Yesterday, I rode on Southwest Airlines flight 113, which goes from Albany to Baltimore to Houston to Los Angeles to Oakland and then on to Boise. If you stayed for the whole trip, you’d get at least eight packets of peanuts.

This is what happens when Washingtonians visit New York: we check out MOMA, we eat some bagels, and we tolerate the constant drone from New Yorkers about how much better/hipper/sexier and altogether “more relevant” NYC is than our modest District. I’ve even heard these cosmopolitan personalities declare that “in the City, all the women are beautiful,” their eyes gazing wistfully past the buildings that extend high above them, free of the chains of a 10-story height limit.

Last weekend, I hopped on a Chinatown bus to go get demeaned for a few days. “The City,” as they call it, has been exacting a thorough Northeastern sucking motion over my group of friends for several years now. It’s also trained them to ask, in a droll and eventual tone, “And when are you moving to the City?”

Don’t get me wrong, I like New York City. I can admit that the grass is greener on the Central Park side of the National Mall. I can accept that the MOMA trumps the NGA (perhaps that’s why it costs to get in). But when, on this particular trip, these New Yorkers went so far as to off-handedly insult my neighborhood, I got a little defensive. “I went down to D.C. a few months ago,” a friend of mine told me. “I ended up at some place called Adam’s Morgan. It was very…college.”

I’ll be the first to admit that my neighborhood’s known to get overloaded with pizza-chucking, flip-cupping assholes on a nightly basis. Still, it’s where I call home, and I’m not going to sit idly by as some self-important City-dwellers peer down on it from their ivory Empire State Building.

So, help me out here: what parts of D.C. are better/hipper/sexier and altogether “more relevant”?

Or, alternately: When are you moving to the City?

There are fewer smells better than a crackling campfire in the woods, fewer pleasures more distinct than a pitched tent, a cold beer, and conversation. And there are even fewer inventions as genius as the humble pie iron.

Although my fiance and I recently acquired as a gift a fancy camping stove, I’m not entirely convinced we need it. The possibilities with a pie iron—two cast-iron squares, roughly the size of a piece of bread, hinged at the top and attached to long handles—are awesome to contemplate. With this one primitive piece of equipment, some wood, a couple of ingredients, and a little patience, you’ve got every meal covered: breakfast (try store-bought biscuit dough with cheese and a slice of turkey stuffed in the middle), lunch (some nutty bread, a slice of Swiss and a marinated Portobello) and dinner, the always-reliable pizza pocket (bread, sauce, cheese, and whatever else you like). Apply cooking spray to your iron, stack your ingredients, close it up, and stick it in the fire. That’s it. A few minutes later, you can flip out a neat, toasty package encasing simple ingredients, made melty and smoky from open-fire cooking.

Pie irons are sold in most camping stores, although I’ve never bought one. Pizza pockets were, I think, my first solid food as a child and the pie iron (a Tonka toaster) I inherited has been in my family for 30 years or more.

But if you don’t have one, don’t sweat it. Just get outdoors. Three-day weekends with near-perfect weather are too rare to sit inside your air-conditioned apartment. Camping in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania is super fun…and close!

Five weeks and one day. That’s how long it takes to get an “expedited” passport, which is just a hair outside the “two to five weeks” I was told at the P.O. July 16.

So plan accordingly, world travelers, if you’re putting together a fall itinerary that includes a trip to the Freindly Fun Franks hostel in Riga, Latvia—”Party Captial of the Baltics.” It won a Hoscar in 2005. I’m just saying.

On the second leg of my trip from D.C. to Portland, Ore., my plane out of Charlotte was an hour late on its way in from San Diego. Once we all, grumbling, took our seats, they announced there would be another short delay—to replace A LIGHT BULB. The new bulb was screwed in in about 10 minutes.

Then the stewards announced there would be another short delay: to fill out PAPER WORK about the burnt-out bulb. Thus passed another 45 minutes. Then we took off on a bumpy five-hour cruise with no in-flight movie, no free cocktails, and a really boring seatmate who wanted to talk about his job as a medical-equipment salesman.

As anyone who has spent time in the Caribbean knows, island life often feels several decades behind our ever-changing, ever-obsessive American culture. This is not necessarily a bad thing. You quickly learn that 900 cable channels, a BlackBerry, and an iPod filled with three months of music and NPR programming have nothing on a day snorkeling among the coral and neon blue fish.

If you can’t tell, my wife, Carrie, and I just returned from a trip to the Caribbean, Puerto Rico specifically. (Thanks Uncle Hobs and Aunt Joyce for the use of your condo!) While I genuinely realized how little I need to feel at peace—now if I could only stop checking e-mail on vacation, I’d be golden—I did miss one recent trend of American life: the modern microbrews.

