travel – Page 49

I Love a Parade!!

June 17, 2013 | 1 Comment

Gosh! I can hear Ethel Merman singing this song, and it’s not a good thing to have stuck in my head! Still, who doesn’t love a parade?

Is all of New England like this? I just can’t believe how many parades there are up in this area and how enthusiastic everyone is about them! It sure makes me happy. So, this is how Bob and I spent a perfect Saturday in June.

It started with a ride on the Essex steam train, which took us up to Haddam for the start of the Haddam Bridge Centennial parade!

I’ve never seen a parade come across a bridge! It was great fun! I’ve now seen the Moodus Fife and Drum Corps at numerous parades in this area. They are terrific!…and they have a wide range of ages in the group, from what looks like high school students to retirees! ….men and women!

Next over the bridge was the oldest car in the area. This looks like a horse drawn carriage that was fitted with some kind of motor and a tiller for steering. There were about 30 antique cars in this parade, and they were all beautiful!

There was a ceremonial opening of the bridge, and isn’t it pretty with its fresh coat of paint?

When this bridge was built in 1913, it had one of the longest opening spans. On this June day in 2013, the river was very swollen with spring rains and the current was running hard. The local ferry at Chester was not running due to the high waters. The dock was under water, and the river currents were ripping by at more than 5 knots!

There were festivities all through the town of East Haddam, and we spent some time enjoying the views of the river and the Goodspeed Opera House, which is celebrating its 50th year. This is a postcard New England town, and when it’s decorated for a celebration it is just breathtaking!

We crossed the river and boarded the Becky Thatcher steamboat for the second half of this great trip.

It’s hard to believe that the banks of the Connecticut River are still so rural and undeveloped. In our area the river passes through hills called the Seven Sisters. At the summit of the Seventh Sister is Gillette Castle, an eccentric dwelling built in 1853, by the actor William Gillette who played the role of Sherlock Holmes on stage for many years.

On the western shore on top of another hill in Deep River, is the Mount St. John school for boys.

In Deep River we got back on the steam train for our return to Essex. I loved sitting in the parlour car with comfy swiveling wing chairs! I didn’t want to leave!

….and this was just the first half of our beautiful Saturday in June. We then drove across the Haddam Bridge on our own wheels to visit the Salem Herb Farm.

I met my friend Jody who works at the farm. She grows a large field of garlic at her own home, and now is the time of year when she cuts the scapes in order for the plants to use their energy toward making bigger garlic bulbs. The scapes are good used like chives, only with a powerful garlic flavor. Jody loves using scapes to make pesto, substituting scapes for basil. I thought that was a wonderful idea at a time of year when scapes are plentiful and basil is not quite yet! So last night’s dinner was scape pesto on linguine with a salad of local lettuce and hothouse tomatoes….a delicious way to end a beautiful weekend!

Home Alone

May 19, 2013 | 1 Comment

This has been such a productive week while home alone. I’ve made progress on my current tapestry, which has been neglected for the past 9 months. I finished plying the saffron mohair and am contemplating ideas for a striped fabric with some kind of warp-direction float pattern in the brighter stripes, like a rose path or other twill. Nothing has yet to strike my fancy.

Yesterday was the last statewide Connecticut weavers’ guild meeting, and I was thrilled to get there! It was my first meeting since last May when we moved up here… during the morning, I got a call from Bob (in Marsh Harbor, in the Abacos) to say goodbye and use up the last of his Batelco minutes on our Bahamas cell phone. He and his crew were planning to leave mid-morning to sail the few miles to “the Whale,” the eastern inlet just north of Marsh Harbor. He’ll be using the transponder on board to mark his progress up the eastern side of Abacos as he heads north toward the Gulf Stream. With luck, they will sail in the Gulf Stream, well off shore, all the way to Montauk at the top of Long Island. That is 1,000 miles! Thank heaven I don’t have to do that trip! If all goes well he will arrive home in about 7 days, in time to celebrate Memorial Day! (He missed that last year doing the same trip.)

If the weather does not smile on them, there are any number of places they can bail out, either south of Cape Hatteras or north of it. Doing that will mean that he won’t be home as quickly. He’ll be communicating with his weather router via sideband radio, and he’ll be sending me emails over the side band. As of late last night Pandora was here.

Here are some Bob’s last photos of the Bahamas. It’s already hard to believe that I was ever on beaches like this, with powder soft sand and aquamarine water!

We spent so much time looking for orchids and hardly found any. What a difference a few weeks makes! After a month in the wet season, Bob told me the Abacos are blooming with lots of these epyphytes (which I think are epidendrum) with pendulous flower stalks hanging down from trees.

I hope his trip home will be completely uneventful!

There’s No Place Like Home…

May 15, 2013 | Leave a Comment

There really isn’t. And to top it off it’s May in New England.

My sister had offered to meet me at the airport. It would just be the two of us; we’d have dinner afterward so she could catch me up on her family and her long solo stint of taking care of our aging and difficult mother.

