Rockwell's Berkshires

Yesterday we had lunch in a Norman Rockwell painting. Norman Rockwell lived for much of his life in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, where we are staying.

They've got a nice museum and gallery of his works nearby so we went on a field trip yesterday to see what there was to see there. It was nice, and I was just going to type "no big surprises", but there was one surprise on the grounds of the museum. These gnarly statues were on display right next to the museum. I didn't expect to see them at a Norman Rockwell Museum, but they're pretty cool:


So anyway, we went to Rockwell's hometown of Stockbridge afterwards for lunch, and Main Street looked EXACTLY like his painting called "Main Street". We ate in a little restaurant in the alley to the left of the biggest white building.


I think I told you before that a little robin taps frantically on one of our bedroom windows each day. We trimmed back all the vines near the side of the house so he wouldn't perch so close to the windows, and we also taped a big piece of cardboard to the window so he wouldn't see his reflection, but you knew that already. After we did that he just flew higher to the uncovered peak of the window and tapped against it there. He has also found another window at another part of the house to attack. He's so violent that we can hear him when we are downstairs and he is tapping an upstairs window. We're not sure what to do. I think he's just not right in the head.

We've been continuing with farm chores but the past few days have been pretty rainy so we've spent a lot of time staying snug indoors.


Mark and Heather have started to compete with each other on their morning crossword puzzles (two copies of the same puzzle). Heather has a slight lead at the moment but Mark doesn't mind.

I've continued to develop my friendship with Beau the horse, and a few days ago we started pushing his boundaries. He goes nuts when his back legs are touched, and of course horses need to have all their hoofs trimmed pretty regularly, so this is a problem. I've started gently stroking his back legs with a stiff whip while he eats his supper. He's doing okay with it; only lifting his leg gently when I do it up until now. Actually the hardest part is BEFORE we start doing it. He knows something is up because he is so incredibly sensitive, so he circles around his stall wildly until we can settle him down. He only does this right before it's time to touch his back legs - he just knows something is about to happen, even though nothing has happened yet. Maybe I can make a bit of a difference in his life before it's time to leave Massachusetts. I don't know. I hope so.

We've been continuing with our farm chores, all the time having fun and feeling like we're pretending, but really what we're doing is needed work. We transplanted some strawberries into the garden one afternoon, and we've continued to prune away at the various apple trees on the property.


Mark got into the woodpile and chopped a bunch of stuff up, and all sorts of typical farm stuff. Here are some hay bales destined for the garden.


I've been helping out with horse chores, and fed and watered them by myself one evening so Heather could run some errands in town. It was VERY different to make the long walk to the barn alone in the dark, knowing that black bears frequent the property. I did not get eaten though, so there you have it.

Spring continues to spring, even in the cooler weather we've been having recently.



So that's about it. We have a tentative plan to say goodbye to Heather and continue our road trip on Thursday, but we'll have to see how the roads are. By Thursday we'll have had four days of rain and dreary weather, so it may not be possible to get the Boler out through the dirt roads until they dry up. Here's the only picture I have of Heather. She says she always has a funny face in pictures so I didn't get her face in it:


We're not having exciting adventures, but this is exactly perfect. It will be strange to be on the road again after this, but our trip is nearly over. Next week we will see the rest of New England, and then we're homeward bound!

Porcupine Hill

ALERT

• There is another new post further down the page, from April 16th. Scroll down if you feel like reading a new entry from the past.

There is an angry robin that pecks on the highest loft window of our bedroom every day. We're pretty certain that he sees his own reflection and feels a need to constantly defend his territory from the mirror-image robin in the window. We all felt kind of bad for him so yesterday we put a ladder against the side of the house and wedged some cardboard between the window and some abutting vines. This morning the robin was still at it in the upper corner of the window that was not covered over, but he didn't peck and flap for very long. We'll have to wait and see if further action is required.

