On Friday, July 18, Christina's parents, Harry and Connie, having driven up from New York the day before and spent Thursday night in Boston visiting with Robert and Christina and eating Japanese hotpots, picked us up at 8:30 for an early breakfast at the Flour Bakery & Cafe before driving out to western Massachusetts.

The first stop on our collective vacation was Naumkeg, in Stockbridge, one of the Gilded Age summer cottages, and home of the Choates. While it drizzled, we photographed the afternoon garden and toured the house, and then we walked around the rest of the gardens a little bit afterward. It wasn't very crowded: the tour was interesting, though the guide was a little too jokey, and the gardens were really lovely. We didn't go through all of them for only two reasons: 1) Robert's knee was hurting from his basketball game injury last weekend, and 2) By the time we finished even as much of the gardens as we did, we were very ready for lunch.

 

We drove into Lenox and ate at a fairly cheesy but ultimately acceptable (though not recommended) Mexican-Italian place. The German-sounding waiter was incredibly inattentive, and the bathroom doors were on a spring that sprang shut on my head when I tried to enter. There was also a lack of soap and toilet paper, so we raided the men's room. A mediocre lunch was rescued by very nice ice cream just across the street--an exceptionally creamy cherry ice cream and a very good capuccino crunch made us all very happy.

Earlier, we had stopped at a tourist information booth on the main street of Stockbridge, and, though no one was present at the booth to help us, we'd picked up a not-to-scale map of the area. The map was very explicit about not being to scale, which was somewhat worrisome. Both Harry and Connie and Christina and Robert had had bad experiences, on vacations, with not-to-scale tourist maps before, and the navigations--this afternoon and throughout the weekend--were filled with much guestimating about inches and miles and non-existent scales.

After lunch, we drove north to Pittsfield to see the Herman Melville house, Arrowhead. Arrowhead was really not all that exciting. No one in the family is a huge Melville fan, first of all, and no one was also completely convinced by the tour guide who kept insisting that the beauty of the area--and a whale-shaped mountain we couldn't see at all for the trees and clouds--inspired Melville to write. For that matter, no one was particularly thrilled by the beauty of the area at all--it was all very pleasant and scenic, but not what I consider awe-inspiring. But, we felt better for seeing Arrowhead than missing it and always wondering what we'd missed, and the tour was thankfully rather short.

After Arrowhead, it was still early, so with more not-to-scale navigations, we headed over to West Stockbridge to go to Baldwin Extracts, a store advertised on the not-to-scale map. Christina was excited because they had genuine, all-natural root beer extract, which she'd been wanting for awhile to have in order to use in a root beer cake. Robert was excited that the little store had the difficult to find Zagnuts, a coconut-Mary-Jane-type candy bar he remembered hearing about in his childhood. We poked around in a glass-blowing store in West Stockbridge, buying a few ornaments to hang in the windows of our new apartment, and then looked at Vietnamese imports in another store down the street before heading back north to our hotel.

During one of our criss-crossing trips around Routes 7 and 41 and 20 that afternon, we took the following picture at a scenic overlook. It really wasn't all that scenic, but again, we were glad we'd stopped.

 

We decided to drive further north, to Williamstown, which--being a college town--we assumed would have better dining options than the somewhat run-down Subways and no-name delis of Pittsfield proper. (New Ashford had no restaurants at all, as far as we could tell.) We ended up eating at Meze in Williamstown--a nice, upscale new-American restaurant with good service and very good food of the hanger steak, rack of lamb, roast chicken, roast scallops variety with nice sidedishes and excellent deserts. After dinner, we drove around for a little while looking for a movie theatre, and verifying that neither 333-FILM or 777-FILM worked in this area code. Ending our fruitless search, we decided to call it an early night, and we started heading back toward the hotel.

Immediately, it began to pour. Robert drove the Subaru down winding little unmarked unlit lanes in horrendous rain, until we began to be afraid that we'd missed the hotel. We finally found it, rushed in, and watched Woody Allen movies (Jade Scorpion) on HBO until bed.

 

Saturday morning, after watching part of another Woody Allen (the blind director one) while getting dressed, we got an early start and headed back south to Lenox. After a very nice breakfast at Carol's, at which we enjoyed very nice oatmeal with wild blueberries, tasty omelets, and exceptional hash with fried eggs and buttered toast, we went straight to Edith Wharton's home, the Mount. I'm an Edith Wharton freak, and my mother loves her as well. Since the house was just restored and opened last year, for the first time, we couldn't believe we'd waited this long to get out there to see it. First, we walked around the gardens, which were planned by Wharton according to her principles of symmetry. Then, we made the 11:30 tour, because there were so few people visiting that they decided to cancel the 11:00 tour and combine the two. We still weren't seeing the hoardes of people who had booked up all the hotel rooms in the area. Where on earth were they? We did know they weren't on our tour here, although we saw more people at the Mount than at any other house/attraction so far. Still in its "designer showcase" phase, in which the rooms are furnished with modern pieces in the spirit of Wharton's tastes, the house itself was fabulous--absolutely one of my favorite old houses ever. We know we need to come back in 2005, when the house reopens in Stage 2 of its renovation with all period-style furnishings.