Instead, she and my sons planned a larger family gathering to greet me. Seven family members were waiting for me when I arrived, and because my flight was late all the other people waiting for loved ones had gotten in on the act. So, I arrived to a crowd of clapping bystanders, who were shouting, “Welcome home, Mom!” I was completely confused, which is a very good thing, because otherwise I would have cried…

Mother’s Day weekend was about as perfect as possible. The kids and I went to the annual Garden Club sale at the little park in the center of town, and we worked in the garden cleaning up the debris from winter and planting my purchases from the sale. It was a wonderful homecoming!

Today I plied the brilliant saffron mohair that I spun in the Bahamas. Here it is with the mohair skeins from Persimmon Tree that I plan to use with it. I’m envisioning a fall jacket….

Farewell to Hope Town

May 6, 2013 | Leave a Comment

Today I will begin organizing what I’ll take home with me, and tomorrow we will head back to Marsh Habor to do laundry, restock the larder for the arrival of our next guest, and get me close to the airport where I will end this journey. I can’t really believe this is happening.

A few last sights of Hope Town, definitely the prettiest settlement in all the Bahamas!

All the houses are painted wonderful pastel colors down here.

Walking through the north end of town along the “road” better suited to golf carts than to any bigger vehicles.

Farewell to the dramatic skies and thunderstorms we are having every day this month!

I will definitely miss my daily visit to the pool at Hope Town Marina!

Farewell to the lovely gardens, the exotic scent of gardenia and jasmine and things I cannot name…..and colorful hibiscus and bougainvillea!

And seeing Pandora at the end of a lovely street of colorful houses and gardens!

Until next year……

2725 Miles….

May 5, 2013 | 1 Comment

Yep, it’s true. Hard to believe that I have sailed 2725 miles over the past 9 months.

I cannot deny that this trip has had a steep learning curve for me, and I think the first couple of months down here I was so focused on coping that it was hard to see the larger picture. We headed south determinedly, and did the more remote areas first. Now that we’re in the Abacos, everything seems so easy! Short sailing distances, lots of provisions, more forgiving weather….

Once I got past how hard things were going to be and got a little experience under my belt, I had time to take a look around me.

The community of sailors is about as small as the community of tapestry weavers. There just aren’t a lot of us. I have tried to find the number of personal sailing craft that have cleared customs in the Bahamas for the winter of 2013, but I can’t find an answer to that yet. Seasoned sailors who have been coming down here for years tell me that it’s usually between 1500 and 2000 boats. In the vast world of people taking some leisure time or vacation time, this is a very small number.

I’ve been keeping track of the foreign home flags down here, though, of course all of us are foreigners. Canadians just might outnumber Americans down here this year, but both nationalities are certainly the majority. I noticed that many Quebecois do not fly a home flag at all, and I have heard a number of times (but not from the Quebecois themselves) that there are some political reasons for this. Beyond Canada and the US, we have seen flags from Germany, Switzerland, France, the UK (they are not keen on flying their home flag either!), Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Oh, I almost forgot South Africa….now that is a journey. It’s a cultural melting pot down here!

It is no surprise that the visitors down here are almost entirely from northern climates. However, just yesterday we noticed a flag we did not recognize flying on the stern of the boat right next to us in Hope Town. It is from Suriname. Where’s that?? It’s on the northern coast of South America, between Guyana and French Guiana (I had to google this!), and it’s the only South American country that has Dutch as its national language. We hope to meet the Surinamian couple later this morning.

Here is the flag:

Another surprise to me is the list of home ports on the US boats. I expected to see mostly boats from the East Coast… maybe a few boats from the West Coast, those adventurous sailors who would cross a hemisphere and go through the Panama Canal. Maybe even a few boats from the Great Lakes. And yes, boats from these places are certainly down here. The surprise is how many US-flagged boats down here have home ports that are completely land-locked. There are boats from Iowa (no kidding!), Arkansas, Kentucky! We just met a couple who split their time between their house in Montana and the boat they just bought in Florida. I’m just naming a few. I’ve seen lots of boats from Texas, with home ports no where near the Gulf Coast–Ft. Worth, Austin… Right now there is a boat in Hope Town harbor with a home port of Boulder City, Nevada!

In talking to some of these travelers, we’ve learned that the lure of sailing can entice those who’ve never been anywhere near a coast. I can’t imagine buying a boat and immediately heading offshore, but there are a good number of folks down here who don’t know much about sailing and are not yet familiar with their brand new boats. Now that’s a learning curve.

The experienced cruisers we’ve met are a marvelous group of people. They are out to explore, not to exploit. They are are impressively self reliant and very generous with their hard earned knowledge. I cringe at the thought of making stereotypes, but there just aren’t that many of them and they seem to have similar goals and values: to leave a clean wake, to be respectful of the cultures they are visiting, and to help others in need by sharing their sailing knowledge… or even their supplies, or by lending a helping hand. Bob and I have been the recipient of tremendous help from these seasoned sailors. It has made a world of difference to me.