Snowbirds, part one.
DAY ONE
Thursday, February 6th
Woke up to a couple inches of snow as the sky began to sleet and then became snow again--an annoying reminder of one of the many reasons we were getting the fuck out of the northeast. I got up real early and shoveled before positioning the car in front of the camper so it’d be ready to hook up right away. I also tried the new wiring out to make sure the lights worked--they did! The morning was spent piling all of our belongings into the car. It was pretty exciting to have so much space between the SUV, camper, and rooftop luggage. We still had put a lot of it inside the camper, but we didn’t have time to and the weather got in the way.
We received a really nice and warm bid farewell. Alyssa’s younger sister, Meg, wrote us the sweetest little letter goodbye that made us wanna cry. We were proud of her for becoming our lil’ baby vegan. And her father helped us so much with removing and folding up the giant tarp, but especially with backing out in the snow and slush. Camper trailers were really complicated when it came to backing up, we’d learned. It behaved like a snake and you basically had to do the opposite of what felt intuitive.
I drove through a lotta rain, fog, and dusty tree skeletons in Massachusetts and Connecticut. We skipped over Hartford because we couldn’t find parking. We stopped for gas and a Beyond sausage English muffin at a Dunkin’ since it was gonna be another three and a half hours before we got to food. I stole two pairs of their socks. Alyssa took over the wheel and I felt bad she got the scariest traffic of the day on the shittiest roads in the country during continual traffic slowdowns caused by simply being on the periphery of the infectious disease that is New York City.
We were suggested this vegan spot in Red Bank, NJ called Good Karma Cafe and were really looking forward to it, especially after a two and a half hour drive became a three and a half hour one. We called ahead and ordered pickup. We got the crispy baked buffalo tempeh wings and two sandwiches: the Asian Fusion BBQ Seitan (spicy shredded seitan smothered in homemade barbecue sauce, piled high on a toasted sesame roll with caramelized onions, pickled cucumber salad, fresh arugula, and sriracha aioli) and their signature Earth Burger (burger patty made of homemade tofu, sunflower seed, and brown rice baked until golden on a whole grain bun with mayo, romaine lettuce, sliced tomato, and red onion). We also had to grab a s’mores bar. Parking in their tiny, cramped lot was excellent practice for many other tricky situations in the future, and the inside of their cafe was even more cramped, to the point that I had no idea how it was legal to have people dining inside or how anyone there could tolerate it.
This food was really good, very fresh, mostly baked and therefore lower on oil, and made from scratch with whole foods. But goddamn were we pretty shocked and outraged that we got four wings for the $10 they cost. We got wings at every place we went to and were pretty used to them being overpriced and low-quantity, but this was a new low for us. Had we known it was four pieces of tempeh, a detail conveniently left out of the description in the menu, we wouldn’t have gotten them. Anyway, the food was still really good. It just never ceased to blow our minds that vegan places who used more whole food and homemade ingredients (and hence cheaper ingredients) wound up being the most expensive ones. It was so baffling to me that I messaged a restaurant for the first time ever, insisting a justification for the price of those wings
Was traveling through Red Bank and was suggested your place since my partner and I are longtime vegan travelers. The food was delicious, but I regret having not asked about the buffalo tempeh wings beforehand. They too were sooo good, but... four tempeh wings for $10? Our minds were blown.
I know vegans are oftentimes more financially comfortable, and we’ll too often accept whatever prices are thrown at us because we’re just unhappily used to it. But damn, this was especially egregious. I mean no disrespect, I just genuinely needed to message and ask for this outlandish price for such a small quantity of food whose core ingredient is among the cheapest meat alternatives to be explained to me. Is there something I’m missing that justifies four wings for $10?
I don’t want to think it’s intentional that it isn’t included, but I would suggest stating how many pieces the wings come with on the menu. Even my low expectations never would have anticipated four wings for $10, which is why I didn’t ask, but upon receiving it (we got takeout and didn’t open it until we got to our hotel) I immediately knew I wouldn’t have ordered it had I known.
... but received a commercial about their food being organic and made from scratch in response...
Sorry to disappoint you. We make all of our food from scratch and use almost 100% organic ingredients. To be honest with the cost of rent, payroll, insurance and food cost it’s almost impossible to run a small business these days!
Our profit margins are low because we choose to make real food from scratch and not cut corners.
It’s not our intention to gouge our customers. We feel blessed to do what we love and create jobs and serve delicious food made with love and intention to our community. Thanks for the feedback back.
Sorry you weren’t pleased with your experience. Enjoy your stay 😎🙏🏽
Maybe I was just an asshole, I dunno. I just knew that each wing cost, like, a dime to make.
Since we weren’t in camper-friendly weather just yet, we opted for a hotel. We ate all the food on our bed. I hoped it would be less gross tomorrow as we'd check out some Kevin Smith spots in Red Bank before heading to Philly. Regardless, we were both so excited to be far away from Manchester!
Found a can of the notorious punk water tallboy designed to look like some sorta tough craft beer, in some random gas station in Manchester. It sure did taste like water!
The little letter from Megan, which made us all weepy. It even included some money!
Overpriced vegan food in a hotel bed! Starting off the trip like yuppies!
DAY TWO
Friday, February 7th
Fell asleep to Shark Tank, woke up to loud men on the TV talking about the stock market. The rain had died outside, but it was still pretty nippy with sudden and unexpected bursts of powerful winds. The stupid hotel made us give them a deposit of $50 for incidentals, so we had to officially check out and wait for the guy at the desk to get clearance from a cleaning lady to give it back to us. It was a comfortable night’s sleep, though, and we technically survived our first day on the road. No one tried to rob our camper! We drove down the road to a Staples so Alyssa could get some prints made. The heavy winds and rain came in short and powerful bursts. The electricity went out for a few seconds while we were inside.
