winkys, wings and hop devils

Ah ... welcome to another edition of Vacations From Home my dear and dedicated blog readers! I went for a physical exam the other week and let me tell you it was not a lot of fun. I'm in good health and good spirits, but boy oh boy my indignity is less than intact! And...there's more tests in the future.... I'm thinking the Who had it right in their song...My Generation..."Hope I die before I get old..." Truthfully though, the alternative is not very appealing... So, I'll submit to pokes and probes as needed... I just wish the doctor would give me flowers when she's done.....

Winkys....A lovely word. I was introduced to "winky" a number of years ago by my sainted Home Vacation Team member, Janet, and let me tell you it's another slur on one's dignity! Winkys are those little white areas of your body that don't tan because layers of skin fold over it and the sun don't shine there.... Of course it's really not a horrible thing, but when you stand in the bathroom after you've allowed the sun to kiss your body all day, and you've got this little white streak going across your fat belly, you just feel, well, like you haven't tanned properly.... Time to put on a shirt.

Last week we tried to make our winkys blend into various parts of our body. This was the 3rd time we made it to the beach this summer; a new record for us. I think we were successful, but I'm not going to post any pictures for you to judge.

In any event the weather turned ugly in the afternoon, but we knew this would be the case and had left for Sandy Hook earlier in the day than usual. We got five hours of sunning in and the Winkys were defeated! We were back in Lambertville in time for happy hour at Triumph and drank Amarillo IPA's for just $3.00.

Saturday our dear friends Jill and Carl invited us to their house for an afternoon of lunch by the pool. We didn't even have to ask!!!!! Mooching at it's best. Of course we helped a bit with some weeding, ignoring their feeble protests. Sometimes you just have to give a little to get back a lot.
Your Home Vacation Team pulled out some weeds for ten minutes or so and then relaxed the rest of the afternoon. We were happy to give a little back to our dear friends and they were so very appreciative. Later on, when Carl and Jill left for their second home in Delaware, we lingered for awhile at the pool. We then raided their refrigerator.

After showering we headed over to the Victory Brewing Company's pub in Downingtown. http://www.victorybeer.com/ Over a number of tasty and strong hand pumped brews and while watching the Yankees defeat the hated Boston Red Sox for the third straight game we ate wings and had a spirited discussion over which is the best brew pub. Brew snobs that we were it did not take that long. There have been so many brew pubs to consider over the years. This was a good thing for we were able to linger over our beer. We first had Victory's signature brew, Hop Devil, off their hand pump. It was perfect. Served at room temperature, it was smooth and tasty and with a high alcohol content of 6.7% it was dangerous on an empty stomach. We had wings. We had a pretzel with some liquidfied cheese and mustard for dipping. I then had a very strong and flavorable Storm King Stout, also off a hand pump. It too was served at room temperature and was bold and complex and at a 9.1% alcohol content the two beers were sufficent enough to stop me in my tracks. As a nod to personal safety Janet chose a Donnybrook Stout served colder than the others and only 3.7%.

So, talking strictly beer, we selected Victory as our favorite destination. Perhaps the great distance we need to travel to reach the brewery influenced us, but they had at least 10 different beers we were interested in, plus with three on hand pumps (or cask conditioned) it was hard to choose. The Storm King Stout often gets a 100 rating and I've had dreams about the Hop Devil on hand pump with its oh so delectable smoothness! Other places we've visited either don't have the uniqueness of Victory, like Rock Bottom in the King of Prussia mall which is a countrywide chain, or fail to have enough different beers for our liking. Triumph in New Hope (also in Philadelphia and Princeton) http://www.triumphbrew.com/ is a great place, but usually they have 5 beers total with only one that we're interested in drinking. The Ship Inn in Milford, NJ www.shipinn.com/ is enchanting and a joy to find and their ESB and the cask conditioned Best Bitter are refreshing, but there's never much beyond that we enjoy. We certainly enjoyed our trip to Dogfish Head in Rehobeth Beach last month http://www.dogfish.com/ and Janet has acquired a taste for all I.P.A.'s. They offer a good number of beers too, so perhaps if we lived in Delaware Victory would lose.

Our love of craft beers has gotten so discerning that we avoid regular gin mills. We would often frequent say, the Inn of the Hawke in Lambertville, but haven't done that in months. And, we look forward to the Chili Cook-Off at the Winter Festival so we could drink vast amounts of River Horse brew. http://www.riverhorse.com/ River Horse does not have a pub, but offers their beer to several events in the Lambertville area, like the Shad Fest, usually held the last weekend in April and the Octoberfest held, well, in October.

Sunday we bit the bullet and dodged the rain and drove up to Bethlehem, PA to attend Musikest www.musikfest.org/ It was the final day of the festival that had started on July 31st. It is an incredible event with stages everywhere and such varied music that there is something appealing somewhere. Except for the headliners, all the music was free. Sunday Crosby, Still and Nash were set to perform, but this is all about having an inexpensive fun time. We purchased a Musikfest mug and walked around and past all the stages with odd Germanic names ending in "platz". At the Volksplatz we listened to a zydeco-type group out of Baltimore called The Crawdaddies. I caught for Janet a string of beads tossed into the crowd by the lead singer. At Liederplatz we listened to a folk group called Girls, Guns and Glory. We stuck our head Festplatz to ogle people dancing to polka music and we briefly lingered at a Hip Hop group performing at some platz or another. There was music in the streets. On Main Street there was a stage for folk music and street performers juggled flames and walked slack ropes. We quickly discovered that once you buy your huge mug, several places in town would fill it at a nominal cost. We stopped drinking Molson and sampled beers at the Bethlehem Brew Works on the corner of Broad and Main. Several times we said this event was done right. There were a lot of people, even with the sporadic rain that was torrential sometimes, but everything was calm and pleasant. Perhaps it was the mainly folksy music being offered today that had a calm effect on the crowd. Perhaps it was the beer people were able to tote around and drink that helped. Whatever it was, I think we'll be looking forward to Musikfest 2010. We ended our day at the Musikfest with a performance by an Australian group called Women In Docs. They have the typical big voice sound made popular by Missy Higgins, but with a fiddle player that quite literally enchanted the crowd with his play.

Incredibly Musikfest runs for 9 days and goes as late as 11 p.m. each night. Martin guitars is located in town, so I guess that has an impact on the event. Sadly it was the last day for Musikfest. I had never heard of it before, and yet the event has been going on since 1984. As I look at the website myself I see there's a number of shows I wished I could have attended this year. The surfer music band, Los Straitjackets, is one, Polka Family Band is another. CSN would have been nice, as well as Yes and the B52s.

It was a busy weekend of Home Vacationing. If we keep up this pace, we're going to need a real vacation.