Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay - Smitty's Clam Bar, Somers Point, NJ

A ten-minute drive from the tourist traps along the Jersey shore boardwalks, Somers Point, a sleepy and oft-overlooked marina village on the bay, is home to one of the greatest seafood dives on the East Coast - Smitty’s Clam Bar. While it might seem obvious that you can get great seafood near the coast, palatable dining on the Jersey shore is surprisingly hard to come by. Restaurants seem to come and go with each summer season, aside from a few classics that withstand the yearly ebb and flow of visitors. Throughout most of my childhood, my family spent many steamy summer nights at Smitty’s, filling up on fresh fish and fried clams on our way from Atlantic City to ride the rides at Wonderland Pier in Ocean City.

Smitty’s is universally beloved by a loyal following of diners. Come Memorial Day, chowderheads line up snarling to fight for first-come bar seating or brave the hour-long wait for a table inside, pacifying their children with cartons of french fries. The food is just that good. Arriving just before Memorial Day, we luckily missed the sideshow.

We each ordered a cup of the red clam chowder, served spilling over the side with a packet of saltines. The tomato stock is rich, and well-seasoned, thick with potatoes, carrots and giant, meaty pieces of clam. For addicts, Smitty’s sells quarts of the stuff that you can take home, freeze, and eat in the dead of winter when you’re aching for summer.

The tuna.

The fish is gratuitously sauced in simple elements like garlic, lemon, and olive oil. It’s broiled in a ceramic dish which gives the fish the ultimate balance of a crispy exterior and delicate inside. We picked the mako shark and the tuna, both sizzling in a soy, ginger, and wasabi blend. It’s a powerful feeling to consume something with the capability of eating you. The food is not about revisionism, it’s about freshness and flavor, the way great seafood should be.

The mako shark.

The elderly couple that sat down next to us were clearly regulars, greeted with everything short of a kiss from the entire staff. Their adorable waitress knew their order by heart, including the gentleman’s birch beer. It’s Cheers in real life, for the Jersey shore set.

The place is not by any means fancy, with plastic chairs, specials scribbled on a white board, and their menus designed in crayon by the youngest patrons. But sitting dockside, twenty feet from where your dinner was plucked, makes for one of the most authentic dining experiences on Earth.

God Save The Village Green - New Castle, DE

I hope our friend Caitlin – an alum of the University of Delaware – is not too righteously offended by this, but neither of us had lofty hopes for the state of Delaware. We went into it knowing three things about it:

1.)   It was the first colony to become a state.

2.)   It is very tiny.

3.)   Joe Biden is from there.

The only big thing about Delaware known in most of popular culture is this scene from Wayne’s World:

Somebody tell their board of tourism this, but our moderately low expectations were exceeded ten times over. Aside from a quick jaunt through Wilmington, which was just another Mid-Atlantic shithole, we were delighted to find several towns that time forgot. The first we visited was New Castle, just six miles south of Wilmington. New Castle looks like it hasn’t changed since the late 18th Century, complete with an English-style village green. At the north end of the village green is an Episcopalian church from the 1700’s. In describing it to a friend, I said it was like the town is a giant Kinks song, a quaint village with a deep reverence toward its past.

One of the main drags in New Castle.

In the present day, cities have their own ethnic enclaves, where the spirit of “back home” manifests itself in the architecture, the signage, and the types of stores in the neighborhood. Currently, there are a large number of immigrants from Africa, South Asia, and South America coming into the United States, all of them bringing their cultural heritage and artifacts as the latest ingredients in our cultural stew. Before that, it was my great-grandfather coming by way of Sicily and Alexa’s great-grandparents coming from Warsaw, Poland. At the same time, there was a massive wave of Chinese immigrants. Before that, it was the Irish (including the ancestors of my maternal grandfather). In a weird way, New Castle is the British take on the ethnic neighborhood, like Wee Britain from Arrested Development, only real.

The Episcopalian church on the green.

There have been some criticisms about Williamsburg, Virginia, for replicating (rather than restoring) all of the old homes from colonial times; New Castle, by contrast, is the real deal. The gorgeous homes here have been treated with the utmost care, with friendly locals out tending to their gardens and saying hello to passersby. There were also more people on bicycles than there were automobiles. As a low-key and comparatively small town, it seems to attract dedicated followers rather than gaggles of waddling visor-wearers fresh off of a tour bus.

New Castle marked a great start for our trip through Delaware, which included stops in Dover (the only state capital that looks like a college campus), Rehoboth Beach (the only East Coast beach town we visited that had not been overtaken by neon-lit consumerism), and Lewes, which itself was another town that time forgot, albeit with a pronounced maritime flavor.

We also saw this.

What's New In Baltimore? - Baltimore, MD

Baltimore is a rough city to navigate, with its downtown overrun by impoverished and dangerous neighborhoods and drivers who possess about as much value for human life as a drone strike. It seems to be one of those cities where every few years someone starts a rumor that it’s on the rise and cool things are happening, but that generally just means they finally got a Crate & Barrel and there weren’t any homicides in the gentrified (read: white) neighborhoods.

We began the afternoon in what we now believe might be Baltimore’s only livable neighborhood, made popular by Baltimore’s flashiest son John Waters and his attraction to several of its book and record stores. Even the hip area seemed to attract a strange crowd of derelict meth-heads, the types one would be inclined to see manning the water-gun game at the county fair, instead roaming the streets in the middle of the day. The neighborhood, while an oasis, was still nothing out of the ordinary. An overpriced vintage shop here, a record store there, a tattoo parlor around the corner, and plenty of yoga studios.