We stopped in Red Bank, NJ specifically out of love for Kevin Smith, whose first couple of films are not just objectively significant in film history but also some of my favorites of all time. Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, and Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back were on constant replay in my early teens and stand up still today. Alyssa and I had recently watched them all in chronological order and we were both excited to go where the View Askewniverse was based.
We’d been wondering how hard it’d be to find parking within city limits with the camper. So far, in lots, I’d just wielded my arrogant power as the owner of a camper and parked across several spaces at once like a semi-truck. This time, we used satellite on Google Maps to better distinguish where parking lots and residential areas were and opted to park nearby on a block of houses. It was a relief to see how easy it could be if we weren’t staying somewhere too long.
We went to Jay & Silent Bob's Secret Stash, a comic book shop and small museum of sorts owned by Kevin Smith a block away from the vegan cafe with expensive tempeh wings we’d picked up from the night before. It was a sick comic shop in its own right, but we mostly loved seeing all of the props and mementos saved from his filmography: the real Buddy Christ statue from Dogma, framed drawings from Chasing Amy, a slab of fake flesh from Tusk, the original Silent Bob overcoat and hat. We just walked around and giggled a lot. I Dream of Jeannie played on a TV. There were loads of comics, but also a lot of merch from his filmography, including obscure references like Zippo lighters with the Nails logo or copies of the dealer union membership cards from Strikes Back. It was all so cool.
From there, we headed a half hour to a small town called Leonardo to visit the Quick Stop convenience store that was the primary setting of Clerks, which still stood virtually unchanged on the outside. Kevin Smith actually worked there while filming it, only able to shoot at night after closing. The shutters being glued shut was to excuse why no light was coming in from the outside during the scenes. Clerks was one of my favorite comedies and a triumph in the world of independent film. Shot for only $27,575, it wound up making $3 million, despite being a dialog-heavy, nerdy, crude, aimless, black and white slacker comedy about two lowly retail workers. Kevin Smith paid for it by selling much of his comic book collection, maxing out ten credit cards, using some of his college fund, spending insurance money from a car lost in a flood, and shooting it at the actual place he worked. He would work all day and then shoot all night. Inside was pretty different due to the addition of an e-cig/smoke supply section, and it was being manned by a humorless and likely unaware Indian man. Some bootleg shirts were for sale in the back.
The drive from there to Philadelphia took twice as long as it was supposed to. I thought having a long camper with a propane tank hooked to it would get people to back off more, but I learned that wasn’t the case; at least, not in Jersey. So we drove through three hours of sporadic rain, snow, and winds that felt like they’d flip the camper at any moment, along roads riddled with craters, as borderline suicidal commuters tested their luck around me.
When we got to Tia’s, we unhooked the camper. The plan was to just leave it sitting on her block until we left a few days later. I was a little worried it’d get tagged with graffiti or robbed, but there wasn’t much we could do to prevent that. We drove into Center City in hopes of eating dinner together at a vegetarian Chinese place called Su Xing, but after a half hour of maddening traffic and an unsuccessful hunt for a parking space we gave up and instead ate at Vegan Tree on South Street. Vegan Tree was the right choice, though: Golden Sushi (rice, vegan ham, carrot, and tofu), Golden Nuggets with sriracha aioli, Summer Rolls (tofu, ham, lettuce, rice noodle, carrots, and cucumbers with peanut sauce), the Vegan Tree Sandwich (soy patties, lettuce, cooked onion, yellow mustard, Asian barbecue sauce on whole wheat bread), and of course the obligatory strawberry smoothie bubble tea. The food there is so light and fresh, though, and thus only satisfies for a few hours before you feel like you haven’t eaten anything at all.
It was conveniently right up the street from the Theater of Living Arts where I was set to see a show at 8. As a birthday present to myself, I’d gotten a ticket to finally see Poppy live. My brother Kyle drove over four hours in a car that sounded like a jackhammer on the inside to join me. Both of us had developed an obsession over Poppy and the entire project. For me, she was one of the most exciting and interesting things to happen to music in such a long time, and the new album “I Disagree” was already one of the best albums of the year. Her progression over the years through nearly every art medium and genre had been endlessly fascinating to watch unfold and I was so proud of her for ditching that Titanic Sinclair creep. It was a very strange but lovely sold out crowd of weirdos, seemingly dispersed between mostly 13-year old girls and 30-year old men. She put on such a sick show, though I wished she would have spoke more and played some of the older stuff. The Poppy nu-metal cover of “All the Things She Said” by tATu was a nice surprise. At one point, she requested a circle pit, which the crowd obliged. I realized we’d eaten at Vegan Tree behind her bassist earlier.
Kyle hadn’t eaten in a while, so we went to Tattooed Mom for some food and to reflect on how great Poppy was. We met up later with Alyssa, Tia, and her partner Michael at Ritz East to see a screening of the 1977 Japanese film Hausu, which was one of the wildest cinematic rides that existed. Alyssa and Michael had never seen it before. I dozed off in my seat a little bit.
Back at Tia’s house, we stayed up into the morning, chatting. Midnight marked my birthday. What my age was was irrelevant and I’d decided I'd reject it. I decided I'd be 22 for another year, again.
The Secret Stash.
Yes.
Also yes.
The famous Quick Stop!
An urban wasteland by Tia's house, alongside which we parked our camper.
Yes.
Feast at Vegan Tree.
POPPY!
King Snuggles.
DAY THREE
Saturday, February 8th
We started our third day off with coffee and pastries at the almighty Grindcore House. I got a peppermint mocha latte and a huge Vegan Treats cinnamon bun. Tia later inspired me to get a whole wheat bagel with roasted red pepper cream cheese, seitan, and avocado. We hung out there for a bit.
