Restaurant Hotel Saxonburg, Saxonburg, Pennsylvania
How lucky can you get? Just next door to the Mainstay in Saxonburg is the Hote Saxonburg, which has a restaurant, and that restaurant has a menu full of good choices. We ate lunch there, two days in a row. We thought the food was super good, but it may also have to do with eating meals with good friends; everything just tastes good when you are laughing and having fun.
Inside, the owner told us when renovating, they found these old beams, and the original straw and wattle construction, and they decided to leave it – it really adds to the interior atmoshpere:
The food was really good, and the restaurant staff was very accomodating about our picky style of ordering. They had two sandwiches, a Reuben, made with corned beef and sauerkraut, and a Rachel, made with turkey breast and cold slaw. I asked if I could have the Reuben, but made with turkey breast, and they did it as if it were no inconvenience at all. I love it when a restaurant treats my requests with respect, instead of huffing and puffing about how no, it isn’t possible.
Before we started, we ordered cups of the Lobster Bisque, which I am sad to say was so delicious that we ate it all up before even thinking about taking a photo.
My Reuben/Rachel:
What you can’t see much of on our plates is the green beans with pecans; you can’t see them because they disappeared so fast. As good as our meals were, those green beans with pecans were divine.
The Ahi Nicoise Salad (YUM!):
The Pork Barbecue (AdventureMan)
A shrimp and fish dish:
One big guy among us ordered both the spinach salad and the sausage sandwich, and ate every bite, they were both so delicious:
The food was so good, we could only drink coffee afterwards, no room for dessert!
Richard’s BBQ in Birmingham, Alabama
The iPhone was made for road trips. We used to kid each other “if we had an iPhone right now, we could look up . . . ” and now we have one and we do!
It got us flawlessly to the Marriott Residence Inns we favor, even those hidden away, miles from the interstates.
We also found we could enter “BBQ restaurant off I-459 Birmingham” and Boom! There it would be! We found Richard’s that way, and it was our favorite kind of place, not a chain, and full of people who live and work in the area.
This is what it looks like inside, and although there is a train that runs around the top of the restaurant, it is not a noisy train, and after a while, you don’t even notice it.
The food was excellent. I had the barbecued Grouper – and my first ever fried green tomatoes. I discovered I love fried green tomatoes.
AdventureMan had ‘vegetables.’ For strict vegetarians, warning: ‘vegetables’ in The South often contain shreds of meat, and meat fat, usually pork:
We resisted the desserts, but barely . . .
Gotta love those iPhones!
Here are some excerpts from the menu:
Prices were great, service was excellent. When I first ordered, I was told that they were already out of fried green tomatoes, so I ordered the grilled asparagus, and got another sorry, they were out of that, too. I ordered something else – I don’t know what – and when the food came – I had fried green tomatoes! It’s a miracle!
The Mainstay in Saxonburg (Pennsylvania) B&B
Part of the sheer exhilaration of our recent trip was the three day stay at The Mainstay, In Saxonburg. It didn’t hurt that all the rooms were taken for the same wedding party, and that we all got along so well. Three of the four couples were friends who had gotten to know one another when we all lived in Doha, Qatar, together, and the fourth couple had visited in Doha, so we all had that in common, as well as our friendship with the wedding family.
We got there early, and thought we would just find out what time we could check-in, but the house manager, James Stanek, welcomed us right in. We has reserved the Safari room, mostly because I really wanted AdventureMan to be happy about being on this trip, and the room was really a lot of fun.
Even the bathroom had lions and giraffe, carried out the Safari theme. The rooms were immaculately clean, always a good thing, and the beds were comfy with really good sheets. We all slept great.
The best part about the Mainstay was that it was a very welcoming B&B. While it is elegantly and tastefully decorated, you don’t get the feeling “don’t touch!” “don’t sit here!”, quite the opposite. We often gathered in the library; watched the news, all us nerdy geeks and our computers keeping up with the world first thing in the morning, coffee cups in hand. One day it rained, and the library was a great place to just hang out while we figured out how to spend the day. AdventureMan spent some time reading in the gathering room, close enough to join in if there was a lively conversation; far enough away to be able to read without breaking concentration.
