We arrived in Baltimore this evening, deciding to eat at the hotel. We've done a lot of traveling and it will be good to get home tomorrow. Since our trip to Block Island, we've maneuvered around the Northeast through seven states to reach here. In the days after Block Island we spent one day doing little in Bristol, except seeing half Brit-half Yank flags hung in honor of a British automobile parade on Hope Street--the site of the oldest, possibly, and biggest, possibly, Fourth of July parades in the country. We also lunched with our friend Elaine at one her favorite places in Warren, Rhode Island, Eli's Kitchen, where we had an eclectic menu before us. John chose a Cuban panini, and Ben had a portobello mushroom and goat cheese panini. Both lived up to Elaine's superb recommendation. Then on Friday we headed headed north for a weekend in Dorset, Vermont.
Our travels took us through Worcester, Massachusetts, where we found a very suitable coffee shop-cum-bakery in an old textile factory in the Canal District. The Birchtree Bread Company did a very good coffee for Ben and the pastries, which John avoided, just oozed "eat me!" The textile factory, probably close to 200 years old, has little charm, but lots of interest. Thousands of people worked in them and now they are being turned into offices, condos, and yes, bakeries.
From there we headed across Massachusetts to the Connecticut River and headed north in to Vermont. We stopped for lunch at the Putney Co-Op, just north of Brattleboro for a meal that John found organic but rather boring. Not much of a spice in the organic salami of the Italian sub he had. We found coffee later in the afternoon at a crossroads named Rawsonville, where Ben learned the history of the barista--she was an equestrienne and horse trainer partnered with an animator. They lived in New Zealand while he animated parts of the Lords of the Rings trilogy. They gave this up to settle in Vermont with their children to roast coffee and open a coffee shop. He also continues to do freelance animation.
At last we arrived in Dorset, a lovely, quaint Vermont village with grassy greens, a village center and an old church that had a carillon. Just a magnificent little place for our friends Joe and Howard to settle in their maison secondaire. Their home was built in 1860 but completely redone in the 1990s. It sits on the bank of a stream where waters on one side drain south to the Atlantic and on the north side drain to the St. Lawrence in Canada. A home on a continental divide. We enjoyed meals at home from the caterers in Manchester of chicken, various Chinese dim sums, salmon and fresh local asparagus from the farmers market. We spent very pleasant times discussing food, preparation, locavore eating and organic farming.
We left there on Sunday for Connecticut and a night with John's brother and family and friends at his friend's home at the beach on Long Island Sound. Much fun and conversation. Then a ride south today.
All in all a good two weeks!
Next to Oregon after visits from England and then from Australia!
On Tuesday, June 9 we headed south for the day in Newport. We had had cocktails the night before with Rhode Island friends, Bill, Julie and Nan, all of whom pushed a visit to Rough Point, the home of the late Doris Duke.
The weather on Tuesday was dreadful so the idea of being inside was very appealing. And Duke's home is truly appealing. It's not as nouveau-riche as the Vanderbilt mansions in their gaudiness. Toward the end of Duke's life it was her home for many months of the year till she died in the 1990s. It has a 270º view of the Atlantic Ocean from the point, impressive with its own private way to the beach, under a bridge below the public Cliff Walk to the water where she swam daily privately amidst the rocks.
Duke collected stray dogs, but toward the end of her life came back from a visit to the Middle East to purchase a Boeing 737 that came with with a collection of three live camels (who outlived her). Camel models are now visible throughout Newport, probably as a note of thanks for all the work Duke did to restore the city's colonial past. There are camel topiaries on her Rough Point house grounds. She bought many of the nearly derelict decaying 17th and 18th century homes for the Historical Society through her own foundation and restored them. They are now rented.
The house itself contains a grand collection of art from Rembrandt to Van Dyck, and a large collection of Louis XVI furniture. A visit to mother-of-pearl bedroom reveals an inner shine-loving character!
We lunched at Annie's, a breakfast and lunch place with a very rich, full clam chowder, in the buildings of the Tennis Hall of Fame. Then we walked Thames Street in the sometime fog down restored side streets and finally returned to Bristol for dinner at Le Central on Hope Street.
Le Central is a favorite of our host, and ours. We go there on our visits for fine steak-frites or good French fish. Ben had sea bass, Elaine and John at steak-frites. John began with local asparagus done with onions and parmesan, whileElaine and Ben had soupe de poisson, made with a lovely lobster broth. A good Hautes Côtes de Beaune red completed an excellent meal.
Bristol is in the midst of painting the Hope Street traffic stripe red, white and blue for its annual grand Fourth of July parade. The trucks and the work limit street movement after 9 PM as the stripes are repaired.
Wednesday, June 10. It was a magnificent day for travel. We decided to spend the day on Block Island, about 18 miles off the coast, reached by ferry from Point Judith. It's about an hour from Bristol over three Narragansett Bay bridges to get to Point Judith and then an hour on a ferry. The island is worth the visit.
After the exquisite cappuccino at Persephone's, a three-day old business making a superb coffee and very good frittata, we rented bicycles for the afternoon and took off to the old South Lighthouse. It's two miles up, and up, and up to the top of the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic to this old 19th century operating lighthouse. It's been moved from its original site because of erosion of the cliffs, last time 22 years ago. Nearby are 160 steps down the cliffs to the beach. There was a grand view from the top. We don't know about the bottom.