Alyssa and I had plans (and tickets) to an historical walking tour of Philadelphia centered around all things morbid; specifically serial killers, disease, and death. My brother Kyle hadn’t gotten a ticket yet, and the Facebook page was no longer showing tickets for that day. He searched until he found a phone number to call, but was told they don’t sell tickets anywhere else but online, and that if he didn’t have one yet then he couldn’t get one. He was pretty bummed, but Alyssa and I saved the day by being the clever, stubborn little schemers that we were.
Upon ordering our tickets, Alyssa received a receipt with an order number and not much else. It didn’t have anything like to scan when we got there or anything, but it did say “2 walking tour”. So we started trying to see if we could quickly alter it to say 3. Of course, we totally could. We even found sites where you could upload a screenshot of a page and it would detect what fonts were being used on it. After figuring that out, we cut and pasted a 3 on and set out to Independence Hall where the tour was to meet.
When we got there, a man was standing by himself and there was no sign of a group anywhere. He asked us if we were looking for the walking tour. At first, I was thinking, ‘We’re fucked, we’re the only ones here, a quick headcount proves we’re lying...’ But when he asked for the ticket holder name, he didn’t even have one for Alyssa Gallagher to begin with. He asked her to send him the receipt and told us we could wait inside with the others. Next thing we knew, we were on the tour, with Kyle joining for free! Later that night, Alyssa would get two emails in a row: one thanking her for her order of three tickets and one for coming to the tour.
Our tour guide was named Ted and he was really hilarious and knowledgeable. He was apparently a social studies teacher as his day job with a particular love of Betsy Ross, but was also very much caught up in the world of true crime, even volunteering as part of the reenactments at the Lizzie Borden house in Massachusetts and regularly visiting his favorite cemeteries whenever he could. The weather was a little nippy, but not horrible, so the three-hour tour was pretty pleasant as we were told dark stories and trivia about Philly. The crowd was twenty or so people, all seemingly normie types and including a small bachelorette party.
As we walked from spot to spot, we heard the stories of serial killers like H.H. Holmes, Marie Noe, Gary Heidnik, Leonard Christopher (aka The Frankfort Slasher, though almost definitely wrongfully accused), Harrison “Marty” Graham, and Joseph Kallinger. We visited the gravesite of Benjamin Franklin and heard about the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 that killed thousands of people. We were given the really creepy, fucked-up origins of common sayings like “saved by the bell”, the modern funerary wake, and the western mythos of vampires. He spared us no graphic details and passersby just had to dash by as he said terrible things. We stopped by the Betsy Ross house and Elfreth’s Alley (one of the oldest continuously used streets in America) where other tourists wandered by in time to hear that Betsy was a “hot piece of ass” or that Gary Heidnik held multiple women tied up in his basement. The tour ended at an old, beautiful church, but I think a deal between the tour and the church required them to let some woman take a mic, recite boring history about the church, and not so subtly try to convince us to come to church. The tour ended at the bar where you got a free drink or whatever, so we split up by then and stopped at a small used book store with a shop cat named Dr. Pickles.
We hung out in the warmth of the Independence Hall where consumers consumed all around us. We had a few hours to kill before meeting up with some friends, so we walked over to the Reading Terminal Market for a snack. In trying to find somewhere gluten-free for my friend Kim, I came across a small vendor there called Fox & Son Fancy Corn Dogs who had a ton of great vegan options--namely three giant vegan corndogs for $10. I’d never really explored the Market before. A long time ago, I think I’d gone inside, but quickly turned around due to how crowded it was and how many dead animal parts were on display. We each got to eat a corndog and shared some banana funnel cake covered in powdered sugar. We ate at standing tables right across from a meat market where the ice was covered in and covering pools of blood and a full bag of viscera sat in plain sight because that sort of thing is totally normal and acceptable.
We were surprised to not see any tickets on our cars when we got back to them. We’d parked at a meter that was broken and told us to try the next nearest one, of which there were none in sight to our left or right. So we just took pictures of the situation for contesting a potential future ticket and went on our way. Four hours later and we were miraculously ticketless.
Another painstaking and maddening drive in circles around Center City proceeded as we looked for a parking spot. We had plans to meet up with an online friend named Kim and her partner LJ at a falafel place. They were smart and took an Uber. By the time we found one, the falafel place was not far from closing. Kim and LJ suggested Su Xing House, the vegetarian Chinese place we’d failed at going to the day before, which had more seating and was open until 11. We got food and wound up talking for several hours. I got the Szechuan soy nuggets and cheesy wontons. I was the only one who had met Kim before, and none of us had met her partner. She was XVX, he was vegan, both were activists. We talked about animal rights drama, local food, New Hampshire, intersectional veganism, graffiti, abandoned buildings, shoplifting. It was a really good time and I was thankful I decided to try and be social despite this trip largely being about isolating myself from the human race. They were both really nice people.
We picked Tia up from a dreadful day of comic book shop retail wage slavery and headed back to her place. We all stayed up real late, just chatting. I was overjoyed being surrounded by such wonderful people.
Obligatory Grindcore brunch.
Macabre Philly tour! That one picture is literally in the middle of him telling me I couldn't take video.
Dr. Pickles, bookstore cat. I watched him take a shit in a litter box.
This sticker made me so sad.
So much food from Fox & Son and Su Xing.
Me, Kim, LJ, and Alyssa!
Kyle, Snuggles, Michael, and Tia!
DAY FOUR
Sunday, February 9th
It was officially my birthday! The usual flood of comments from the people I interacted with the least commenced on Facebook. Since Tia was an integral part of the celebration of my birth and would be working all day, I didn’t make too heavy a plan. We started our day again at Grindcore House. I again got a peppermint mocha latte, giant Vegan Treats cinnamon roll, and a bagel. My friend Ian came and met up with us. He was a lot of fun to sit and chat with. After eating, he suggested we walk over to some of the nearby abandoned piers. None of us had been to them before, so we followed his lead.
