In early 2020, one month before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, I went to visit my aunt and cousin in New Jersey. Even though I was still traveling somewhat normally throughout the pandemic, due to my aunt’s old age, I opted not to visit again in 2021. However, with the pandemic under better control and all of us having been fully vaccinated and having received an additional booster dosage, I decided to make a visit again this year.

As you’re probably already familiar, for the sake of protecting their identities and helping them maintain their peaceful and private lifestyles, I don’t like to share photographs or information about my friends or family members unless they are already public figures. Because of this, I won’t be sharing any photos from my time with family (except for one, which you’ll see later), but I do have some photos of other stuff I did while I was in town.

 
Getting to New Jersey this time around was a bit difficult—my flight outbound from Los Angeles International Airport to Newark Liberty International Air­port was canceled due to “Winter Storm Landon.” I am putting that in quotation marks because the United States generally does not name winter storms, so I’m not even sure how this winter storm got a name, but I guess it deserves one if it made JetBlue cancel my flight.

I did end up getting as lucky as possible for someone with a canceled flight, though, because I was rebooked onto a different flight out of Los Angeles International Airport, but instead heading to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. It was obviously a bit more inconvenient, because I would have to drive a bit longer to get to northern New Jersey, and I would either have to pick between going through a toll bridge or driving through Manhattan (I ended up taking the toll bridge), but it only set me back by two hours, so I couldn’t complain that much.

In fact, this might have been a worthy trade-off. I don’t know what the passenger density situation was like in my original flight to Newark, but this flight was so sparsely populated that I was able to have an entire extra-legroom row to myself.

That made for a much more comfortable and private travel ex­perience, and it also meant I was able to get snacks and beverages from the JetBlue Pantry without needing to climb over anyone, while still having a win­dow seat to be able to take nice photos, like this one while flying over Colorado.

I obviously had to change my rental vehicle pick-up location, seeing as it was originally reserved in Newark and now I’m arriving in New Jersey. Al­though I had a guaranteed pickup truck reserved in Newark, when I transferred it over to New York City, I guess there wasn’t enough pickup truck availability, because they ended up putting me in a Volkswagen Jetta, a compact sedan.

Needless to say, that was a horrible experience, because the mirrors were so small that the vehicle had a ton of blind spots everywhere, and the height of the car was so short that it felt like everyone around me was just going to run right over me, and the engine was so weak that I felt like I could’ve sprint­ed faster than the car accelerated… but I survived.

 
During one of the days that I was on my own and wasn’t spending time with family, I met up with one of my friends who lives in the area. I was looking forward to going to Elements to try out their chef’s tasting menu, which is similar to the one I tried at Nonesuch in Oklahoma City… except apparently, Elements is closed on Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays right now—which happens to coincide perfectly with the days that I was free.

Instead, we went to Mistral, a restaurant right next door and owned by the same person. Although there was no tasting menu, there was still a nice se­lection of high-quality food options.

For our appetizer, we ordered beef tartare with cornichons, capers, and tarragon, topped with some potato chips. I usually like eating dishes with raw meat (like sushi, tartare, and blue rare steak), but this beef tartare was a bit too sour for my taste—the cornichons and capers completely overwhelmed any beef flavor that there was.

For my main entrée, I ordered a crispy whole black bass in mapo mushroom sauce topped with chilis, peanuts, and pea leaves. Although the name of the dish literally says “whole black bass” in it, for whatever reason, the true meaning of that didn’t register in my brain when I ordered it. Because of that, you can probably guess my utter appalment when the waiter brought out an entire crispy fish standing upright.

I had never eaten an entire fish like this before, and I had no idea what to do, so I asked the waiter for advice; he said that I can sort of just knock the fish over on its side and begin scraping away at it, being careful not to swallow any bones. This took a little over an hour for me to finish.

My friend decided to use both halves of her brain and ordered something much more reasonable–seared diver scallop with charred corn, peppadew pep­pers, queso fresco, and sorrel cream.

Although I would’ve preferred to have a dish that didn’t require more time to dig at it than it does to actually eat it, I’m honestly glad that I accidentally ordered this whole fish. If I had known ahead of time that I would have to strip all the meat off the fish myself, I wouldn’t have ordered it, but this was definitely an experience to add to my roster of interesting things I’ve done. … Definitely not an experience that I would ever want to have again, but still one that I’m happy I had.

