Month: September 2023

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,…

Post by Grubb. Sunday was spent in the rain, a continuous drizzle that drove us indoors. Connecticut has some famous houses and we visited a couple. First, the Mark Twain house which is next to the Harriet Beecher Stowe house. Both dwellings are large and magnificent, but between these two 19th century heavy hitters, Twain…

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…

Post by Grubb. Saturday morning it was raining when we hit New Bedford. At one time, this Massachusetts shipping town was the center of the American whaling industry. Now it just sticks with fish. Downtown by the docks the cobblestone streets were slippery, the weathered brick buildings damp and dripping, giving the area a 19th…

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…

Post by Grubb. If you imagine the birds eye view of Cape Cod as an arm bent at the elbow with South Beach at the bottom and Provincetown inside the curved fingers of the fist at the top, it looks like the long thin islet could easily disappear under the swell of a tsunami. But…

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…

Post by Grubb. Friday, after taking a walk along the National Seashore, Marc and Judi took us to Provincetown for an afternoon ramble. A bayside Greenwich Village, since the 1920s P-town has been famous for being a summertime bohemian hangout. I expected rundown cabanas and a restored Provincetown Playhouse. The cabanas have morphed into upscale…

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…

Post by Grubb. The last time we enjoyed an extensive visit with Marc and Judi was when we were in Oaxaca during the Christmas holidays in 2018. That was when Marc, bent on introducing Ella to the world of mescal, gave us the rambling go-for-the-worm dark doorway bar tour that prepared us for joining the…

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…