It was a short walk and the weather was unusually nice. As we were crossing a busy street, we were just in time to witness hundreds of people young and old riding their bikes and completely congesting South Christopher Columbus Boulevard. All cars were powerless. It was a wild sight. A man filmed it with a wide-angle lens from the trunk of a car. I never could find any information as to how or why such a booming collective ride was organized.
The first pier was right off the Delaware River Trail and could be easily accessed by climbing over the wooden fence, walking down a very short dirt trail, and through a broken chain link fence. It was a large and empty pier, not yet reclaimed by native plants or submerged in the river. There was lots of good graffiti and someone had left behind some unopened cans of beer and a pair of keys. Ian destroyed the beers. Seagulls congregated at the very end and we watched some fight in mid-air over a single French fry. The next pier had become a peninsula of nature and collapsed sinkholes. A man was sleeping on a mattress at the end of it, so we gave him his space. It was so nice being outside, exploring, and catching tags. Ian went home after that.
My birthday dinner was had at The Nile Cafe, the first vegan spot 'd ever tried in Philly like ten years ago and to this day my favorite. Soul food was my favorite food, and this family-owned spot had been doing it for 26 years. In fact, they were the first 100% vegan restaurant in the area. I got the large combo platter with barbecue chicken, roast duck with gravy, collards, and cabbage, shared an order of three jerk drumsticks, and of course some cornbread. I had eaten more food (and oil) in Philly in four days than I had all month in Manchester and my stomach was pretty pissed about it.
We met up with Tia and her partner Michael at the new second Grindcore House location in West Philly just to check it out. They doubled as the storefront for a longtime local XVX bakery called Crust. I could hardly think of eating at that point, but got a lovely little butt sugar cookie for fun. They were thankfully listening to indie new wave music like Cold Cave instead of grindcore. The seats we sat at were covered in band t-shirts.
We all spent another night hanging out in the living room with the cats. All in all, a pretty successful birthday.
Someone left this classic punk record at the little radical library at Grindcore.
A million people on bikes for some reason.
Exploring abandoned piers with Ian!
Bark!
Soul food for the soulless white kids on my birthday!
Sugar butt cookie from Crust.
I love these zines so so so much.
DAY FIVE
Monday, February 10th
We woke up to gloomy skies and rain, but wanted to get outside no matter the moisture. I supposed it was an appropriate setting for the first part of the day. Inspired by the serial killer and death walking tour we’d gone on, we went out in the rain and hunted for two hidden H.H. Holmes landmarks.
While most people knew Holmes as America’s “first serial killer” and about his “Murder Castle” in Chicago where he killed the bulk of his confessed 27 murders, most were unaware that he moved to Philadelphia, where he would ultimately be arrested, confess to his many murders, and be executed by hanging. It was after police began showing up at the “hotel” he owned and ran, questioning him on the several missing people whose last known whereabouts were his inn, that it wound up suspiciously but conveniently burnt down. He fled the city and wound up in Philadelphia with his partner in crime, a man named Benjamin Pitezel who agreed to fake his own death in an elaborate scheme to receive and share a large life insurance payout. In the end, Holmes actually killed Benjamin by knocking him out with chloroform and pouring lighter fluid down his throat before setting him on fire, and days later killed his wife, who was in on the scam, and two kids.
It was ultimately insurance fraud and arson that got the cops’ attention, but they obviously found out about the murders soon thereafter. Holmes was tried before a judge for the murders at Moyamensing Prison and was also later executed there by being hung from an intentionally shorter rope so he would suffer more and die slower.
Moyamensing, whose name was derived by the indigenous Lenape word for “place of pigeon droppings”, was opened in 1835 and demolished in 1968. In its place was now an Acme supermarket I and others had dumpster dived and shoplifted from a lot, but unbeknownst to most customers and passersby, a corner of it in the back was a remaining wall from the original prison. We went and found it, though it obviously wasn’t all that exciting.
Worried graverobbers would try to steal his body, Holmes made sure he’d be entombed in concrete before being buried, and he was. The cemetery he was buried at was called Holy Cross and was in the outer Philly town of Yeadon. When he was buried there, they didn’t give him a grave stone or marker of any kind, and they allegedly wouldn’t even admit he was buried there. However, in 2017, his body was exhumed to dispel rumors that he had actually evaded execution. The concrete had preserved his body pretty well and it was proven to be him before being returned to the ground. We went looking for this unmarked grave of his using coordinates on FindAGrave. Thankfully, someone put a rock in the ground to mark it. We added an "HH" to it for future explorers.
Since Tia had worked all day the day before, I delayed my official ~birthday gathering~ until Monday. We didn’t really do anything too special, and the weather sucked all day, but I did get to spend it with Alyssa, Kyle, Tia, and Andrew, who drove over an hour from Lancaster with his trusty pup Skeletor to come hang out with me. Alyssa made me the precise cake I wanted (vanilla with strawberry icing), which was also 100% oil-free even though I’d probably drank an entire bottle of oil just during my brief time eating out in Philly at that point. She brought it out with lights off and lit candles in it and everything like a sweet, sweet dork. We all went out for pizza and wings at Blackbird. Andrew brought me a big bag of vegan snacks and, to our surprise, a solar power converter for our camper with four sizable panels and an incredibly user-friendly interface on the battery container!
And thus ended my four-day birthday and our final night in Philadelphia...
A corner of a prison where one of America's first and most notorious serial killers was tried and executed.
Finding H.H. Holmes's hidden gravesite.
A successful birthday full of pups, people, presents, pizza.
Ebo being beautiful, as always.
