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Aug. 1st, 2009 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerWow, one day of vacation (not even a whole one yet) and I'm already feeling 100% relaxed. It's beautiful up here, and even being a bit warm it's still so much nicer than in DC. Starting with the immense lake a short distance away, and the mountains (Adirondacks to the west and Green Mountains to the east).
The flight was fine, the grrls picked me up at the airport, and we came back to the house they are minding for the summer. They showed me around some of the ten acres they are looking after (mostly the vegetable garden :-), we had some lunch, played Agricola (Bryan and Peter, it plays very differently with all the additional improvements and occupations!), and then we had a two-on-one game of badminton. It's been YEARS since I played, but I do love it, and we had a great deal of fun.
We all cooled down a little and then went to a small "joint" nearby for very good ribs, came back to the house to collect the very charming doggie who is part of their "looking after" remit and we went down to Burlington Bay. Ignoring the lady who tried to lecture us about evil out-of-towners who park on the road to the lake instead of in the city park and thus cheat the city of their $5 entrance fee (get a life, rude person!) we walked along the shore, watching college students party (but not egregiously) on the greensward and leap off the (short) rocky cliffs into the water. J the Dog had a lovely time checking out all the new smells since the last time they'd all been there, and C & M and I sat and watched a beautiful sunset and talked about our plans for the future.
We walked along the shore a bit more, found a rather muddy trial back to the paved path, and came home, while the grrls told me stories of their travels in Central America. Now we're sitting around a quiet living room, Melissa playing a game on her PC, me reading email and writing this entry, and Chris doing some editing work. I imagine we'll all be heading for bed soon, especially the way Chris is rubbing her eyes and stretching :-) And they sleep in until the decadent hour of 8! They have cool p[lands for things to do--this is going to be a wonderful break.
I was thinking this trip would remind me how much I love New England, and I was right. It's a huge pleasure to hook up with two of my bestest friends and spend some time with them, and to be away from home and work and relax, but on top of all of that, this part of the country is what my mother always made sure I would think of as home, and she did that job well. This is further north than where I've spent most of my time, other than summers in Maine, and Mel is right that the winters here are different to anything I've lived with before, but the smell of the roadside fields, the shape of the hills, the way the summer light falls across trees and grass, the quiet of rural summer afternoons, the lapping sound of lake water--this is my heart's country, for sure. I think it very likely that if I don't make a home in the UK, that I will head here when I come back. Canada has its appeal (the culture and the society as much as the geography), but one way or another, I think that the Mid-Atlantic will have seen the last of me after next year. I need mountains and forests and large bodies of water too much to spend more time living in humid, urban, flat DC.
The flight was fine, the grrls picked me up at the airport, and we came back to the house they are minding for the summer. They showed me around some of the ten acres they are looking after (mostly the vegetable garden :-), we had some lunch, played Agricola (Bryan and Peter, it plays very differently with all the additional improvements and occupations!), and then we had a two-on-one game of badminton. It's been YEARS since I played, but I do love it, and we had a great deal of fun.
We all cooled down a little and then went to a small "joint" nearby for very good ribs, came back to the house to collect the very charming doggie who is part of their "looking after" remit and we went down to Burlington Bay. Ignoring the lady who tried to lecture us about evil out-of-towners who park on the road to the lake instead of in the city park and thus cheat the city of their $5 entrance fee (get a life, rude person!) we walked along the shore, watching college students party (but not egregiously) on the greensward and leap off the (short) rocky cliffs into the water. J the Dog had a lovely time checking out all the new smells since the last time they'd all been there, and C & M and I sat and watched a beautiful sunset and talked about our plans for the future.
We walked along the shore a bit more, found a rather muddy trial back to the paved path, and came home, while the grrls told me stories of their travels in Central America. Now we're sitting around a quiet living room, Melissa playing a game on her PC, me reading email and writing this entry, and Chris doing some editing work. I imagine we'll all be heading for bed soon, especially the way Chris is rubbing her eyes and stretching :-) And they sleep in until the decadent hour of 8! They have cool p[lands for things to do--this is going to be a wonderful break.
I was thinking this trip would remind me how much I love New England, and I was right. It's a huge pleasure to hook up with two of my bestest friends and spend some time with them, and to be away from home and work and relax, but on top of all of that, this part of the country is what my mother always made sure I would think of as home, and she did that job well. This is further north than where I've spent most of my time, other than summers in Maine, and Mel is right that the winters here are different to anything I've lived with before, but the smell of the roadside fields, the shape of the hills, the way the summer light falls across trees and grass, the quiet of rural summer afternoons, the lapping sound of lake water--this is my heart's country, for sure. I think it very likely that if I don't make a home in the UK, that I will head here when I come back. Canada has its appeal (the culture and the society as much as the geography), but one way or another, I think that the Mid-Atlantic will have seen the last of me after next year. I need mountains and forests and large bodies of water too much to spend more time living in humid, urban, flat DC.
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Date: 2009-08-02 08:45 am (UTC)I am about to mail a package to you - presume if you're not back yet your neighbors will take it in for you? If not, it's big enough that you would notice it being put under your doormat and there's nothing breakable in it. :)
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Date: 2009-08-02 09:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-02 11:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-02 01:12 pm (UTC)Sounds like you're having a wonderful time! Huzzah!
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Date: 2009-08-02 02:24 pm (UTC)Yes, my cat-sitting neighbours should take it in, if nothing else so they don't trip over the door mat. :-)
no subject
Date: 2009-08-02 02:33 pm (UTC)I definitely would like to see (more of) the Northwest sometime (all I've really seen is Portland). But I didn't spend the formative years of my life thinking, and being encouraged to think, that I was happiest and most comfortable when I was there, as I do of NE, so it would be up against some stiff competition.
I should explain that my mum, being a Nutmeg State girl through and through and descended from a line of old-line Yankees (the real kind, not the baseball team or "anyone from North of here" :-) deprecated Virginia intensely, for reasons I couldn't help but agree with. And the happiest times of the year were when we would take the summer (Dad being a prep school teacher) and spend part of it in New Haven with my grandmother (Mum's mum)--my initial exposure to city life--and then the rest either in the lake cabin my great-grandfather had bought back in 18somethingsomething or at my uncle and aunt's summer house in Maine (my uncle was also a prep school teacher, poorest of a poor profession, but he had inherited a very comfortable old place on an island). Add to that four years at Williams and two years living in Boston, and...
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Date: 2009-08-02 02:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-02 02:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-02 02:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-02 08:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-03 03:07 pm (UTC)Glad you're having such a great time and that you're relaxing. Huzzah!