I’ve been in Connecticut for going on three weeks. The weather’s been cold and/or rainy.
Not great paddling weather.
But today some good paddling friends were going out at Lake Mattawa in Orange, in the very nice north-central part of Massachusetts.
And highs were predicted in the 60s, with no rain. That’s bearable for me, so I made this my first northeast paddle of the 2024 season.
And fortunately a bear showed up. Just in time to give me my headline for this post.
He, or she, was swimming from one side to another in a cove of the lake. A log, someone shouted. No, it’s moving, another noted.
Soon, several kayakers, some fisher folks and some residents having a barbecue lunch at a nearby house got to see it all. The bear swam all the way across, hit shallow water, stood up and glanced back to pose for the onlookers, and then ambled off into the hills.
We also saw an immature bald eagle and a plastic alligator.
All you have to do is look at them…sometimes from one week to the next.
The music growth is more subtle, but at concert time it is on full display. That’s when all age groups are right there on the stage and the music ranges from the simple, painstakingly played one-minute variations on “Twinkle” to some very long, complicated pieces with fancy names performed with lots of flair and flourish.
Margeaux and Simone don’t play “Twinkle” variations much anymore, except maybe for fun or as a warm up exercise. They are way beyond that, in ways that are beyond my understanding.
I got caught up on their musical accomplishments at recent concerts at the Hartt School of Music.
Here’s Margeaux on violin…
And Simone on cello…
And, for contrast, a 2017 photo of Margeaux and a 2019 shot of Simone…
I saw lots of oldies but goodies on a recent visit over to Sarasota on the west side of Florida.
It’s that area of the state, by the way, where the ocean’s in the wrong place and I get north and south confused a lot.
First there were these three nicely recycled gas stations, all within a few blocks of each other just south of downtown Sarasota. They are now a UPS store, a Goodwill donation center and a dry cleaners. They will of course be added to my collection of photos of repurposed gas stations.
And now the reason I went over there, more great oldies. It was a great relaxed meet up with cousin Peggy and husband Roger, down from Pennsylvania, and bother Roger and wife Beth, who drove over from Gainesville. Peggy, Roger and I are the three surviving cousins from the Norton side of my family. Peggy is the daughter of Margaret Norton Crisman and Roger and I are the offsprings of Catherine Norton Haines, Margaret’s only sibling.
The visit included a few relaxing hours at Snook Haven in Venice, a laid-back outdoor restaurant/music/boating venue along the Myakka River. Getting there is easy: find Venice Avenue and keep going east until you hit the river, then get out of your car and order lunch. It’s worth a stop if you’re in the area.
Below are the six of us on our final morning together at the Toasted Yolk, which was for me an upscale breakfast experience. It’s the first time I’ve had an appetizer with my morning meal, courtesy of Peggy.
Dubbed Millionaire Chicken Beignets, the appetizer was chicken strips fried in pancake batter sprinkled with powdered sugar and served with Jack Daniels-laced syrup and strips of candied bacon. Not a terrific combination. Peggy didn’t finish her portion.
It’s the very last thing I would think of ordering if I were a millionaire, that’s for sure.
I passed on a mimosa (on sale on Fridays) and ordered my usual, two eggs over easy, bacon, potatoes, and toast.
It seems a happy place, with the motto: “It’s Never Too Early To Get Toasted.” It’s a chain, a marketing trend which seems to have moved into the breakfast-lunch diner industry (open 7 to 3).
This past weekend I hit some favored sweet spots, including one I thought would be long gone by now. (If you’ve tuned in to this post just to see the paddling photos you can skip down to the gallery at the bottom)
The Desert Inn at Yeehaw Junction.
It remains mortally wounded, but still hangs on for some reason.
Half destroyed by an errant trailer truck at the end of 2019, I thought what remained would be torn down and long gone by now.
It hasn’t been rebuilt. It hasn’t been demolished. It is still there four years later, a sad heap at the intersection of U.S. 441 and State Road 60 in east central Florida. I suspect the local historical society, which owns it, just doesn’t have the money to deal with it.
This previous blog post has a photo of it in its prime and a few with the truck embedded in it, as well as some history and its place in my life. Below are some photos from the weekend.
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Seeing high school friends.
The handful of 1962 graduates of Bradley-Bourbonnais High School in Bradley, Illinois, who hang out in Florida (or nearby) in the wintertime, gathered in The Villages once again for a leisurely weekend. I dropped in for lunch and dinner on Saturday.
As I have said before, I didn’t renew any high school friendships until the 50th reunion, in Illinois, in 2012. I have found each encounter since then to be increasingly pleasant. It’s not quite the same category as “someone I’ve known all my life.” It’s more like that weird feeling of “Wow, here’s someone I went to high school with” coupled with “here’s how they turned out.”
Here we are at dinner (I’m the big head at lower right).
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Scenic drive in Martin County.
It’s called the Martin Grade Scenic Highway. Some of the tourist literature describes it as this splendid, 60-mile drive through old and scenic Florida, connecting Okeechobee at the top of Lake Okeechobee with Stuart over on the east coast. Don’t be fooled! Only twelve miles of it are the ones that count: a two-lane road mostly canopied by old, moss-draped oak trees. The rest of the route is about like you’ll find elsewhere in what is left of rural central and south Florida.
