Tag independent bookstore

Day 1 of my Spring Break: Harrisburg, Pa., and Gaithersburg, Md.

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

Eva and I are traveling to Washington, D.C., so that I may grab a flight to Dublin with my traveling companion M on Wednesday.

M. and I have not traveled in about a decade, and this is probably the first time we are traveling someplace where they are not shooting each other.

But that’s another story.

Eva is on spring break and for some strange, serendipitous reason, she has no pet clients this weekend. She’s exhausted after finishing her home renovation project on our hallway.

I could have taken Amtrak from Philly to D.C., as a matter of fact that is how I am getting home. But Eva wanted to visit D.C., and thought it might be nice to visit the National Zoo. She had hoped she could introduce her boyfriend to our friends in D.C. but he is traveling to a welding competition.

Now, Eva didn’t want to make the 3.5 hour one-way trip to D.C. and then turned around a few hours later and drive home alone.

But we learned none of our friends would be home Saturday until late.

So we booked a room at the Doubletree in Gaithersburg, MD, basically because they had a breakfast, an indoor/outdoor pool and who doesn’t love the warm cookies?

And Eva never had the warm cookie experience.

So at 9:30 we checked the old in the car– she’s an old girl and has been acting a tad funny lately about her oil. It disappears and then reappears. Maybe she has some build-up. We know she’s burning some… but to be safe, we check her often. And today we checked her cool in the flat garage

She looked good. But we have oil with us just in case.

We headed to Sheetz, and by then I already needed to pee. Eva put gas in the car. I hoped to find the cookies and cream puff things but every since I decided to try them, they never have that flavor.

Next, we went to Grocery Outlet. I need my famous $7 pen set. This cheap set of gel pens comes in a plastic case and I love them. Each set lasts about 6 months before my favorite colors start running out.

Meanwhile, Eva was in charge of road trip snacks. She selected:

  • 2 C4 energy drinks in zero sugar, very fruity flavors. I find these are easier to stomach than coffee or soda when temperature can not be maintained. Plus we both like them so we can share, and save space in the cupholders.
  • A present for someone’s birthday that has nothing to do with this trip
  • sunglasses
  • A massive can of bar mix nuts
  • A fairly big box of those nutty buddy style wafer bars that Little Debbie makes but instead they were made by Nature Valley and trying to be fancy. 20 of them.
  • A bag of beef jerky– some plain, some ranch, some buffalo, all mixed in one bag

We were on the road by 10.

Around 11, we got a phone call– the dog had bit the neighbor and the neighbor went to the ER. Now, it was a minor bite, but it broke skin, and the neighbor wanted to make sure he didn’t need shots/antibiotics. But that’s another story. But it sure did put a stressful spin on the next couple hours.

At 11:30, we arrived at Midtown Scholar Books, once voted bookstore of the year by Publisher Weekly. See my review here on the Parisian Phoenix blog. (It was $4.35 to park for 90 minutes in downtown Harrisburg.)

Eva had a doctor appointment via Zoom at noon so she took that in the car and then we visited Broad Street Market. Apparently, oldest market in America in continuous operation. We weren’t hungry– all those road trip snacks but they had all kinds of ethnic food from Chinese (I think) to Korean, Jamaican to African.

1 p.m. We crossed the state line into Maryland while on the phone with Larry Sceurman.

At 2:10 we arrived at Doubletree Washington DC North in Gaithersburg MD (about 40 minutes from M’s house). We got our cookies and our parking pass. We didn’t really need our keys because I used Hilton’s digital check-in, chose my room and they had emailed me that it was ready and activated my digital key which I can use from my phone.

I picked a room on the end of the lower level, away from any noise but fairly close to the indoor/outdoor pool.

And there’s a frozen yogurt vending machine in the lobby.

Panera and CVS are within a third of a mile and there’s a food truck in the shady looking parking lot across the street that has good reviews on Google Maps. I wonder what time they open in the morning… They don’t… the internet says they are closed Sundays. I might have to head out there tonight…

Eva and I went to Habit Burger and Grill because it was three-in-the-afternoon and we were hungry but not insanely hungry and while it is a chain, it’s not one we knew. I saw it had a free self-serve pepper bar with jalapenos, banana peppers and pepperocini. So we had to investigate.

