790 Machu Picchu

Thursday, July 13, 2006

[Edit - minor clarification - ignore if you've seen this already.]

Dinner last evening was at Machu Picchu, a Peruvian restaurant in Newburgh. (Interesting coincidence, Machu Picchu, Peru, was the locale for a "Nightline" story last night. When I was younger, I'd always wanted to go there. Now I know I can't handle the altitude.) The menu was a surprise. It included tripe, and some of the sauces contained potatoes, and there were Chinese items. I ended up with a thin (but tender) flank steak covered in sauteed tomatoes, mushrooms, and onions, with a scoop of rice on the side. The guy across from me had lo mein with the same vegetables mixed in, plus sweet and hot peppers.

There were only four of us. One woman (a professor at West Point, whose husband is currently in Iraq) had brought her toddler, so she had to leave early. The remaining three of us wanted dessert, but they didn't have any. Angela mentioned that there was an ice cream place "just up the road", so we decided to walk to it.

I forgot that Angela thinks nothing of a 10-mile run, and the 25-year-old guy with us runs several miles every morning. "Just up the road" turned out to be about a mile and a half - a three mile round trip. Ick! I was wearing flip-flops. Plastic flip-flops. (Not on purpose - they're what I wear around the house, and I forgot to change before I left.) But the goal of REAL frozen custard kept me going.

When we got there, the ice cream parlor was now a pizza parlor. There was a Baskin Robbins across the street, so that's where we ended up.

I'm sorry, Newburgh, but I find your Broadway scary. Maybe that's why we had so few people show up for dinner. Heading back to the cars after ice cream, we walked past at least two examples of your fearless cops in action, patting down suspects. We also saw several police cars flashing lights on the other side of the street far ahead of us, but by the time we got there the excitement was over. That's on a Wednesday night, about 9 pm. I'd hate to see Saturday.

But the trees lining the street are pretty. They distract attention from the crumbling concrete.