Berkshire Sunday

The Man writes...the small, pretty town of Lenox in the Berkshires is home to restaurants, retreats, and several cultural attractions like the Tanglewood open-air concert venue and the Shakespeare and Co theatre company. Already at 11 on a rainy Sunday morning it was busy with people gathering for a posh brunch and perhaps heading on to a concert. Police were on every corner guiding traffic, and there was barely a parking space to be had anywhere.

There was a long queue at the Haven Cafe, but the shiitake and spinach omelette and kale salad were well worth the wait. Afterwards we strolled around the craft market, admiring enormous gourd birdhouses, and visited some independent book shops.

Then we headed out to The Mount, Edith Wharton's house and garden. Of course Albaniana already described it better than I can. We took House and Garden tours, which were both excellently done.

I particularly liked the grass steps.

In the woods there was modern "sculpture", like a fishing net arranged artfully and on sale for $12000, and open-air Shakepeare was being energetically performed to a see of umbrellas as we departed.

Tradin' Palin

The Man writes...I spent the day moving the Young Man around between various appointments. He was disappointed to find Four Corners Luncheonette did not have their traditional stall at the Delmar Farmers Market, so we rapidly moved on to the real place for Home Fries and toasted sandwich.

We also stopped to buy sunglasses and couldn't resist picking up Pokemon Trading Cards (for old time's sake) and another type of trading card for its "I don't believe it!" value:

In our pack of Decision 2016 ("Politics is the New Sports", "Collect all 110 Base Cards")  we were "lucky" enough to find "Influencers" Sarah Palin and Barack Obama, Dr Ben Carson, and "Spouse" Jeanette Rubio.

The day finished with a sublime barbecue. The other guests were young people who had just flown in from Mongolia and Zambia, whose work and achievements for those in need were inspiring and humbling. 

A long Huyck

The Man writes...I enjoyed a long hike at the Huyk preserve in Rensselaerville. We visited many times down the years, most memorably in winter, but I was able to go much further today.

Charging On

The Man writes...the Young Man had a yen for brunch at the place we will always know as the Shiny Diner. As usual we marveled over the friendliness of the staff, the intensity of the air conditioning, and the American wonder that is bottomless soda.

We went on to Indian Ladder Farms, where TYM met up with the animals, got re-aquainted with the staff, and recognized our old car and some toys in the rabbit hutches which he had made at Camp four years ago.

Then it was time for him to buy provisions for a party tonight with some 20 old school mates. It's great so see how much trouble everyone is taking to welcome him back.

Here is one welcome new addition at Price Chopper since our day...

Another day, another half-built Center

 
The Man writes...like Five Rivers, Thacher State Park will also have a large Visitor Center soon, situated on the escarpment immediately above the Indian Ladder Trail. To be honest, it hadn't progressed as far since last year as I had expected.

As usual there were cute newts in a shady pool on the Trail below:

The day ended at Okinawa in Poestenkill - that pleasing style of Japanese-American cuisine that is common here but I have never really seen in the UK.

Center of Excellence?

 
The Man writes...the Young Man spent the day with friends while I visited some old haunts including Five Rivers. The new Visitor Center seems to have progressed significantly since Albaniana's visit a few weeks ago. It has a budget of seven million dollars. I remember the hours that Albaniana used to devote to raising a few hundred dollars for the Friends of Five Rivers.

The old Center has seen better days, but has a rustic charm, and part of me will be sorry to see it go.

Our host has just returned from Iceland, and we both enjoyed her tales of trolls and geysers and tectonic plates.

Swifty Return

The Man writes...we woke in Boston to a sunny day. At breakfast we immediately knew we were in America. Instead of the self conscious silence of a British hotel (where you can get a hard stare for scraping your plate with a fork or gulping your tea audibly) there were two loud TVs and easy listening music competing for attention. But people were noticeably courteous over the self service buffet and they all carefully cleared up after themselves.

