Back in Asia

October 5-7

We left Newark a bit after 11 in the morning on Thursday for the long flight to Tokyo, a little more than 13 hours non-stop to Narita airport.

It is a grueling run, and you have to remember to get up and walk up and down the cabin aisle from time to time. The Boeing 787 gave us headroom to stand in front of our seats, too.

I was trying out a new back brace, which Joanna had recommended. It worked wonders making the long trip a lot more comfortable, but still, after more than a dozen hours, my back was sore and my ass more so.

It seems that every time I go through Narita, something is different. Last time Joanna and I walked from gate to gate. The first time, when I was alone, had to go through conventional passport control.

This time, there was a quick pass through a passport check. One glance at your boarding pass and passport, and they let you through.

Of course, I’m usually so rocky by the time I get to Tokyo that maybe it’s the same every time, and I just remember only parts of it.

We got to Narita around 1:30 p.m. local time, which was about 13 hours ahead of daylight saving time in New Jersey.

I don’t know what meal we had—late dinner, maybe, or early breakfast—at a place called Avion, where we can sit by the window and watch the planes come and go.

We had a soup called udon and gyoza dumplings. I’m not sure what is in the dumplings, but they are very tasty.

I came across something new, to me at least, a black brew called Yebisu, which is like a slightly lighter version of Guinness. It’s a dry stout on nitrogen draft, which gives it a smooth, creamy texture. 

We had about five hours to kill, so Joanna took a nap while I went walking around the terminal. I came across another bar which had a tap for Asahi black, also new to me. It was another nitro stout, dry and smooth. 

The Yebisu and Asahi black were among the best local beers I’ve had in Asia.

The flight to Bangkok took about five hours. We got a couple of hours’ sleep on the  second leg of the trip and landed at Suvarnabhumi a little after 11 p.m. on the 6th.

While we waited to get our bags from the overhead, Joanna started to chat with the woman sitting next to her by the window. Turns out, she is an American, a student at the University of Arizona, who has come to Thailand to work with elephants.

Her group rescues domestic elephants and retrains them to be released into the wild. 

The trip from Newark to Bangkok takes about 25 hours travel and layover time, but the clock advances 36 hours because of the time difference.

I guess we got to our hotel, the Centric Place, around 1 a.m.

There was a message for Joanna. Her son Gregory asked her to phone him when we arrived at the hotel.

We didn’t have working phones. Maybe we could use Skype. But it was easier than that. The man at the desk offered Joanna the use of his cell.

Joanna called, fearing an emergency, but learned that Greg and his wife, Eugenia, wanted to let her know they were in town.

That was a surprise. Joanna knew that her niece Kimberly, who lives in the Philippines, was coming to Thailand during part of our stay here, but Greg and Eugie apparently had decided on short notice to come to Bangkok for a quick trip, too.

We slept until about 7:30 and went downstairs to breakfast. The Asian option was a rice porridge that in Cantonese is called cheok (sounds almost like “joke”) and a selection of mix-or-match ingredients—deep-fried dried fish, peanuts, cubes of chicken, preserved vegetable—to go into it. 

I’ve developed quite a taste for cheok, and Joanna grew up with it. 

There was also a salad described as spicy pickles. It consisted of pickled cabbage and sliced chiles. 

For dessert we had a small omelet.

Larry came to the hotel around 11 and we headed out to buy SIM cards for our phones. We had bought the phones in Bangkok a year and a half ago. The cards had expired, so we needed new ones.

We went to a mall not far from the hotel, and after a couple of false starts bought cards and then taxied to Larry’s new enterprise.

Larry’s significant other, Noi, is a barber ,and they have set up a small shop in I don’t know exactly where because we took a taxi to get there. It’s called The Barber by L & N. So if you get a chance, go and like it on Facebook.

We came bearing clippers, Clubman talc, and Barbicide for the shop. They were actually cheaper to buy in the States and ship to Joanna’s house, where I packed them in my suitcase, than to buy them and have them shipped directly to Thailand.

We met Noi for the first time and watched her set up her new toys. Then we left for a short stroll that took us to one of those rough-looking eating places that are so good in Thailand.

This one had a roof, long tables, and no walls. Outside, by the sidewalk, they were grilling fish dressed in salt.