 

After the meaty, hour-long tour and a nice pass through the gift shop, we went back into downtown Lenox to grab some lunch. We ate at the Church Street Cafe, which despite some very inefficient service and seating, offered good food without more than a five-minute wait. We realized that all the crowds we'd seen since arriving in the Berkshires were at restaurants, which were almost uniformly packed. We couldn't understand it--was everyone here really so dull as only to go to Tanglewood, and nowhere else? Rather than ponder this more, however, we just settled down and ate along with them--I had a really nice cheese and olive plate, and my mother had an antipasto platter, and we shared that and a very tasty roasted vegetable sandwich. Lunch finished, we went over to Shakespeare & Company to see "The Complete Works, Abridged" at a 3:00 matinee. We all enjoyed the play, though anyone who went into it expecting "regular" Shakespeare was clearly in for a shock. Robert remarked that it contained some of the most well-done bathroom humor he'd ever seen, and indeed, the play was very true to the spirit of Shakespearean comedies.

When the play ended, we tried to get a reservation for the evening at Bizen, the sushi place we'd heard so much about in Great Barrington, but we were snootily told that it was hopeless--this was, the staff said, a very busy summer Saturday, and you can't just call and hope to walk in an hour later. We drove down to Great Barrington anyway, and were very put off by the crunchy, flaky, Berkeley-like feel of the place--here were all the crowds, we saw, and here were more people between the ages of 10 and 30 than we'd seen all weekend long. Nearly everyone looked very strange. We saw a man with bright blue eyebrows and moustache, for instance, in the parking lot of a (closed) antiques store. "I guess they're not afraid anyone will walk off with their stuff," my mother observed, while Robert rolled his eyes and wanted to know who would ever want any of this "junk" (old sinks, tubs, wrought-iron railings, etc.) for free, never mind for hundreds of dollars. We are clearly not antiques people. After a stop at a handmade chocolates place to buy jellies, chocolate creams, and fudge for later, we ended up eating dinner at Shiro, a strange pseudo-suburban Japanese restaurant with decent sushi but very bizarre clientele--and ponzu sauce. Shiro is right next door to a bowling alley and indoor mini-golf course, and in search of air conditioning and a lack of mosquitos we sprung for the $3/person course. Here were the Berkshire locals, we saw, somewhat frightened when others began playing along next to us, but we continued despite our fears. The mini-golf was actually very nice for a completely rundown, not-at-all-maintained place under electric lights, decaying papier-mache dragons, and fans (not, after all, ACs), and we had a good time on some of the utterly impossible holes.

Back at our hotel, after a stop at a Ben and Jerry's for ice cream sodas, we hoped to catch another Woody Allen movie on HBO, but they were still showing the blind director one. We watched another half-hour or so of that before calling it a night.

 

On Sunday morning we got another early start, and we began driving west in search of breakfast. We'd hoped to find something promising--not a hotel restaurant, or a chain, or a deli, or just a donut store--before we got to Hancock, but we had no such luck. Instead, we kept driving to West Stockbridge, a trip of altogether close to an hour, but when we got there we found an excellent breakfast option at Cafe Pomodoro. We ate inside, though there was a patio as well, and I had a nice goat cheese and tomato tart while my parents had omelets and Robert had a raspberry croissant. The menu was a great mix of real breakfast and bakery items, and the food was excellent. After breakfast and tea, now fortified, we drove back to the Hancock Shaker Village.

Robert and I had just been to the Canterbury, New Hampshire Shaker village last year, and so he wasn't crazy about coming to this one. However, with its self-guided tour of the 20 different buildings, with the herb gardens, barnyards, and hands-on discovery center, this village was much more interesting. We got to see demonstrations of water-powered woodworking and Shaker chair weaving, and we got to pet various sheep and goats. Robert even tried to get up close to a chicken, but it ran away from him in a very funny run. We took some pictures, enjoyed walking around in the sun, and got into the spirit of the day by dressing up in Shaker clothes.

We stayed at the Shaker village until lunch, at which point we drove back to Great Barrington because we were able to get a 1:45 reservation at Bizen, and Robert would have been very disappointed if we hadn't gone. We poked around in a few used bookstores before lunch (the Yellow House Bookstore was the best one in the area for good fiction), and then had a lunch filled with awful, pretentious service but extremely good fish. We didn't think Bizen was better than places in California or New York, but it was definitely good for even a Boston sushi place, much less a rural western Massachusetts one. In particular, we had an excellent real-crab California roll, a wonderful monkfish liver and avocado roll (the "Meditation" roll), and a very good tuna, avocado, and mango roll topped with a rainbow of roe (the "Yo Yo Ma maki").

A few doors down from lunch was dessert--Bev's homemade ice cream, which was great--we had a softserve vanilla raspberry swirl yogurt and a coffee-malted-stout hard ice cream. As we were attempting to leave Bev's, however, all our negative, crazy, Berkeley-like perceptions of the town of Great Barrington were confirmed when a man with a nasty dog nearly lost control of it outside the ice cream place, agitating two other dogs in the process and driving me, cowering, back into the store. The man calmly explained that the dog had a mean streak, reported my father later (again, I was cowering inside, clutching the door shut, so I couldn't hear), but said that he was harmless even as he growled up and down the block. We managed to escape Great Barrington intact, thank goodness, and immediately headed for the Mass Pike and civilization, after that traumatic event. I was too shaken up even to eat any ice cream!

We got back to Boston around 6:00, and finished up the weekend with dinner at the Barking Crab (stuffed lobster, baby--yum) and an hour of pool at King's, near the Prudential, before saying goodnight and goodbye to a wonderful short, shared, weekend vacation.

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Created: 7/20/03. Last Modified: 7/20/03