Cool Destinations

Beer in a Barn – Inverness Brewing, Monkton, MD

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / 5 Comments

With a blossoming renaissance of microbreweries, tap rooms and privatized beer peddling across America, you may be seeing a lot more farmland being repurposed into expansive day tripper destinations like Inverness Brewing, dropping visitors and hops hounds into the pastoral splendor of Monkton, Maryland.

Not so much transforming as maximizing what a 100 acre working farm can be to the community as much as to the owning family, Inverness is a terrific operation with equally superb beers. Three different bars with a bucket load of taps spread over two tiers in the main barn, the third being fleshed out in the estate’s old horse stables.

TJ’s family gave us a gift card last Christmas to Inverness Brewing which were finally able to break away and use. While she’s no fan of beer, she’s bitten the bullet for me a number of times and it helps Inverness had adult-styled slushies for her and a banging food truck on the premises–more like a permanent trailer with casual fare food well up to its level of beers.

Naturally, the advent of IPAs means Inverness like most microbrews, has a heavy lean on those, my favorite being the double IPA, Monkton Madness. I also dug There’s Always One IPA, as much for the taste as the hilarious name. They have a hazy mango IPA and British IPA I also recommend. Being more a fan of the darker side of beers, however, I found the 8.5% APV Miss Molly’s Imperial Nitro Stout to be stellar. The rye barrel aged, honey fused Helles Maibock called The Pollenator, is a sheer joy in a bottle, more like a hard mead. Fair warning, though, The Pollenator is a 9.2% APV drink, so it’s recommended you give this one its own separate consumption day.

Similar to vineyards, homestead breweries such as Inverness offer open-air leisure aside from the plentiful indoor seating (there’s even a large leather couch in the bottom seating area of the barn). After hitting the food truck, we said hello to a birthday gathering before picking up a couple games of cornhole Inverness has stationed outside the stable bar. TJ and I split the wins and were content to skip a needless tiebreaker game. It was enough just to get some sorely-needed downtime to play with one another.

Nearly as impressive as the empire known as Brewery Ommegang near Cooperstown, NY (that one had its own Game of Thrones-themed ales that ROCKED) which we took in a couple years ago, Inverness Brewing is a cosmopolitan brand of country with more than 20 beers, live music, lush patios and even a jumbo t.v. to watch a baseball game on while hopping it up.

The old man in the tree…

Cheers, y’all…

–Photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

The Site of My Upcoming Novel, “Revolution Calling,” the Former North Carroll High School

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / 17 Comments

My forthcoming novel, Revolution Calling, to be released soon by Raw Earth Ink, is set in the year 1988, the year I graduated high school. Funny enough, we are about to celebrate our class’s 35th year reunion next month.

My alma mater is North Carroll High School, doubled as Merriweather High in Revolution Calling. Back then, you could call North Carroll High a rural-suburban school as its homebased town Hampstead was in the midst of gradual, resistant industrialization. It’s one of the themes I explore in the story.

North Carroll High School officially closed its doors in 2015 due to a population burst prompting the opening of a new school in the neighboring town of Manchester. Beyond that, however, a decline in school-aged children ensued as much of my generation and that behind me began to move from the area. Frankly put, North Carroll was left to flounder in the shadow of upgrade one burg over. Considering Manchester Valley High won bragging rights by its newness, North Carroll was repurposed in part for the local police. In recent times, the Coppermine fitness company bought into the building and its outdoor facilities, keeping the premises operational for sports and theater inside the former school’s auditorium. This, still sharing the back end of the school with the Hampstead police department.

Having spent nearly two years writing Revolution Calling after first coming up with the concept of an Outsiders type of story for Generation X heavy-metal-style while in the music industry, I took a walk around the campus of my old school. The first thing I thought of was to look at myself now versus the longhair grit who used to prowl these halls from 1984 to 1988. I know my peers from North Carroll, many of whom I’ve stayed friends with and have routine dinner and drink dates with, probably laugh even harder at the sight of khaki cargo shorts, a peach tee and hair shaved to two inches.

I took a lot of pictures of scenes which appear in Revolution Calling and I’m happier than hell they match what I wrote. At least, to my mind’s eye and hopefully those who went to North Carroll High with me. For everyone else, the fictional Merriweather High and their cougar school mascot is a thinly-veiled disguise for North Carroll Panthers. As we all say amongst our North Carroll tribe across the decades before its closure, we are Panther Strong.

So have a look at these pictures before Revolution Calling’s release and I hope it’ll help put some context to the story. What you see in these pictures is where my characters breathe. The two protagonists of the story, Rob and Jason, are me divided into two leads. I didn’t rely upon actual friendships and relationships from my high school days. Only a handful of characters are based on real people. The story is built around my life back then, collecting the hardest moments of my teenaged life and compressing the events into a two-month narrative for the story. Most of Revolution Calling happened to me, until it hits the violent side in the story, which evolves into fiction.

I laughed the hardest in my revisit tour at the “Senior patio” I use in the story, where students of the day were allowed to smoke outdoors, if you can get your head around that.

