Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from I am BARRY HESS
Parking a vehicle for a concert at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, is quite a challenge. Before heading to the BTS concerts this past week I did some research, even asking Chat GPT about how to handle parking. To its credit, with my hints about what I wanted, it ended up putting us at a pretty good spot in someone’s yard. The spot was a 25-minute walk from the stadium. We were staying at a hotel about four miles south of the stadium. Our tickets provided us free parking in the general parking lot across US-1, but I was skeptical. A bit of reading said you could end up waiting in that lot for quite a while after a concert. After day one, we talked to some folks who parked there and discovered they had literally not moved their car in the lot for about two hours. Not waiting in line, but literally just sitting in their car unable to move into a line. US-1 does not allow any left turns heading north toward the stadium starting anywhere from 2-4pm, and I assume something similar happens north side of the stadium. Earlier in that time slot you can sometimes sneak a left turn into a gas station when heading north, but as the day goes on you will probably get a ticket (or in an accident) if you try to do that. If you also need to head south after a show, parking where we did is a pretty good option. You can text the number on that page to reserve a spot. In our case, reserving was $40, but if you drove up to the lot it would have been $60. I’m sure prices vary per event. If you don’t park there, finding one of the few side streets to park on like this one on Pine Street is a good bet since you have easy right-turn access onto US-1. (I think that Lafayette House was also doing parking on Pine.) There are many businesses directly on US-1 south of the stadium that offer parking, but most don’t offer traffic control to get you out of the lot past the walking concert leavers and into the bumper-to-bumper traffic on US-1. If you’re heading north, I’ve read good things about parking at South Walpole UMC. I assume you could take some side streets from there to a less congested version of the busy road that you need to get to. Parking on Pine Street might even work for heading north if you can head west from your spot to 115 and on to 1A. The city does block off some residential roads in the area to protect neighborhoods from all the traffic, so your mileage may vary (heh). I did see some people leave lots on Pine and head west, though. If you need to take ride share, good luck! I read of people waiting at the ride share lot on site until 2 or 3 in the morning. At a certain point I think that drivers just stop being willing to drive there. I believe your best bet would be to start walking toward a side street like Pine and scheduling a car for a time about 30 minutes after you start walking. (Of course, cars cannot turn right from US-1 to Pine and I don’t think they’re allowed to enter Pine from the west, so YMMV on this as well. Probably you can’t do what I’m recommending!) If you need to take the event train back toward the city, good luck! For these concert there was only a single train and tickets sold out in five minutes. I assume there’s always only a single train. Some booked the commuter train that was scheduled between 10:30 and 11 pm. You will need to leave the show early to make that train. There are two hotels on site. If you want to book them for a show, you’ll need to book them well before the show tickets actually go on sale, so good luck! For these shows I checked every week to see if some rooms were cancelled and later became available. About a month before the show a few rooms became available, probably because they released accessible rooms that they have to hold back. Those rooms were…over $1,000 a night. I’m not sure if that’s the original price if you booked pre-sellout or if that’s just the “we’re sold out” price. A final option is to check if some of the restaurants to the west of the stadium are open for a couple of hours after the event. In that case, I may suggest parking in the general lot and hanging out for a meal after the game. Reply by email
We have collectively been recovering from a physically and emotionally draining two weeks of marching band. We all were caught napping at some point throughout the early days of this week! It’s been nice to have activities wind down this week, and we’ll have a bit of relaxation for a few weeks going forward. It’s been raining a lot around here. No flooding in our area, but I think there’s been some within an hour or two of us. We’re hoping our annual July 4th festivities are not washed out this year. My brother and his family are visiting today. We only get to see them once or twice a year, so we’re excited to hang for, well, 24 hours or so. 🙂 Time to get cooking in preparation for all of this. Cole slaw, cucumber salad, some desserts, and more. Let’s go! I saw this screenshot and a lot of memories came flooding back. I had totally forgotten about this game! For whatever reason it immediately made me think of these two games: This is nothing new, but the Social Security Administration sending out Trump bootlicking emails to the whole country has been one of my least favorite things of the past couple years. I’m not going to screenshot the whole thing, but rest assured it includes lots of “Thanks to President Trump” statements. What a sadly unique time in history. It’s interesting to see someone go the way of rebuilding a socials recommendation algorithm for themselves. What a fun visual comparison! (h/t Amit) Reply by email