That fish was tender and flavored by the salt that had worked through the skin.

We had that and a leafy green sometimes called morning glories. Then came a spicy wild boar, made with cocoanut milk. Very unusual, and very new to me.

We cabbed back to the hotel. The place doesn’t seem easy to find. 

Last night at the airport, we gave our driver a printout of the address, and he had to call someone for directions over the phone. Then he took us right to it.

This time the driver got lost. He circled a couple of blocks and then asked someone for directions. After that it was a straight run. Even with the fare for lost time, the meter read 63 baht—a little more than $1.80.

I find jet lag to be a wonderful feeling—that sense of disorientation, the inability to tell if you’re high or just tired—but it can play tricks on you. I lay down for a nap and expected to be up in maybe two hours. I was out for almost four.

Larry met us at the hotel again shortly before 7 and led us a few blocks to a Mexican fusion restaurant called OMG.

Most of the taps were dry because there had been a big party the night before, but the place specializes in local craft beers. Larry told us that it is technically illegal to brew craft beer in Thailand, but even so, it is a growing phenomenon.

I had a draft double IPA from Happy New Beer that ran a little more than 8 percent alcohol by volume. It was mildly fragrant, a little sweet (maybe from the alcohol), but nonetheless very drinkable.

I also drank a bottled milder version that ran 6.5 percent.

Joanna and I had beans and rice and shared a plate of chicken fajitas. The food was amazingly good.  And that’s not even considering that we were eating Mexican in Bangkok and the cook-proprietor was native Indian who had grown up in Thailand.

He came out to chat with us for a while. In addition to running the restaurant, he is a musician involved in various cover bands, one for 60s and 70s, another for heavy metal.

Travel is broadening. Especially if you like the beer and the food.

Good night, all, and stay well.

Harry

War and Oysters

September 12-13

Harrisburg hosts the National Civil War Museum and the State Museum of Pennsylvania. Large or small, one museum a day is enough. So which was it going to be?

The decision was made for me. The State Museum is closed on Monday and Tuesday.

Wikipedia describes the Civil War Museum as a non-profit educational institution. 

I just learned that it has a fairly colorful history itself. Apparently it was formed during the term of Harrisburg’s previous mayor, Stephen Reed. The building sits on top of a commanding hill in the city’s Reservoir Park.

The view is spectacular. There was an agreement that the museum could rent the ground for $1 a year.

The mayor had amassed a Civil War collection for the city and offered to sell it to the museum well below the city’s cost.

New mayor. Begin feud. 

According to an editorial on a news website, pennlive.com, the new mayor, Eric Papenfuse, once called the museum “a monument to corruption,” and wanted to shut it down.

Things have cooled a bit and both parties have struck a new deal. The museum will begin paying rents that will start at $45,000 a year and eventually grow to $100,000. The new mayor had at one time threatened to raise the rent to about $600,000 a year.

The museum can buy the city’s Civil War collection if it can raise $5.25 million in five years. 

If the museum can’t do it, the city will offer the collection on the open market. Harrisburg paid about $10 million to buy it all.

I knew none of that when I visited. The editorial was posted the next day, on the 13th.

Outside the museum there is a life-size bronze of a Confederate sergeant giving a drink of water to a fallen Union soldier. Called “Mission of Mercy,” it depicts an actual event. After the repulse of a Union charge at Fredericksburg, wounded men lay on the field calling for help.

The sergeant, Richard Kirkland, gathered several canteens and went onto the field. Some of the Union soldiers started to shooting at him, but when they saw what he was doing, they were ordered to hold their fire. “That man is too brave to die,” the officer said.

As museums go, this one is pretty well organized. You start at the top of the stairs in a room that deals with a history of American slavery and the issues that led to the Civil War. 

This is where you are introduced to a video of several characters, including a Massachusetts blacksmith who is an escaped slave, his wife, and three brothers who take different paths. One is a Union officer; another is a Confederate cavalryman; the third takes off to Montana to look for gold.

This room leads to the next, about secession and the beginning of the war. Each room leads to the next in chronological order. 

There are artifacts of various kinds, weapons, uniforms, flags, tools, pocket hymnals, and whatnot. There are mannequins dressed as typical soldiers and sailors on both sides.

