Rand's View

My New England Hiking Guide calls Rand's View, a hilly spot in the northwest corner of Connecticut where the forest opens to a long view of prairie, countryside, and distant ridges, "the nicest view along the Appalachian Trail in Connecticut." It goes on to editorialize that "that's a big claim." WHAT? Anyone who has been to Connecticut (or more likely, driven through it) knows that it is neither very large nor very mountainous, and c'mon, it boasts only 52 miles of the Appalachian Trail's 2,178. 20 fewer miles than New Jersey, for heaven's sake! I can only think that the poor guy who wrote the book was tired and completely tapped out of good adjectives by the time he got to Connecticut, being the last of the New England states he hiked. Nevertheless, my new hiking buddy Audra and I put our skepticism aside and headed up there one late fall Sunday.

We were encouraged by the surrounding countryside, which we had the opportunity to fully critique while wandering around lost in it:


Rand's View could very well be the nicest view along the Appalachian Trail in Connecticut. It's definitely the nicest part of the 2.6 miles I've hiked. That peak on the left is Jug End, to which we would hike if we were the sorts to hike the Appalachian Trail. That is Mt. Greylock in the distance, 50 miles north in Massachusetts:


Audra, making her way back down:

Fall (with a dash of winter) Colors

We spent the middle week of October catching the tail end of the prettiness of fall. We started out in the Lakes Region in New Hampshire, poked around there and the southern White Mountains, and then headed over to Lake Dunmore in Vermont, in between Rutland and Middlebury. We did some hikes, grilled some meats, drank some beer, tasted apple cider doughnuts good and bad, and generally soaked in the crunchy crisp New England fall goodness. It was unseasonably cold the whole week, so we got a little taste of winter snow. Yay!

On our first hike, up Squam Mountain, Rachel was on a quest to bring the perfect leaf back to a season-deprived northern California child:

Spiffy display of those window glass thingies in some ye olde general store in a little New Hampshire village:

Some stuff we saw in the White Mountains:


Views from the Welch and Dickey peaks trail:


This was our view from our cozy little place in Vermont. You could almost hear the lake sighing with regret for the summer visitors, long since returned to school and work.

We were just a stone's throw from Burlington, so we spent a day with these folks (shown here in the midst of a Lake Champlain Chocolate hot chocolate fix/stupor), friends of Rachel's from college:


They showed us the highlights of Burlington, a mellow city with a Seattleish feel, along the eastern edge of Lake Champlain with the Adirondacks rising prettily over the western shore. They also let us sample their homemade honey (well, not homemade, but made by bees with whom they are acquainted), which looked like this:

and indulged John in his favorite vacation activity:


When we got back this cartoon appeared in the Nov. 9, 2009 New Yorker:

As we are not New Yorkers, I'm sure it wasn't targeted at us. Happy fall! More pics.

P Town and Head of the Meadow Beach

One of New Haven's greatest virtues is it's proximity to other places. I don't mean to knock it. It's a scrappy little place with many charms, but certainly being within two hours of New York, Boston and countless bucolic New England countryside settings has kept us here even when we felt a bit cut off from our world.

So when my Uncle Denny says he and my Aunt Ellen are coming up for a week to stay a friend's place in Cape Cod, and we discover that there are only about 24 hours that we can be there when they're there, we really appreciate this virtue! That's what happened in mid September. And we cranked a lot out of those 24 hours. Above you see the sunset over the harbor in Provincetown, which was bookended by chowder lunch and lobster dinner. After strolling Commercial Street, we caught the final show of the season of Miss Ridgefield 1981, Asians & Homos & Jews, Oh My! I was unsure what to expect, never having been to a drag show, and not sure how appropriate it was as entertainment to take your mom to. Miss R takes no political correctness prisoners, and our faces were all sore from laughing by the end.

We decided to start Sunday off right: with a stroll, picnic and some frisbee on Head of the Meadow beach. This is a rock band we came across that was posing for their album cover. I kid. It's Denny and Ellen (backing vocals), my mom (lead vocals), and John (bass).

Truth be told, we started off at the beach because wine tasting at Truro Vineyards didn't start until noon, and we had to kill time somehow. Hmph. Puritans. After tasting, feeling pretty good, and buying lots of wine and wine related tchotchkes, it was finally time for ... more seafood! This time we bought our own oysters, clams, and mussels, and roasted and steamed up a feast, which we chowed. Mollusk glamour shot:

After a short bike ride with one more view of Cape Cod Bay, it was back to New Haven. A few more pics.