We continued our bike ride through the countryside of this island, where half of the land is in a conservancy. Back to the harbor, mango-lemon ice and a seat in the sun before the trip back to the mainland.
On land, dinner was a collection of Rhode Island style dishes at George's in Galilee. We ate outside as the sun began to set, beginning with steamers (small clams steamed in broth with drawn butter) and continued on to snail salad (that's the Rhode Island name--it's really conch salad, but with local sea creatures). It's mixture of chopped conch with chopped onions, celery and spices in a vinaigrette, served over arugula. Ben had, and John tasted, a Portuguese style monkfish with chorizo, mixed rices and steamed zucchini as a main. John splurged on a mango cocktail, like a frozen daiquiri.
Then in the car and home across the three bridges as the day darkened to Bristol. The lighted bridges are very impressive between the mainland and Jamestown, Jamestown and Newport, and the old Mt. Hope Bridge between Portsmouth and Bristol. Narragansett Bay is magnificent.
Thursday, June 11 -- Family called us North at the beginning of June, for a few days of play and visit. Last week on June 1, we began with our long drive of more than eight hours behind the wheel, ten hours of travel total, for our 450 miles between Washington and Boston. It's a long haul, but we have broken it up into pieces with various stops for coffee, shopping and lunch. It makes the trek for more interesting.
We began early from our home on Capitol Hill at 8:15 AM, running into a bit of slow traffic between Washington and Baltimore at the tail end of that rush. From there it's an easy run nowadays to Delaware where we head into Christiana Mall to have Ben's special cappuccino at the Nordstrom's coffee bar. From there it's the New Jersey Turnpike, then over the GW Bridge in New York. We found lunch at the Sherwood Diner in Westport, Connecticut, where we enjoyed a couple of good sandwiches. It gave us a respite from the 65 mph ka-thump ka-thump of the freeway in the pouring rain.
From there it was a short run to New Haven and our special coffees at the Blue State Coffee house near the Yale Medical School. Wired, we continued into Massachusetts and arrived in Boston about 6 PM to a house full of family and grandkids.
The rest of the week was finely spent with the kids, coffees and lunch at Kickstand Cafe in Arlington, Massachusetts, brunch at Madrona Tree, and walks to the park. We managed a visits to Ball Square Wines for some aglianico reds from Italy that we had encountered in Pittsburgh in May but not found in Washington.
We left Boston on Monday for Rhode Island. We enjoyed Blue State Coffee in Providence at their Thayer Street operation near the Brown University campus, and walked the East Side and the Brown campus. Brown's campus is one of the prettiest Ivies. It doesn't have the size of Harvard, nor does it have the spreading magnificence of Princeton, it does compete favorably with the "all of a piece" Yale campus and the urban situations of Penn and Columbia. It's not rural, of course, like Cornell or Dartmouth.
There are art installations throughout the campus, though not all are permanent. One we visited that made us stop and look closely was a piece by Tom Friedman called The Circle done in 2010, a large piece made of stainless steel that looks like aluminum foil cooking trays, modeled on the The Dance by Marc Chagall.
Never having been in the John Carter Brown Library on the campus, we decided to visit a small show of colonial era books and manuscripts from mostly Spanish colonial sources describing the mining and metallurgical work the Spaniards undertook in Chile, Mexico, and Peru. We found it an interesting exhibit.
We lunched at Julian's Restaurant on Broadway on Federal Hill. This place started as a food truck about 15 years ago and now is a good sized tavern/pub on Broadway in an area of 1880s and 1890s homes. It specializes in beers and brunches, so we enjoyed an omelette, smoked onion rings, and pulled duck soup. Great fun including the collection of model super-heroes in the washroom.
We arrived in Baltimore this evening, deciding to eat at the hotel. We've done a lot of traveling and it will be good to get home tomorrow. Since our trip to Block Island, we've maneuvered around the Northeast through seven states to reach here. In the days after Block Island we spent one day doing little in Bristol, except seeing half Brit-half Yank flags hung in honor of a British automobile parade on Hope Street--the site of the oldest, possibly, and biggest, possibly, Fourth of July parades in the country. We also lunched with our friend Elaine at one her favorite places in Warren, Rhode Island, Eli's Kitchen, where we had an eclectic menu before us. John chose a Cuban panini, and Ben had a portobello mushroom and goat cheese panini. Both lived up to Elaine's superb recommendation. Then on Friday we headed headed north for a weekend in Dorset, Vermont.
At last we arrived in Dorset, a lovely, quaint Vermont village with grassy greens, a village center and an old church that had a carillon. Just a magnificent little place for our friends Joe and Howard to settle in their maison secondaire. Their home was built in 1860 but completely redone in the 1990s. It sits on the bank of a stream where waters on one side drain south to the Atlantic and on the north side drain to the St. Lawrence in Canada. A home on a continental divide. We enjoyed meals at home from the caterers in Manchester of chicken, various Chinese dim sums, salmon and fresh local asparagus from the farmers market. We spent very pleasant times discussing food, preparation, locavore eating and organic farming.
