’t in such contact to identify the killers.

Maybe the defects in the mystery are balanced out by the fact that solving the mystery was not worth very much in terms of points. I did a lot of puzzle-solving over the weekend, but I think that my individual score was much less than that of the guy who caught the egg in his mouth. I don’t begrudge him his points at all, but I wonder whether my strategy was right for the event.

~//~

Overall, it was a weekend I’ll remember for quite a while, with some great new friends and some marvelous moments.

We got off late on Friday, with intentions to get to Philadelphia and explore a bit there before eating dinner with friends. But I took it into my head that we should try to have brunch in Delaware.

The Delaware diversion was a purely collector’s impulse. At one time, I dreamed of visiting all the restaurants listed in Roadfood, but after several years of fairly diligent Roadfooding, I’ve hit only a few hundred of those restaurants; I don’t think that goal is viable. But I still have a ‘collect them all’ mentality. So I’ve reduced my goals to smaller collections; I’m still trying to eat at all of the Roadfood honor roll (37/100), and I’m trying to eat Roadfood in every state (40/50).
But we hadn’t previously eaten in Delaware, and from Pittsburgh, Delaware is not really en route to anything but Delaware. So I was tempted into the detour because we were already so close.

We chose Dutch Country Cafe as our destination because the Roadfood review mentioned breakfast food and we thought we could get there in time for brunch. But the drive was slow, albeit pleasant, and they were no longer serving breakfast by the time we arrived.

The Dutch Country Cafe is in the Dutch Market, which appears to be a former big box store in a strip mall that’s been divided up into a bunch of small Amish stalls. The effect is very utilitarian and severe.

We sat at the counter, and this may have been a mistake. The service was extremely lackluster; we had to wait a long time to receive drinks, a long time to get our order taken, a very long time to receive our food, and a very long time to receive our bill. I never did receive the soup that I ordered. When I asked for the bill, I said in my best chilly tone, “please take the soup off the bill”. The waitress said, “Oh, did you still want that?”
We saw later that there was booth seating on the other side of the kitchen. Perhaps if we had chosen seats there, we would not have felt forgotten and forlorn.


The lunch menu did not seem to have much Pennsylvania Dutch character. The only thing that seemed out of the ordinary was the chicken and corn soup. Had I received the soup, I might have an opinion about that.

I got an American sub, with salami, white cheddar cheese, fresh juicy tomato, and pickled peppers, piled high enough on a sub roll that was necessary to eat it open-faced because the sandwich could not be closed. It was actually a very good sandwich, particularly because of the tomatoes.


Lori’s beef and bacon melt was much less nice. It tasted much more of grill and grease than beef or bacon.


Afterward, I got a very nice soft pretzel at the pretzel stand across the aisle.



With our late arrival, the excruciating slowness of the service, and traffic delays around Wilmington, we had no time to enjoy Philadelphia at all this day. It would be an error to judge the whole state by this bad experience, but nevertheless I was muttering “stupid Delaware” for most of the trip.

We had dinner with our friends Seth and Karen in Cherry Hill. Karen had prepared a beautiful feast, including four different types of quiches, a very fancy vegetable tart with cucumber and carrot rosettes, and a beautiful caramel apple tart. We were very impressed that she could do so much, particularly with four young children.

After visiting the British Isles in 2013 and 2014, we wanted to stay within road-trip distance of home this year. In June and July of 2015, we took a long road trip through Baltimore, New York, New England, New Brunswick, and Quebec.

We set out for Baltimore on the evening of Wednesday, June 24. Now, the direct route from Pittsburgh to Baltimore goes straight down the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and the Turnpike makes it much more convenient to eat at its service plazas than to get off the road. But I have my own superstitions, and one of my superstitions is that it’s important to start an eating vacation with an interesting meal – and the service plazas hardly count as interesting. So we got off the turnpike to eat at Out of the Fire, a place we’ve enjoyed before just minutes from the Donegal exit.

We were able to sit on the deck with a lovely sunset view of the Laurel Highlands. (This turned out to be a great vacation for eating outdoors; we ended up with fourteen outdoor dinners.)


For an appetizer, we ordered the house-made fresh mozzarella with bruschetta.


Our first impression of it was that it was very tricky to eat neatly. It fiercely resisted forking out a bite-sized portion:


But once we overcame that, the mozzarella was very tasty, with a mild salty flavor and a very nice texture.

Lori had the smoked chicken breast and enjoyed it very much. I thought I tasted a touch of ash behind the smoke, but she did not.


Instead of a full entree, I chose two appetizers.
The first was an extraordinary grilled watermelon salad with cherries and blue cheese. The grilling made the watermelon super-sweet, but the sweetness was balanced very nicely by the funky tang of the blue cheese.


