Rhode Island

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

We had an uneventful drive from New York State to Providence, where we spent lunch with John’s Chinese Studies advisor from his Brown grad school days.  It was lovely to see him, and an added bonus was seeing his daughter and grand-daughter, Adrienne and Lucie, who were visiting from Paris.  Lucie was on her way back to Mt Holyoke to begin her sophomore year.  We had not seen her for years since a visit to Paris, perhaps six years ago.  It was good, too, to spend time with his advisor’s wife, whom he has known for 50 years, but is not in strong health. 

Lunch was fine thin pizza from Bob and Timmy’s Grilled Pizza on Federal Hill, the other side of downtown Providence.  The specialty is thin grilled pizza with mozzarella and mushrooms, which are grilled and then topped with fresh spinach..the house specialty.

From Providence we drove immediately to Tiverton, did a little shopping and arrived at our friends John and his wife Jon.   We have been here several times, and enjoyed sitting on the deck eating fresh salmon on a salad niçoise, a nice Tablelands sauvignon blanc from New Zealand, and watching the tides and currents make it hard from a guy out of gas to row his small rubber raft back to shore.  It took him over 30 minutes to go about half a mile the eddies were so strong.

This morning it is pouring with rain and it is expect to be wet most of the day.  

Ben, Adrienne, Lucie & Lea

Ben, John, Adrienne

Again the Gilded Age

Lenox café

 Tuesday, August 12, 2014

We explored the quite twee towns from Great Barrington, Massachusetts to Lenox, Massachusetts yesterday.  They are lovely little places which show what tons of money over 125 years with no working class, save tradesmen and servants, can make of a beautiful natural setting.  Grand old homes, smaller summer cottages, and smart shops make the little towns places to strolls, and yes, find coffee.   Two places yesterday:  Rudi’s in Great Barrington, where we had been before, and where a cappuccino with a heart on top for Ben was a treat from the barista, and Shots in Lenox.

Edith Wharton's home:  The Mount

The Library at the Mount

The highlight was the Ogden Codman-designed home of Edith Wharton, the Mount, now a museum. http://www.edithwharton.org   She was the first woman to win a Pulitzer prize around the turn of the last century.   She was also a noted interior designed, wrote 40-some other novels and when she divorced her mad husband, decamped for France in 1912 where she lived till her death in 1937.    She was a bit of a gadget freak, too, with electricity in 1902 provided by George Westinghouse himself, and an elevator for moving guest baggage up and down the stories.   She did not, however, have electric refrigeration like William Vanderbilt’s Biltmore in North Carolina, nor was there an electric stove for her cook.

Sculpture Gardebn:  The Globe

The house is surrounded by a sculpture garden, set amongst the trees along the winding lane from the entrance off the main road.   Some of the pieces were absolutely outstanding, while others did nothing for us.  These two were among the winners of praises.  

Sculpture Garden:  Walls

The Codman house brought back memories of Nid and Pat Pibulsonggram when Nid was Thai ambassador to the US.  The Thai Ambassador’s residence was also designed by Ogden Codman.  The interior arrangement of rooms and the design of the house, to the column on the verandah were virtually identical to their Residence.   A trip back in time.

We finished up the day with scampi at Andy and David’s and a bottle of Millbrook Winery’s tocai friulano, a Dutchess county wine from the next county south of Columbia county where we are staying.  An enjoyable quaff.  

We leave this morning for Rhode Island.   More to come.

A Trip to the Late 19th Century

Monday, August 11, 2014

Sunday passed as you’d expect a Sunday in the country to pass:   We visited with new friends, talked of issues and looked out over the Catskill Mountains to the Hudson, sipping chardonnay.   The plan was to spend some time with new friends, an artist and his wife who is with the ACLU, at their summer home in Twilight Park, a collection of late 19th century summer cottages perched on the hills above the Kaaterskill Falls.  The link with a fuller story of Twilight Park:   http://wikimapia.org/5538743/Twilight-Park  The home we visited was built in 1898 and has had minimal changes to it since then.  With a view from the verandah down to the Hudson and up to the Catskill Mountains, it was a trip back in time for us:  Good conversation, good wine and interesting people.   We had planned to spend an hour there, and our visit rambled on to nearly two and a half.   

Our hosts in Twilight Park, Jane and Joe, and their other guests, Glenn and Silvia, were all New Yorkers, two of them artists.  We discussed politics, art, summer homes and our travels and friends.