I had a nice fish sandwich and limeade.

We came back to the hotel and I did some stuff for the business while Eva did some schoolwork. We plan to go swimming tonight.

Day 1 of the Massachusetts adventure: Mystic

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

Yesterday, I drove my friend Gayle to Massachusetts.

We’re driving up route 287 through New Jersey, 50 miles into the journey, and the tire pressure light goes on. We drive a couple miles and no exits advertise gas stations, so eventually I get off at the next exit. We drive through some beautiful tree-lined streets, no businesses in site, and eventually I see a sign for police. I follow it.

If I need to wait for AAA, a police station nearby is a good thing. And maybe a police station means a town. No such luck.

Eventually, I pull over. I can’t find the tire gauge we used to keep in Eva’s car. She confirms it never made it into my car. Gayle uses her phone and finds the nearest QuickCheck while I walk around the car kicking the tires and listening for hissing sounds that would indicate a nail or something in the tire. With the tires having passed my inspection, we head to the closest QuickChek.

We use the facilities. They have no air machine. So we walk to the Auto Zone next door and buy a cheap tire gauge and a quart of oil. Might as well buy the quart of oil.

It looks like Gayle’s side of the car might be a little low. We drive across the street to the Sunoco. No air. We get back on the highway, and two exits later, we see a sign for Wawa. As we look for Wawa, we see a QuickChek with air. I fill all the tires. The light does not go out. I reset the light. It comes on.

Eventually, we give up and drive with the light on.

We arrived in Mystic, Connecticut at 12:20 instead of 11:15. But the shopping village near the aquarium where one can find Alice’s Little Haunted Bookshop was very cool. So cool that Gayle was cold and huddled in the corner… Actually, Gayle found some great children’s books but she really was cold and I didn’t notice how miserable she looked because I was preoccupied with the chandelier.

But the true winners at the shopping village were Becca Rose (so much tarot and books, so many spooky hair clips) and Cloak & Wand— a coffee shop that sold wands and cloaks and books.

From there, Gayle wanted to check out the walk box for the local Volkssport trail which was at a Howard Johnson’s nearby and we had lunch at Mystic Diner while plotting our next adventure. The hope was a short walk– not the full 5K– and then heading over to Stonington to see the new location of Square Bank Books and visit Lara Ehrlich’s writing studio, Thought Fox Writers Den.

But Mystis had too many interesting twists and turns, and a candy store, and a drawbridge, and we ended up starting the walk at the wrong entrance of the museum and adding more than half a mile…

So while we walked by the former location of the bookstore, we did not make it to the new one. The drive to Massachusetts was uneventful, except for some traffic in Worcester and discussion of my great grandmother’s birthplace in Lowell.

We arrived at Doubletree for our warm cookies around 6:30 and I had dinner and was in the hot tub by 8 p.m. The hotel restaurant where we ate was named Characters— another omen that we ended up in the right place. Speaking of omens we found pennies at just about every stop today.

The final leg of bookstores and driving

Angel Ackerman 6 Comments

If you’ve been following my journey, you know that yesterday morning I left Greenville, SC, for Atlanta. It was about a three hour drive, technically less, but I stopped at bookstores and other places to entertain myself along the way.

As a small business owner, I am doing everything I can to make this trip inexpensive and fun.

I have a massive crate of snacks (which M said was very me) that are my emergency food rations and I’ve been gathering more items along the way– the “breakfast” at my previous hotel was grab-and-go so I now have two muffins. I stopped at a rest stop in Anderson County, South Carolina (my mother’s maiden name, plus near Clemson where my stepmom attended school) and saw that vending machine benefited the South Carolina some-organization-for-the-blind. I bought two snacks, because I saw something one doesn’t normally see in vending machine: snacks with protein! Individual packs of tuna salad and chicken salad. My collection now has one of each. And at the conference, I snagged a bag of raisinets. Fruit, right?

Of my snacks, I have eaten two KIND breakfast bars and a bag of harvest cheddar snap peas. I had forgotten how delicious those are.

My breakfast stop yesterday was Panera. They offered me a $1 bagel again. I considered Waffle House for my “main meal” stop of the day, but the timing didn’t work out because I stopped at a TA “travel center” to pee and grabbed a banana while selecting a magnet for Eva.

