The Perfect Ending to Our Pandemic Honeymoon Road Trip

We began in Binghamton, home of IBM and Rod Serling, near the border of Pennsylvania. We stopped mainly because my almost-grown son attends SUNY Binghamton. The three of us dined at Oaks Inn, a time-capsule of a red-sauce joint that felt straight out of a Scorsese film. Soft light, large Martinis, and lamb spiedies, a local specialty of marinated meat cubes cooked over charcoal.

Signs on the road to Rochester indicated that Mark Twain, the bard of the Mississippi, was buried, improbably, in Elmira. So we pulled off the highway and visited him.

We hit Rochester and toured the Susan B. Anthony house. In Buffalo, we had lunch at the Anchor Bar, home of Buffalo wings, and followed the bartender’s directions to the cemetery where Rick James (author of “Super Freak”) was buried.

But by the time we got to Niagara Falls, we knew the jig was up. The streets were as empty as had been the highways leading up to them. We started our honeymoon on March 13: supremely bad timing. As the coronavirus spread, America closed up. We knew we had to head back home.

I canceled all the hotel and restaurant reservations. There would be no cocktails at the Velvet Tango Room in Cleveland; no visit to the jazz pianist Art Tatum’s birthplace in Toledo; no tour of the Detroit Athletic Club, where the Last Word cocktail may or may not have been born; no sinus-clearing shrimp cocktail at St. Elmo Steak House in Indianapolis; no walk through the wonderland of modern architecture that is Columbus, Indiana; no chili in Cincinnati.