To be continued...
Thursday, February 6th
Woke up to a couple inches of snow as the sky began to sleet and then became snow again--an annoying reminder of one of the many reasons we were getting the fuck out of the northeast. I got up real early and shoveled before positioning the car in front of the camper so it’d be ready to hook up right away. I also tried the new wiring out to make sure the lights worked--they did! The morning was spent piling all of our belongings into the car. It was pretty exciting to have so much space between the SUV, camper, and rooftop luggage. We still had put a lot of it inside the camper, but we didn’t have time to and the weather got in the way.
We received a really nice and warm bid farewell. Alyssa’s younger sister, Meg, wrote us the sweetest little letter goodbye that made us wanna cry. We were proud of her for becoming our lil’ baby vegan. And her father helped us so much with removing and folding up the giant tarp, but especially with backing out in the snow and slush. Camper trailers were really complicated when it came to backing up, we’d learned. It behaved like a snake and you basically had to do the opposite of what felt intuitive.
I drove through a lotta rain, fog, and dusty tree skeletons in Massachusetts and Connecticut. We skipped over Hartford because we couldn’t find parking. We stopped for gas and a Beyond sausage English muffin at a Dunkin’ since it was gonna be another three and a half hours before we got to food. I stole two pairs of their socks. Alyssa took over the wheel and I felt bad she got the scariest traffic of the day on the shittiest roads in the country during continual traffic slowdowns caused by simply being on the periphery of the infectious disease that is New York City.
We were suggested this vegan spot in Red Bank, NJ called Good Karma Cafe and were really looking forward to it, especially after a two and a half hour drive became a three and a half hour one. We called ahead and ordered pickup. We got the crispy baked buffalo tempeh wings and two sandwiches: the Asian Fusion BBQ Seitan (spicy shredded seitan smothered in homemade barbecue sauce, piled high on a toasted sesame roll with caramelized onions, pickled cucumber salad, fresh arugula, and sriracha aioli) and their signature Earth Burger (burger patty made of homemade tofu, sunflower seed, and brown rice baked until golden on a whole grain bun with mayo, romaine lettuce, sliced tomato, and red onion). We also had to grab a s’mores bar. Parking in their tiny, cramped lot was excellent practice for many other tricky situations in the future, and the inside of their cafe was even more cramped, to the point that I had no idea how it was legal to have people dining inside or how anyone there could tolerate it.
This food was really good, very fresh, mostly baked and therefore lower on oil, and made from scratch with whole foods. But goddamn were we pretty shocked and outraged that we got four wings for the $10 they cost. We got wings at every place we went to and were pretty used to them being overpriced and low-quantity, but this was a new low for us. Had we known it was four pieces of tempeh, a detail conveniently left out of the description in the menu, we wouldn’t have gotten them. Anyway, the food was still really good. It just never ceased to blow our minds that vegan places who used more whole food and homemade ingredients (and hence cheaper ingredients) wound up being the most expensive ones. It was so baffling to me that I messaged a restaurant for the first time ever, insisting a justification for the price of those wings
Was traveling through Red Bank and was suggested your place since my partner and I are longtime vegan travelers. The food was delicious, but I regret having not asked about the buffalo tempeh wings beforehand. They too were sooo good, but... four tempeh wings for $10? Our minds were blown.
I know vegans are oftentimes more financially comfortable, and we’ll too often accept whatever prices are thrown at us because we’re just unhappily used to it. But damn, this was especially egregious. I mean no disrespect, I just genuinely needed to message and ask for this outlandish price for such a small quantity of food whose core ingredient is among the cheapest meat alternatives to be explained to me. Is there something I’m missing that justifies four wings for $10?
I don’t want to think it’s intentional that it isn’t included, but I would suggest stating how many pieces the wings come with on the menu. Even my low expectations never would have anticipated four wings for $10, which is why I didn’t ask, but upon receiving it (we got takeout and didn’t open it until we got to our hotel) I immediately knew I wouldn’t have ordered it had I known.
... but received a commercial about their food being organic and made from scratch in response...
Sorry to disappoint you. We make all of our food from scratch and use almost 100% organic ingredients. To be honest with the cost of rent, payroll, insurance and food cost it’s almost impossible to run a small business these days!
Our profit margins are low because we choose to make real food from scratch and not cut corners.
It’s not our intention to gouge our customers. We feel blessed to do what we love and create jobs and serve delicious food made with love and intention to our community. Thanks for the feedback back.
Sorry you weren’t pleased with your experience. Enjoy your stay 😎🙏🏽
Maybe I was just an asshole, I dunno. I just knew that each wing cost, like, a dime to make.
Since we weren’t in camper-friendly weather just yet, we opted for a hotel. We ate all the food on our bed. I hoped it would be less gross tomorrow as we'd check out some Kevin Smith spots in Red Bank before heading to Philly. Regardless, we were both so excited to be far away from Manchester!
Found a can of the notorious punk water tallboy designed to look like some sorta tough craft beer, in some random gas station in Manchester. It sure did taste like water!
The little letter from Megan, which made us all weepy. It even included some money!
Overpriced vegan food in a hotel bed! Starting off the trip like yuppies!
DAY TWO
Friday, February 7th
Fell asleep to Shark Tank, woke up to loud men on the TV talking about the stock market. The rain had died outside, but it was still pretty nippy with sudden and unexpected bursts of powerful winds. The stupid hotel made us give them a deposit of $50 for incidentals, so we had to officially check out and wait for the guy at the desk to get clearance from a cleaning lady to give it back to us. It was a comfortable night’s sleep, though, and we technically survived our first day on the road. No one tried to rob our camper! We drove down the road to a Staples so Alyssa could get some prints made. The heavy winds and rain came in short and powerful bursts. The electricity went out for a few seconds while we were inside.