 
The following day, I decided to go on a quick hiking trip. Northern New Jersey isn’t exactly the most terraneous area, but I did still manage to find a trail that had decent elevation gain, at the Sourland Mountain Preserve in Hillsborough Township.

I think the hike would’ve otherwise been fairly mundane, but because there was so much ice on the trail, it actually made it a lot more technical and fun, as I had to constantly be on the lookout as to where I could step without having another comical fall like I did a few weeks ago and get another injury.

The summit had a clearing where you could look towards New York City and see the skyline. You might be able to see it in the photo below if you bring your screen right up to your face… the buildings appear as a few pixels above the horizon.

When I returned back to where I had parked, I went past a frozen pond. Even though I grew up in the Chicagoland suburbs where it regularly gets freez­ing cold in the winter, for some reason, I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a frozen pond up-close in-person before.

After looking at it for a while, I thought I was getting vertigo, but what was actually happening was that the ice layer was slightly shifting, bending, and moving back and forth from the force of the water below. I sort of wanted to get a huge boulder and throw it into the pond to see if I can make a nice shattered ice pattern, but I decided against it.

You can’t really tell from my GPS tracker because the line is a little too thick to effectively show path overlap, but the top corner of this trail was very con­fusing, not only because the trail wasn’t that well marked, but also because there was ice and fallen leaves everywhere, so it felt like I was just ran­domly walking through thin forest.

Whenever I did think I caught a trail, I would follow it… but I ended up just walking in circles about three times before finally noticing that everything looked awfully familiar, and realizing that I should probably keep an eye on my map while trying to escape this maze.

Remember how I said earlier that I usually don’t share photos of family, but I had one exception here? This is the exception photo. This is Tinkerbell, my cousin’s dog. I believe she is a Chihuahua mix, but I’m not 100% sure what breed she is (though the likely answer is that she is just a normal, healthy, mixed breed).

After the conclusion of my five days in New Jersey, I went to refuel my rental vehicle and drop it off before flying out. I found a gas station and pulled up to a vacant pump. I swiped my credit card, but the machine rejected it. Wondering if Chase was blocking my personal credit card, I pulled out my busi­ness credit card and tried that… and the machine rejected that too. Wondering if this particular gas station only accepts debit cards, I tried swiping my debit card, but still, to no avail.

I got back my rental car and reversed to a different vacant pump. I went through the same procedure again, but all my cards got rejected again. Confused, I left the gas station and went to another one nearby.

The exact same thing happened at the other gas station too. I tried two pumps, three payment methods at each of the two pumps, and everything got de­clined. Now mildly annoyed, I decided to just use the rental car provider’s refueling service, even though it is astronomically more expensive than re­fueling myself, because I didn’t want to risk missing my flight while going from gas station to gas station trying to find one that wants my business.

I later texted my cousin and was informed that, in New Jersey, it is illegal to pump your own fuel. Apparently, I wasn’t supposed to drive up to a vacant pump and try to do it myself… I was supposed to drive up to a pump with an attendant (which I didn’t even see) and have them pump my fuel for me.

I researched this while waiting for my plane, and it’s true—New Jersey is one of only two states out of 50 in the United States that prohibits you from refueling your own vehicle, with Oregon being the other state (though that law in Oregon only applies in cities, and not in areas with a population under a certain thresh­old).

They claim that refueling gasoline yourself can be dangerous, especially for pregnant women. Well, I guess the entire rest of the country’s infants are all born with birth defects, then. They may as well just say it how it is—this inconvenience is clearly a result of political lobbying.

Apart from the refueling fiasco, this was overall a nice trip. I generally like to avoid excessively cold places, but for some reason, this wasn’t too bad—I just bundled up in a coat thicker than I usually wear, and I was able to manage fine.

I was originally planning on going to Seattle for one week immediately following my trip to New Jersey, but I decided to switch up my plans a bit due to some unexpected scheduling conflicts. Instead, I’ll be sticking around Southern California for another week and a half before setting off to continue my road trip.

Texas is a large state, so it took some time to get through it. On top of that, my stay in Texas felt a bit longer because, not only did I stay for 11 days in Dal­las (which is longer than the usual 6-7 maximum days that I spend in each major city), but I also flew to Seattle for a week and flew back to Dallas to con­tin­ue my road trip.