The car journey up I90 to the Capital District was tiresomely busy and the external thermometer touched 100F at one point.

The Young Man immediately met up with some friends, and later we went to dinner with his old best buddy's family at Swifty's in Delmar. As if this wasn't calorific enough, we followed it up with an ice cream at Jim's Tastee Freez. It was great fun to see them all again.  

No Room at the Inn

The Man writes....the Young Man (formerly known as the Boy) and I are back in the States. For him it is a two year absence, so he will see a lot of changes.

The journey contained a few firsts even for a gnarled traveller. The first flight on Norwegian (good), the first time being fingerprinted and photographed by a machine (nice not to fill in forms) and the first time I have been given a key for a hotel room that didn't exist. TYM and I searched long and hard for Room 433 before returning to the Front Desk, but there really was nothing between 432 and 434!

That Friday feeling

Last full day in the USA. The Girl spent most of it with one friend, then the evening with a couple more. I tootled around and made a few revisits to people I wanted to see one more time, and managed a long walk at Fiver Rivers, too.

In the evening I went out with friends J, V and A to a restaurant in Troy called The Shop. It used to be a hardware store, and is fitted out with nods to that past. The food was tasty, the service excellent. By the looks of it, Troy is on the up and is certainly gaining a reputation as a foodie town.

Much needed rainfall has brought some cooler air for the weekend.

Down on the farm

I took the Girl to see her special friend C at Indian Ladder Farms, so that was a happy reunion. We also headed higher up and walked the Indian Ladder Trail - lovely as ever, but at 95F and high humidity it left us quite puffed.

We had time to spare before our next appointments, so spent it in the cool of Bethlehem Library. It's one of the places I miss most - so much going on there, and a resource for all in any season (and especially attractive and popular in the heat). As well as books and internet, there were jigsaws out, and colouring sheets, games to play...and there are always quiet corners where a person can nod off if they choose.

In the evening I had dinner with my own good friends M & C and their daughter.

Splash down

The Girl and three of her friends had a plan to go to Zoom Flume, and I became the designated driver. I had no desire to join them (I'm sure the feeling was mutual) so I dropped them off and drove about for a while.

I stopped for lunch in East Durham, which is a little outpost of a remembered Ireland in the Catskills. Shamrocks at every turn, even on everyday people's t-shirts. I stopped for lunch at Lawyer's General Stores, and ate a sandwich on the porch. There was a choice of benches marked "Republicans" and "Democrats". I don't know if this was supposed to generate conversation or not, but it mostly seemed to mean that some people said hello to me and some pointedly ignored me (I sat on the Democrat bench).

The Catskills have seen better days. The area used to be a summer playground for New Yorkers, but nearly every motel or restaurant I passed had a for sale sign out, or was boarded up and overgrown. I headed up to the ski resort of Windham - a pretty enough town, but hardly hopping on this hot and humid day.

The girls wore themselves out at the water park after about four hours, and so we wound our way back along Rte 32.

Crash course

In addition to chauffeuring the Girl hither and yon, I visited my refugee friends again, and we went out for lunch.

We travelled in their car. Unfortunately, while stopping at traffic lights on our journey back we were rear-ended. In fact it was more of a hit-and-run pile-up situation - the silver car behind us was shunted into us, having been smashed into by the pick-up truck behind it. Said truck nipped around the traffic and took off at speed - I didn't even see it.

No-one in our car was hurt. I rang 911 and everything swung into action. The police arrived, and guys to manage the traffic, and an ambulance for the passenger in the middle car who was suffering from whiplash. We gave statements, and limped the car off the road to wait for a tow-truck. The cop gave us an incident number and told us they'd likely find the truck driver as there are cameras at the traffic lights. Then a taxi came for us to take us home. I could then help out to some extent reporting everything to the insurers.

Not the day we'd planned, obviously. However it could very easily have been worse.

This evening, dinner in Delmar with the Boy's buddy's family.

