Author: Ella

Wednesday, we reluctantly took our leave of Joe and Elaine after a home cooked 3 course breakfast (would we ever being able to eat again?) and headed up the Maine coast. The weather was on our side. Blue sky, no wind. Beautiful. Our destination was Boothbay Harbor with two stops along the way: Ogunquit (a…

Post by Ella. Tuesday, after walking the Freedom Trail and riding/floating the DUKW, what better than a stroll to Boston’s north end, crammed with Italian eateries and bakeries. The area was hopping. You want Italian?. We got Italian.  We dined at Trattoria Il Panino. My choice of pasta, the penne arrabbiata, had a light, spicy…

Post by Ella. After a living history tour of the Freedom Trail (see Grubb’s post “The city that gobbled the revolution “), we headed towards the harbor for our Duck experience.  If it waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a DUKW.  Okay, so it bumps and shakes instead of waddling, but it…

Post by Ella. Once again we owe a hearty thanks to kin. So thank you Sharen and Tom, our Connecticut cousins, for showing us so much. The Mark Twain house, Gillette’s Castle and all mom’s old haunts. We very much appreciated your generosity of time and opening your home to us. And thanks to Ben…

Post by Ella. Onward. On Monday, after the trip down mom’s memory lane in Norwich and Preston with our able guides Sharen and Tom, we said adios to Connecticut and headed to Massachusetts for a Break-Fast dinner at Michelle and Joe’s with Elaine and Joe in Natick (Massachusetts). The rain never let up. The good…

My mom has vivid memories of her rock. She grew up on a farm in Preston, Ct., her parents and older siblings working from sun up to sun down when not in school. Mom would sometimes escape from chores and walk up the hill behind her house to a large rock where she could perch,…

Over the quiet first months of the pandemic, when gyms were shut down and I began taking long rambling walks, I grew to enjoy listening to podcasts. Freakonomics is one of my regulars and not long ago, there was a fascinating three part series on the whaling industry. From the beginnings in Nantucket, the sociology…

Yesterday we rode from the lush green flats of the Cape to the verdant green rolling hills of Connecticut…yes, it’s all green, all the time here. Except when the leaves turn colors, which is beginning. First up, more cousins. Both my mom and dad had lots of siblings, therefore, lots of cousins. Sharen and Tom…

What a great way to see another side of the Cape. We enjoyed wonderful hospitality, expeditions to the Atlantic, got a flavor of the history, including the Native American cultures, not to mention the all-you-can eat lobster dinner. Marc and I are second cousins: our fathers, Irwin and Joe, are first cousins. I got to…

And just like that, the first week of our travels is in the bag. We flew in just missing Hurricane Lee, or rather Hurricane Lee just missed the Cape, and today we rode the edge of Tropical Storm Ophelia as we made our way to Connecticut. Meanwhile, yesterday was another beautiful day on the Cape….

I am still feeling the effects. Yow! A fabulous dinner of boiled lobster. Grubb and I were tutored in the finer points of lobster dismantling by Helen and Irwin. Scooping out the body meat, prying off the claws and floaters and fishing out the thin strips with a lobster fork,dropping the bits and chunks into…

On a frigid winter’s day during a powerful nor easter in 1952, an oil tanker, the Pendleton, snapped in two 10 miles off the coast of Chatham. They didn’t manage to issue an SOS, but a couple hours later, the two pieces of the tanker were picked up on radar. The Coast Guard launched a…

From Barry and Deirdre’s home in West Barnstable (north side of the Mid Cape) we moved 25 minutes east to Marc and Judi’s in Harwich, on the south side of the Lower Cape.  First order of business (okay, after a gin and tonic and a lovely dinner), was an expedition to Paine’s Creek Beach to…

What a wonderful start to our journey. Thank you to our wonderful hosts, Barry and Deirdre, for putting up with us for four days, for beginning our orientation to the Cape and to New England, for fun, educational, stimulating conversation, maps and recommendations, and for our first ever lobster roll. Barry and I are first…

I can’t get enough of the green.