Spent this morning at Minnebar. This year was the 20th anniversary. I’ve had several posts about Minnebar on this blog through the years. I’ve only been able to go a couple times over the past ten years and it was good to see many familiar faces. (Even some Minnesota expats. 👋, Luke!) I called TRUNCATE on a Postgres database table in production for the first time. That was nerve wracking! I did some wood work for the first time in a while. I’m working on a loft for Emma. I don’t know whether it’s time away from woodworking or just the type of project, but this felt a lot more like work and a lot less like hobby. Part of it might also be because it’s such a physically big project and that is a lot for my older body. You can never have too many clamps I’m way behind, but I just learned that Songkick was purchased by Suno. Did I know what Suno was before I learned that? No, but it sounds pretty ick. From their own home page: Make any song you can imagine Start with a simple prompt or dive into our pro editing tools, your next track is just a step away. Yeah, ick. Time to migrate to Bandsintown? Something else? Give up? I just finished the excellent Fela Kuti: Fear No Man podcast by Jad Abumrad and team. Highly recommended. I think I might become an Onion paper subscriber. Anyone else going back to paper? Discovered NOT A HOTEL. A man can dream. Reply by email
Short, and late, rendition of Friday this week as I’m traveling. We took a spring break to Phoenix and were able to fit in a Project Hail Mary IMAX screening. It was excellent! Two of us have read the book, and we enjoyed both versions of the story on their own terms. We got in to Phoenix late on a Friday, stayed at a hotel, and kicked around the city proper on Saturday before checking into our VRBO. Out of nowhere I found an afternoon performance of Come From Away at The Phoenix Theatre. It was our first time seeing the musical, and it was fantastic. Lots of memories flooded back for those of us who lived through 9/11. Other than the two events above, this trip was pure relaxation for us. A few meals out, a lot of ice cream, and otherwise lounging around the pool at the VRBO. We all are coming home with some new tans (and a few burns). We wrapped the last meal of our trip at Fabio on Fire in Peoria. Excellent pizza, excellent pasta. Ravioli Al Brasato Fritti Reply by email
More in travel
If you know what to look for, you can work out the restaurant lineage of Impala just from a quick scan of the menu. Firstly, and most importantly, you want to try every last item - a feat frustratingly unavailable unless you're eating with at least ten of your friends. Between four of us last week, I think we managed to try about half of what was on offer, and looking back on the menu now some of the things we had to leave unordered still make me quite sad. cull yaw, an extraordinary product which means only one thing: this is a Super 8 restaurant. Together with Brat, Smoking Goat, Kiln and Mountain, places that are regularly spoken about as some of the best in London, a Super 8 restaurant is a stamp of quality like almost no other, and as close to a guarantee that you're going to have a good time that exists in town. And so yes, inevitably, Impala is brilliant - blindingly, uncompromisingly brilliant - a showcase of style and technique that thrills from the very first moment to the very last. We began with martinis, because if any way you can, you should. These arrived alongside two types of bread - fluffy aish baladi which was warm and crackly and lovely and absolutely would have been the best bread I'd eaten all week if it wasn't for the other type, honey and olive oil, which was closer to fine French pastry than anything so humble as a house bread. Dipped in the grassy olive oil and some kind of salty chilli chutney it was absolutely superb - the kind of thing it would be way too easy to fill up on before the rest of the food arrived. It took a great deal of self-control not to. I couldn't visit a Super 8 restaurant without ordering some cull yaw, in the form of these delicate little pastries a bit like samosas. The mutton flavour was rich and powerful, and a light dusting of icing sugar, which I was worried might be a bit weird, seemed to enhance the overall effect somehow - very clever stuff. That little dollop of sauce by the way is pickled walnut, which was