We stopped in Red Bank, NJ specifically out of love for Kevin Smith, whose first couple of films are not just objectively significant in film history but also some of my favorites of all time. Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, and Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back were on constant replay in my early teens and stand up still today. Alyssa and I had recently watched them all in chronological order and we were both excited to go where the View Askewniverse was based.
We’d been wondering how hard it’d be to find parking within city limits with the camper. So far, in lots, I’d just wielded my arrogant power as the owner of a camper and parked across several spaces at once like a semi-truck. This time, we used satellite on Google Maps to better distinguish where parking lots and residential areas were and opted to park nearby on a block of houses. It was a relief to see how easy it could be if we weren’t staying somewhere too long.
We went to Jay & Silent Bob's Secret Stash, a comic book shop and small museum of sorts owned by Kevin Smith a block away from the vegan cafe with expensive tempeh wings we’d picked up from the night before. It was a sick comic shop in its own right, but we mostly loved seeing all of the props and mementos saved from his filmography: the real Buddy Christ statue from Dogma, framed drawings from Chasing Amy, a slab of fake flesh from Tusk, the original Silent Bob overcoat and hat. We just walked around and giggled a lot. I Dream of Jeannie played on a TV. There were loads of comics, but also a lot of merch from his filmography, including obscure references like Zippo lighters with the Nails logo or copies of the dealer union membership cards from Strikes Back. It was all so cool.
From there, we headed a half hour to a small town called Leonardo to visit the Quick Stop convenience store that was the primary setting of Clerks, which still stood virtually unchanged on the outside. Kevin Smith actually worked there while filming it, only able to shoot at night after closing. The shutters being glued shut was to excuse why no light was coming in from the outside during the scenes. Clerks was one of my favorite comedies and a triumph in the world of independent film. Shot for only $27,575, it wound up making $3 million, despite being a dialog-heavy, nerdy, crude, aimless, black and white slacker comedy about two lowly retail workers. Kevin Smith paid for it by selling much of his comic book collection, maxing out ten credit cards, using some of his college fund, spending insurance money from a car lost in a flood, and shooting it at the actual place he worked. He would work all day and then shoot all night. Inside was pretty different due to the addition of an e-cig/smoke supply section, and it was being manned by a humorless and likely unaware Indian man. Some bootleg shirts were for sale in the back.
The drive from there to Philadelphia took twice as long as it was supposed to. I thought having a long camper with a propane tank hooked to it would get people to back off more, but I learned that wasn’t the case; at least, not in Jersey. So we drove through three hours of sporadic rain, snow, and winds that felt like they’d flip the camper at any moment, along roads riddled with craters, as borderline suicidal commuters tested their luck around me.
When we got to Tia’s, we unhooked the camper. The plan was to just leave it sitting on her block until we left a few days later. I was a little worried it’d get tagged with graffiti or robbed, but there wasn’t much we could do to prevent that. We drove into Center City in hopes of eating dinner together at a vegetarian Chinese place called Su Xing, but after a half hour of maddening traffic and an unsuccessful hunt for a parking space we gave up and instead ate at Vegan Tree on South Street. Vegan Tree was the right choice, though: Golden Sushi (rice, vegan ham, carrot, and tofu), Golden Nuggets with sriracha aioli, Summer Rolls (tofu, ham, lettuce, rice noodle, carrots, and cucumbers with peanut sauce), the Vegan Tree Sandwich (soy patties, lettuce, cooked onion, yellow mustard, Asian barbecue sauce on whole wheat bread), and of course the obligatory strawberry smoothie bubble tea. The food there is so light and fresh, though, and thus only satisfies for a few hours before you feel like you haven’t eaten anything at all.
It was conveniently right up the street from the Theater of Living Arts where I was set to see a show at 8. As a birthday present to myself, I’d gotten a ticket to finally see Poppy live. My brother Kyle drove over four hours in a car that sounded like a jackhammer on the inside to join me. Both of us had developed an obsession over Poppy and the entire project. For me, she was one of the most exciting and interesting things to happen to music in such a long time, and the new album “I Disagree” was already one of the best albums of the year. Her progression over the years through nearly every art medium and genre had been endlessly fascinating to watch unfold and I was so proud of her for ditching that Titanic Sinclair creep. It was a very strange but lovely sold out crowd of weirdos, seemingly dispersed between mostly 13-year old girls and 30-year old men. She put on such a sick show, though I wished she would have spoke more and played some of the older stuff. The Poppy nu-metal cover of “All the Things She Said” by tATu was a nice surprise. At one point, she requested a circle pit, which the crowd obliged. I realized we’d eaten at Vegan Tree behind her bassist earlier.
Kyle hadn’t eaten in a while, so we went to Tattooed Mom for some food and to reflect on how great Poppy was. We met up later with Alyssa, Tia, and her partner Michael at Ritz East to see a screening of the 1977 Japanese film Hausu, which was one of the wildest cinematic rides that existed. Alyssa and Michael had never seen it before. I dozed off in my seat a little bit.
Back at Tia’s house, we stayed up into the morning, chatting. Midnight marked my birthday. What my age was was irrelevant and I’d decided I'd reject it. I decided I'd be 22 for another year, again.
The Secret Stash.
Yes.
Also yes.
The famous Quick Stop!
An urban wasteland by Tia's house, alongside which we parked our camper.
Yes.
Feast at Vegan Tree.
POPPY!
King Snuggles.
DAY THREE
Saturday, February 8th
We started our third day off with coffee and pastries at the almighty Grindcore House. I got a peppermint mocha latte and a huge Vegan Treats cinnamon bun. Tia later inspired me to get a whole wheat bagel with roasted red pepper cream cheese, seitan, and avocado. We hung out there for a bit.