Otherwise life is going well at Porcupine Hill. I've been spending time with one of the horses, Beau, who seems to just need a friend. He was rescued from becoming dog food and probably didn't live that great a life in his early years. He's skitzy and sensitive and can't be ridden, but we are becoming friends I think. Heather seems happy that Beau is getting some extra attention.


The other horse, Blackberry, is the boss of the pasture and tries to herd Beau and I away from each other. He's much more outgoing and I think he's used to getting all the attention and doesn't know what to make of my behaviour. I make sure he gets treats whenever Beau does though, don't worry!


Other than playing with horses, we've been doing lots of spring chores around the farm. We spent an afternoon earlier this week hauling around hay bales and mulching over a garden. That's a lot of work! We also pruned some apple trees and they look beautiful and very zen now. I can't wait for the buds to bloom - I hope they do so before we leave.


Heather was at work today so we took one of the dogs and poked around the unexplored corners of the property. There is apparently a half-built cabin in the woods that her old farm-hand had started, but we couldn't find it. While we were out we found some old patches of snow in the woods. It's hard to believe it's there - the weather has been beautiful and sunny all week and we are both wearing sandals and are slightly sunburned. Cuinn the pup decided he would roll in the snow:

Farm Life

We've been here at Porcupine Hill for two full days now, and it is a ton of fun. We're supposed to work a certain number of hours for every week we stay here, but yesterday we totally lazed about instead and went into the nearest little town to wander around. It was our host Heather's fault - she insisted that we relax and explore the town while she was at work, so we did. We did do a bit of pruning last night, and we really got at 'er today and finished the two whole rows of pruning that needed doing. It was fun to be in the garden, listening to the peepers and birds all day while we worked. I would also go visit with the horses every once in a while as a break from pruning. I think they are starting to like me...at least I hope they are!

Heather is a very kind person and we get along well. We were supposed to stay here for one week, but we might stay longer. We'll see! We've been talking a lot and last night I found out that Heather is deathly afraid of snakes and spiders. I felt so bad - we'd been walking in the woods together our first night here, and I came across a little snake snoozing on the path and deliberately pointed him out to her. Woops!!

Anyway that's all I've got for now. We're living the simple farm life for the moment and loving it. I apologize for the lack of pictures - I think I will be able to add some on Monday when/if we go into town again. (I'm not on my own computer at the moment.)

WWOOFing in the Berkshires

I'm so behind on writing posts it's not even funny. I will work hard to get up-to-date over the next week....maybe...

After spending some time in Amish country, Pennsylvania (details to come later) and driving through Pennsylvania, New York, seeing New Jersey but not going in, Connecticut, and finally Massachusetts, we are now deep in the Berkshires in the western part of the state. This is a very cool progressive area, apparently.

We're staying on a rural farm with a cute little sprite of a vegan chef named Heather, her three dogs, and her two horses. Over the next week we will be helping her with some spring farming chores that are a bit too much for one person, and in return we have a room in her house to sleep in and she cooks for us (but we'll help if we can).

We arrived yesterday. As we neared our destination Karen the GPS led us to a tiny little hilly road that seemed too narrow for two vehicles to pass by each other. We soon found out that it wasn't though, when a laughing guy in a car inched past our travel trailer going the other way. Soon though, the pavement disappeared off the narrow road. We got a bit worried - what if Karen was wrong? What if the road became impassable? We kept going.

Luckily, the farm was right where it should have been and Heather's three dogs were running up to us, barking in greeting. Heather came out of the house and we all launched into excited conversation for about five minutes before we thought to introduce ourselves...I take that as a good indication that we'll get along well for the next week.