The captioning is generally good, although sometimes there is a curious object without an identifier. From time to time, an article was described but I couldn’t find it. Maybe it had been removed from the case. 

Some rooms contain videos that check in on the characters at different stages of the period. The blacksmith joins the Colored Troops, for instance. He complains about the unequal treatment of black and white soldiers, but decides he is doing the right thing.

Other rooms run videos of a historian (didn’t get the name, but it’s not Shelby Foote) describing some of the more horrific battles of the war.

A tableau of a Union camp has a soundtrack behind it that includes a parody of “Dixie” in which the rebels are called children who should “listen to your Uncle Sam.” 

The highlight of the place for me is all the information posted on the walls with the exhibits. The detail was just right. It was a real subject review for me.

I got there around one, figuring four hours would be plenty of time. I was little more than half-way through when an announcement over the PA system said the museum would close in 10 minutes.

It was that absorbing.

On the way back to the hotel, I noticed a steakhouse called Leeds Ltd. It hadn’t turned up on my Google searches.

Its website looked promising. First thing on the menu was something called Oysters Louie. This could be interesting.

I sat at the bar and working my way into a Medocino County pinot noir when I saw something listed as Creamy Crab soup. What would that be? Maybe like clam chowder, but with a different invertebrate?

Not quite. It wasn’t soupy at all but instead was a thick pink almost-pudding with lumps of crab meat. It may qualify as a bisque. It had a little sweetness somewhere in there, but nothing cloying or offensive.

Second course was an appetizer, Spinach Crepes Alfredo, which were filled with spinach, Romano, and Mozzarella. The crepes came smothered in an Alfredo sauce.

That was better even than the crab chowder. 

Most bizarre, though, were the Oysters Louie, which I had for dessert. The oysters are lightly battered and fried. They are served on the shell with something Leeds calls Rockefeller sauce, but tasted nothing like Oysters Rockefeller. 

The dish had a good hit of hot chiles, and the oysters were covered with blue cheese dressing, which counteracted the capsaicin. It was terrific.

The pinot noir was unusual. It had a lot of sharpness, almost like the tannins in Chianti. I never tasted that in a California pinot before. 

It was OK, but I liked the Argentinian Malbec that followed it better. I had two of those before I left.

Wednesday morning I left La Quinta around 10:30 and was back in the old neighborhood a few minutes after one. There was a little rain on the way, but it was mostly smooth sailing all the back.

Stay well, everybody. This run is over.

Harry

Historic Sights

September 10-11

My Sunday exploration took me to the center of the city of Lancaster for a stroll around the historic district. 

It is full of lore, as you’d expect for a town that got its start in 1730: early settlers, French and Indian Wars, Revolution, Civil War, and various atrocities.

The site of the old jail has a historical marker relating that sometime in the mid-1700s a group of Conestoga Indians were being held at the jail under protective custody. It wasn’t very effective. They were all murdered by a local vigilante group known as the Paxton Boys.

The Paxton Boys and some of their other activities are mentioned in the historical novel “The Light in the Forest.”

I ran into a note about another person I had read about. General John Reynolds, who was among the first to engage the Rebels at Gettysburg and also among the first to die there, lived in Lancaster.

A very interesting guy, whose name and exploits were new to me, was Joseph Simon. He was a merchant trader who had extensive land holdings in the West. He had actually traveled as far as the Mississippi River. That was quite a distinction in the 18th century.

In the 1740s his house hosted the first Jewish services in Pennsylvania west of Philadelphia.

There’s a charming brick building that looks like it should be in Quebec. The sign outside says this kind of story-and-a-half house—one full story with a dormered roof—was standard in the early days of the town.

Another charmer, a two-and-a-half story stone house, was the home of someone with a name I know, mainly because I was brought up Lutheran.

This house belonged to Frederick Muhlenberg, who served as the first Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. 

Lots of Muhlenbergs made names for themselves in 18th century, so I went to the Internet to sort some of them out.

Frederick’s father, Heinrich Melchior Muhlenberg, is the one I learned about in Sunday School days. He was sent from Germany as a missionary to Pennsylvania, where he is credited with establishing the Lutheran church in America.

