Recreation
Places to Go, Things to Do ...
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Food Road Trip; Portland, Maine in Summer
To mark my 58th birthday, Elisa and I hit the road early and set our sights on Portland, Maine. Portland, for a city of its size, has an amazing food scene, and we like food. It seemed like a match made in heaven. When we left Rindge in the morning it was raining, but the forecast for Portland was for a dry, but overcast day. It rained for most of the two and a half hour drive, but as we got within twenty miles of the city the rain stopped and that was the last we’d see of it. The Standard Baking Company Some time ago, we had watched a pair…
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Fathers’ Day, Bistecca alla Fiorentina
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Boston Tall Ships Commemorate War of 1812 Bicentennial
The Tall Ships are in Boston celebrating the Bicentennial of the War of 1812. My wife’s mother is visiting us from Italy, and as a belated Mother’s Day present, we took her to Boston on Saturday, June 30 and went on a harbor cruise to view the tall ships from the water. We took advantage of a trip that was organized by the Rindge Recreation Department that included transportation and the cruise for a very nominal fee. We arrived at Faneuil Hall well before the scheduled cruise, and had time to walk around a bit and have a leisurely lunch and do some people watching at a restaurant with outdoor tables. The weather…
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Apple Picking in Northern New England
It’s the time of the year when New England apple orchards put out their ‘pick your own’ signs and New Englanders pack up their families on the weekend and go in search of the ultimate apple picking experience. Here’s an admittedly arbitrary sampling of orchards to visit in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts. New Hampshire Alyson’s Apple Orchard (Walpole, NH) is a can’t miss picking destination in New Hampshire’s Connecticut River Valley. Their pick-your-own orchards are open until Halloween and they also have a very nice farm stand. During the fall they have several events, including a Chili Contest, Pumpkin Carving Demonstrations, an Heirloom Apple Tasting, and a Halloween Costume Contest.…
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Maple Syrup Season in New Hampshire
It’s maple syrup season here in New England, and for the past few weeks, sugarhouses have been busy, boiling down maple sap to create maple syrup. You really don’t see sap buckets on the trees like the ones shown in the photograph on the left anymore. About the only place you can find those are in antique shops. That’s because the process of collecting sap has been streamlined over the years. Look carefully into the woods and the evidence is unmistakable: plastic tubing snaking from tree to tree, terminating in large, sealed plastic containers that can hold many gallons of sap. It takes about forty gallons of sap to make one…
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Day Trip to the Berkshires: The Clark & Tanglewood
Elisa decided that our Mother’s Day gift to her mother would be to take her on a day trip to the Berkshires, a part of Massachusetts that my mother-in-law, who was visiting from her home in Italy, had never visited. So after a date was settled on (Sunday, June 27), we got to work looking for some fun things to do that she would enjoy. The wonderful thing about visiting the Berkshires is that you could spend a week there and not see everything. But that also means that if you only have a day trip in front of you, there is a wealth of attractions from which to choose. We’d…
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Apple Tasting & Foliage Drive, VT Route 100
With Columbus Day weekend comes peak foliage in northern New England, and this year Elisa and I decided to explore the southern half of Vermont State Route 100. Inspired by the September/October issue of Yankee magazine, which did an article on traveling Route 100, we had made a dry run back in September just to make sure the drive would live up to its hype. Columbus Day weekend came blessed with a good weather forecast, and we left the house early on Sunday morning in order to make it to Dummerston in time for the 10:00 am apple tasting at Scott Farm. The inside of the barn had been renovated since…
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Enjoying New England’s Fall Foliage
Autumn is without a doubt northern New England’s best time of the year. The other seasons have their place, although Spring here might better be named ‘mud and bug season,’ but in the Autumn, New England is truly in her glory days. This is due, in a word, to one thing: foliage. This year, like most years, the peak weekend for enjoying New England’s foliage is Columbus Day weekend (October 10-12). Sure, the leaf peeper tour buses start hitting the scenic back roads of New England in mid-September, but those folks are way too early to the party. It’s not until September gives way to October that the foliage begins to…
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Canterbury Shaker Village
North of Concord, New Hampshire, just a short detour off of I-93, you’ll find Canterbury Shaker Village. Founded in 1792, just eighteen years after the first Shakers immigrated to America from England, the Shaker village in Canterbuy was one of nineteen Shaker communities in the United States. Shakers lived, worked, and worshiped at Canterbury Village for some 200 years, with the population reaching 300 during the 1850s. The last shaker who lived at Canterbury Village, sister Ethel Hudson, passed away in 1992. Functioning solely as a historical museum since then, Canterbury Shaker Village offers a unique opportunity to immerse yourself into another time and place, and for the contemplative among us,…