I had my doubts about ordering lobster mac and cheese so far from the water, but I ended up being glad. The lobster was very tender and flavorful, and it complemented the smoky gouda of the cheese sauce very nicely.


For dessert, Lori enticed me into the blackberry-cognac sorbet, which was a smooth, intense delight.


We had entirely succeeded at starting our trip off on the right culinary foot. Our dinner had taken long enough that we saw a beautiful sunset in the rearview mirror as we set off again. We made it to our hotel in Baltimore near midnight.

Last weekend, Dave, Kevin and I tried a couple of experiments with playing Pandemic with Dave in Florida. Neither was absolutely perfect, but both were successful enough to be better than not playing.

For our first experiment, we tried video chat with Google Hangouts, with one camera pointing at our faces and one pointing at the board. We had Dave’s hand visible to the webcam pointing at the board, and we did all his moving and card drawing for him.

This worked pretty well. The down side was that since Dave had no way to change his focus, it was hard for him to read the names on cities, and sometimes hard for him to read the cards in his hand. But it was good enough to participate in strategy discussions with us.

This would be a bigger challenge with Eldritch Horror, where the fine print on the cards would be too hard to read. To make this work with Eldritch Horror, the remote user would have to take good notes.

Our second experiment was using Vassal (http://www.vassalengine.org/index.php), a Java program for a shared gameboard.

It wasn’t everything one would want from a Pandemic experience. It turns out that Vassal is really just providing a shared gameboard and not much else. For example, setting up the player deck is an eleven-step process whose only advantage over the physical game is that you can shuffle a deck with a right-click. And it was rather finicky in play; we had a couple of problems with cards getting flipped over or decks shuffled wrong until we figured out that we had to place things just so. (Voice chat of some sort would be very helpful for teaching each other how to play.)

But the positive side of it being such a basic implementation was that we had little trouble incorporating our house rules. Using our revised Special Orders was easy, for example. The one rule that might have been a bit tricky was our starting with a choice of two roles, and I have ideas about how we could do that next time.

Vassal is a modular game engine, and there have been a lot of game modules written for it. For example, there’s a module for Small World, which Andy has wanted to play with us. There’s not one for Eldritch Horror currently. There is one for Arkham Horror (and all the expansions), and one for Elder Sign, a dice game on the same theme. (But the download page says "As per FFG policy, all common item card texts are blank to ensure players own a copy. “)
We could imagine writing a module for Eldritch Horror. In practice, it would take me quite a while to scan everything and do the implementation. (The expression language used for writing conditions is pretty half-assed. Two examples of half-assery: (1) it doesn’t support grouping subexpressions with parentheses, and (2) because there’s an implicit dereference on the left-hand side of a comparison, ‘foo = bar’ is not equivalent to ‘bar = foo’.)

If we want to play Advanced Civilization again, Vassal might be a good option. It allows easy saving and restoring of games, and that might be really useful for such a long game.

Kevin said that Vassal would make a lunchtime game of Pandemic more appealing to him, because it would cut out the commuting costs. This has a definite appeal. Doing a videoconference from my office would be a bit awkward, just because of the risk that my manager might stop in - but I could overcome that. Another alternative might be to play a slower game over the course of a day, with text chat instead of live voice chat.

Lori’s pancakes at Marless House.


On Friday, we were growing aware that our time in Ireland was ending soon.
We found a post office and mailed home all the books we’d bought, so that we could fit everything into our bags. We then parked near the Latin Quarter (in a parking garage with such small parking spaces that parking was a nerve-wracking process) to finish up our shopping.

We stumbled on a group of preteens doing a balloon release. Lori learned that this was honoring a classmate who had died.



We ate our last lunch at Griffin’s Bakery and Coffee Shop, because it had caught Lori’s fancy the previous day.



Unfortunately, it was not very satisfying; we were squeezed uncomfortably into a tight corner, and service was very slow.

My bacon and brie sandwich convinced me of two things: 1) brie is not the best cheese to accompany Irish bacon, and 2) if you’re going to cook the bacon and toast the bread, I think you really ought to melt the cheese as well.


Lori’s burger was so overcooked it was hard, and though it was not a very large burger, it was so tall that it was hard to eat. A friend of ours has a similar story of a burger in Ireland with a hard, round patty; he’s been told by his Irish coworkers that a burger in Ireland is typically eaten with a knife and fork. I am of course biased by my upbringing, but I prefer American burger style.


Lori had chosen the bakery more because of its promise of dessert, and after much deliberation over all the possibilities, she settled on an eclair.


It took us a while to finish our shopping, and then we hit a traffic jam leaving Galway. So it was late afternoon before we arrived at our final hotel. Had we known what we were getting, we would have struggled to have more time there.

