the last 24 hours

It's a big night in Prospect Heights, perhaps the biggest of the year. Tomorrow is the West Indian-American Day Parade which means that tonight is J'Ouvert (joo-VAY). J'Ouvert is the non-stop party that begins around 3am on Labor Day and goes until the parade's end around 6pm. The noise from the street below our apartment has died down considerably as most of the revelers have made their way over to the parade route on Eastern Parkway. A close friend and former neighbor of ours (who now lives in Toronto) arrived at our place about an hour after Deb's sisters had headed out of town. The three of us had dinner, then we stayed up talking and laughing until he went off into the wilds of Brooklyn for the borough's annual night of unmatched revelry.

Deb and I leave in just over 24 hours so we're staying in. She's exhausted from a weekend of stoop sales, bridal showers, and out-of-town visitors (to be fair, there was only one bridal shower, but since she also helped organize it, I'm counting it as two). I'm up typing because I haven't written an entry today and because I am still too excited to sleep. We have a lot to do tomorrow, but nothing that's make or break: little things, nuances of other, already completed things, plus laundry, and one final stoop sale. Perhaps people will stop at our stoop sale tomorrow because they saw us on the TV:

http://www.ny1.com/content/ny1_living/travel/?r=9609797426

labored day

Another stoop sale, another day closer to lift-off; less successful than last week, but it is Labor Day weekend and maybe people bought all the good stuff last week. I have no idea what people want to buy and I'm still stunned that no one wants to buy a Pink Floyd album for $5. I tried to buy an album on itunes once and they wanted twice that. Some people look at me like I'm trying to sell them 8-tracks or 78s. Am I the last person in America who isn't illegally downloading music off the internet?

I thought about lowering the price to $4, but I'm not sure that's the problem. Plus, I already sell them for $4 to anyone who asks. So if I price them at $4, I'll only get $3. Maybe I should have taken economics in college. Or maybe I should have done what my good friend Justin did and sold my cd collection in 2005. One thing is certain, however, this travel blog has had far too many entries about the psychological subtleties of stoop sales.

second city of angels

Two of Deb's sisters have arrived from down south; the bride-to-be & the maid-of-honor-to-be. My stacks of uploaded/to be uploaded/and don't want to upload cds have been squirreled away until tomorrow's stoop sale and in its place—a three-woman, clockwork, assembly-line producing tiny gift boxes for this weekend's bridal shower. Pink flowers, pink-pattered wrapping paper, and pink ribbons all working together toward a common goal.

I've been asking my facebook friends for recommendations of stuff to do in a couple of the cities we'll be visiting next week: Chicago and Los Angeles. I received a lots of great responses about the Second City: Navy Pier, architecture tours, Nick's Bar and Italian Restaurant, a jazz club called the Green Mill, a pizza place called Dijiordanos, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The responses for the City of Angels were less than enthusiastic, only a couple suggestions including: botox, the Getty Museum, and driving around. I like the driving around tip the best. Maybe we could head to Van Nuys and visit the place of my birth. Or maybe not.

we must, we must increase our blog

I have been trying to write at least one blog entry per day. And although I didn't write a post yesterday, that is quite alright because nothing really interesting happened. Today we have more exciting plans: laundry, dishes, mail sorting, cleaning, and organizing more items for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow's stoop sales.

I expect that once we leave our apartment for JFK and actually start traveling, that this travel blog is going to start really getting good. So get ready for that. Until then, please enjoy more tidbits of homestead goings-on and my meandering philosophical musings.

abbreviated sale

Our brief stoop sale only lasted three hours but it netted us exactly $100. At this point every drip helps fill the bucket and even if we'd made $50, it would've been well worth our time. I'd been worried that our weekend stoop sale would be ill-attended since the city really clears our on Memorial and Labor Day weekends. What I failed to take into account, however, is that the city's biggest Labor Day parade, the West Indian-American Day Parade, ends only a few blocks away. So hopefully we'll get some happy, slightly tipsy post-parade foot traffic and plenty of nice folks just itching to buy my old cds.

Scott quartet

Deb stitched together this series of photos from our Saturday stoop sale. She is a master of the photoshop arts, a dream weaver spinning her Inceptionesque web to create this mosaic parallel universe Brooklyn populated by four Scotts.

Deb and I have been discussing our travel plans and fine tuning our plans for travel. We had never planned to check bags on this trip. We always travel light, so not bringing bags to check will be easy for us. But Deb is aiming higher and I am intrigued. Can we do it with just a backpack each? And I'm not talking about big hiking backpacks, I'm talking small enough to fit in the overhead compartment.

When I was in Europe long ago, I'd arrive in a new city and plop my big backpack into a train station locker so I could roam the city unburdened. Do airports even have storage lockers anymore? For that matter, do American train stations? I know train stations in movies have them; whenever there's a mysterious key it inevitably opens a locker in a train station. And inside of that locker is a duffel bag full of money, a severed limb, or a dirty bomb, the discovery of which drives the plot into the third act.

We'd just like a square box to store our clothes and toiletries for a few hours while we walk around the city. I think we're on our own.

every trip ends in Baltimore

With just over a week before we go, it's time to make a list. Actually, it's time to make a lot of lists. We've done pretty good so far because Deb and I work well as a team. We already received my passport back from the passport maker and it took even less time that we thought. When something like that occurs, part of me wonders if we even needed to pay the extra money to expedite it and laments the fact that we delayed our international destination by a week. Then a second part of me gets annoyed and tells the first part to shut the hell up and be thankful that we have both our passports in hand and will be free to travel abroad.