Heather was hosting an outdoor dinner party that evening with a few people from the vegan cafe that she works at. We ended up eating in a clearing near the house that was banked on one side by stately Oak trees and by a rambling garden on the other side. At one end of the clearing was a roaring bonfire, and eventually at the other end we watched the sun go down. As it became completely dark, a drum started to beat as one of the dinner guests danced with burning "poi". Poi are balls about the size of a baseball on the end of a little chain. You hold one chain in each hand and swing the balls around in insane patterns. Anyway the girl was very good at it and the poi slowly went from bright burning balls of flame to blue, guttering orbs, and then went out as she continued to dance. It was stunning and surreal.

I'm sitting in Heather's cafe now and we are waiting for her to finish up working for the day so that we can go home and trim some hedges and mulch the garden. I'll have less internet access than usual this week but I want to tell you guys about the Amish, so I'll write something up and post it as soon as I can.

No place to go

This is the one about the truck stop blues!

Wednesday was one of those rare days where we just couldn't find a place to stop for the night. We decided to stop well before sunset - a lucky thing. We found a listing for a KOA campground in the countryside in New York state, but as we wound our way down tiny back-country roads, I noticed I hadn't seen a single sign. Usually for big chains like KOA, there's plenty of advertisement. We zeroed in on the location, passed by some farms and one redneck house with some dead vehicles in the yard, and kept right on going down the road, away from the spot where Karen the GPS had said there was a campground.

Great.

I found another one in Karen, "Yogi Bear's Jellystone Campground" or something very similar, about 15 miles away. As we neared, we joked about the fact that there were signs this time. And there were! Things were looking promising! We drove down yet another tiny country lane, this time along a picturesque river, and spotted a few RVs up at the end of the road. Success! We'd found Yogi Bear's Family Campground (or whatever). We pulled over to the office, walked right up to the office door, read the sign that said they were closed for the season, and walked back to the truck.

Well dang.

I decided I'd see if the facilities were accessible - never hurts. They were, what a bonus! It will be a special thing to have my very own bathroom that never goes away when we get to Nova Scotia. Anyway when I got back we looked bitterly at the smattering of big RVs that were parked in the campground. We also noticed that there was some activity at the campground. People who were obviously employees were driving around in trucks and golf carts, studiously avoiding looking at us. I think they were all mean. We stayed for quite a few minutes in order to devise a new strategy and at least three employees passed right by, trying really hard not to notice us.

So, a truck stop is usually not closed for the season, right? All we wanted was a place to park and, as a bonus, maybe a shower. We went to the nearest truck stop and I am listening to all the big trucks driving around and idling as I type. They do have showers here. TEN DOLLARS per shower. Uh-uh! We're going WWOOFing tomorrow and I'd hoped to show up looking and smelling nice, but our first impression will have to be a grubby one instead. Oh well!

We're not 100% sure what the rules are here. Can we stay all night? Will they kick us out at 3am? There's a Walmart within reasonable driving distance so that's our backup plan for the night.

Hey! look! We're having an adventure...right? There are at least 50 big rigs in the parking lot behind me. It's time for bed.

Hershey, PA

Sunday was a four-state day for use. Don't be too impressed with that though, until after you look at a map of the Virginia / West Virginia / Maryland / Pennsylvania corner of the world. You can hit all four states in, oh, under an hour going in the same direction on one highway. So we did.

We decided we couldn't pass by the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania and all it's associated chocolatey goodness. This morning we went to "Hersheypark" to do a factory tour. I hadn't realized that there was this whole big theme park, including roller coasters, waterslides, 3-D movies, museums, and just about everything else you could think of. I haven't been over the flu for long enough to want to go on a roller coaster, but luckily we didn't have to pay the theme park admission to go on the factory tour of the Hershey plant. Yay, cheap educational stuff!


Remember our Jelly Belly factory tour? Where we saw actual factory workers making actual candy, and learned things about it all? Hershey was altogether something different. The tour was free, but instead of "tour", think "ride". That's right - we got on a car on a little track and it whipped us into the bowels of the Hershey building.

I was expecting an informative discourse on the making of Hershey's milk chocolate, but suddenly, animatronic gospel-singing cows were shrieking at me about how it was "all about the milk". Uh, gotcha.