I did a lot in Texas, but not all my activities warranted their own blog post, so I decided to do a Texas round-up with all the miscellaneous photographs I have that I want to share.

My first entry into Texas was when I was visiting Texarkana, a city that straddles both Arkansas and Texas. From there, I drove to Coppell, a northern sub­urb of the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex. My hotel of choice was the Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott Dallas DFW Airport North/Coppell Grape­vine, a nice, clean, modern, straightforward, newly-constructed hotel. As a reminder, I’m a big fan of barebones hotels like this because it gives me eve­ry­thing I need and nothing I don’t need.

A few days after arriving in Dallas, I met up with my friend and former assistant Monica and her newly-engaged fiancé for some all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue. I forgot to take a photo of the actual meat that we cooked, so instead, here is a photo of the aftermath of our meal.

When Monica and I toured Dallas, we each purchased a CityPASS and went to four tourist at­tractions included in the bundle price. The first two at­trac­tions we went to, I already blogged about—the Dallas Zoo and Reunion Tower. The third place we visited was the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, often referred to as the John F. Kennedy Museum.

The JFK Museum wasn’t exactly the best museum I’ve ever been to, but there’s only so much that you can put in a museum about a single president. It was a lot more crowded than I expected (which was probably the case because we had to go on a weekend, because Monica works traditional hours and weekdays), so the first floor ended up being very cramped. What made it worse was that almost the entire first floor composed of big text-heavy posters and normal television-style videos, so people were crowded around and not really moving.

It ended up getting better once you got to the seventh floor, and it felt much more like an actual museum there—there were artifacts from the time period of JFK’s as­sas­si­na­tion, and there was a window where you could look out to see from where precisely Lee Harvey Oswald carried out the as­sas­si­na­tion. I took a photograph of it.

That’s not the photograph. After looking at my camera roll, Monica proudly declared to me that I had taken a photo of the wrong street, and that she had “saved my blog from doom” from my mistake. … Here’s the actual street—the location where JFK was shot is marked on the street with a white X.

Our fourth and final tourist activity of our CityPASS was the Perot Museum of Nature and Science. This museum was a mixture of a ton of different things all smashed into one museum; I actually think that this would be a great place for children to learn a fairly broad overview of a lot of scientific top­ics.

There was a tech area near the end of the museum with a lot of hands-on experiments and exhibits. I don’t really ever take selfies, so when I do end up with a picture of myself, I like to share it; here I am in front of a projector tracking software exhibit thing that took your face and replaced it with a 3D mod­el. It seems like it didn’t recognize me because I had a black face covering on (as was required by the museum due to the pandemic) and my camera was in front of my face, but it recognized Monica.

After my trip to Seattle, I flew back to Dallas–Fort Worth, then drove to Decatur after I landed to get a little bit closer to my next destination, Amarillo, so I could break up the monotony of the drive the following day.

It’s a meme at this point that every Texan drives a large pickup truck. When I arrived in Decatur, I noticed that there were a lot of pickup trucks in the parking lot—more than there were any other kind of vehicle combined. In order to capture this meme moment, I snapped a photo from my hotel room window after checking in. Yes, my truck was indeed the smallest one in the lot.

Next up was Amarillo. This was an interesting hotel experience—I booked a room at the Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott Amarillo Central, but ap­par­ent­ly this hotel is connected to and within the same building as the Four Points by Sheraton Amarillo Central. I’m guessing that the Fairfield Inn part was still “under construction,” in the sense that the rooms were ready, but the management of that side of the building hadn’t been staffed up yet, so the Four Points was overseeing the entire building.

I also noticed that this design and color scheme of Fairfield Inn wasn’t one that I had ever seen before. I’m curious to find out whether this is the new look of all the next-generation Fairfield Inns (as opposed to the blue carpet, black desk, and green chair look that you see above in the Dallas pho­to­graph), or if this one was just unique because it was attached to a Four Points.

(And in case you’re curious, no, I wasn’t traveling with anyone in Amarillo—I just had a room with two beds because the rate for this was cheaper than the rate for a single king bed.)

And after a few days in Amarillo (which I mostly used just to exercise in the gym, catch up on work, and relax), I headed out of Texas and into New Mex­i­co. I missed the moment when my truck hit 30,000 miles on the odometer, but I noticed it in time to catch a photo at 30,033 miles.

Next up, Albuquerque.