Exploring the Berkshires

May 9, 2011

The Berkshire mountain area in Western Massachusetts is so beautiful in the spring. We have been driving around the area of Lenox and Stockbridge visiting some outdoor things and a few indoor things and ooh-ing and aah-ing over the gorgeous flowers. I am able to identify magnolias, forsythia, daffodils, jonquils, tulips (thousands and thousands!), dogwood, lilac, and numerous shades of red and purple in azalea bushes. Absolutely spectacular! Like this house, although my photo doesn’t do it justice. The weird looking, very low tree  behind the tulips is, I think, a weeping cherry and they are just now starting to bloom.

A Stockbridge house---and it's for sale!

 It is so much fun to be a tourist! We have—of course!—been to the Visitor Bureau and the two little old white haired ladies staffing the VB were very surprised that we could even find them. Apparently they only moved into their new digs three weeks ago and haven’t even had a sign to show strangers where they are. But our GPS came to the rescue. We didn’t see a sign but George (our GPS voice) told us where it was! We’ve had a few problems with George, but this sort of made up for them.

The Round Barn, an efficient way to house animals

Hancock Shaker Village

Randy talking to one of the staff in period costume

Thanks to them we have more ideas than we have time for. We have already been to the Hancock Shaker Village where we drooled over the beautiful handmade wooden boxes and the baby animals. We were very surprised to see signs encouraging children to climb into the stalls with the baby animals. The Village has free range chickens wandering around the property although some are enclosed by fences with a sign that says to close the gate or there would be “Poultry in Motion.” Sadly, the Shakers died off in this village (a few live in other areas) in the 1960s. I say “sadly,” but I could not have been a Shaker!

Stockbridge was the home to Norman Rockwell so we had to go visit his museum and his studio. The studio was moved from downtown Stockbridge after he died but it is in such a beautiful place that he would have loved working in the studio where it is now.

A contemporary  of Rockwell was M. C. Escher (although I doubt they ever met) and there is an exhibition of his work in a Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. I  have been a fan of M. C. Escher for almost as long as I can remember but there were works in the museum that I have never seen, even in books. It was a fabulous exhibit.

And so our day ended and we went back to our timeshare. The Ponds at Foxhollow. Doesn’t that sound elegant? It’s actually a pretty good timeshare except for the kitchen, which has exactly one, count ‘em, one foot of counter space! My motorhome has more space that that! There would be two more feet of counter space but it is completely taken up by the microwave over. If that’s the worst I have to comment on, that’s not too bad! There are three more timeshares to compare to this one.

The grounds are spectacular, however, with lots of tulips and magnolias and daffodils, all in glorious bloom.