For me, one of the best parts, too, was the house dog, Buddy. I’m an early riser, and I like to get my exercise early in the day so I can slack off the rest of the day. (Actually, exercise tends to help me not slack off; it gives me more energy.) Buddy was always polite, never pushy, but when he heard the word “walk” he was right there for me, eager to keep me company. There is just something wonderful about having an eager dog to walk, as he checks out all the fascinating smells in the neighborhood.
The Mainstay in Saxonburg is a short drive north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and minutes away from Armstrong Farms, a party site for weddings, family reunions and gatherings of all kinds.
Mileage Makes Me Smile
We just got back from our road trip. This time we took my little Rav4 since I barely put 5,000 miles on it this last year. We put 2255 miles on it, and (Ta DA!) we got an amazing 28.814945436888241 miles per gallon during the trip, even counting all the in-town travel we did in Pittsburgh (yes, photos and write-up to follow, first we have to get unpacked and I have to get some laundry started.)
Back a long long time ago, when I was in 6th grade, my parents took us out of school for a road trip, and my teacher gave me several assignments I had to do while I was gone those two weeks. One assignment was to keep track of the mileage, the gas consumption, and to figure the miles per gallon. (I also had to keep a daily journal, and to see how many different state license plates I could find while we travelled.) I’m such a geek, keeping track of gas mileage has fascinated me ever since. Cars do so many things better than they every used to. Nearly 29 mpg makes me smile.
Travel over the Memorial Day weekend also made us smile. We expected horrendous traffic and found calm, rational driving everywhere we went, even through the larger cities. . . it was heaven.
I love road trips. I get time with my husband, I have him all to myself and as we drive along every now and then he will start talking and – after all these years – I will learn something new about my husband. Someone makes the bed I sleep in and irons the sheets. Someone fixes my meals, and I get to eat what I want. I get to see new things and take a few photos. This trip we got to spend time with a very special group of friends we grew close to in Doha . . . What’s not to love?
Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and WOW
“Isn’t it funny,” I said, “here we are in West Virginia, and I haven’t seen an ounce of coal. Like here are all these mountains, there must be coal, West Virginia is famous for coal mines . . . ”
And just then we saw the first of the coal processing places to our right, huge, and it was just the first. AdventureMan laughed, it happened just as I was saying we had not seen any. I just finished reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, part of which takes place in Welch, West Virginia, but it was off our route, and I didn’t get to see it. I looked for run down shacks, and saw a few, but found West Virginia green, and beautiful and actually very prosperous looking.
All in all it was a really great day of driving. I got the first shift, and drove until lunch, when AM took over until time to stop. The WOW was that I discovered I can put in a destination and ask for directions on my iPhone, and the iPhone shows where we are as a pulsing blue dot, and draws a line to where we are going. The hotel we wanted was not in view from the highway, and we never would have found it otherwise. It was so totally cool; I could tell AdventueMan which street to turn on and which direction.
It’s quirky. There was actually another way, a way that did not take us through the University of West Virginia (!) and past the hospital entrance and through the parking lot (!) but it got us there, relatively directly, and it was a total hoot getting there.
I love this capability. I love my iPhone. We used to joke about how I needed one for our road trips, but oh, I never knew how much. I am having so much fun. I can just ask “hotel in Morgantown, WV” and it gives me so many options! I ask for BBQ restaurants and it gives me the nearest ones; it knows where I am! I love this capability!
There was another bad storm yesterday, in Oklahoma, with a lot of damage and people missing. Doesn’t it seem like there have been more damaging storms this year than most? I hope this does not foreshadow an active hurricane season.
Storm Damage
We’ve taken a brief trip to be with friends for a wedding and reunion, and en route, passed through the areas of Georgia and Tennessee where there was so much storm damage.
The damage was shocking. Entire areas just flattened, with people’s lives, their accumulations, scattered to the winds. It looked like a tsunami hit.
There was one room at the inn, and it wasn’t cheap.
“Why are all the hotels so full?” I asked. “They’re never this full!”
