The Great American Road Trip: Day 61

Steve and I started our day a little late after staying out at the party the night before, but he had big plans for the day and I was happy to tag along. He lives in the Short North neighborhood, which has a fantastic main street type area with restaurants and shops just a quick walk from his house, so after breakfast we set out to explore.

We started our adventure at Flower Child Vintage. As one would expect, it's a bit cluttered but fairly organized, overflowing with enough fun and surprising items to keep you entertained for days. Steve's friend Mike met us there, I believe he found us in one of the basements holding up and posing with the sequined, shoulder padded 80's dresses and the fur hats. We proceeded to work our way through a dozen more rooms and the other basement, laughing over costumes and outfits that should have been costumes, commiserating over how we had all wanted clear plastic phones when we were kids but now no one really has a land line anymore even if we did buy one of the ones here, trying on the saddle shoes and sombreros and wigs.

Mike suggested lunch at a Thai restaurant down the street but we found out that it was closed for lunch on Saturdays so we ended up at a place called Bodega. In Cleveland, Bodega was a fancy tapas restaurant and bar, here in Columbus it was a hip burger and comfort food joint with a beer list long enough to have it's own spiral bound menu. I passed over the beer in favor of a hot spiced cider (perfect with the chilly weather) and a hamburger with the "Unsimple Green" salad - romaine and arugula with green beans, pistachios, green grapes, green onions, and parsley. Not a place I would be able to afford to eat every day for lunch, but as a treat it was delicious and everything on the menu looked like something I would be entirely willing to try.

We said goodbye to Mike, walked home to get the car, and drove back over to the German Village to visit the Book Loft. Just a few doors over from Cup O'Joe, the Book Loft used to be two houses that were converted into a book store by building as many staircases and passageways as necessary to stitch the two together into something vaguely cohesive. I think we spent several hours there and could have easily spent more than that wandering around. Each of the 32 rooms had a theme, with lots of hand written signs and arrows directing you to various rooms and genres (it made me think of a potential precursor to Powell's in Portland). The best part is that almost everything is new but some of the books are deeply discounted, and all of them are at least 5 to 10% lower than the regular listed price. I ended up with a compendium of a trilogy series that I started while I was in Burkina - I remember really enjoying it and being frustrated that I never found the last book, so this way I can re-read all three should I ever get the time to actually sit down and read something in the next few months.

Steve wanted to make his mother's chicken paprikash recipe for dinner, but it calls for a huge amount of chicken. Rather than cut down the recipe or have a lot of leftovers, we decided to throw a dinner party! A few hours later we had chicken, garlic-lemon greens (kale and spinach, from the recipe I first tried on Jerry in Springfield), mashed potatoes, and sliced apples that I baked with a blend of spices (cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and bay leaves) and a healthy splash of the black walnut creme liqueur I bought at the Round Barn Winery on my way through Michigan. I wish I had taken pictures before the 5 of us devoured everything, we were pretty proud of ourselves with how well it all turned out.