There were disco balls and movie screens and up-tempo milk themed songs. Our car on it's little train track went hither and thither. A speaker in the car quietly dispensed information that I simply could not follow amidst all the lights and noises as we drove past fake conveyor belts full of candy and chocolate. There was another appearance of the sassy cows, and then it was all over and somebody gave us free chocolate. That's all I remember, I swear.


The Hershey place was actually really cool. The tour was unexpected but hilarious, and the giant gift shop was full of Hershey candy that was cheaper than it normally is. Even the non-candy things, like shirts and kid's toys, were reasonably priced. I was shocked. Mark was quite taken with this here five pound chocolate bar. Too bad we're on a road trip and chocolate melts when left in the car.


Unfortunately, although I wouldn't say I'm still sick from the flu, I would say that I still can't really eat much, so I was unable to gorge on vast quantities of sugar. We had fun, bought a few little things, and headed out of town.

better now

We're not sick any more! I haven't got much else to report but I figured I'd at least say that.


We'll finally be leaving our campsite today and taking a tour of Luray Caverns, Virginia. I went there with my family when I was younger. I remember it being a lot nicer than Carlsbad Caverns, which Mark and I visited recently (and I forgot to tell you about). But I'm not sure if Luray was nicer because it was a guided tour, wherein:

- the cool things are pointed out and explained to you, and

- people are babysat so that they can't touch the million year old formations and RUIN them.

Maybe Luray was just nicer overall. Carlsbad was full of annoying people, and we both got so irked after a while that Mark (Mark of all people!) yelled at some kid twice for touching the rock formations.

So...I'm thinking I'll post some sort of comparison after we go to Luray Caverns. After that we'll continue north, and in a few days we're going to stay at someone's farm and help them prune fruit trees and stuff!

not so good

We have the flu. Mark is mostly over it because he got it first. We're in farm country in Virginia and there was a spectacular thunderstorm last night. You should all hope that you never require the use of an umbrella and a head-lamp just to throw up. Ugh.

I miss my dogs.

Happier posts will continue in a day or so.

Southern Food Roundup

We've both gained about 200 pounds eating southern food. Here are some regional highlights.

In Tombstone, Arizona, we heard a rumour that the local saloon served a cactus-flavoured Margarita. We went to investigate, and here it is, the Prickly Pear Margarita. Not bad. Not amazing, but not bad.


I've mentioned the "beignets" that are to be found in New Orleans. The pigeons liked these sugared pastries as much as the people did.


Deep fried catfish in New Orleans. It tasted kind of watery, but was okay I guess.

We were just in off the bayou when we went to this restaurant, and had gotten soaked to the bone. That was fine outside in the heat, but the restaurant had the air conditioning blasting. I asked if they had any hot tea. Nope. Hot tea is not common in the south - I hear all you Canadians gasping! Hot chocolate? Nope. Decaf coffee? Yes? Fine. The waitress reappeared proudly at the table a minute or so later, announcing that she had found me some hot tea! She put a cup of steaming water on the table and presented me with a HUGE teabag that clearly stated on the packaging that it was specially formulated for making a perfect pitcher of iced tea. It was the thought that counted, and the tea actually tasted fine.

Once, in a Texas restaurant, the cowboys at the table next to ours ordered tea. It came iced. When I was young and lived in Virginia, my mother used to carry around Canadian teabags in her purse for when we went out to eat. She'd order hot water and make her own tea.

I digress. Here's the deep fried catfish, served on top of home-made mac 'n cheese:


In Memphis, Tennessee, we found these deep fried pickles on the menu and couldn't pass up the opportunity. When would we ever, ever get to order deep fried pickles again?


Near Knoxville, Tennessee we got ourselves some good old-fashioned beans and corn bread. Mmmboy.