“We’re full with families whose homes were destroyed,” the clerk explained quietly. “They’re trying to figure out what to do, what the insurance will cover, what it won’t.”
Oh. Oh. Oh. We saw this in Pensacola, too, after the stunning Hurricane Ivan. Hotels were full of people trying to get back into their houses, and also full of builders and roofers and carpenters and finishers, there to try to help people put their lives back together.
It puts things back into perspective, quickly, when you are surrounded by those whose lives changed in a heartbeat, and who are trying to figure out where to go from here. We’re just glad to have a room. And a home.
A God of Infinite Mercy
This morning, Father Neal Goldsborough of Christ Church Pensacola gave a sermon that held us all totally spellbound. It had to do with the fundamentalist preacher who – once again – forecast the coming rapture, which he says was scheduled for yesterday. (I wonder what he has to say today? He was wrong once before, in 1994. Or maybe people were raptured yesterday, but all the folk I know are, like me, sinners who didn’t make the cut.)
Father Neal talked about his service in the chaplain corp overseas, and faiths which exclude based on narrow rules, specific rules, churches and religions who say ‘this is the only way and all the rest of you are damned to everlasting fire” whether they use those words or paraphrases. He pointed to Jesus, who broke the rules of his time and flagrantly spent time with sinners, and the unclean, and showed them by his love and by his actions what the infinite love and mercy and forgiveness of Almighty God looks like.
It couldn’t have come at a better time for me.
Soon, I will be meeting up with three women who are particularly dear to me, friends for many years in Qatar, friends who worshipped at the Church of the Epiphany in Doha, Qatar. The new Anglican Church of the Epiphany is being built on land dedicated to church use by His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, and will be used by many denominations.
My friends and I all returned to the USA within months of one another, and have been sending e-mails with “reply to all” as we struggle with our re-entry into our old church communities. We struggle with the hatreds and prejudices and ignorance about our Moslem brothers and sisters, and we struggle with the narrow strictures imposed by our churches and study groups. I thank God to have these wonderful women among whom we can share our dismay and our hurting hearts, and re-inforce the lessons we learned living in a very exotic, and sometimes alien culture, but which had so many wonderful and mighty lessons to teach us. I often joke that in my life, God kept sending me back to the Middle East (Tunisia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait) until he saw that I finally got it. My sisters-in-faith were quicker studies than I was. 🙂
It was a breath of the Holy Spirit I felt this morning, as Father Neal spoke about God’s mercy, his plan to redeem ALL of his creation, God’s desire for our love and our service. I couldn’t help it, it made me weep with relief to know my church is a church that serves God by including, rather than excluding, and which mercifully welcomes sinners like me.
Here is the really cool part. Christ Church Pensacola has recently begun putting the sermons online. If there is one thing Christ Church has, it is great sermons – and if you want to hear Father Neal’s sermon, you can click HERE, in a few days and you can hear his sermon for yourself. 🙂 Look for the May 22 sermon by Father Neal Goldsborough.
Did you Tell Him We’re Going Dancing?
I was laughing as I heard AdventureMan talking with his Saudi friend, making a time when they could get together. I knew he had called about tonight.
“Did you tell him we were going dancing?” I laughed as I asked him.
“Uhhh . . . no,” he said.
This is new to us. We are taking dancing lessons, ballroom dancing, at the YMCA. We both had those lessons you take in eighth grade, but we’ve forgotten most of what we learned. I don’t care about going dancing, or fancy dresses, or competitions. I don’t even watch dance stuff on TV; I just don’t care that much. These classes are something we’ve wanted to do for a long time, and it really takes us out of our comfort zones.
We really are having fun. The first lesson – not so much. It is hard work! It doesn’t come naturally, it comes with PRACTICE! Lots of PRACTICE! It’s like fencing lessons, or horseback riding, or karate, or gymnastics – After a while, your body knows what to do, but at the beginning, it can be a little excruciating. As for AdventureMan and I, we mess up a lot, but we laugh a lot too. We are getting better, but best of all we are having a lot of fun. These kinds of things rewire your brains; it may not be easy, but it is good for us.
