Our First Northern Trek of the Summer

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.