One of the delights of the south that we failed to photograph is grits, that slimy corn concoction that commonly accompanies breakfast. It's actually not bad if you make sure to add butter and salt. We've had it a few times In Louisiana and Mississippi just for the novelty of it.

One last thing that Mark FINALLY had today after chasing the dream literally for weeks is frozen custard. We've been trying to find a frozen custard stand for so long that it's sort of become epic.


I don't even know how Mark got it into his head that he needed it. Our custard adventure started when we were en route to Las Vegas, Nevada.

Mark had nagged me to search for "Frozen Custard" using Karen the GPS. One turned up right on our way, in Henderson, Nevada. Right around the same time, we heard from our friend Kristie that she'd arrived in Vegas, so we decided of course to meet her as soon as possible (stopping very briefly for Frozen Custard along the way). Well, we got to Neilson's Frozen Custard Shack at about 10:45am, only to find that they didn't open until 11:30. Being on time to meet friends is more important than candy though! We had to go, and Mark's dream was foiled for the moment.

Since then, there have been internet searches and Karen the GPS has also been heavily involved, but for weeks we either haven't found any or else we find one that's like 200 miles out of our way.

Until today.

With a sudden jerk of the wheel, we pulled off the road. I'd had my head down looking at the map and it kind of startled me. (There'd been a wasp incident earlier in the day. My nerves were a bit frayed.) Lo and behold, Pack's Frozen Custard stand was sitting not 30 feet from us. Mark got his custard!

(...although he denies it, I don't think he liked it as much as he was expecting to.)

Kentucky

We woke up, said goodbye to the neighbours, and had a pleasant day driving aimlessly around Eastern Kentucky today. This is a very rural area of the country and most of the people we encounter ask us where we're from - I think our accent must sound strange - and then they almost invariably ask "what are you doing HERE?!" when we say we're from Canada.

There's really no concrete reason. It's fun to drive around on little rural roads and see what there is to see. Kentucky is very pretty and many of the people we meet tend to pull us into leisurely conversation seemingly just for the fun of it. The pace of life seems a bit slower here.

A lot of the trees are blossoming in pink and white, and the hilly countryside is pleasant to look at. Oh, that reminds me. Karen the GPS, who has been doing oh-so-well lately, pulled a fit when we told her to take us to Kentucky. From Virginia (my old home state!) she made us turn onto a road called "Trail of the Lonesome Pine". Sounds pretty, right? Well, it was a bit more dramatic than we would have liked. It wound steeply back and forth into Kentucky until we saw a sign informing us that we were at the highest point in the state. It then wound steeply back and forth until we were at a lower altitude again.


Later in the morning Karen sneakily took us over the SECOND highest peak in the state. I'm pretty sure she did that purposely!

Scary Appalachian "art"

The people of Appalachia make beautiful rustic furniture and other objects - check out this chair.


I consider that chair to be a piece of art. When they consciously try to make art, though, it seems to turn into a big mess. This polka-dotted nightmare was once part of a man's house, and every object (including the walls, floors, ceilings, and furniture) has been garishly painted and polka-dotted in red, white and blue. This piece of his house in now displayed in the Museum of Appalachia but shouldn't be.


These creeps were found in the display area next-door to the polka dots. My best guess is that these three characters are a husband, a wife, and a transvestite. You guess which is which.


There's a lady that specialized in making art out of gourds. For some reason she seemed to use only diseased gourds. If this rabbit had been dropped off at the SPCA it would have been put out of its misery immediately.


Some more gourd figures. Click on the picture and take a good look at the middle guy's forehead. And the girl in blue? Did she come back from the dead? That's just wrong.


Watermelon of death.


Cletus, Queequeg, and Elvis. Or that's my best guess anyway.


I don't even know what to say about this mutant. He makes me feel uncomfortable. May I direct particular attention to his hands.


Any parent that gives a doll like this to their daughter doesn't really love her.


This spiteful duo seems to have murdered a neighbouring doll.


