Friday, October 11, 2024

Highway Hot Dogs in Athens, Pupusas in Hudson, and the Wokest Street in America


Coxsackie to Hudson to Athens – 7 nautical miles and 14,000 steps

The hurricane season has been heating up and causing all sorts of chaos in the Caribbean and US. Everyone had been laughing at the weather forecasters who predicted a brutal hurricane season this year, but only a few storms had occurred. The end of September brought a little more action and now it seems there’s a new one brewing every few days. We are well outside of the regularly affected range of hurricanes but are sticking to a slower pace as we’ve heard a lot of boats are backing up in New York City waiting for these hurricanes to pass before they continue south. We are okay taking it slow for now as we are really enjoying exploring these new towns, getting used to the tides and currents, hanging out with our new friends, making great meals, daily cocktail hour, and taking advantage of all the free or cheap docks we’ve been able to find. The free options are going to dry up the closer to NYC, then after that it will be all anchoring, which is sure to bring its own challenges.

 

We left Coxsackie around 9:30 on an outgoing tide and most of the seven miles were spent dodging massive freighters and barges moving up and down the Hudson. Everybody here communicates on channel 13 and I’ve found the vessel captains to be extremely helpful on the radio in planning out how to manage the channel and keep out of their way. We reached Hudson but the free public docks there were far too small for our boats so instead we continued across the river to the much smaller town of Athens where we found, once again, magnificent and free public docks. These ones had large “NO OVERNIGHT DOCKAGE” signs, but everything we read online said this was not enforced so we tied up SeaLight then caught Kate and Ben’s lines when they arrived.

 


Athens is a cute little town, but once again we didn’t find much open, and the whole place was eerily deserted, looking almost like a movie set shortly before the zombies start piling up and eating everybody’s brains. It didn’t help when we came across a rusted out Hearse parked behind a derelict house and in the back window of the Hearse was a paper cut out of Joe Biden. I did get a little excited when we found a flag outside a brewery with the lettering DEEP FRIED BEERS, but the damn place was closed so I didn’t get to try a deep fried beer. I might go back tomorrow.

At 11:30 a loud siren went off and lasted for 4 excruciating minutes. I started salivating like a Pavlovian dog, trained at one of the previous towns which had a noon siren, signifying lunch. We’ve noticed most of these small American towns have sirens – another one had two per day – the noon one, but also one at 5pm which meant go home. There was one in a different town that went off very early so I guess that one meant wake up. But at siren at 11:30 didn’t make any sense. So we went to the Town Hall to find the mayor and get some answers.

 

The mayor hadn’t turned up for work but we did find a clerk who told us their sirens were used to call in the volunteer fire force for emergencies like cats in trees or gas plant explosions.


“But when the siren went off nobody came running out of houses,” Ana said.

 

“Well, they are supposed to come,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “Wait, what time is it? Is it noon? They were probably going to the bakery first. It opens at noon.”

 

Bakery? We left immediately to investigate this new development.

 

As we walked back down the main street we saw a queue forming on the sidewalk and Kate got really excited – the most excited I’ve seen her yet. You see, Kate is English, and the English love nothing better than a good queue. It doesn’t even matter what they’re lining up for. If there’s a queue, there must be something at the end worth waiting for. We reached the queue and it was indeed the bakery with at least six people (presumed firefighters) waiting to buy bread. We didn’t need any bread and it took the strength of all three of us to pull Kate away from the queue as she was grasping onto a street sign, yelling and screaming for us to let her join the line, and we had her horizontal, pulling her by the legs. It was a little embarrassing.

 


To make her feel better we walked over to Stewart’s Shops, a gas station/eatery that seems very common in these parts. Ana, Ben, and I created a faux-queue by standing next to the hot dog roller and she jumped in line behind us, overcome with glee. I crafted a magnificent hot dog complete with ketchup, relish, and a bunch of steamy meat sauce while Ana and Ben went for a more basic version. Kate doesn’t dig on swine, so she ordered a waffle chicken sandwich, a very strange looking item and we all went outside, sat at the picnic tables, and enjoyed our highway lunch. Ana also picked up a big jug of fancy vanilla ice cream which we shared for dessert.

Back at the boats, Kate and Ben decided to hang back and do some boat jobs while Ana and I took the dinghy over to Hudson to see what that town had to offer. We slid the dinghy into the public dock, very excited to test out our new safety chain, then realized we have forgotten both the lock and the key, so had to do a quick return trip. The system is a super thick, ten foot long, bolt-cutter resistant chain with a big fat stainless steel lock which connects the motor and dinghy to anything solid - in this case a bow-roller bolted to the dock.

 


From here we walked quite far to the downtown area and reached the base of Warren Street and let me tell you, I have never seen anything quite like it. The street was arrow-straight and must have been at least a mile long, and on it was a never-ending sequence of fanciness. Art galleries, vintage clothing shops, fancy cafes, high end fashion stores, custom and vintage furniture shops, an opera house, a theatre, funky bookstores with Democrat-friendly titles, gourmet food boutiques, wine shops, hair stylists, and at the end was a Democrat campaign office. The trucks we’d gotten used to seeing everywhere else were replace with Tesla, Porsche, and Lexus vehicles. The people were either well dressed, or hippy’d up and there were plenty of same sex couples, all with beautiful teeth and classy footwear. The contrast with every other town we’d visited so far, with their Trump signs, beaten up downtowns, beaten up people, and deserted buildings was striking. And it made sense of the chaotic political situation we see in the US. It really is a tale of two realities.

Ana’s uncanny retail radar picked up a thrift shop and I found a super classy new shirt with snaps for seven buck plus a Richard Dawkins book on Athiesm, and a God book showing how quantum mechanic principles prove reincarnation, fifty cents each, sure to bring me fresh enlightenment. Ana struck out, but she gets a lot of joy just digging around in these places.

 


Ana found an Aldi store that was a mile or so away so we started walking and almost immediately came across a huge liquor superstore (where I bought a 1.75 litre bottle of Captain Morgan’s spiced rum for $37), then directly after that was an authentic Salvadorian pupusaria, where we enjoyed three delicious pupusas and made friends with the three sisters who owned the place and their kids who were running around causing trouble.

 


Aldi was a shopping extravaganza and we bought enough food to last us three weeks. An Uber picked us up, dashed us back to the dinghy which we loaded up with our bags, zipped back across the river to Athens, unloaded everything, then joined Kate and Ben for dinner at Stella’s Pizza, and came home with two days’ worth of leftovers.

That, my friends, is how you make a day feel like a week.

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