Monday mooching

I wasn't really mooching. I quite enjoyed a day off from socializing to mainly read a book. "Being Mortal" by Atul Gawande is about end-of-life decisions, so you wouldn't think it to be too uplifting, but the author is intelligent and compassionate and in fact it's a positive and interesting read.

I rounded off the day dining with friends A & C at an Indian restaurant on Madison Ave. Conversation ranged all over the place and was positive and interesting too.

Three Sunday meals

Started the day with homemade waffles and maple syrup, with friend A and the Girl.

My lunch was ice-cream from the Tollgate Diner - as ever, astounded by the size of a "regular" serving (but I still managed to wolf it down before it melted). Walked it off on the rail trail with J.

Lastly, Indian snacks for dinner at the home of our Indian friends, where the Girl is staying the night.

In between times I checked in on Five Rivers again - staff were out in little boats trying to clear
the invasive water chestnut from the Beaver Pond. As M puts it, "a Sisyphean task".

Uplifting

I went to see the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performing at Saratoga Performance Art Center (SPAC) today.

I am normally rather lukewarm about dance, but my friend A suggested it and booked some great seats, so I thought it might be an enjoyable enough experience, and I'd never been to SPAC.

Wow! It was an amazing experience. This is an immensely talented company - the performance was moving and beautiful and joyful. I really was left speechless by it. At a time when there seem to be man-made problems at every turn, it was incredibly uplifting to witness a human achievement as positive as this.

If you ever get the chance to see them, don't pass it up.

Friday

M and I decided to visit The Mount, an hour away in Lenox, Massachusetts. It was the writer Edith Wharton's home for ten years in the early 20th century, and has been restored to something close to what she would have remembered. I haven't read any Wharton (The Age of Innocence is maybe her best known book) but will do now - although I've been warned, "she didn't do happy endings". She was quite prolific and received many accolades in her lifetime. She furnished her house for modest entertaining only - she was rather introverted and only cared to see a few friends at a time. She did most of her writing in bed. I feel I might have liked her.

We strolled in the gardens and took a tour of the house, and just managed to beat the rain.

In the evening, dinner at the Four Corners Luncheonette and dessert at a frozen yoghurt place, where I ran into a former neighbour in the car park, by happy chance.

Thursday

I started Thursday with my refugee friends in Albany.

They are doing very well. They are settled in the house they'd bought just before I last saw them, and they like the neighbourhood - and another Karen family has moved in two doors down. Both parents are working. The oldest girl has finished high school with good grades and lots of friends and has a college place to study nursing. The other kids have a few more years of school to go, but between them they are looking at careers in engineering, medicine and teaching. If you want a refugee success story, this is it.

I moved on to lunch with a German friend, V, and we caught up on each other's news and of course talked Brexit - a bit of a theme in nearly every conversation, but she's a professor of politics so had a particular interest. However the young guy serving in the cafe also wanted to quiz me about it - everyone is fascinated by what has happened.

Then I reunited with the Girl for a bit and we spent a couple of hours relaxing at Pine Hollow Arboretum, which is looking especially lush at this time of year. We weren't the only visitors.

I dropped her at the next friend's house, and had an invigorating chat with the friend's mom, who has a different view of the world from me (she's something of a libertarian) so it's always interesting to talk with her.

And finally to my friend M's house, for dinner and to stay a couple of nights.

Friends at Five Rivers and elsewhere

I spent a happy morning walking at Five Rivers with a friend and catching up with various people who work there. Despite the new building work things are generally the same - similar challenges to face, but the usual great community spirit and sense of purpose.

Later I dropped in on another friend and it was good to hear that all goes well for her and her family. She has a 16 year-old son who is nearly 6'7" and a bit of a whizz as a baseball pitcher, so their lives involve lots of travel to baseball events around the country I was lucky to find them at home.

We've had a relaxing afternoon and evening with our hosts, eating Chinese takeaway, before another busy and sociable day tomorrow.