And for the grand finale, the devil.


Now, I want to put out the disclaimer that I admire the Appalachian people of the past and the present for many different reasons. Just not for this particular branch of their art. Apologies in advance if this gives anyone nightmares.

Appalachia

This past week we drove the long way through Tennessee. It's a pretty state, filled with idyllic rural landscapes dotted with perfect "country" farm houses and populated with very friendly and easy-going people.

After a 10 minute stop in Nashville to buy my grandmother a keepsake from the Grand Ole Opry (had to, she knew I was going past it) we made it to Knoxville where we prepared to get our brains filled up with knowledge at the Museum of Appalachia, and then at the American Museum of Science and Energy. These two places are about a half hour away from each other, but each presents a VERY, VERY different facet of Tennessee history.

The first stop was the Museum of Appalachia, which had been built by a guy whose passion was collecting artifacts and first-hand historical and cultural knowledge about Appalachian life. Many artifacts on display had quite personal first-hand stories accompanying them and there were thousands of things to look at - we could not have read every word of every exhibit in a single day, I don't think.


The Appalachian people made beautiful furniture and pottery, wonderful music, and scary scary horrifying "art". We'll cover the artistic stuff in a separate post. The museum had stories about quirky individualists and stoic mountain men.

One crazy guy thought God was telling him to make gigantic cement crosses with religious messages on them and erect them everywhere in the solar system. He got a bunch put up in different parts of the States before he died, but the ones he had set aside for Jupiter and whatnot are now at the museum.


There were also stories of people who lived self-sufficient lives in mountain cabins into their eighties, nineties, and beyond. At one point America's oldest living person was a 108 year old woman living in the woods in the Appalachian mountains, still spinning the wool that she used to clothe herself and her two elderly children - in their eighties, I think - who still lived with her. She finally died at 115, if we remember correctly.

There was a cabin in the middle of the museum grounds that had three Appalachian musicians jamming in it when we entered. We talked with them for a bit as they played us songs and Mark ended up jamming on the mandolin with them for a bit.


The next day we went to the American Museum of Science and Energy. Well, it turns out that Oak Ridge, a suburb of Knoxville, was the town where they enriched the uranium that went into the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. The government created the town all at once, and although at the time it was the third largest city in Tennessee (population 75,000), it was not on any map and armed sentries controlled access into and out of the fully fenced-in city. Everyone from the age of 12 and up had to carry an i.d. card with them at all times. To this day, Oak Ridge's nickname is "the Secret City".

The town was created, as I said, to make the uranium for atomic bombs. At the time, nobody had ever made an atomic bomb and they weren't sure if what they were doing would actually work. The museum covers WWII from a nuclear perspective mostly but had other related exhibits too. It made us think.


On a more positive note, I did get to put on these crazy "contamination room" gloves and play with children's toys through the wall.


We rounded out the educational portion of our week by going to Jonesborough, Tennessee, to visit the International Storytelling Center. Sadly, the storyteller-in-residence does not begin his season until June, so we wandered around their gift shop and then left. Fortunately, the town of Jonesborough is absolutely adorable and the previous evening we had accidentally found the birthplace of Davy Crockett and slept at the campground next door to it.


So, Even if the Storytelling Center was a bust (no tales of rolling cheeses down the hill...you know who you are...) the area itself was worth it for a million tiny reasons, and that's what this trip is all about.

As I write we're camped by a lagoon on the Virginia/Kentucky border. Tomorrow we will be going to "The Poor Folk Arts and Crafts Guild" and afterward will probably drive through the town of Hazard, Kentucky, which became famous after the Dukes of Hazzard - set in a fictional county in Georgia - came out. Who cares about details?! Not the fans of The Dukes of Hazzard, apparently!


I was interrupted in writing this post a minute ago by a trio of Mallard ducks that walked past the open door of the Boler and paused as though to ask me if I had any Ritz crackers available. Yes, yes I do.