Finally, I ran a gazillion miles around North Carroll’s track after graduation and I was pleased to see it felt and looks exactly the same. The track has a pivotal moment in the story for Jason’s evolution, as it doubled my own struggle to belong as a metalhead infiltrating the jock life by taking three years of Weightlifting class and becoming accepted by those guys in time. Same as with the rest my classmates. It had become a rare thing where a headbanger had found social acceptance amongst so many different walks of life in the high school social strata. My precise thesis for writing Revolution Calling.

Sometimes you really can go home…

–Photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

New York, New York, Is It Everything They Say?

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / 27 Comments

I’ve been in a New York state of mind all week, obviously, so I’ll conclude this week’s blog love for Manhattan and New York City with a final photo dump, also from last Saturday. I have a gazillion other photos of New York from trips prior, but for those who’ve never been to New York, it’s a pilgrimage every American should make in his or her lifetime. Right down to the aromas, good and bad, hot dogs with real meat and a screechy hightail underground on the subway, New York, New York, is everything they say, to quote Huey Lewis and The News from back in 1983.

Next trip, I’ll be on the hunt for roads lesser traveled in NYC.

–Photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

The Wooden Escalators at Macy’s Herald Square, Manhattan

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / 6 Comments

Over the weekend, I took my son up to New York City for the day and we tramped more than 60 blocks between Midtown, Downtown and Central Park, with a gazillion stops in our travels.

This included the original Macy’s in Manhattan, the same site of the annual Thanksgiving Day Parade. Originally built in 1902 and certified a historical landmark in 1978, the nine floor Macy’s is something you’ll never forget as the largest retail store in the United States. I’ve always called this Macy’s location “a city within a city.”

Comprised of 2.5 million square feet total with 1.25 million feet devoted to retail space, Macy’s, like most New York commercial stores, is a multi-tiered adventure. I’m still holding vigil for the long-gone four level Virgin Megastore, always a past mandatory stop anytime I’ve visited New York. This trip with my kid hitting my 14th time.

Macy’s Manhattan, plotted in the neon-cast shadow of Times Square, with its massive block circumvention of 34th and 35th Streets, Broadway and Seventh Avenue, has its own McDonald’s and one of the few remaining Toys ‘R Us outlets. It’s biggest charm, however, is those 20 oak and ash Otis jumbo cleat wooden escalators running through the fifth and ninth floors. It’s irresistible not to imagine a century’s worth of New Yorkers and visitors, taking the same exact mobile pathways.

Yes, they’re modernized and braced to meet inspection code, but the retro rickety resonance remains the same. Macy’s Herald Square is hardly a road lesser traveled, especially if you’ve been to New York enough times to know a public bathroom is a rarer commodity than homegrown horticulture. Yet, those wonderfully giddy wooden escalators are a must-do blast from the past joy ride whenever you hit the Big Apple. My sixth, for the record.

–Photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

2023 Carroll County Celtic Festival, Westminster, MD

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / 12 Comments

By request from a handful of folks reaching out to see me in a kilt, here ya go!

TJ and I were at the 2023 Carroll County Celtic Festival selling her books, The Healthy Witch and Three Little Witches, along with a recently-released Healthy Witch tarot deck and coloring books.

Lots of traditional and rock-themed Celtic music, beer and about 3,000 attendees, so many fun people to talk to, including our neighboring vendors.

I upgraded my kilt and decided to re-try an old look I gave up on, the flat cap. TJ was most pleased by the flat cap, but better yet, she sold out of everything except for a handful of coloring books!

Piseach!

Come on, vogue…

The salute this child snapped off made my heart burst.

Piper Jones Band lighting it up! The hands-down rulers of the festival.

Drop in for a spell…

I love this generational statement so much that I had to snap it.

Mando!!!!

TJ reacts to selling out of nearly everything she brought. Slainte, love…

–All photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

While In the Can at the Carroll County Celtic Festival: The Sex Pistols’ Legacy Lives On

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / 5 Comments

At this point, it comes off as artifice, nearly 47 years since punk rock legends The Sex Pistols lit up Parliament and Buckingham Palace with a balls-out declaration of no future for no dogsbody with their then-alarming dictum, “Anarchy in the U.K.”

I can remember seeing the old anarchy symbol above all over the streets, spray-painted on bridge underpasses or scrawled on the book covers of the punkers I went to school with. I even wore a scratchy iron anarchy symbol of my own when us metalheads merged our subculture with the punk cotillion back in the late 1980s. It was called crossover back then, and the anarchy symbol, more than a macabre skull, was a unifying symbol.

Maybe we were artifice ourselves, maybe we were believing in something far over our young, dumb heads. True anarchy is a state of mind, yes, but put into action, the ramifications are the undoing of society itself. At age 52, rebellion and anarchy comes off to me more like couture instead of counterculture. A bunch of bollocks.

Taking a pit stop and lifting my kilt at a local Celtic Festival my fiancée, TJ, was selling her books at to a large degree of success, I felt obligated to snap this picture in the stall as much as shake my head at it. These days, unlike Johnny Rotten, I know what I want and I know how to get it. The long road to getting what I want has been the road lesser traveled, and filled with anarchy of a proverbial, not a literal sense.

Today’s youth have their own problems and their own frustrations their seniors can never get on their level with. Generations pass and generations find bigger conveniences, elevating the angst of those who came before them. Yet getting pissed and destroying as junior insurrectionists or even old, crusty dogs, is just, well, a wankfest.

–Photo by Ray Van Horn, Jr.