There was also a John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg, Frederick’s brother, who served as a general in the Continental Army.

All three of these Muhlenbergs were clergymen. Frederick was licensed by the Lutheran church and later also by the Anglican so he could preach in Virginia. That's in Colonial times, before the First Amendment.

Dinner on Sunday was an improvement. The Lancaster Brewing Tap Room, near the Rodeway Inn on the Lincoln Highway, has good meat loaf with even better mushroom gravy. 

I even got to try two new brews. I started with one called, appropriately enough, Pre-Flight IPA. It’s lighter on alcohol than Lancaster Brewing’s other India pale ales. Sharp and crisp, as an IPA should be, but also light, almost like a Pilsner, but without the Pilsner aftertaste.

I had another Hop Hog, one of the ales that I had tried at Pearly Baker’s in Easton. There is a Boss Hog, too, a double IPA that comes in at 9 percent alcohol, but I decided to pass that one up. I was driving.

They had an extra special bitter on tap. Well, they bill it as an ESB, but it had a strong taste of chocolate, probably from the malt. It was a deep amber, but came across more like an English stout, a little sweeter than Guinness, say. So that one is a been-there, done-that.

Monday took me to a historic site of a different order.

It’s a short hop from Ronks to Middletown, Pa., an hour tops. Middletown is a quaint old town about 10 miles south of Harrisburg. A mile or two south of Middletown is Three Mile Island.

It’s a simple route to get there: U.S. 30 West and then Pa. 441 North. The street view on Google Maps shows the power station behind a thin screen of trees. 

 I was concerned that I might miss it. That, it turns out, is damned near impossible.

The road comes over a rise and you see the tops of the four huge cooling towers. At the time, two were active with huge, but gentle plumes of steam. The other two were still.

A short while later, you come up square across from them. The road has a place at the side where you can pull your car while you gawk. 

Clearly, I wasn’t the first person to do this.

You can’t drive onto the island, because it’s privately owned, but then I didn’t want to do that anyway. And this was a better view than I had hoped for. 

In March 1979 Reactor 2 at the plant suffered a coolant loss. There was an explosion and a release of radioactive material into the environment.

The entire event was largely contained by the pressure vessel that housed it. I’ve read that the containment was so effective that operators, who knew the reactor was overheating, at first didn’t know there had been an explosion.

The issue of nuclear power is so politically charged that you never know what to believe. 

In connection with a story for Mechanical Engineering magazine, I spoke to Pennsylvania’s environmental administrator a few years ago and he told me that readings in the atmosphere in the days after the incident showed less radioactivity than there had been a year earlier. The earlier radioactivity measurement was attributed to drifting fallout from an atmospheric nuclear test in Red China.

I do remember how nervous we all were at the time. A lot of nuclear power projects ended then. 

I am ambivalent about nuclear power. Can it be dangerous? Yeah, sure. 

But it is nowhere near as dangerous or environmentally destructive as digging and burning coal. 

We haven’t decided what to do about spent nuclear fuel. We haven’t found a way to safely store coal ash either.

Coal and nukes are becoming dinosaurs not because of social agitation or government regulation. They are up against the one supreme decider of civilization: market forces. 

The Three Mile Island plant in recent years has been losing money, and Exelon, the owner, plans to close it in 2019 unless it gets help from the state of Pennsylvania. Apparently the natural gas plants can sell their electricity much cheaper than a nuclear generating station, or at least this nuclear station, can.

So the question out here may be: Is the state going to step in with some kind of bailout or a local New Deal? That might be nice for maybe several thousand people. It may also be unfair to people working for Exelon’s competitors.

Who can say? Not me, thank goodness. As an ex-Communist, I’m in no position to judge these things.

It was a short drive, half-hour at most, to my new digs, the La Quinta Harrisburg Airport Hershey.

I got to the room and searched Google for places with craft beer and good food. It gave me a very short, and rather disappointing, list. The menus were short, gimmicky, and heavy. Most of the beer selections were limited.

I wound up going to the nearest place, another franchise of the Lancaster Brewing Co. That’s the company that runs the Tap Room in Ronks.

I would have ordered the chicken schnitzel but it seems to have the same gravy as the meatloaf from last night. Very good, but not for two nights in a row.

