Gladys tidings: Ruth Buzzi leaves a comment on our blog!

We did a post last year about the Ruth Buzzi Gladys Ormphby bench in Westerly, Rhode Island and the great woman herself left this nice comment today:

Great memories! I grew up in Westerly area and love the place and the people, still. My brother Harold owns Buzzi Memorials on the road down in Wequetequock Cove just south of town. Thank you for the nice tribute! I am now on Twitter as @Ruth_A_Buzzi and I love my twitter friends, too! XOXO Ruthie

Are we thrilled by this? You bet your sweet bippy! Check out our original post here.

Bean there, done that: Freeport, Maine's L.L. Bean flagship store

I love a good "ruined" picture. Here are a few of me in front of the giant boot at L.L. Bean.

Boot cookies (a sweet deal for not a lot of dough).

Bear with me on this.

Mmmm...I thought I smelled buck nip!

Come 'n' git it!

Mrs. Bean's trout, caught at Moosehead on July 8, 1953.

Just keepin' it reel.

They've got some cool exhibits of vintage merchandise. These items are from the 1930s.

This unclaimed personalized bag is for sale at the outlet store. It's an especially good bargain if your name happens to be Patti Hall.

Leon Leonwood Bean, founder of the company...

...not to be confused with that other famous Mr. Bean.

In 1912, Leon Leonwood Bean (L.L. to you and me) was tired of getting his feet wet while moose hunting in the woods of Maine. He came up with a boot made up of lightweight leather uppers and rubber bottoms, set up shop in his brother's Freeport, Maine basement, printed up some fliers and thus began one of the nation's most successful mail order businesses. Almost 100 years later, the L.L. Bean company is still located in Freeport, with a giant campus of clothing, hunting, fishing, boating, skiing, camping and furniture stores on Main Street. And the Bean boot, or Maine Hunting Shoe, is still a popular item, as the giant 16-foot photo-op model outside their door will attest. Inside the store, you'll find a trout pond, aquarium, stuffed animals, and lots of friendly, knowledgeable employees to advise you on the proper weight of waders or gauge of Gortex. I'm not exactly what you'd call an outdoorsman (roughing it for me is a motel room with only 10 channels on cable), but it's still very entertaining walking through a retail temple to the great outdoors like this. Orange dog safety vest? Right over here. Swarovski Z3 rifle scope? Behind you. Under Armour Evolution ColdGear leggings? You just passed them. And if all this isn't enough, there's an outlet store across the street with clearance items and markdowns on unclaimed personalized tote bags (where are you, Patti Hall?). If you can't have a good eccentric roadside time here, well, you just don't know Bean's.

Eccentric street name of the week

Old or new, I love this name.

Well, here we are: Pismo Beach and all the clams we can eat

"Well, here we are: Pismo Beach and all the clams we can eat"

"What a way for a duck to travel -- underground!"

Cue the music: "We're in the Money"

"I have a feeling Pismo Beach ain't quite this wide..."

"Well, what do you know... a poil!"

"Down! Down! Down! Mine! Mine! Mine!"

Looney Tunes cartoons play like the soundtrack of my childhood. I can remember coming home from school every day and watching Bugs Bunny cartoons at 4:00 on Channel 5 until I could recite the dialogue by heart. Throw in a Ring Ding or two and you've got yourself one happy kid. When we were traveling on the California coast last spring, I saw an opportunity to visit a place I had no reference to, other than a Bugs Bunny cartoon. In "Ali Baba Bunny," Bugs and Daffy Duck are vacationing together and Bugs is presumably doing the driving, navigating by underground tunnel to their holiday destination, Pismo Beach. A missed "left toin at Albecoikie" puts them somewhere in Arabia, inside a cave with mountains of gold, jewels and treasure, bringing out vile greediness in Daffy. Bugs eventually does make it to Pismo Beach, as does Daffy, albeit in a comically altered state. Bugs' line, "Well, here we are, Pismo Beach and all the clams we can eat" has been in my mind ever since those days, and I finally got the chance to say it and mean it when we passed through last May. It's a pleasant seaside community, with restaurants, gift shops, and bustling surfers making the scene. Our visit wasn't very lengthy, just long enough to pick up a delicious lunch at eat it by the shore and there were no clams for me, due to a clam-intolerant stomach. That's all folks.

No need to be coy, Roy: Roy's Motel and Cafe of Amboy, California

In the Mojave Desert of eastern California sits the town of Amboy, a once-prosperous stop along Route 66 where weary drivers could gas up, get some grub and spend the night before heading out the next morning on another lonesome stretch of the Mother Road. Roy's Cafe and gas station was opened in 1938 by Roy Crowl, who owned the whole town of Amboy (not a very big place, but impressive nonetheless) with his wife Velma. The Crowls' daughter Betty married a Herman "Buster" Burris and together they expanded Roy's and made it a booming post-War success. And then, as was the case with most Route 66 establishments, the Interstate came along and dried up all the local business. Buster sold the town in 1995 to a party that then went into foreclosure and then Buster's widow bought it back in 2005 and sold it to its current owner, a Mr. Albert Okura, who promised to keep the yesteryear ambiance and reopen Roy's in the future. When we were there last spring, the gas station was pumping $4.99/gallon gas, the cafe had cold soda and souvenirs and a busload of European tourists were milling about the place. The motel cabins were deserted but graffiti-free, like a well-preserved ghost town. The awesome decaying Googie sign reaches for the sky like a skyscraper in this hardscrabble no man's land to all fans of dilapidated roadside nostalgia. It was 100 degrees when we stopped by, a little chilly for these parts, but it was worth every bead of sweat to see such an amazing eccentric roadside site. Roy Orbison, Roy Scheider, Roy's of Amboy...there's a lot of greatness in the name Roy.