In early June I was inform ed that the job I loved and really wanted to stay in was being eliminated for me, through a series of events I was no longer going to be able to do the job I wanted to do on day shift and would be moved to the midnight shift. I was not pleased but would have to deal with it the best that I could.
Before the big change I would make 2 trips to visit some DDD places. The first came on June 1st and would take me to a place that when I saw it on DDD I knew I had to get there one way or another. I had always wanted to visit Huntington, West Virginia, especially after seeing the movie "We Are...Marshall", the tragic story of the Marshall football team killed in a plane crash in 1970. The main problem was getting to Huntington. As I researched it, it seemed like it was in the middle of nowhere but after further review I noticed it was about 40 miles west of Charleston, WV, so I caught a flight there and drove to Huntington. The place I really wanted to visit was "Hillbilly Hot Dogs" in the nearby town of Lesage along the banks of the Ohio River. This is probably one of the most unique places that DDD has visited. It looks from the outside as a very messy yard sale with stuff all over the place. The building consists of 2 old school buses with an old boat parked on top! The joint is run by Sharri and Sonny and is almost hard to describe. After ordering I met Sharri and we had a long conversation about the filming and that she and Sonny also travel around to try places, wow, a kindred spirit! She sang a song to me, now that was a first! The hot dogs were excellent and it made for one of the best visits I have ever had at a DDD place. For dinner I made another 40 mile trip west into Kentucky to a small town called Olive Hill. I can tell you that a GPS is a godsend for travelling in most cases, but in this case it was a curse. The GPS kept sending me to a wood covered field as the place I was looking for, after about an hour of driving around I just happened upon an old gas station that is the "Smoky Valley Truck Stop". I had the Roast Beef dinner and it was good and then got the special Coconut Cream Pie desert to take back with me. It was the featured desert on the DDD episode that made Guy exclaim about it's secret ingredient "THAT'S VODKA!!". The next day I visited Marshall University and got to see alot of the places that were featured in the movie, including the memorial fountain and the burial site of many of the players and the memorial headstone. For lunch I went to "Central City Cafe" a nice family run place. I did get the owner to sign the book he had cooked with Guy on the show and started his cooking career working on the railroads.
A few weeks later I went back to Disney in Florida as my buddy Tony was celebrating his 50th birthday at the parks. The day before Tony and his family arrived I made a quick trip from the Orlando area to Indian Rocks beach on the Gulf of Mexico west of Tampa to "Keegans Seafood Grille". On DDD Guy and the chef cooked Octopus, not the well known calamari but real Octopus! It was very interesting and tasty. When I presented my book for signing not only was it signed but they gave me a soup sampler plate for free! Now that was real nice!
Over the next few months I was trying to get used to a new shift and made a few driving trips in the Virginia and Maryland areas, some places I went I had already been to but needed to get the booked signed, a few were new visits. One place was in Norfolk and claims to be the inventor of the the ice cream cone, "Doumars" is a great place to get you ice cream fix. I also made another trip to the Baltimore area and went to the "Stoney Creek Inn". This place is in Pasadena, MD and almost within site of the Key Bridge and has, in my opinion the best crab cakes I have ever had, although Chuck-A-Mucks in Virginia is a close second. If you are in the Baltimore area go to the Stoney Creek Inn, they even will do a Crab Feast for you, with newspaper spread and all!
The summer was ending and my travelling was just begining!
No comments:
Post a Comment