Summers at the Dolce Vita

The first time I saw Dolce Vita was a couple years ago, when we gathered for the annual employee dinner. It was a nice-ish restaurant that could only be reached by taking a side road across a one-lane bridge and following it as the pavement disappeared and it snaked up a hill. When I started keeping this blog I knew I’d have to write about it again, because there is absolutely no good explanation for why the owner decided to put it there.

Granted, this isn’t the first time I’ve come across a restaurant in an odd place. If you take the right road from Rochester to Decorah, you’ll see a combination gas station/convenience store/restaurant that also happens to be part of a farming co-op, with a barn, silos and more tractors than you thought could exist in the same area. Not to mention in northeastern Michigan there was at least one restaurant located on a road that was definitely not well-traveled, and in an area where the nearest business was a gas station at least two miles away. However, both these restaurants were your typical “stop ‘n’ eat” places that didn’t really serve anything extravagant. Dolce Vita, on the other hand, is meant to be a fine dining destination, and most fine dining destinations are not quite so out-of-the-way.

Despite the restaurant’s location, it does serve really good food. Mostly it’s Italian, although the Dolce Vita has its share of sandwiches and the Kid’s Menu reportedly serves up a mean PB&J. However, during the summer, the big draw to the restaurant is its concert series. If you go to http://www.mcdolcevita.com/decorah-entertainment/decorah-entertainment.html, you can see all the bands that will be playing this summer. You may also see that, from the names of such bands as Buckhollow Band, Beet Root Stew and Big Daddy Cade, that the type of music tends toward blues, folk, and rock that is heavy on its blues and folk influences. Still, this was a wonderful opportunity. A fine dining restaurant in the middle of nowhere putting out a summer concert series? I’m in!

I ended up getting to the restaurant a bit late, owing to a visit to Cedar Falls to visit the comic book store in the early afternoon. I thought parking might be tight, but I was sure I could get a good parking place there, because how many people could this event draw, really? Longtime readers of my blog should already know the answer, and will not be surprised when I say that the parking lot was full, the sides of the road were filled up from sharp curve the sharp curve, and the owners of neighboring properties had posted barricades across their drive warning concert-goers not to park there.

I managed to find a tight spot next to a dumpster, and in no time whatsoever I was walking to the small concert stage, surrounded by all of Decorah’s Patrons Of The Arts. The band was playing some jazz-tinged blues song, and the crowd was busy sipping beer and socializing under the canvas tents. Some people were even inside eating!

To be honest, this felt less like a concert and more like a wedding reception. Sure, the band was the main focus, and while I’m not an expert on jazz and blues they definitely kept the crowd entertained. A good four or five people were in the courtesy space that usually separates a band from the audience, dancing as the spirit moved them. Off to the side, a spate of very cool twentysomethings sat, chatting and smoking, obviously digging the scene.

As far as the food, I settled for a Cajun dish, and despite the fact that I was in Iowa it was quite good. I wish I had more to report, but I have to be honest, it was a nice restaurant, nice food, decent music and a surprising turnout. You could definitely do worse on a Saturday night.

Graduations and Get-Togethers

Spring is turning into summer here in northeastern Iowa. It probably does this in other parts of the world as well, but for now we’re focused on Cresco, where school will be getting out for the summer, which can mean only one thing—open houses.

Open houses are wonderful things, for those unfamiliar with them. It’s a great excuse to get out and meet people, and also you’re getting a copious amount of free food. I can remember my high school graduation open house where, even after lots of family and friends visited we had enough food left over to feed our family of six for at least two or three dinners, since when you have four teenage boys food lasts about as long as a snowflake in Saudi Arabia.

When you go to an open house in a small town, there are two things that are unavoidable. First, you are going to know several people there. Second, you’re going to find out that some people know each other in oddly unexpected ways. This was how, for instance, I found out that two coworkers who had almost nothing to do with each other in the workplace knew each other because one coworker’s brother was the manager at the local bank where the other coworker did most of his banking. On any other day you would assume that the two coworkers had a passing familiarity with each other, but then you get the one coworker’s brother in the mix and the dynamic totally changes. It’s a type of alchemical reaction you rarely see anymore, since in larger towns and cities social groups are more separated.

An open house in a small town is also an interesting way to gauge closeness to someone you know. Let’s say, for instance, Coworker A puts out an open invitation to an open house in your town. Coworker B, who lives in the town 20 miles away, also puts out an open invitation. You can safely go to Coworker A’s open house as an invited guest—you live in the town, you’ll probably know some folks and you won’t feel completely weird about it. With Coworker B, though, you have to be a bit more thoughtful. The town 20 miles away has its own society, and the people there have their own relationships. If you go there, who exactly will you be talking to? Sure, it’s nice to chat with people about what their town is like, but you’re also an outsider at an event where family and friends want to get together to chat and reminisce a bit. If you’re like me and hate reminiscing, you’re going to think twice about showing up for anything other than the much-vaunted “token appearance,” where you stop by, say hi and have a plate of food before disappearing. In a lot of ways, having a plateful of food is actually doing the host of the open house a favor, although not technically approved by Miss Manners.

Perhaps it’s just the season, but I’ve also started seeing several notices for get-togethers and benefit dinners. One person was burned in a factory accident. Another person is suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease. It’s hard to come up with anything funny to say about that, and even if I could I’d have to accept the fact that I’d be a pretty terrible person to make a joke about people getting together to help a friend out. Also—it’s just admirable. Both in how the community comes together and the extent of these benefit dinners. For about five to ten dollars, you can not only get a large dinner, but there’s also a dance or a concert. On at least one occasion, the band performing was a quasi-professional country band! I feel secure in saying Cresco takes their benefit dinners seriously.