Alyssa and I had plans (and tickets) to an historical walking tour of Philadelphia centered around all things morbid; specifically serial killers, disease, and death. My brother Kyle hadn’t gotten a ticket yet, and the Facebook page was no longer showing tickets for that day. He searched until he found a phone number to call, but was told they don’t sell tickets anywhere else but online, and that if he didn’t have one yet then he couldn’t get one. He was pretty bummed, but Alyssa and I saved the day by being the clever, stubborn little schemers that we were.
Upon ordering our tickets, Alyssa received a receipt with an order number and not much else. It didn’t have anything like to scan when we got there or anything, but it did say “2 walking tour”. So we started trying to see if we could quickly alter it to say 3. Of course, we totally could. We even found sites where you could upload a screenshot of a page and it would detect what fonts were being used on it. After figuring that out, we cut and pasted a 3 on and set out to Independence Hall where the tour was to meet.
When we got there, a man was standing by himself and there was no sign of a group anywhere. He asked us if we were looking for the walking tour. At first, I was thinking, ‘We’re fucked, we’re the only ones here, a quick headcount proves we’re lying...’ But when he asked for the ticket holder name, he didn’t even have one for Alyssa Gallagher to begin with. He asked her to send him the receipt and told us we could wait inside with the others. Next thing we knew, we were on the tour, with Kyle joining for free! Later that night, Alyssa would get two emails in a row: one thanking her for her order of three tickets and one for coming to the tour.
Our tour guide was named Ted and he was really hilarious and knowledgeable. He was apparently a social studies teacher as his day job with a particular love of Betsy Ross, but was also very much caught up in the world of true crime, even volunteering as part of the reenactments at the Lizzie Borden house in Massachusetts and regularly visiting his favorite cemeteries whenever he could. The weather was a little nippy, but not horrible, so the three-hour tour was pretty pleasant as we were told dark stories and trivia about Philly. The crowd was twenty or so people, all seemingly normie types and including a small bachelorette party.
As we walked from spot to spot, we heard the stories of serial killers like H.H. Holmes, Marie Noe, Gary Heidnik, Leonard Christopher (aka The Frankfort Slasher, though almost definitely wrongfully accused), Harrison “Marty” Graham, and Joseph Kallinger. We visited the gravesite of Benjamin Franklin and heard about the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 that killed thousands of people. We were given the really creepy, fucked-up origins of common sayings like “saved by the bell”, the modern funerary wake, and the western mythos of vampires. He spared us no graphic details and passersby just had to dash by as he said terrible things. We stopped by the Betsy Ross house and Elfreth’s Alley (one of the oldest continuously used streets in America) where other tourists wandered by in time to hear that Betsy was a “hot piece of ass” or that Gary Heidnik held multiple women tied up in his basement. The tour ended at an old, beautiful church, but I think a deal between the tour and the church required them to let some woman take a mic, recite boring history about the church, and not so subtly try to convince us to come to church. The tour ended at the bar where you got a free drink or whatever, so we split up by then and stopped at a small used book store with a shop cat named Dr. Pickles.
We hung out in the warmth of the Independence Hall where consumers consumed all around us. We had a few hours to kill before meeting up with some friends, so we walked over to the Reading Terminal Market for a snack. In trying to find somewhere gluten-free for my friend Kim, I came across a small vendor there called Fox & Son Fancy Corn Dogs who had a ton of great vegan options--namely three giant vegan corndogs for $10. I’d never really explored the Market before. A long time ago, I think I’d gone inside, but quickly turned around due to how crowded it was and how many dead animal parts were on display. We each got to eat a corndog and shared some banana funnel cake covered in powdered sugar. We ate at standing tables right across from a meat market where the ice was covered in and covering pools of blood and a full bag of viscera sat in plain sight because that sort of thing is totally normal and acceptable.
We were surprised to not see any tickets on our cars when we got back to them. We’d parked at a meter that was broken and told us to try the next nearest one, of which there were none in sight to our left or right. So we just took pictures of the situation for contesting a potential future ticket and went on our way. Four hours later and we were miraculously ticketless.
Another painstaking and maddening drive in circles around Center City proceeded as we looked for a parking spot. We had plans to meet up with an online friend named Kim and her partner LJ at a falafel place. They were smart and took an Uber. By the time we found one, the falafel place was not far from closing. Kim and LJ suggested Su Xing House, the vegetarian Chinese place we’d failed at going to the day before, which had more seating and was open until 11. We got food and wound up talking for several hours. I got the Szechuan soy nuggets and cheesy wontons. I was the only one who had met Kim before, and none of us had met her partner. She was XVX, he was vegan, both were activists. We talked about animal rights drama, local food, New Hampshire, intersectional veganism, graffiti, abandoned buildings, shoplifting. It was a really good time and I was thankful I decided to try and be social despite this trip largely being about isolating myself from the human race. They were both really nice people.
We picked Tia up from a dreadful day of comic book shop retail wage slavery and headed back to her place. We all stayed up real late, just chatting. I was overjoyed being surrounded by such wonderful people.
Obligatory Grindcore brunch.
Macabre Philly tour! That one picture is literally in the middle of him telling me I couldn't take video.
Dr. Pickles, bookstore cat. I watched him take a shit in a litter box.
This sticker made me so sad.
So much food from Fox & Son and Su Xing.
Me, Kim, LJ, and Alyssa!
Kyle, Snuggles, Michael, and Tia!
DAY FOUR
Sunday, February 9th
It was officially my birthday! The usual flood of comments from the people I interacted with the least commenced on Facebook. Since Tia was an integral part of the celebration of my birth and would be working all day, I didn’t make too heavy a plan. We started our day again at Grindcore House. I again got a peppermint mocha latte, giant Vegan Treats cinnamon roll, and a bagel. My friend Ian came and met up with us. He was a lot of fun to sit and chat with. After eating, he suggested we walk over to some of the nearby abandoned piers. None of us had been to them before, so we followed his lead.