If you walk into any bar in Puerto Rico and ask what beers are available, the bartender will rattle off—and I’m not exaggerating—almost the exact same list: Coors Light, Budweiser, Miller Lite, Medalla Light (the Puerto Rican lager that has a stranglehold on the market), and the Dutch stowaway, Heineken. Occasionally the list will expand to include a Corona or Presidente, the Dominican Republic pilsner. While all of these beers make for easy summer drinking (i.e., you can pound that shit down on a hot beach), I really missed my Dogfish Head IPAs, my Rogue Dead Guy Ale, and my Smuttynose Old Brown Dog Ale.

I also realized how much my beer drinking has changed over the years. Back in a day, it wasn’t unusual for me and friends to stock a cooler full of American lagers and spend a summer day knocking back one can after another, barely feeling anything more than an urge to pee every hour or so. These days, I can’t finish two Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPAs without feeling like somebody’s hit me upside the head with a 2-by-4.

I love the taste of these highly alcoholic microbrews, but, you know, I sometimes miss the hot-afternoon social camaraderie that went with drinking watery beer.

The clock started today at 10:30 a.m.

At the Cleveland Park Post Office, where it took me a week to get an appointment to even apply for my passport, the woman who calls me “Baby” and “Honey” alternately wants to know if I need the pricey expedited option. I’m inclined to say no. Our trip to Ireland is more than three months off. The official wait time is 10 to 12 weeks. I knew I’d be cutting it close…but, c’mon. “Well, Honey, it can take four months now,” she says, and I ask her if that is really true, or more like a scare tactic.

“Baby,” she says, “I know it’s true.” Well, seeing that I don’t want to be sitting in D.C. when my new husband is off drinking Guinness without me, I hand her my two checks: $127 to the State Department and $30 to the U.S. Postmaster. That’s an extra $60 on top of the nonexpedited fee and, despite the State Department officially apologizing to Congress for the backlog and calling in more than 300 young diplomats to start stamping, the whole process is fraught with waiting. That leaves just about everyone plunking down that extra $60.

So do yourself a favor: Get in line now. For first-timers, here’s what you need:

• a completed application. You can fill one out here.
• proof of citizenship. It took a letter, a check for $10, and about a week for an official copy of my birth certificate to come in the mail, but if you were born somewhere other than Cowtown, N.Y., it could take longer.
• two photos. Some places, like the Cleveland Park Post Office, will take them when you apply, but you can save a few dollars by going to mom-and-pop shops, like the one called “Photo Service” at 1664 Columbia Road ($11 instead of $15).
• valid photo ID

Got a passport story? Still waiting for yours to come in the mail? We’ve got nothing to do but wait, so go ahead and share.

A road trip just isn’t a road trip, in my view, unless you see a few signs for deer processing. There were several of those yesterday, along with a good, long string of windowless cinder-block adult video arcades along Pennsylvania Route 15. This is a great road. In one form or another, Rt. 15 hits Gettysburg, Harrisburg, skirts the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania and follows the picturesque Susquehanna watershed north-south through the state James Carville once described as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.”

Now having spent more than a decade in Erie, which always gets the short end of quotable quotes about Pennsylvania, I might take issue with that. But I can see Carville’s point after some adventures on Rt. 15.

Take Farmer Boy Furniture. In addition to an 8-foot chicken, a purple dragon, and a life-size metal pig for your lawn, go ahead and stop for some “treat sticks.” The sign doesn’t say if they’re made out of processed deer. One can only assume. And hope.

When The New York Times invited me, today, to spend 36 hours in Baltimore, I scoffed. My relationship with Charm City is, at best, strained.

As a kid from PA, I enjoyed trips to the aquarium and Camden Yards, but now I choose to overlook Charm City, the “forgotten middle child among attention-getting Eastern cities.” I can appreciate its scene; doing listings, I occasionally get postcards about the city’s more adventurous art openings. I’ve been to Ottobar and liked it.

The crime doesn’t do much for me, though, and I’ve never watched The Wire. All my warm fuzzies about seeing dolphins and home runs and Spoon left because of some thief. In 2003, a friend’s car was stolen from classy-sounding Art Museum Drive while we attended a concert at Johns Hopkins. We’d driven from D.C., and while I didn’t get stabbed or shot or even lose much in the car, it meant a long, expensive cab ride in the middle of the night. (To boot, the only person I know at Hopkins is a jerk.) Considering I don’t like seafood, even crab cakes can’t lure me back.

If I want East Coast “working class,” I head for Philly. I’m sure plenty of Baltimore’s residents are very happy, but E. A. Poe’s mysterious death there is yet another reminder to me of the dangers of too much time spent in those parts.

Feel free to disagree.