Back at Andy and David’s we had wonderful summer bread and butter corn (white and yellow kernels, mixed on the cob) with local sausages and the end of the cheese and blueberry pie.   Our hosts are very much into True Blood  on HBO, which John enjoyed watching. 

Hummingbirds, by the way, are not mute.   They actually do sing, and make angry noises when fighting off other hummingbirds at the feeder in their territory.

Days in the Taconics

Sunday, August 10, 2014.   Hummingbirds are territorial.  They fight over feeders hung from our friends’ front verandah.  They thrum, they swoop and they head off any strangers aiming for a sip of sugar water.  When they float in mid-air with their wings moving at hundreds of beats per minute they are gorgeous.   Among themselves they’re rather nasty.

But nothing has been nasty about this trip.  We had a find drive up through the mountains of central New Jersey after our stops in Wilmington, Delaware, for coffee and shopping, and our visit to Mikonos restaurant for Greek food for lunch in Ewing Township, New Jersey.  The traffic in New York was heavy with weekenders heading off to the Catskills but once north of there the roads turned pleasant and the hills and mountains were beautiful as we headed up the Hudson Valley.

We are visiting our friends Andy and David at their home in Craryville, about 15 miles east of the town of Hudson on the river.  The view of the Taconics is magnificent at this time of year, and even better this weekend with nary a cloud in the sky.   The gardens are ablaze with color and their dog, Cooper, guards the grounds and checks out all visitors.   

We spent part of yesterday, Saturday visiting the antique mecca, Hudson, walking up and down Warren Street.  We  some antique books.   We found many of the street’s shops to be very expensive, but used books are always cheap.  John found an old British history book, a Spanish cookbook, and a history of pre-Civil War English history (that’s the English civil war between roundheads and cavaliers, not the American one.)

Along they way we watched the start of the Black Arts Festival Parade, where John chatted with the Mayor of Hudson, Bill Hillenback, who urged the election of a Republican to the mayor’s office in Washington—a bit of a joke since we are working to elect a Democrat, Muriel Bowser! One of the parade floats was a model of the first ship built in Hudson, the Hudson, built in 1785, before steamboats came 
to the river in 1809-1810…and it became a whaling town.

The farmers market overflowed with magnificent vegetables and pies, which we avoided, knowing home-made blueberry pie would be on the menu last night.  We had lunch at the Park Cafe, a kosher sandwich shop—excellent baba ghanoosh and pita sandwiches, and coffee per normal at Nolita.

Our two nights here so far have been good food, good wine and superb conversation.  Last night Andy did a lovely ragout with rigatoni to go with David’s blueberry pie and a West Virgnina valençay goat cheese we brought from Washington’s H Street Market, and the night before rack of lamb, cooked perfectly.

Our days have been busy.  Two friends arrived yesterday afternoon from Boston for a visit. Turns out they have secondary careers as Titan Men in all-male movies.  Today we visit with friends on the other side of the Hudson.

Hudson is very gay!

A Northern Expedition

We head off tomorrow on a 1500 mile/2200 km trip north.  It's a trip to visit old haunts, visit good friends, and see some new-ish sites.  Most of the places we're going we have visited before, so expect some reminiscences.

We start with a visit to the Hudson Valley to see friends in Craryville, near Hudson, New York.  Then we go to Rhode Island for a few days in Tiverton overlooking the harbor and the sunsets over Narragansett Bay, with a short day-trip, we hope, to Boston, in nearby Massachusetts.   We'll finish with a long weekend in Asbury Park, New Jersey getting our annual beach fix.

We'll do the trip by car, stopping for the requisite XX dry skim capucchino and perhaps some Greek salads.  We'll try to have a lobster roll or two in Rhode Island and will avoid the deep-fried Milky Way bars that we've seen in Asbury Park.

Off to pack!

Our day of exploration: Suchou gardens and Roe...and a bit more too

Friday, July 10, 2014

We complete our vacation in Oregon this morning.  Off to the airport and home.

We have loved our time in Portland.  Pam, the owner of the Heron Haus, with her husband, Carl, is a delight and very helpful with directions and assistance.   We think the BnB is a gem.

The breakfasts are good, the outside areas with lovely stone walls and plantings, and the inside, all very elegant and tasteful.   

Yesterday we decided to walk to downtown, which is about 30 minutes.  We sauntered along the old pre-World War 1 streets of the neighborhood, stopping to look in shop windows on a few of the streets, and view the architecture.  One particular building took our interest, the Temple Beth El, which dates from the 1920s I would guess.   It’s a round building with a huge dome.  One of its rabbis, Stephen Wise, was one of the founders of Reform Judaism and helped reduce the influence of the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon.