When we attempted to visit Billie Holiday’s former residence, we were averted after realizing it was now a housing project in a neighborhood where we didn’t even feel safe inside our car. From the street, there was no indication that the building was of any historical or cultural significance - no sign, no plaque - so we just kept driving.

We paid our respects to Edgar Allan Poe, whose grave still garners flowers and love notes 164 years after his death. Buried just inside the entrance to the cemetery, next to his bride Virginia Clemm, what was once a quiet graveyard is now surrounded by the stench of diesel exhaust, the wailing of sirens at the nearby medical center, and all sunlight blocked by the towering office buildings. It seems something of a dishonor for the American master of horror, suspense, and all things gothic, but at the time of his death, the church was the centerpiece of the city, which itself was built around it. We circled through the surrounding graves, some dating back to the early 1700s, worn and weathered from the years. The cemetery ended up being our small moment of calm that day, edging out the noise of downtown, interrupted only when we spotted a bum napping on top of a headstone and decided it was time to leave.

We followed signs for Poe’s Baltimore home only to discover that the building is now surrounded by housing projects and across the street from a vacant lot, the kind of place to dump off a body...or at least a duffel bag of spare parts. We chalked it up to another instance of incredibly poor city planning, but it still left us feeling like The Wire might actually be a more accurate representation of this sad city than any local government official would like to admit. Baltimore’s piss-poor job preserving and marketing what could be an immense source of tourism makes one wonder if the people running the city even care about drawing visitors, a nearly insane notion after visiting places like New Orleans and Williamsburg that thrive on it. The home of America’s first truly great writer, whose works defined an entire genre of literature, is smack in the center of the kind of neighborhood one can hear described in a Bobby Womack song.

Poe's Baltimore home.

Across the street from Poe's Baltimore home.

The Inner Harbor, Baltimore’s most well-known tourist destination, seemed more like a giant waterfront mall than something actually worthy of an entire afternoon. It is something we are noticing with an increased frequency that exists in cities such as this, where the token “place to go” is little more than a glorified shopping mall, the place where you can buy some artifact proving that yes, indeed, you did go to Baltimore and spent too much money on a stupid little lime green shirt illustrating that fact. We opted to avoid the hordes of Vacation Families™ and shot down to Annapolis to stuff our faces with crab, which seemed like a much better way to spend the evening.

Maybe everyone just has a different idea of what vacation is than we do. This is starting to become a problem.

American Royalty: Solomon's Castle, Ona, FL

For the average Florida tourist, the only castle on the peninsula belongs to Cinderella. Roughly a hundred miles from the calculated splendor of Disney World, off unpaved country roads, past a group of vultures snacking on a deer carcass, where cell reception goes black, is another palace, made entirely from repurposed junk.

To twist the old adage, one man’s trash is definitely still another man’s treasure - bringing us to Solomon’s Castle, one of the places that helped inspire the American Weirdness project back in the autumn of 2012.

Howard Solomon is the king of this castle, though he opts for a skipper’s hat rather than a crown. He moved to the central Florida property in 1972, having bought it on the cheap. With the first late-summer rains, Solomon realized he had scored a massive deal on acres of mosquito-infested swampland. He began construction on his regal residence that year, transforming the waterlogged acres into a recycled wonderland. It withstood hurricanes Charley, Jeanne, and Frances, which all tore through Ona, ripping out groves of old oak trees but leaving the castle unharmed. Now in his late 70’s, Solomon presides over a massive kingdom, one both unique and ever-expanding.

The castle features over 90 hand-made, stained-glass windows, depicting images of nursery rhymes, zodiac symbols, and the planets. The exterior panels are made of a holographic metal that changes colors in the sunlight. A black and white knight stand watch at either side of the entrance - Knight and Day.

While serving as a residence for Solomon and his wife, the castle is also a museum of his artwork, crafted entirely from found objects. He has used oil drums, beer cans, and failed appliances, even re-appropriating the cylinder of a Volkswagen Beetle into one of his sculptures. He made a menagerie of animals out of coat hangers, weighing nearly 50 pounds, and has crafted over 300 cars out of beer cans, the only project he says he doesn’t remember making. It took him over a year to gather the parts to create a steam engine that runs on a working Hoover vacuum motor. He made a carousel from old record players, complete with singing figurines in the style of “It’s a Small World After All.”

Our tour guide, a Vietnam War veteran, blessed with the quick rap of a vaudeville performer, took every opportunity to crack jokes about the sculptures and their pun-filled monikers. He stopped beside a six-foot-long metal Lion named Lionel, quipping “Lionel has two glass eyes and two steal balls.” The “Lorena Bobbitt” shotgun has a knife attached, to keep fidelity in check, and the “Mother-in-Law” clock, which runs backwards with the three on the left and the nine on the right.

Between 1990 and 1994, Solomon built the Boat in the Moat, called the Santa Maria, a restaurant run by Princess Solomon and her husband that serves country-style lunch fare. Two years ago, Solomon created the Alashmo, his version of the Alamo, right next door to his daughters home, which he also built himself, a deep brown stucco structure called The Chocolate House.

Remember the Alashmo. 

Lunch like a pirate.

King Solomon is never far from his castle, greeting visitors with a lissome grin and taking their tickets. It took a few minutes for us to even realize that he was the Solomon of Solomon’s Castle, taking a Saturday off from his workshop on the premises to man the register.

Solomon’s Castle is one of the most interesting pieces of living art in the cultural wasteland of Florida, made by a true, original Dadaist. If you’re not in love with paying $100 for the screaming, vomiting experience of Disney World to stand inside a castle, drive the 90 minutes to Ona to visit one created by a real artist for a mere $10.

Despite his age, Solomon assured that he plans to keep expanding and creating so long as he’s able.

“Some day,” he said. “The castle will be my kids problem.”