CQ2 | Ed Murphy

If you asked a Spaniard about US (or South American, or Australian…) wines, you’d get pretty much the same reaction as if you’d asked an American about Spanish beers; they theoretically probably exist but why bother?

At my local grocer, though, Spain has been relegated to a district of Chile, apparently.

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Our dentist sends us a useless newsletter every so often (quarterly?) with gems like this, a set of code words to deceive your children, so in addition to being traumatized by a painful dental procedure they will also not trust you because you lied to them and they will always wonder who the hell Mr. Bumpy was.

It would be funnier if it wasn’t so creepy.

How is it that highways can have personalities?

The I-10  in California changes character as it goes east from ocean.  It’s a typical southern California multi-lane concrete freeway in Los Angeles that becomes  something out of a Mad Max movie in the Inland Empire, especially around the Colton rail yards.  By the time it reaches Yuciapa, it’s settled down again into a lanky western interstate.

No doubt that this personality can be defined by factors like traffic density, the physical landscape, the number of exits, development alongside the highway (either preceding it or because of it), and the condition of the actual road.  But the people driving on the road play a big part, too, in defining its character.

Whatever the cause, it never ceases to amaze me that a highway can have a personality.  Generalizing a bit, highways  in the IE are insane.

I thought that New Jersey, where I grew up, was the last word in traffic until I moved to Boston.  Even driving in Manhattan, which has a peculiar but clearly understood set of  driving protocols, was better than Boston.  Boston’s got bad, nasty, aggressive drivers and crummy roads.  Nothing worse than Boston.

Then I moved to the Inland Empire.

Rather than try to convince you by anecdote, see this report on road rage by the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership.  It’s out of date by now, but they measured deaths attributable to aggressive driving and the IE was the top-ranked metro area in the country.

It wasn’t even close; measured in deaths per 100,000 people, the Inland Empire scored 13.4 while second-ranked Tampa was at 9.5.  New York City (including northern NJ) was 36th, with a score of 2.6, and Boston was 37th with 2.1.  That is, drivers in the Inland Empire are six times more aggressive than Boston drivers.

More on the Basque country:

There’s an old beautiful rustic church,the ermita de San Adrián, located on a hillside outside of the town of Elorrio (near Durango).  “Ermita” literally means “hermitage,” so strictly translated it’s “Hadrian’s hermitage” but I think “the chapel of San Adrián” better captures the feel of this single-roomed church. Perhaps there were hermits associated with these little chapels that are so common in the Basque country, but I sort of doubt it.  A cluster of farmhouses might share an ermita, and today people visit them only on the feast day of the saint associated with the chapel.

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There’s an article in the Sunday (tomorrow’s) travel section of the New York Times by Sarah Wildman entitled “Basque Without Borders.” It’s a lovely article, a narrative of a short trip eating across the Basque country of northern Spain and southwestern France.

Coincidentally, I just returned from a similar short trip to the Basque country to visit my aunt in Bakio, a little seashore town outside of Bilbao.  She spends half the year there and I’ve been going there, on and off, my whole life (so far, as they add in Maine.)

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