I have been buying Eva magnets from different places because they are usually cheap, easy to transport and they are easy to store at home. Magnets don’t take up space. They sit on the fridge or on a filing cabinet. I texted her from the truck stop to ask, “Are you to old for a magnet?” and I got the response, “never.”

Three Bookstores of the Day

  • Walls Of Books: A chain of used bookstores, I visited the one in Commerce, Ga. Bought three old paperbacks. Really wanted a book on found on Hebrew and English and the Old Testament but it was almost $20 and I can’t read Hebrew.
  • The Book Nook: A strange used everything store in Lilburn, Ga. This was the only place I didn’t talk to anyone because the people and the customers were all really old. And it was the only place I walked into where nobody talked to me. They had everything from records to comics to books and DVDs. And a cat-themed ladies room.
  • Phoenix & Dragon: A spiritual bookstore on the outskirts of Atlanta. I had to go and find a witchy present for Eva. And the name! They had three cats who live in the store. Best collection of tarot cards I gave ever seen in one place.

Chasing a dream in the autumn chill

Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

Sometimes, as members of the human race, we have days that are full of delights from sun-up to sundown. Those days are rare, but often involve a leisurely day with the family, a vacation or a holiday.

Then there are days that are good despite— or perhaps because of — their imperfections and today was one of those days.

Maybe today was my “bones day” after all. If you don’t get the reference, it’s a prognosticating pug on TikTok (read more here).

I was originally going to blog this on the Parisian Phoenix website, but I thought I could be more honest and personal here. So here I am.

I came home from work in a lot of pain last night. I achieved 90% in my work metrics and came home, once again, in the kind of pain that leaves me crying and nauseous. Part of a marker for bad pain for me is if the pain interferes with my sleep and/or does not dissipate by morning.

I did not sleep well and I woke in pain.

But, I got up, got dressed, combed my hair and put on makeup. Because today was the Easton Book Festival. It might have been cold and rainy, but I was putting my best foot forward, even if the discomfort made it hard to put a shoe on that foot.

Now, here’s the thing.

Easton has been a part of my life for more than 25 years. Even now, I live very close to Easton. I can walk there.

Book and Puppet Company has been a part of our lives for quite some time. The teenager’s father connected with the owners of the independent bookstore. The teenager had a career as a contained character there.

Andy Laties of Book and Puppet founded the Easton Book Festival three years ago. I even appeared in the original “Read a Book” video— and they also featured a Muslim student in hijab outside the literacy center at my last non-profit job in development at ProJeCt of Easton.

My supervisor there quickly forgot the things I did well, like that placement and our involvement in the Easton Downtown Association scarecrow competition, in which they still participate. But I digress.

The teenager’s father now serves on the board of the Easton Book Festival, so when they organized a local author’s event, he invited me.

One month into Parisian Phoenix’s launch and I have a promotional spot. I didn’t sell enough books to pay for the small expenses of the event: parking, coffee, book printing (but hey, I would have needed those anyway), and the copy of the inaugural issue of the Lehigh Valley Literary Magazine I bought. And an overpriced breakfast.

But one person not only bought my book, but also came back specifically to hear me read. So that was touching.

I read a scene from the sequel to MANIPULATIONS, COURTING APPARITIONS where the villain performs a magical ritual in downtown Easton.

It was my first “reading out” in years!

I kept it very brief, because some others had run long and we were all tired.

Until the YouTube video drops— you should be able to view the Facebook live here.

I had intended to join the teenager’s father at one of the last poetry events of the festival, but I was frozen so I came home instead.

My neighbor, aka Sobaka’s mom, has now formally joined the Parisian Phoenix team as a proofread. She says we need to talk about chapters 1 & 2 of COURTING APPARITIONS tomorrow.

The teenager’s father received the copyright for his upcoming poetry chapbook so that could be going to press in a few weeks.

And tomorrow I hope to make applesauce, post some new material from Rachel Thompson on the Parisian Phoenix blog, and start typing Maryann Stephanie Ignatz’s material.

I even got to have dinner at my favorite diner with my neighbor to celebrate Jan’s official status as part of the Parisian Phoenix team.