I opted for summer sausage with mashed potatoes and sauerkraut. The sausage was very salty, but that was probably intentional, to go with the beer.

This place had fewer taps than the one in Ronks, so I wound up having two Hop Hog IPAs. 

There was a gose, a sour ale, on tap, so I drank that for dessert. The description said they use the wild yeast strain for only part of the fermentation. Then they add more-conventional yeast. I could taste the sour edge but it was mild. 

A very pleasant sour. And just right to have one among those bitter IPAs.

Be well, all, and here’s hoping that the sour edge is always just right for you.

Harry

Bibles and Buggies

September 9-10

I drove from Easton to Ronks, in Lancaster County, in a couple of hours.

It could have been a few minutes quicker perhaps, if I had followed the original Google Maps directions. Toward the end of the Google route, you have to leave the highway and make turns on roads that aren’t part of any established route.

You can take that kind of shortcut if you know the area. But then, you wouldn’t need to consult Google Maps. 

It’s what happens when you let a computer make decisions. 

I took Google’s advice for the start. I went north on Third Street to U.S. 22 West, which later merges with I-78 for a while. You travel about 25 miles from Easton and take the exit at Fogelsville for U.S. 222 south. 

This could take me back to Reading, so I used the bypass. U.S. 222 meets one of my favorite highways, U.S. 30, a few miles west of where I was going.

Some of the signs got a little confusing, so I stopped for gas and directions. The lady at Speedway said, yes, I was on the right track to the Lincoln Highway in Ronks.

The highway is almost like Pigeon Forge, Tenn. But here the emphasis is on Amish. There’s Amish this and Old Dutch that, which probably have precious little to do with anybody Amish or Pennsylvania Dutch.

Ah, gang, it was a good morning.

The Sleep Inn is a hundred or so yards east of the Bible History Exhibits, which is the reason I came here.

I had no idea what the museum would be. Maybe it’s one of those places that tries to convince people that the story of the creation of Adam and Eve is sound history and that the world indeed is 6,000 years old. 

The museum is in a small house on the Lincoln Highway. I walked from the hotel and went into the entrance, where I met two small dogs behind a baby gate. They barked aggressively, as small dogs do. Maybe that’s small dog for hello. 

They serve as the entry bell, because a man came up from the backyard to let me into the museum. For eight bucks, he led me on an hour-long tour of the Old and New Testaments and church history.

And it was history, not propaganda. 

There was far too much for me to remember it all. Most of the exhibits are replicas, although there are some originals. 

There is a replica of the copy of Isaiah found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The man showed how the scrolls were stored in jars in the cave where they were found in 1947.

One small scrap from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is represented by a replica, is believed by some to be a fragment from the Gospel of Mark. That’s controversial, the man said.

There were replicas of cuneiform and hieroglyphic tablets, some actual size and some scaled down. The inscriptions included references to the Habiru, which is generally interpreted as a form of the word “Hebrew.”

Some of the replicas show figures, illustrating how people mentioned in the Bible may have dressed. One had images of three Patriarchs, including Israel, an alternative name for Jacob, with names written in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

The New Testament section included a full-size photo reproduction of the Shroud of Turin and replicas of several historical codices. One of the most important from a scholarly point of view is the Codex Sinaiticus, so called because it was retrieved from a monastery on Mount Sinai in the 19th century.

The codex, a hand-written text bound as a book instead of a scroll, contains the Septuagint, a pre-Christian translation of the Old Testament into Greek, and the oldest complete text of the New Testament. It is generally believed to have been made in the 4th century.

It was taken from the monastery by a German scholar named Tischendorf, who presented it to the Tsar of Russia. The codex is now scattered among several places, including Moscow and Berlin. A few pages have been returned to the monastery.

I had read about the codex several years ago in a book lent to me by Pyrrhus Ruches, a newspaper copy editor whose real occupation was the study of the former Roman and Ottoman Empires. He’s the only guy I ever knew whom you could stop on the street to ask, “What’s a Janissary?” And get an answer. 

I really did that one morning on University Place when Pyrrhus and I worked for Fairchild Publications.

Anyhow, to see the codex, even though in facsimile, was quite a treat. 

