Still in the Berkshires

We had a wonderful lunch yesterday at Once Upon a Table in Stockbridge after our Norman Rockwell/M. C. Escher day. About 75°, sitting outside under a bunch of flowering trees sipping iced tea and enjoying sandwiches with couscous as a side, a slight breeze blowing the puffy clouds around. So fabulous!

Today, May 10, we decided to try to find a mountain. There is a mountain—well, it’s what passes for a mountain in the east—called Mt. Greylock, one of the highest if not the highest in Massachusetts. 3,941 feet. No self-respecting westerner would dare to call THAT a mountain. A hill, maybe. 

Anyway, we wanted to go hiking there but after we finally figured out how to get to it—it was closed. It’s the middle of May, for goodness sakes! So we parked by the gate that closed the mountain to go for a short hike. Aside from getting totally screwed by the bugs—I HATE mosquitos!—it was so wet that we just gave up. We’ve already washed our shoes once, we really didn’t want to do it again.

What else could we do? Go back to North Adams, which we had driven through several times whilst (now that my son and his wife are living in Australia, I have to learn Aussie-isms) looking for Mt. Greylock, and have lunch. As it happens we picked from the AAA guide what turned out to be a great restaurant, the Freight Yard Pub. Randy had nachos—he had to see how they differ from Arizona nachos (not much). The only thing to write home about was the size of the nachos: they would have easily fed four people. Randy made a valiant try at finishing the dish but couldn’t quite do it. But it did mean that we had a very small dinner.

There are several art galleries shown in North Adams, which by the way is MUCH larger than Adams. None of them were open. Most of the towns in this part of Massachusetts (also known, we were told, as Taxachusetts) were originally mill towns because of the water power available to them. The mills closed and many just rotted away but some took on a new life as art galleries or museums. Mass MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) is an erstwhile mill. We haven’t been there yet, but it is supposed to have an interior space that is as big as a football field and thus able to display art that cannot be displayed anywhere else.

We went to what used to be called the Eclipse Mill, now the Eclipse Mill Art Gallery. Kind of sad but understandable in today’s economic climate that, although the galleries inside seemed to be alive, not a single one was open. We tried another gallery in downtown North Adams and it too was closed. Not permanently, apparently, but not open when we were there on a Tuesday mid-afternoon.

So, discouraged, we drove back to our “home” and tried to play tennis. Well, really, I just tried to hit the ball back to somewhere in the vicinity of where Randy was.