I recently got a phone call from my father letting my know that, when Deb and I are in Montana, he'll have some other visitors as well. My aunt and uncle will be making their way up to Big Sky Country and my sister will be there too. My little sister is a Master Sargeant in the Air Force, a veteran of two wars, and notoriously busy as her demanding job affords her little time off. I'm very happy that she's going to be there.

So after Deb and I fly into Seattle, we're renting a car and heading due east; and upon our arrival there'll be an impromptu family reunion. If I added up the time it's been since I've seen my father, my uncle, and my aunt, the total tops 50 years. America is a such an enormous country. This never would've happened if we were all Belgian.

At the end of our 30-day ticket our last flight will be New York-to-Baltimore. We are heading down there for the wedding of Deb's oldest sister; a wedding in which Deb is a bridesmaid. So included in our 30+ days of travel, we'll have two big family events in two unique corners of the country. It promises to be interesting—families always are. We are also looking forward to seeing glaciers and eating soft-shelled crab.

can I offer you five dollars?

Two full days of selling our stuff on the street and we are wealthier and wiser. Perhaps wealthy and wise are overstatements; but we do have many more monies to fund our impending trip and we know a lot more about what people are willing to pay for old dvds and cds. Apparently they're both available for pennies on the internet.

It's a strange thing to have a themed stoop sale and to try to give people a reason to buy your stuff, a reason beyond offering them something they want at a price they're willing to pay. To sell the sizzle and not steak, as Hank Hill might say. The end result had us enthusiastically listing our itinerary to everyone who asked and then solemnly watching as they slowly walked away empty-handed. One nice lady talked to us for quite a while, asked a ton of questions, then smiled broadly and offered us a third of our asking price on a dvd boxed-set.

I don't mean to sound bitter; I'm not. The stoop sales were a rousing success and no one who asked to hear our traveling tale was under any obligation to buy anything. Though after chatting with friendly folks about what a wonderful thing it was that we were doing and being offered the best of luck on our travels, it was sometimes surprising when those ebulliently supportive folks didn't spend a buck or two.

It was fun talking to random people all day, it was fun making deals, and it was fun trying to make those deals financially beneficial. My favorite customer was a middle-aged man who came by yesterday and bought two dvds and three cds at face value. Then he asked about my Ray Charles box-set and promptly paid the asking price. That box-set was the first gift Deb ever gave me on our first Valentine's Day together (my gift to her was the first thing we sold online and the subject of an earlier post).

Bringing in lots of three to five dollars sales really adds up over the course of a day. When a single customer spends $75, however, you think about what that particular sum of money will buy on the trip: a nice dinner in New Orleans, a motel room in Las Vegas, or an upgrade to a convertible in Seattle. The convertible was a travel tip from a friend of ours about how spending a little more money in the right places can improve a trip tremendously. So the more stuff we can sell in the next week, the more travel tips we can take, and the more upgrades we can afford to make.

it has been three day since my last blog

It has been a busy time. A trip to the doctor. Deb's birthday trip to The Cloisters, followed by sushi and lots of sake. A day of organizing and pricing for another stoop sale. And a day selling on the stoop. And three days without a blog entry. I will do better. I have to do better—36 people are counting on me.

A man came by with a camera booth contraption atop a makeshift wheelbarrow. The "Brooklyn Mobile YouTube Booth" I believe it may have been called, if I'm not mistaken. Deb and I recorded a video for a quarter. When the sale was over we counted up our day's receipts and went online to see our video. It came out backwards:

http://www.youtube.com/brooklynmobile#p/u/0/bAuxnzLQcuE

I think that it has to do with a mirror system the booth's proprietor must've used a mirror to bounce the image to the camera inside the booth. I suppose most people he films aren't holding signs bearing URLs. But if you are reading this blog now from deciphering the address from that video; then kudos to you! And despite the video being backwards, it's still a pretty damn good deal for two bits. That much dough once got you a shave and a haircut, now you need 50¢ just to buy plastic jewelry from the machine at the grocery store.

freddy's dead

Yesterday was our day of rest.

We tidied up the apartment and went to Target. On the way, we saw construction workers tearing down a building with a huge back-hoey thing wielding a pincher-claw that cut through a steel support beam like butter, bringing down an entire floor. In front of us was the empty space where Freddy's once stood.

Freddy's was the best bar in the neighborhood; an old school establishment where curiosities, trophy heads, framed photos, and statuary decorated the cluttered bar. The windows were lined with books and board games, and the bartenders possessed a potent mix of friendly and surly. When I used go down to watch the Mets playoff games I could also watch the avant-garde video art that played endlessly at the other end of the bar. Freddy's was almost the only bar in the neighborhood when I moved in 11 years ago. Now there are bars-a-plenty and many of the buildings between my apartment and Freddy's are being razed (via Eminent Domain http://www.expertlaw.com/library/real_estate/eminent_domain.html) to put up the new arena home for the Brookyn Nets.

And Freddy's dead.

I'm not much of a drinker, and neither is Deb. So that last time we were there was March 17th, 2008. I mention Freddy's here not because it's a bar, but because it's the type of place that we hope to discover on this trip. Places that are of where they are—that is: unique to, and a product of, their surroundings. Places that the locals not only frequent, but revere. They are hard to create and impossible to replace.

We're lucky then, I suppose, to be able to spy on the cities we intend to visit and mine for their local treasure online so that we can make the most of our short time in each place. It's hard to get a sense of a city in a day. Sometimes it's best not to try so hard. Just find a good place to start and then wander.