The church history section contains a complete facsimile of the King James Bible and a few leaves from an original. After the plays of Shakespeare, the King James, or Authorized, translation of the Bible is a crowning work of English literature, so I always approach it with a certain awe.

I’ve seen originals in the British Museum in London, but even so, it was fun to see it again.

The exhibit is illustrated by framed photos of places like Petra and Tel el Amarna, which are identified with locations in the Bible. The man said he had taken most of them himself.

He also mentioned taking his kids to a site in the Near East where they could dig and recover pottery shards. That surprised me.

But maybe it was like the spots in his museum’s backyard where kids can dig for replica treasures that he put there. 

He also has an olive press out back. He explained the different pressings. Extra virgin (as Beatrice once put it, “squeezed only a little bit”) was the first press with only one weight on the lever. Then he pulled a bottle of EVOO out of the press. 

That was used for special occasions, like religious observances and anointing kings. 

Second pressing needed extra weight and was used for every day cooking. The oil in that bottle had a little less color.

Last press would have impurities in it and so was used for burning. No bottle this time, just an oil lamp.

The big thing in the yard, though, is a reconstruction of a tomb. The practice was much the same as in present-day New Orleans. The body is laid out in a shroud for a year inside the tomb. Then the bones are transferred to an ossuary and placed in a niche in the wall.

What you see in the photo of the day would have been the interior of the tomb. The body wasn't left exposed to the elements.

It has been a long while since I was last in Lancaster County. It’s surprising how Amish it still is. I would have expected the big tourist trade to have driven them out.

They are here, though. You see buggies everywhere. They carry small electric lights, probably required by law.

There is also an innovation over the past 10 or 20 years of using scooters and bicycles with no pedals. 

I saw the bicycle in use on the Eastern Shore of Maryland a few years ago.  In Lancaster there were men pushing scooters, equipped with tires that you might find on a child’s bike and handle-bar baskets to carry packages home from the store.

The men wearing long beards, straw hats, and suspenders patiently push them along on the side of the Lincoln Highway, next to the traffic.

My favorite Amish sighting of the day was a young man, beardless and in his teens or twenties, driving a traditional black one-horse buggy up the shoulder of the highway. He was holding the reins in one hand because the other hand was holding what appeared to be a smart phone.

I have no idea what the story behind that is.

This is a tourist trap area, so the food and drink here are adequate, but so far generally undistinguished.

It’s Sunday afternoon right now, so I’m about to go exploring to see what I can find.

Be well, all.

Harry

Local History, Local Brew

September 8

I left early in the afternoon to walk to the county history museum. It’s here because Easton is the seat of Northumberland County. 

This section of town is very colorful. The route brought me to a walking street, a bright alley that is part of Bank Street.

It’s right by the back entrance to the Crayola Experience.

There is a bike rack that looks like the Three Wise Monkeys. Farther down are walls covered with pictures, rough versions of things like a Van Gogh self-portrait and the Mona Lisa, along with mosaics of what may be local sights.

Most of them are outside a gift shop called Grandma’s Backporch. The picture of the day shows part of it.

The main streets were festooned with flags—the current U.S. flag alternating with another that has reversed the field and the stripes. The Union is at the upper mast side of the flag, but contains the red and white stripes. The body of the flag is blue with 12 white stars in a circle surrounding the 13th.

[Editor’s note: It took Harry almost a month to track down information on the reverse flag. It wasn’t from the Revolution, as he had originally surmised. It is known as the Easton Flag and was the company colors of a local militia unit during the War of 1812.]

The Sigal Museum is small, but like most local museums is interesting. Many of the objects on display are identified with specific local people, including a Lenape umbilical cord pouch, which had been donated by a descendant of the lady who made it.

It looks like yellow silk with beading. It’s probably from the late 19th or early 20 century. I learned that, even if you try, you can’t see whether it still holds the umbilical cord or not. 

There is a lot about the Lenape, including a wigwam made of tree bark furnished with a rough bunk and tools that the people would have used.

Many of the worked stone tools in the exhibit cases were found along the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers. The area is a trove for arrowheads, spear points, and other Indian artifacts.

There is a wall devoted to the Walking Purchase. I had heard the term, but didn’t know much about it. It happened here.

