drinking and driving

Week one of work over, so it's time for some weekend exploring. High on the list is checking out some of the local microbreweries to test the truth of the phrase "America: Worst beers in the world, and best beers in the world". Greenport on the north fork of Long Island (http://tinyurl.com/27s58jd) is home to the Greenport Harbor Brewery. They have a small bar/tasting room where you buy a glass, and they give you a 4 oz sample of each of their tap beers. They're not allowed to actually operate as a bar. Takeaways are in 64 oz flagons known locally as growlers. Their beers include a pale ale, an amber ale, a porter, and IPA and a Belgian style ale. The winter highlight will be the porter, but given that it's summer time, the IPA is the choice of beer to fill our shiny new growler. The north fork of Long Island is also home to a lot of wineries, so I expect there will be a trip or two back to the area. It's also a major agricultural area for Long Island. Fields of corn lined long sections of the roads in the area. So to start to answer the original question, they certainly do have some very fine beers here. Testing of the bad end of the equation started on Saturday evening with a sampling of Bud Regular. At least it wasn't Bud Light. It should be renamed Bud Average. Or Bud Ordinary. Or Dud.

Cars are a fact of life on Long Island. Many roads don't have footpaths. Every single shop, no matter how small, has a number of car parks. People will drive between shops within a single shopping centre. Bikes pretty much don't exist on the roads, and when they are there, they're often being ridden on the wrong side of the road, without helmets. Scary! So we have to get a car. There's a shortage of Moon Buggies over here (although I have seen one Camry wagon of a similar vintage), so we came up with a shortlist of possible cars. Criteria were: small (ruling out pretty much every American car), hatch/wagon (ruling out just about everything else), not white (so we can find it when it snows) and with something less that 100000 miles on it (we are getting picky!). So, meet Joan, our shiny new (well, 2002) VW Jetta wagon. The New York DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) has a complex system of identification required before we can register a car in our name. Six points of identification are required, and we're sitting (un)happily on five points, waiting for either a social security card, or a power bill, or a pay slip to arrive. So, in the meantime, Joan's previous owners were kind enough to drive her over to our place and then remove the plates, effectively deregistering it until we can sufficiently identify ourselves. Which will happen hopefully in the next couple of days.