Suchow Garden

From there we went to the Lan Su Suchow Gardens downtown.   This Chinese garden was a gift from the citizens of Suchou  to their sister city of Portland about 14 years ago.  It’s an intricate series of urban gardens with a lake and pavilions.   We were fortunate to have as a guide one of the Chinese women of Portland who helped convince the city to establish the garden.   She had come to Portland in the 1950s with her parents and had been working to bring Chinese culture here.   Lots of stories and explanations about the value of urban gardens and the role of the Mandarinate in Chinese history.

Charles Rennie MacIntosh as lamp

From there we walked around the city’s Chinatown, lunched on small dim sum at the House of Louie, and then took a streetcar to NW 23rd Street and Ben’s coffee.  He found it at Barista, where the barista not only understood his need for art on his XXX-skim dry cappuccino  but also asked him what kind of art he wanted.  When told that abstract expressionism would be fine the barista asked:  “Jackson Pollock?”   And then he wondered if he should put the cup across the room and throw the second shot of espresso toward it. 

The barista knew!

Dinner was at Roe, a discreet little restaurant attached to Block and Tackle, on SE Division Street.    Here you enter the restaurant and you are seated at the bar until the room at the back of Block and Tackle, which is Roe, is ready.   Then you are ushered in for a fish and seafood tasting menu that’s very inventive and worth the time (and the expense).   We had such divergent sea food as white tuna sashimi, marlin and squid ceviche, lobster with chopped green beans and onion blossoms, poached NZ salmon that had the taste of magnificent lox, and a grilled sea bass.  There was a wine to go with each course.  We enjoyed them all, though Ben would have preferred not to have sparkling wine or champagne.  The high point were the wines from Annie Amie, a winery here in the Yamhill-Carlton area.  Of particular note from from Annie Amie was the Müller-Thurgau.  John had a cardamaro aperatif which had a mild artichoke flavor.  One of the palate cleanser after the first course was made of watermelon, tomato juice and onion blossom.

Portland

Thursday, July 10

The Coast Starlight at Chemult, Oregon

It’s a long way from Crater Lake to Portland.   We didn’t measure the miles, but we seemed to average about 40 mpg when we bought gasoline yesterday morning on the eastern side of the mountains, in the village of Chemult, where trains actually do stop for people to get off to go hiking or to the national park.   The train that stopped while we were there goes north to Portland and Seattle and comes up from LA.  One a day.  Quite a train, though.

From there we moved through the mountains, stopping to picnic on the banks of Lake Odell with Diamond Mountain in the distance.   Very pretty place to sit and nibble a banana with yoghurt.

From there we managed to find a lovely little coffee shack in Oakridge, where the barrista said she enjoyed making Ben’s coffee—the first time she had ever done it! She and Ben were having such a good time that she forgot to collect the $3.25 for the cappuccino and when Ben realized this, after we had driven several blocks, we turned around to pay her.  

And to Eugene, and I-5.  It’s the West Coast version of I-95 and it’s worse.   It’s narrow with only two lanes per side, with very heavy truck traffic.  Fortunately there are very few reckless drivers in Oregon and no one speeds!   We got off for a few minutes to visit Ben’s favorite XXX-dry coffee shop in Salem, the Ike Box where we stopped on the way south.   And then to Portland.

Herron Haus, Portland

We are staying at the Heron Haus, a 1902 mansion on the side of a hill overlooking the city.   It’s very grand and very comfortable.   Dormered rooms, parquet floors, interesting owner, a very comfy bed.   The gardens are exquisite.  

It’s within walking distance of a neighborhood loaded with restaurants, nightlife and interesting little shops.  It’s also walking distance to the city street car system.   We will use that today.

We dined outside at a sidewalk café, Café Mingo, an Italian place.   We thoroughly enjoyed our dinners and a lovely Chehalem Vineyard 2011 Pinot Noir.   John started with a smoked trout, grapefruit and butter lettuce salad and followed it with a lovely piece of Italian sausage, spicy sautéed spinach and polenta.   Ben began with crepelle stuffed with shiitake and two or three other kinds of mushrooms over arugula and sprinkled with parmesan, and followed it with a grilled chicken breast on a summer salad of spices, baby tomatoes and cucumbers mixed with cold rice.   Very lovely evening.