Journey's End- New Hampshire

 

 

Breakfast is served from a buffet. The dining room tables are set with china and silver.

 

 

 

 

Our final destination on this journey was the Follansbee Inn on Kezar lake. The inn is only a fifteen minute drive from our daughter's house and we love staying there. It is located right on the shore of Kezar Lake. They have a nice dock with kayaks and paddle boards for guests to use. It is a delight to walk down to the dining room each morning to see what is served for breakfast. Every breakfast is noteworthy and the inn is renown for their creative breakfast dishes. 

Chelsea and her husband and three boys have lived in New Hampshire for many years now. Steve and I know the drive from New York to New Hampshire by heart. The three hour drive itself is a dream because we drive straight across the state of Vermont. I love this drive. I have driven it in every season and it is always beautiful. There are fun little stops like the Vermont Country Deli in Brattleboro and white clapboard towns with antique shops along the way. We have stopped at breweries and scenic overlooks. The mountains covered in pine, maples, and shimmering birch never disappoint.

 

On our first night at Chelsea's we had a lobster boil. Lobsters were only $7.99 a pound at the local market. Late summer is the best time to enjoy fresh lobster.  We cooked and dined outside because it is a messy meal after all. The boys were excited about the whole thing. Eating lobster is never a boring meal and the boys are pros at it. 

 

I was impressed by four-year-old Eliot's ability in the kayak.

There is a lovely sitting area under the pines with many chairs, picnic table and hammock.

We spent two days swimming and paddling around on Kezar Lake. On one day, all six of us went out on three kayaks and two paddle boards and paddled our way to the island and back. That was fun! We went out for ice cream, visited Cheslea's potter friend at her studio, had a potluck at the local library, and had grown up visits every evening after the boys were tucked into bed. As always, it was very hard to part ways. Our consolation is that Chelsea's family will come down to visit us in Virginia this fall so we were able to say, "See you soon" instead of, "Goodbye".

A Day Around Albany, New York

 

The time has long passed for us to ever move back home. Even so, this place holds our families' history and it is where we feel most at home. Our brothers and sisters are still there and we make this journey home to reconnect with our roots. It is all about family...and food!

Albany was built on the Hudson River and was first claimed by Henry Hudson for the Dutch in 1606. It is the second oldest chartered city in the country. In earlier days it was surrounded by farmland and has mountains to the north (Adirondack), and south (Catskills). Because of its location on the Hudson River, many immigrants entering the country through Ellis Island in the early twentieth century came up the river and settled here. 

We arranged to picnic with my sister and brother-in-law at Thatcher Park on the Helderberg Escarpment. We had many family picnics here and we always loved hiking the Indian Ladder Trail. We decided to drive through the city on our way west of Albany so we could stop at Ragonese's Italian Imports on New Scotland Ave. to have sandwiches made. Boy, was I in foodie heaven! The sandwiches and salads were excellent as were the olives, cookies and candies. We followed New Scotland Avenue all the way through Altamont and on to Thatcher Park. The weather was cool and we needed sweatshirts to keep warm. It was refreshing and I was loving it. We ate under a picnic shelter and then walked through the woods and along paths. I could not get enough of the pines and their wonderful scent. The Helderberg Escarpment is a geological wonderland. Way back in time, it was the shoreline of an enormous lake, of which the Hudson River now flows at the very bottom. Over time, sediment layers fossilized and the area is now littered with prehistoric fossils of sea life. On this day, I bent down to pick up a round stone from a stream bed and discovered that it was not a stone but a perfectly fossilized clam!

A beautiful day for a picnic in the pines.

 

Sediment layers along the stream beds shed fossils.

We meandered along country roads on the way home to my sister's house in East Greenbush. Although lunch was filling, I still had room for a fish fry from Gene's. They don't have these where we live in Virginia so I try to have at least two or three while we are in New York. : ) It was a good day.

These fish fries were from Ted's Fish Fries, which we had on a different night. I prefer Gene's Fish Fries but I forgot to take a photo of my fish fry at Gene's. Gene's has the best cole slaw, too.

 

Summer Travel - Back in Time to Upstate New York

 August is my favorite summer month to make our trek to New York and New England. By August the heat in Virginia is monotonous and I appreciate some cool weather relief. Our first stop this summer was back home to the Albany area to visit brothers and sisters. The temperature gauge in the car slowly dropped as the miles north ticked by. We found the welcome relief I was longing for. It felt good to be outside all week without the need to escape the sun and heat.

Before we reached Albany, we stopped in Fultonville, New York to visit the Auriesville Shrine. I went to this shrine with my parents, aunt, and sister a couple of times back in the 1960's when I was young. My memories of the shrine were vague. They were also from a child's perspective. I wanted to see it again as an adult and with a mature understanding of our faith. The shrine marks the place where three Jesuit missionaries were martyred by the Mohawk Indians in the 1640's.  The history of the shrine can be found HERE.