I have mentioned before that the travel agent who had recommended Ballyseede Castle to us had been very cost-focused. But my belief is that if I’m going to splurge (and any castle stay is at least a bit of a splurge), I should splurge big enough that the sense of luxury overwhelms my penny-pinching, cost-compromising ways. I feel more splurged with an utter splurge rarely than with a partial splurge more frequently. So after we gave up on that travel agent, we asked a consultant at Rick Steves about options for a wondrous castle splurge. He too was very cost-conscious at first, but he realized what we wanted and adjusted, and his recommendation was Dromoland Castle.


Dromoland was another opportunity to briefly experience another culture - in this case, the culture of the landed gentry. And they did a marvelous job of making that culture accessible by gently managing the experience. I will explain with three stories:
- A porter brought our bags to our room for us. (We appreciated this; there were several sets of stairs.) As we started to consider a tip, he vanished, making it quite clear that no tip was expected.
- I realized that I had left my phone in the car. So I walked to the front desk to ask where the cars were parked, because valet parking had whisked them away. The desk clerk suggested, “why don’t you let the porter get it for you?” I returned to our room, and a few minutes later, the porter knocked, handed me my phone, and vanished again.
- At dinner, they changed the table settings with every course. This eliminated any anxiety over what fork to use - there was only one set of utensils available at any time.

Our room at Dromoland was actually not as eccentrically wonderful as our room at Lawcus Farm. But the view from our window was splendid.


We had a bit of time to tour the grounds.





They had their own folly, a petite Greek temple.


The Hermit’s Cottage was built about a century ago and has probably never sheltered an actual hermit.


The lily pond next to it achieves greater authenticity by hosting actual lilies.


We spent the last twilight in the Walled Garden.





I was impressed with what good roses they had in October.



We dressed as smartly as we could for dinner at the Earl of Thomond. I wished I had brought a tie; I still felt underdressed. But no one made us feel unwelcome. Dinner was superb, and again they made the luxury very accessible, with very helpful explanations for all of our questions and good suggestions of food and wine. (The wine list was the size of a telephone book. Part of that turned out to be because the pages were very thick, but even so there were many pages.)

I began with a wild mushroom and chorizo risotto. It was amazing, with sumptuous flavor and rich texture.


The spoon provided for the risotto was very shallow, with an asymmetric shape that I didn’t recognize. I posted a quip about it on Facebook, and my sister asked for a picture, which I had not taken. So at breakfast the next day, I asked them to bring out such a spoon for me to photograph.


Lori had a beautiful goat cheese appetizer.


A lovely champagne sorbet cleansed her palate before the entrees.


I had the fennel and star anise soup. It was much more delicious than it was photogenic.


Silver domes covered our entrees, and the staff would assemble around each table and lift all domes at the same time while exclaiming “voila!” This definitely gave a special feel to the experience, with the only fly in the ointment being the goon taking the picture.


Lori’s entree was roast chicken with etuvee of cabbage, mashed potatoes with scallions. This may not sound terribly exciting, but there’s something wonderful about fresh ingredients prepared well. Lori’s dinner was delicious, and the new potatoes with butter were especially good.


I chose the entree of Irish beef sirloin with shallot sauce. It was wonderful, sumptuous beef.


My dessert was caramel parfait, berry coulis, and house made ice cream. It might just be a matter of my own tastes, but I’d call it “quite good” instead of the “astounding” level of the previous dishes. But this may be like singling out the slowest runner at the Olympics.


Lori: pink meringue trio with mango sauce Lori was delighted by her sweet, pink dessert.


Because we were splurging, I asked the sommelier to recommend a nice port to finish the meal. He said he had an excellent 1988 port that he had just decanted, which he was offering at a special price. We had a moment of confusion when I thought the price he was quoting was for a whole bottle, not just a single glass. It was very good, but I think it was wasted on me; I think it would have been hard for me to distinguish it from a much cheaper port. Lori: Port and truffles were all incredibly lovely, and a rich finish to a sumptuous meal.


When staying at a nice hotel, nothing will take me out of that feeling of luxury more than nickel-and-diming with little charges. A minibar in the room will make me grumble, and paying for WiFi will make me sulk and snarl. Dromoland didn’t nickel-and-dime in that way, but did charge extra for some amenities - but when I discovered that falconry was available for an additional fee, my only reaction was regret that we had arrived too late for me to enjoy it.

Dromoland was certainly a mighty splurge, but we felt that we did get the splendidly luxurious experience that we had paid for. There were places like Lawcus Farm where we got much more value than what we paid for, but Dromoland was at least as good as its price. Lori repeatedly said that she didn’t want to leave, because pretending to be a princess was enchanting!