Charmed Life
With information about every possible travel destination you could imagine visiting available in prodigious amounts on the Internet, it’s easy to plan an entire trip from your desk. Surfing among various sites will let you know where you should stay, where you should eat, what you should do—and what several hundred strangers have opined about it all. It’s so easy to formulate a plan and a checkoff list in your head—“gotta get a martini here, eat a croissant there, take a photo of that”—that sometimes it feels like the trip has actually already happened before you’ve even left your house, that the traveling is more like going through the motions than it is an adventure.
This can be particularly true for a magazine travel writer, who needs to be sure to see and do the most important/compelling/interesting/newsworthy things so as to be able to report on them. And it can be particularly true for a gal like myself, who once earned the title Bataan Death March Travel Planner after I treated a friend and myself to a forced march through Europe during college. “What, you’re tired of cathedrals? Too bad! We must see them ALL!”
Last weekend, my husband and I had the pleasure of traveling to the Northern Neck for a travel story for Style’s September issue. We stayed at a lovely inn, ate a great meal, visited a terrific museum and contributed to the local economy (i.e. shopping!). But all of these things I had read about prior to arriving and so, while they were enjoyable, they didn’t offer the thrill of discovery, that feeling of stumbling upon a jewel that only you know about (or at least you and a few others—not the major travel magazines and books).
Lucky for us, we listened to our innkeeper and stopped on the way back to Baltimore at a placed called “Something Different.” To call it a country store is to totally undersell the joint. Yes, it’s a country store in that you sit on crates and eat peanuts out of glass bottles and it is located in a tiny little crossroads called Pine Tree, Va. But it is perhaps better understood as the studio of Dan Gill, who calls himself an ethno-gastronomist. A former farmer who found he couldn’t make a living, Gill turned to cooking and cultural anthropology years ago and is still going strong. He’s the kind of guy who gets a question rattling around in his head, goes out looking for answers, then pens a treatise containing his discoveries and posts it on his Web site.
There were so many good things to eat, but my husband finally decided to get barbecued ribs and chicken with baked beans and hoecakes (out of this world delicious) and I settled on something known as “The Virginia Sandwich,” which is a smoked turkey and country ham salad immortalized in the book “American Sandwich.” Our mouths were stuffed with food when Dan Gill pulled up a chair to chat, but that was fine because we just wanted to listen, and, well, eat. Once he found out we were curious folks, he gave us samples of his cold cucumber soup (terrific), his barbecued tri-tip (ditto), and his premium ice-cream (outrageously good). I have never been a fan of butter pecan ice cream but Dan Gill’s made me a believer. All the while as we ate, he paged through a white plastic binder that contains his writings on everything from “Barbecue and Sex,” crab cakes and soda cracker pie, and something called The Magic of Umami. Based on Gill’s Umami writings, I bought a jar of kelp powder and plan to use it this fall in my soups. Certainly it tasted great in Gill’s She Crab soup, which we brought home in an insulated container along with some of his smoked salmon and a handful of his crab cakes. They were the perfect souvenirs from an unexpected and thus even more wonderful encounter.
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