Travel, Travel and More Travel

First, let me apologize for missing last week’s post. I hadn’t encountered anything spectacular to write about, and I tried to come up with something while trying to balance a stiff work schedule, some other hobbies and getting over a trip to Chicago while at the same time preparing for another weekend trip. The result? Tuesday came and went, then Wednesday, then Thursday. By Thursday evening I was still telling myself that there had to be something interesting I’d seen, but I really didn’t believe it any more, similar to how some middle-aged men tell themselves that a sports agent will see them shooting hoops in front of their garage and sign them up to the Detroit Pistons.

Which leads us to this blog entry, where I again try to come up with something interesting about Iowa and proceed to fail yet again, because I haven’t spent any appreciable time searching for anything. Instead, I’d like to talk about travel. Specifically, car travel.

In the past four weeks, I have drive to Chicago three times. From Iowa. If you consider that each drive is about six hours, then I have driven a whopping thirty-six hours combined. I have to admit, I now have no idea how truckers do it. Yes, occasional trips to Chicago are quite nice, and the first trip was really pleasant since I avoided the tollway completely. The Illinois Tollway system doubled its prices at the start of the year, and while I’m not blind to the realities of inflation and increased costs, jacking the prices up by 100 percent is a jerk move of the highest order. I’m confident that the lion’s share of this toll increase won’t be going to maintain the roads. So I’m starting to consider it a point of honor to take a route that doesn’t leave you at the tender mercies of the Illinois Tollway, which is a lot like being at the tender mercies of a serial rapist. Actually, that’s not quite correct—at least a serial rapist understands he’s doing a bad thing.

So I drove the expressway in Wisconsin to a highway that led into Chicago where my brother lives, and while it probably did take longer, it was more direct and it was in fact interesting to witness how a few buildings started to become loosely-connected shopping centers, then finally main drags until the buildings and shopping centers and main drags coalesced into the outlying suburbs of Chicago. My brother tells me this is known as “Chicagoland” by the people who actually live in the Chicago area, but if you don’t have an intimate knowledge of the region you could be excused for calling it all “Chicago.” Let’s be honest, by now the cities and suburbs have been grafted together with housing developments and shopping centers. To call one suburb “Des Plaines” and another “Mount Prospect” has as much meaning as figuring out just where the dividing line is between indigo and purple.

The second trip to Chicago was tollway-free as well. On the other hand, it also took me through downtown Chicago and on the Dan Ryan expressway on a Friday night. I can confidently say I never would have made it through this if it weren’t for Lori, who knew her way around the city. We drove through a lot of areas in Chicago that I have strenuously tried to avoid, most notably the downtown area, and I can safely say that my little Aveo would have ended up being scraped off some SUV’s grill if it hadn’t been for her. It’s not that the entire drive was a hellish nightmare of roads designed by MC Escher, though. Lakeshore drive was fairly pleasant, and some of the residential areas were nice, if crowded on both sides due to parking. Downtown, though...I’m trying to think how I would get around there without a state-of-the-art GPS system and years of experience. It’s like trying to navigate through a labyrinth with one-way streets. And the Dan Ryan expressway was a seething mass of taillights marked by the occasional spurts of movement wherein drivers would aggressively nose their way in to different lanes. Combine that with one or two streets that require leaps of faith to make sure they are still there when you turn onto where they are supposed to be at an intersection, and you can understand my point of view that the Blues Brothers was less of a car chase movie than giving two guys who had never been to Chicago before the keys to an old police cruiser and seeing what happens.

The third trip was, quite frankly, excruciating. I brought some of it on myself by catching the midnight showing of the Avengers movie in Decorah, and completing a six-hour drive on three hours of sleep is an experience. At some point when you’re running on very little sleep, your mind starts to realize you’ve gone beyond drowsy and begins shutting down cognitive portions of your brain in order to keep your concentration on driving. This happened to my brother Andy and me a few years ago, and by the time we had gotten to my brother Jay’s Chicago condominium the portions of our brains that could think of the past and the future had been shut down, leaving us in a Zen state of existence where there was only the present moment. In each second I would tell myself what I was going to do, as in, “Now I am going to grab the toothbrush. Now I am going to open the medicine cabinet. Now I am going to grab the toothpaste. Now I will apply the toothpaste to the toothbrush. Now I will begin to brush my teeth.” It was an interesting state of mind to be in, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone make the effort to achieve it as it could cause an accident, traffic or otherwise.

This was how I entered into Chicago for the third time—faintly buzzing on caffeine, my body shaking from the vibration of driving on the road, and feeling strung out in general. By the time I had reached my brother Jay’s new apartment I was feeling like a rag that had been wrung out repeatedly. I desperately wanted to sleep, but since it was only two in the afternoon I would have to wait for a bit. Like eight hours or so. Maybe this is why I was so unwilling to make the drive back, which took a lot more out of me that it otherwise might. Perhaps part of it was that I realized I had spent a total of thirty hours in the car. Part of it might also be that I was tired of the constant drain on my mind from having to be alert all the time. Either way, I ended up getting up to stop and stretch a LOT. Perhaps not every town,  but most of them. My legs were screaming at me to move them. My body was hinting heavily that finding a motel would be an idea on the scale of discovering the theory of relativity in terms of recognizing genius. Still, I pressed on, and eventually ended up back in northeast Iowa.

This weekend, I don’t plan on travelling anywhere. No big trips, nothing involving crossing any state line. This weekend is all about resting, relaxing, and finally getting the chance to clean my bathroom, which is impossible to do if you’re in a different state than it. There’s definitely no place like home.

Unless you can rest there for a couple days, that is.