 

Stations of the cross along the pathways were beautifully done in mosaic. There was another set of stations that went up to a hill of prayer.

 The grounds were not as I remembered it and it was difficult to get my bearings. The trees were all fifty years larger and the entire perspective was different than from my memory. However, it was more beautiful than I remembered. We must have visited it on a feast day when I was young because I remember there being a lot of visitors walking along the paths. Today it was quiet and serene. The place is rustic and has the northern, woodsy, Adirondack feel to it even though it is not located in the Adirondacks. Each path leads to different contemplative spaces with statues, prayers, chapels, and a church. Steve and I walked along the pathways and read the various plaques before attending Mass in the large, circular church. There was more to see than we allowed time for. The grounds aren't overly expansive but it is a contemplative space and one feels led to stop and pause for a time at each location. I was sorry the gift shop closed before we could get to it because I wanted to find some books to further explore the history of the shrine.

The Kateri Chapel built in the 1800's at the foot of the Hill of Torture.

 

The coliseum where Mass is held, built in the 1930's.

 

I am glad we had the opportunity to make the pilgrimage here this year. It took a memory from childhood and brought it to life and into the present moment. It also gave me a deeper appreciation for the holiness of this place and the sacrifices the Jesuits made. (Ever since reading The Musket and the Cross, I have been fascinated with the early explorers and settlers of North America and the interactions with the various native tribes.) Rather than completely satisfy my questions and curiosity, our visit to the Auriesville Shrine has left me feeling the need to go back again. I guess I now understand my mother's desire to take us there on more than one occasion. It was a gift she gave to me, perhaps without realizing it.

The August Garden

 

Here we are already in August! Thanks to hurricane Debby we had an abundant soaking. I can hear the plants all giving a sigh of relief from the drought of July. I tried to be proactive in the garden this year by pulling up vegetable plants as they finished producing. The two back beds, center and right, had Swiss chard, beets, snow peas, radishes, and lettuce. As one crop finished, I planted a succession of another up until now. Those two beds are empty except for a few beets. My goal was to plant one more crop of seeds with zinnias. I got sidetracked with canning tomatoes and pulling weeds so the zinnias never happened. It is a shame because they are always a bright and cheery flower, good for cutting, and they bloom well into October here. However, I have two consolations to make up for no zinnias. One is that the garden still looks fairly tidy and "alive" rather than scraggly and dead. The second are the beautiful hollyhocks, which are new this year, to the left of the shed. 

I had hollyhocks in that spot several years ago until Steve planted a hops plant and it became a monster and choked out the hollyhocks. The hops was invasive and required aggressive pruning, which we did not do. In addition, the dried hops weren't brewing a beer that Steve felt made it worth keeping the plant. Last year we finally pulled the hops plant out. I left that area empty with the hope of returning hollyhocks there. I searched for hollyhocks seeds or plants in all the garden centers around here but could not find any. One day I was rummaging in my seed box for something and I found an old packet of hollyhocks seeds. I felt like I won a prize! The packet was outdated by a couple of years but I figured I had nothing to lose. I planted them and they germinated! The, within a week, the resident rabbits had eaten them down to stubs. I sprayed them with Deer Off and that kept the rabbits from eating them again. Now they are big and beautiful and blooming. I couldn't be more pleased. Steve's mom always had hollyhocks growing near her back door and they remind me of her. This is the view of the garden that I see out of our kitchen sink window. I keep an eye on the garden from here and it gives me pleasure to see everything growing. 

Believe it or not, our county schools went back into session this week. When we lived in New York, the garden was  spent by the time school opened in September. School in August confuses my ancient internal time keeping clock where I associate the seasons with what grows when and what activities take place when. The heat, humidity and growing things tell me it is still high summer. The school buses do not belong in the picture not to mention that we haven't even vacationed yet. August is the best time to be in New England, when the ocean is finally warm enough to step into. I'm going to ignore the school calendar and stay on the summer clock a bit longer.

Quilt Finish- It Took Me Long Enough!

 

 I finally bound this lap quilt I started last year. It's called, "Carousel" from the book, " Simply Fat Quarters Quilt Book, It's Sew Emma #ISE-901" The spring time color palette really caught my eye. I also thought it was a pattern that would not be too challenging for me since I do not quilt that often. 

I had it pieced together fairly quickly. Then, last summer, I dropped it off at Fork Mountain Quilt Shop in Rocky Mount, Virginia to have it quilted. It was there for about six weeks waiting its turn. Since the pattern was all straight lines and right angles, I chose a swirling quilt design as a contrast. I have no excuse for not binding it when I picked it up last August. I tucked it into the blanket chest where it sat for an entire year! 

I finally bound it last Tuesday when two friends and I got together for the day to do hand work. We try to get together at least once a month to sit and stitch and use that time to get some work done. I targeted the binding on this quilt to be my project for that day. It feels really good to have it finished!