very lovely too. Borek had a supremely light and delicate pastry with all lovely little crisps and folds, and a fantastic spinach/feta filling. You get the impression that everything that makes it onto the menu at Impala is considered equally worthy as everything else - there's no "token" veggie dish, there are just dishes that happen to be veggie. Ftira looked as good as it tasted, and it tasted amazing. Yet another masterclass in baking (the bread was warm and soft inside with a beautiful crust) was filled with a delightful avocado mixture and surrounded with a wreath of super fresh, and nicely dressed, herbs and edible flowers. I'm sure Impala wouldn't do anything as trite as design a dish for Instagram deliberately, but they may well have done it accidentally just by virtue of having an artist's eye for presentation. Each new dish to appear maintained the same stunning standard. Sweetbreads are always a direct route to my heart but these were - or rather "this was", a giant single specimen - absolutely breathtaking. The sauce was deeply flavoured, glossy and perfectly balanced, the shredded onion salad crunchy and full of flavour but of course the real star was the offal itself, tasting of wood smoke and marmite and absolutely unimprovable. In any other restaurant I'd describe them as a "must-order" but must-orders are a bit useless when everything else is just as good. Mackerel was a dainty little fillet, with moist, meaty flesh and a delicate crisp skin. It came with two separate - and excellent - sauces, one earthy walnut puree and one shockingly good taramasalata which, again, anywhere else would be one of the highlights of the meal. That Impala can make a tarama this good and have it appear as one of two sauces in a dish and nowhere else on the menu just shows how much talent this place has in the kitchen. Birds tongue pasta came soaked in an oxtail ragu that had clearly been a long time in the making given the rich, complex flavour of it. Again, anywhere else this would be a dish to recommend to anyone you met for the next few days; at Impala it's just yet another thing to knock you sideways. Pasta had a lovely bite too. Perhaps the only dish that didn't completely overwhelm with brilliance was a roast duck, which only managed to be excellent rather than exceptional. Perhaps it was just in comparison to everything else, but although it was cooked perfectly pink and had a nicely rendered skin, the molasses sauce was a little bit one-note and one or two pieces was enough before you started looking for interest elsewhere. Also at £68 for a quarter it was not exactly value either - you can get a whole one for £133 at Park Chinois in Mayfair. Perhaps not an entirely fair comparison, but still. Monkfish wrapped in grape leaves, smokey and perfectly seasoned, were meaty and rewarding and about as good as an example as you will find anywhere. But even more impressive than the fish itself were the accompanying vegetables, particularly a leaf of kale soaked in a completely wonderful umami-rich jus of some kind and still crunchy and crisp from the grill. All the myriad of techniques on display, from the baking to grilling to sauce-making, were absolutely nailed over and over again. Even a tomato salad was impressive - clearly using very good tomatoes, expertly dressed and topped with more crunchy fresh herbs. Beautiful colours on it too. And still Impala had one final trick up its sleeve - this date and pistachio custard tart which put every other similar tart in London to shame. Of course the texture of the custard and the base were both impeccable, but you'd expect that of somewhere like this. The real stroke of genius was just a touch extra of salt in the mixture, which rather than proving a distraction just boosted the flavours to stratospheric levels. We'd eaten a lot by this point, but three portions of this tart all disappeared in record time. Dorian soared north of £200 a head and though was extremely enjoyable it wasn't twice as good as Impala - in fact it wasn't quite as good. 10/10
They say autumn is the season for art. In Japan, fall symbolizes freshness and new endeavors. The season’s clearer skies and brighter moons gives renewed enthusiasm to encounter artistic inspiration. And the entire city of Tokyo is not only here for it, but sponsoring it. From museums extending their hours and all-night art exhibitions to […] Related posts: Five Art Exhibitions Worth Travelling Japan For this Fall 2025 The Japanese Art Festivals to See in the 2nd Half of 2017 Fujiko Nakaya Covers the Sapporo Art Museum in Fog
When he was a young man, Andy Buckley wanted to be an actor. After graduating from Stanford, he moved to New York City to try to make it. He appeared in a couple of music videos, but didn’t experience much initial success otherwise. Andy pivoted, spending much of his early career working as a stockbroker […] The post Falling back in love, for the right reasons appeared first on Herbert Lui.
Use this filter to find new additions.
