Greetings from Connecticut

Another quick post after a day at the Connecticut Renaissance Faire with Cheryl and Kristen, who met us there late morning. We wandered through the market, heard some music, saw some jousting, ate lunch, watched an insane performance of Rats: The Musical, and came home in the late afternoon because Cheryl wasn't feeling great. We showed her the first two episodes of Lanterns because she hadn't seen them, and had soup and cheese for dinner, then we watched this week's epic disaster Silo and the return of the excellent Dark Matter. More tomorrow.

Greetings from Mystic

Sunday was another gorgeous day and we spent most of it at Mystic Seaport at the Sea Glass Festival, where we met Kristen, admired the sea glass, bought some small jewelry, and ate lunch under one of the festival tents. We also walked around the seaport and its museums -- boarded the whaling ship Charles W. Morgan, talked to the shopkeeper in the nautical instruments shop about celestial navigation and the first grandfather clock, looked at the carvings and figureheads on exhibit, saw jellyfish in the river, admired the ships! 

 

We drove home from Connecticut in the late afternoon, had baked potatoes for dinner because they had those at Mystic Seaport so we got in the mood for them, and watched the rest of Pompeii: Out of Time, which has a lot of the flaws of all the National Geographic historical recreation shows but is interesting despite the clunkiness. Now we're watching the first episode of How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, which is alternately very funny and extremely creepy, like an Irish comic I Know What You Did Last Summer with great acting.

Greetings from Hartford

I had a very nice social Saturday starting with a morning drive to Shrewsbury, which was having its annual Scandinavian Midsummer Festival at a park there. Hildy was dancing with her Finnish dance group, and there was a Midsummer pole-raising, a Viking encampment and combat demonstrations, a marketplace with crafts and food, a Frozen moonbounce, and live music on several stages. 

We came home in the afternoon to feed the cats and get organized, then we drove to the Hartford area for dinner with Kristen and Doug, who had just adopted a dog! Laurie and Hal were there too, everyone brought food, we mostly hung out in the gorgeous weather out back and watched the dog and birds and ate bean salad, local cheese, veggie quiche, hummus and muhammarah, and brownies.

Greetings from Rhode Island

Paul had the day off for Juneteenth, a gorgeous mid-70s degree day here, so we drove to Rhode Island to the Roger Williams Park Zoo, which in addition to many animals currently has a Bug's World animatronic display. We saw all the giant insect models around the pond in the zoo, where we also saw the first egret we've seen in New England, and we also saw penguins, snow leopards, elephants, anteaters, red pandas, flamingos with a groundhog living in their enclosure, red wolves, and a pair of sloths with a baby among the many species there. We brought a picnic with us and stopped for ice cream at West End Creamery on the way home.

 

We ate toad in the hole for dinner and took a short walk to see if we could find the snapping turtles in the neighborhood -- we'd seen some in the pond at the zoo -- though we only found bunnies. Then we watched this week's Star City (still good, still very dark) followed by the return of Sugar (still very enjoyable, entertaining use of old movies) and a bit of Discovery season three. We only saw the very end of the US World Cup victory over Australia (our son said it made traffic a nightmare in Seattle, along with incoming traffic for the game the Mariners are now losing) and now the Orioles and Dodgers are tied in the bottom of the 6th.

Greetings from Hartford

On Sunday morning we drove to Hartford to meet Kristen, Laurie, and the latter's husband and youngest child for lunch at the Parkville Market (I had walnut maple cream French toast, hubby had a chicken bacon sub, and everyone else had different things from the big international food court there). Then we went to the Wadsworth Atheneum, which I haven't visited since my in-laws lived in Hartford in the late 1990s before I had digital camera. The museum still has William Holman Hunt's The Lady of Shalott on display and an excellent collection of Hudson River School painters, plus lots of American Impressionists, European Baroque art, and furniture and home design.

 

We also saw both Framing American Democracy: Radical Roots (which has lots of New England connections including pieces of Hartford's legendary Charter Oak) and Framing American Democracy: Contemporary Artists Reflect before we headed home, where we fed the cats, ate a small dinner after the big lunch, and watched the Tony Awards. There were a couple of very self-involved speeches but it was worth watching for Titanique and Cats: The Jellicle Ball, plus the Tonys are always a giant Pride celebration and tonight was no exception.

Greetings from Home

Nearly all of Friday was a travel day for us, with a couple of nice breaks. We ate breakfast in the hotel, then drove to Paul's father in Hanover, bringing Thai food with us for lunch. The roof of the building was being repaired, so the ducklings who live in the courtyard were hiding, but we got to see Clair play the violin and tested his computer by getting Adam on Teams for a few minutes. 

In the afternoon, we drove through parts of three states and over several bridges (with a quick pit stop at a gas station across from the Bayer headquarters in New Jersey) to Mount Kisco, New York, where we had an excellent dinner at The Turk with Tracey, my good friend from college. Now we're home with our cats who claim they were not fed one single time.

Greetings from Maryland

I spent a lot of Tuesday in the car driving from Worcester to Gaithersburg, with a bunch of stops on the way. We saw the varied decorative girders of Connecticut, drove across the Cuomo (Tappan Zee) bridge in New York, had lunch at Burger King in the James Gandolfini (Montvale) Rest Area on the Garden State Parkway so we could get The Mandalorian and Grogu swag, made a pit stop at the Biden (Delaware) Welcome Center, and had dinner with my parents. 

Paul has to work in his company's Maryland office for the next couple of days, so I came down with him to see family and friends in the area. Now we're in a hotel by Washingtonian Lake, whose carousel and fountains are running, where we saw two families of goslings as night fell, and we're watching the Dodgers-Astros because the Orioles (who beat the Marlins) are blacked out locally.