And I am still laughing, thinking of AdventureMan not telling his friend that he was going dancing with his wife, LOL!
The Minority Prayer
I listen to National Public Radio in my car and in my project room. I finally figured out how to stream WUWF, my local station. Until today, unless I wanted to use my wind-up radio, I had to stream KUOW in Seattle, or NPR which I like because it has so much BBC.
I am really delighted to figure out how to stream WUWF, because it has a lot of local news and events I might miss streaming one of the other stations, and I also like hearing who the sponsors are, so I can tell them how much I enjoy National Public Radio.
So today I am listening to Talk of the Nations, a segment on Pakistani-Americans, and this particularly articulate young lawyer mentions ‘the Minority Prayer.
Do you know what that is? I didn’t. But I laughed when he explained it, because we have prayed it so often living overseas . . .
He was talking about when attending a Muslim-American Lawyers National meeting, and how the buzz spread that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, and how they all sent up a quick minority prayer – “Please, Lord, don’t let it be Pakistan where he was found” – and of course, it was Pakistan. He was very wry, and I enjoyed listening to what he had to say. At the same time, I was grinning. I cannot count the number of times we have heard rumors – in Germany, in Kuwait, in Qatar, in Tunisia, in Jordan – and prayed . . . “Please Lord, don’t let it be the USA who did this . . . ”
It’s very much an expat’s prayer.
If you want to listen to the interview yourself, you can find it here.
AdventureMan’s New Adventure: Cinco de Mayo
When he ‘retired,’ AdventureMan chose Thursdays as his day to cook. It’s worked out well. Recently, he has perfected Naan, baked on our grill. We’ve had it several times – it just tastes so good, fresh off the grill, and he bastes it with either olive oil and garlic, or olive oil and sesame seeds. Oh, yummmmmm.
“I’m feeling stressed,” he admitted yesterday morning. “It’s my day to cook and I don’t have any ideas.”
“It’s also Cinco de Mayo,” I said, and that was all I had to say, he was off and running.
All I can say is BRAVO. BRAVO, AdventureMan, Cinco de Mayo was a taste treat. They were fabulous.
He found his recipe on AllRecipes.com, and made it pretty much just as they said to make it, serving it with a small bowl of home-made pico de gallo and a small bowl of sour cream. Oh YUMMMM. This is the recipe he used:
Pico de Gallo Chicken Quesadillas
By: Tony Cortez
Ingredients
2 tomatoes, diced
1 onion, finely chopped
2 limes, juiced
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and minced
salt and pepper to taste
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
2 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves – cut into strips
1/2 onion, thinly sliced
1 green bell pepper, thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced
4 (12 inch) flour tortillas
1 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese
1/4 cup sour cream, for topping
Directions
In a small bowl, combine tomatoes, onion, lime juice, cilantro, jalapeno, salt and pepper. Set aside. (This is the pico de gallo)
In a large skillet, heat 1 tablespoon olive oil. Add chicken and saute until cooked through and juices run clear. Remove chicken from skillet and set aside.
Put the remaining 1 tablespoon of olive oil in the hot skillet and saute the sliced onion and green pepper until tender. Stir in the minced garlic and saute until the aroma is strong. Mix in half of the pico de gallo and chicken breast meat. Set aside; keep warm.
In a heavy skillet, heat one flour tortilla. Spread 1/4 cup shredded cheese on the tortilla and top with 1/2 the chicken mixture. Sprinkle another 1/4 cup cheese over the chicken and top with another tortilla. When bottom tortilla is lightly brown and cheese has started to melt, flip quesadilla and cook on the opposite side. Remove quesadilla from skillet and cut into quarters.
Repeat with remaining ingredients. Serve quesadillas with sour cream and remaining pico de gallo.
I’ve never seen him so happy as he has been the last couple months.
Recent Comments
ExpatAlien on What Country am I Living … intlxpatr on Yellowstone: Old Faithful to C… Michelle on Yellowstone: Old Faithful to C… Cathy on No Grown-Ups in Charge intlxpatr on Waiting for Snow Wikipedia Donate Button
Amazina
Early Voting in Florida
Here There and Everywhere 