It was a fraud perpetrated by William Penn’s heirs. After he died, his two sons because proprietors of the Pennsylvania Colony. They made a deal in 1737 with the Lenape to buy a tract of land to be determined by how far three men could walk in a day and a half.

The Penns brought in ringers, who didn’t walk at all but ran. Their claim was more than twice the size that the Lenape expected. It was a swindle.

William Penn is reputed to have dealt fairly with the Indians all his life. Maybe they expected his sons to be as honest.

The wall contains a panel with a video that runs from time to time. 

The Walking Purchase was one of the many sore points that put the settlers and the displaced Indians at odds during the French and Indian Wars in the 1750s.

The colonial governors of Pennsylvania and New Jersey met leaders of various tribes, including the Lenape, the Six Nations of the Iroquois, and others, to discuss peace terms. 

Pennsylvania agreed to the return of prisoners of war and to an additional payment for the Walking Treaty lands. With the payment, the natives had to leave for wilder territory near present-day Wilkes-Barre.

Other exhibits describe the waves of immigrant settlers, Dutch, Moravian missionaries, Scotch-Irish, and German.

There is a section on people from Easton and Northumberland County who have served in various wars. Much of it looks at the Civil War. Many of the artifacts, mainly swords and uniforms are identified with local residents.

Pennsylvania is very proud of its Civil War history. Small towns all over the state have built monuments to soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union. After all, it was Gettysburg, Pa., where the tide turned and the Confederacy’s inevitable decline began.

Easton’s Civil War monument is in the middle of the city center traffic circle. It has a bugler on top of a column. When I saw it the first time, there was a sparrow perched on the bugler’s cap.

One display at the museum is devoted to fraktur art, mostly display certificates suitable for framing. The documents were printed in old German fraktur letters and names were filled in by hand. Many of the ones on display recorded births.

One of my favorites was an area devoted to toys. A cabinet displays old cast iron miniatures and traditional board games. I remember playing with things like this.

A local lady had a hobby of furnishing dollhouses. She gave one to the museum. Besides the expected display of miniature furnishings and scaled-down wallpaper, this dollhouse is electrified and the walls have framed miniature portraits of the lady’s family.

Martin guitars have a section of their own. Martin is based in Nazareth, Pa., not far from Easton.

It seems that the company set a new standard for guitars. Originally it made instruments with 12 frets up the neck. A musician asked for a longer neck to allow more fingering of chords.

Martin came up with a 14-fret design that it called an Orchestra Model. It proved so popular that 14 frets became the standard for all the company’s guitars.

Museum hands were in the final stages of setting up an exhibit called “Cat’s Meow,” about the Roaring ’20s with a local emphasis. I didn’t get a close look at it, but it seems to focus on clothing and jewelry.

I took a short stroll among the mansions on North Third Street before I went back to the room for a breather.

Dinner was at Antonio’s a block up the street from the hotel. I went there for more craft beer.

Everything was bottled, and familiar to me, which is all right. But I made a small mistake. I started with Dogfish Head 60-Minute IPA. At 6 percent, it has less alcohol content than the 90-Minute, which was also available. 

The problem is that they are both so fine that they are hard to follow. 

My second beer was from a Philadelphia brewer, Yards. The brew was called Sons of Ben and billed as a “rowdy pale ale.” If I had taken it first, and by itself, it might have proved fine.

I ordered spaghetti with oil, garlic, and anchovies. There was no chance that it would be like the anchovy dishes Joanna and I had in Italy. But it seemed the salt would go well with strong beer.

The dish was OK, but I'm not sure that I’ll order it again.

The 60-Minute held up well with the anchovies, but they just wiped out the flavor of the Sons of Ben, rowdy or not. The ale wasn’t strong enough to hold up to the fish and sharp salt that almost burnt my tongue at times.

For dessert I had a Pennsylvania-brewed ale, Victory Golden Monkey. It’s described as a “Belgian-style tripel,” which gives it 9.5 percent alcohol, and is brewed with spices. It’s a U.S. attempt to copy Chimay. Like most Belgian spiced ales, one is enough.

All in all, a very good day.

So I’m back at the hotel and finishing this up.

Good night, everyone, and may you reserve your Dogfish Head for last.

Harry