It was a short walk and the weather was unusually nice. As we were crossing a busy street, we were just in time to witness hundreds of people young and old riding their bikes and completely congesting South Christopher Columbus Boulevard. All cars were powerless. It was a wild sight. A man filmed it with a wide-angle lens from the trunk of a car. I never could find any information as to how or why such a booming collective ride was organized.
The first pier was right off the Delaware River Trail and could be easily accessed by climbing over the wooden fence, walking down a very short dirt trail, and through a broken chain link fence. It was a large and empty pier, not yet reclaimed by native plants or submerged in the river. There was lots of good graffiti and someone had left behind some unopened cans of beer and a pair of keys. Ian destroyed the beers. Seagulls congregated at the very end and we watched some fight in mid-air over a single French fry. The next pier had become a peninsula of nature and collapsed sinkholes. A man was sleeping on a mattress at the end of it, so we gave him his space. It was so nice being outside, exploring, and catching tags. Ian went home after that.
My birthday dinner was had at The Nile Cafe, the first vegan spot 'd ever tried in Philly like ten years ago and to this day my favorite. Soul food was my favorite food, and this family-owned spot had been doing it for 26 years. In fact, they were the first 100% vegan restaurant in the area. I got the large combo platter with barbecue chicken, roast duck with gravy, collards, and cabbage, shared an order of three jerk drumsticks, and of course some cornbread. I had eaten more food (and oil) in Philly in four days than I had all month in Manchester and my stomach was pretty pissed about it.
We met up with Tia and her partner Michael at the new second Grindcore House location in West Philly just to check it out. They doubled as the storefront for a longtime local XVX bakery called Crust. I could hardly think of eating at that point, but got a lovely little butt sugar cookie for fun. They were thankfully listening to indie new wave music like Cold Cave instead of grindcore. The seats we sat at were covered in band t-shirts.
We all spent another night hanging out in the living room with the cats. All in all, a pretty successful birthday.
Someone left this classic punk record at the little radical library at Grindcore.
A million people on bikes for some reason.
Exploring abandoned piers with Ian!
Bark!
Soul food for the soulless white kids on my birthday!
Sugar butt cookie from Crust.
I love these zines so so so much.
DAY FIVE
Monday, February 10th
We woke up to gloomy skies and rain, but wanted to get outside no matter the moisture. I supposed it was an appropriate setting for the first part of the day. Inspired by the serial killer and death walking tour we’d gone on, we went out in the rain and hunted for two hidden H.H. Holmes landmarks.
While most people knew Holmes as America’s “first serial killer” and about his “Murder Castle” in Chicago where he killed the bulk of his confessed 27 murders, most were unaware that he moved to Philadelphia, where he would ultimately be arrested, confess to his many murders, and be executed by hanging. It was after police began showing up at the “hotel” he owned and ran, questioning him on the several missing people whose last known whereabouts were his inn, that it wound up suspiciously but conveniently burnt down. He fled the city and wound up in Philadelphia with his partner in crime, a man named Benjamin Pitezel who agreed to fake his own death in an elaborate scheme to receive and share a large life insurance payout. In the end, Holmes actually killed Benjamin by knocking him out with chloroform and pouring lighter fluid down his throat before setting him on fire, and days later killed his wife, who was in on the scam, and two kids.
It was ultimately insurance fraud and arson that got the cops’ attention, but they obviously found out about the murders soon thereafter. Holmes was tried before a judge for the murders at Moyamensing Prison and was also later executed there by being hung from an intentionally shorter rope so he would suffer more and die slower.
Moyamensing, whose name was derived by the indigenous Lenape word for “place of pigeon droppings”, was opened in 1835 and demolished in 1968. In its place was now an Acme supermarket I and others had dumpster dived and shoplifted from a lot, but unbeknownst to most customers and passersby, a corner of it in the back was a remaining wall from the original prison. We went and found it, though it obviously wasn’t all that exciting.
Worried graverobbers would try to steal his body, Holmes made sure he’d be entombed in concrete before being buried, and he was. The cemetery he was buried at was called Holy Cross and was in the outer Philly town of Yeadon. When he was buried there, they didn’t give him a grave stone or marker of any kind, and they allegedly wouldn’t even admit he was buried there. However, in 2017, his body was exhumed to dispel rumors that he had actually evaded execution. The concrete had preserved his body pretty well and it was proven to be him before being returned to the ground. We went looking for this unmarked grave of his using coordinates on FindAGrave. Thankfully, someone put a rock in the ground to mark it. We added an "HH" to it for future explorers.
Since Tia had worked all day the day before, I delayed my official ~birthday gathering~ until Monday. We didn’t really do anything too special, and the weather sucked all day, but I did get to spend it with Alyssa, Kyle, Tia, and Andrew, who drove over an hour from Lancaster with his trusty pup Skeletor to come hang out with me. Alyssa made me the precise cake I wanted (vanilla with strawberry icing), which was also 100% oil-free even though I’d probably drank an entire bottle of oil just during my brief time eating out in Philly at that point. She brought it out with lights off and lit candles in it and everything like a sweet, sweet dork. We all went out for pizza and wings at Blackbird. Andrew brought me a big bag of vegan snacks and, to our surprise, a solar power converter for our camper with four sizable panels and an incredibly user-friendly interface on the battery container!
And thus ended my four-day birthday and our final night in Philadelphia...
A corner of a prison where one of America's first and most notorious serial killers was tried and executed.
Finding H.H. Holmes's hidden gravesite.
A successful birthday full of pups, people, presents, pizza.
Ebo being beautiful, as always.
To be continued...