Growth industry

Today was a day for catching up with Fair Trade friends. By chance my visit here coincided with a meeting of the organisers, old and new, of the region's FT markets (now plural). It was good to find out what the plans are for this year.

What started as a single market at a church in Delmar years ago grew into the regular Black Friday Market FT extravaganza I was involved with up until we left the States. Now there are to be five different FT market events on five consecutive November/December weekends at locations around the Capital District. One at a convention centre, three hosted by churches and one in a synagogue.

I went on to visit the synagogue (B'nai Sholom in Albany) because it's now the home of Mayan Hands, run by good friends who work with craftswomen in Guatemala. It was great to see their storeroom full of baskets and textiles, and to chew over the topics of the day for a while in their office.

Tanglewood

And I'm posting a day late again because we got in after midnight and I could barely keep awake. My friend A took me to Tanglewood, a concert venue in the Berkshires, MA, for an annual 4th of July special event - a performance by James Taylor.

JT is big over here, perhaps not quite so much in the UK. He's a singer-songwriter, big in the 70s, now nearly 70 himself. I can't claim to have been the youngest person there, but (pushing 50) I did feel quite the spring chicken, and was doing my bit to lower the average age of the audience.

It was fun. A had told me it would be "like Woodstock" - but (it turned out) with lawn chairs and well-packed coolers instead of drugs. And lots of red, white and blue to mark the day. Not really very like Woodstock at all, I suspect.

The venue features The Shed (a covered area with seating) and extensive lawns. People picnicked in.style on the lawns. and we arrived early and joined them, before taking our seats in the Shed. The audience was devoted and enthusiastic though far from wild, and that suited me fine.

Added bonus for the evening, I found out by chance just before we set off that a very dear friend who now lives in Philadelphia was also going to be there (I'd learnt she was heading for the Berkshires and guessed her destination - she's an unrepentant hippie, of course she was going to see James Taylor). So we had a brief but very happy reunion.

Chatty

Much chatting yesterday - with the Boy's buddy's family, with my friend J and her family (including their very chatty cat) and with my host when I got back here in the evening. So much chatting that I completely forgot to post anything last night.

In the market for some conversation

It was fun to revisit Delmar Farmers' Market today, where I surprised a few old friends who weren't expecting to see me there. Then on to lunch with several former neighbours, and much catching up of news, talk of travels and so on.

Including politics, of course. Everyone I've met here asks about, and expresses sympathy for, Britain's current predicament. They're incredulous at what has happened, yet quick to point to the parallels with the scary political possibility here. Before I got here I knew Hillary Clinton was unpopular, but hadn't reckoned on how unpopular (and of course the media is stoking distrust in her for all they are worth). From the outside, the chances of Trump being elected seem remote. On the inside, people are genuinely nervous and Brexit only makes them more so.

This evening I am binge-watching The West Wing to try and restore my faith in...something. And here is a calming message I found at Five Rivers:

Familiar territory

I took myself off to Five Rivers today for a nostalgic walkabout. The new visitor centre is under construction so there's a degree of mess and upheaval in that area, but the rest of the place looks the same as ever.

I'd picked up a sandwich from a shop in Delmar, and I munched it as I went round. It's difficult to eat American sandwiches - they are never just a modest slice of cheese and a leaf of lettuce. This was a veggie thing so stuffed with leaves and olives and pickles and whatnot I couldn't fit it in my mouth. It was dripping slightly with dressing, and before too long so was I.

Later I scoped out the street where we used to live. I called on an old neighbour, originally from Switzerland so we talked politics, European and American. She regards the Brexit vote as an ominous sign of terrible things to come in the US in November. Let's hope she's wrong.

In other news, another guest at the friend's house where I'm staying has been an enormous dog, the hugest I've ever met. When upright he looks more like an upholstered side table than a pet. Luckily he's friendly and calm, which is good in a creature the size of a bear.