Those 12 miles, however, are worth searching out if you’re passing through the area. Some descriptions still have the original swamp and forest of Florida surrounding the road, but the reality is that there is just a narrow band of natural beauty left on each side of the pavement before the landscape becomes the drained dry ground that is most of the state today.
Officially called Southwest Martin Highway, it’s the last bit before hitting State Road 710 at the end of State Road 714 going west from Palm City. I’ve highlighted it in blue on the map below and added a couple photos below that.
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Paddling a pleasant river with nice folks.
I took advantage of being over on the other side of Florida to paddle a bit of the Little Manatee River with some fellow Sierra Club volunteers from the Tampa Bay Group on Sunday.
For any of my friends who travel around the state and are looking for things to do, the Sierra Club has finally moved into modern times and you can now go to the Florida Chapter website and see a calendar of what outings all the groups have going all over the state.
That’s how I happened upon the Tampa Bay Group’s paddle outing on the Little Manatee. Below are some photos from that. Click on any one of them to scroll through the large versions. You can also download any that you wish when in the scrolling format.
I dropped by the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge west of Boynton Beach, FL, a few weeks ago and was fortunate enough to find a couple of stately Sandhill Cranes taking a leisurely afternoon bath. Took lots of photos. Click on any one of them and you can scroll through the larger versions.
It’s been almost a year since I’ve had any decent itch photos to add to this collection. Here are a couple scratchers I’ve seen just in the past week or so. A roseate spoonbill over at John Prince Park and a sandhill crane out at the Marshall Wildlife Refuge.
To see all the Itches through the years, start HERE.
To borrow an old Ed Sullivan cliché, it was a REEELY BIG WEEKEND.
And it’s taken me a reeely long time to write about it because it took a reeely long time for it to settle in my mind.
(There’s a dash of blog fatigue in the mix here too. I haven’t written anything of substance on this site for months. It’s my retirement mode: when something feels too much like work I just don’t do it…I need to sort out a few things in that regard.)
To get back to it: The BIG WEEKEND was a while ago, June of 2022.
It was pretty momentous for the participants, all descendants of Everett and Catherine Haines.
Some background is in order.
Everett and Catherine had three sons, myself and then Roger and then Rick. Brother Rick died on March 25, 2021 in Contoocook, New Hampshire. I touched on that briefly here.
Plans for a celebration of his life were made for that summer of 2021, giving family in Florida and elsewhere time to plan. Cousins Amy and Jenn (next generation behind me) found a large former inn in nearby Bradford we could rent for the travelers. It was a reeely BIG house! And it needed to be. The out-of-town crowd numbered 17.
Covid raised its ugly head again. The event moved to the following year and in June of 2022 it happened. We descended upon the Bradford Village Inn (eight bedrooms, nine bathrooms, and numerous parlors and other communal areas both indoor and outdoor).
It was a splendid choice. All of us were together and there were plenty of bathrooms, a couple of large communal areas and several smaller, quiet spaces for folks to use if the need was there.
Brother Rick was among us, his presence felt in the quiet meeting of family and friends on the lawn next to the pond at his house in Contoocook on Saturday. It was a nice time of peaceful reflection, kind words from friends and family, and, yes, some laughter.
Followed by good food. Good food was the anchor of the entire weekend, from the meals at the BIG HOUSE to the gathering at Rick’s house and even the snacks during the 9-mile canoe ride down the Contoocook River on Sunday.
And Rick’s memory wasn’t the only celebration. The occasion also marked the 50th Wedding Anniversary of my brother Roger and his wife Beth.
Lots of milestones that weekend, a brother gone, a 50-year marriage celebrated and a large extended family all together for the first time.
As I said, they’ve been going there for several years. But it was just this summer that it finally dawned on me that the camp is only about a half-hour from Bethlehem, where my Florida paddling buddy Leslie lives in the summertime.
So, bingo, a road trip evolved, including some paddling, overnights at Leslie’s, and a day or so of concerts and meals at Ogontz. It was all great fun. And, in the Ford family tradition, there was a stop at the famed Chutters Candy Store in nearby Littleton on the way back to Connecticut, where I bought a bag of my childhood favorites.
Below are some photos of the musical goings on. You can click on any one to start a slide show of the full images.
Below are some shots of the camp/resort itself.
And the obligatory paddling shots. Loons are always a welcome addition to a paddle.
And finally, for a change of pace, here’s a tired motorcyclist I found in rural Woodsville.
Twenty years ago today I slid my 30-year-old Grumman canoe into a small creek called the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota, plopped my 59-year-old body into it and began my paddling trip to New Orleans. I slowed the pace of my life to three mph for the next three and a half extraordinary months and have never enjoyed myself more.
And that exquisite feeling behind the grin I had on my face when I pulled ashore in New Orleans has never left my soul.
For someone like me, as a child and through my teens being uncomfortable turning a corner without knowing what’s there, it was an uncharacteristic leap into the unknown armed only with a belief that things will work out. They not only did, but they did so incredibly well. At the end, I had the same feeling I’d had after three years in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps: There’s nothing I can’t handle now!
That attitude served me well after Ethiopia when I embarked on a year-long trip from Nepal to Norway by land. I picked up enough of languages along the way to make do and felt comfortable wherever I happened to be.
It also helped immensely back in the workplace after the river trip. The tedious morning meetings were in a room formerly occupied by the travel department. A huge map of the U.S. covered one entire wall.
And there, every day, in the form of a blue squiggly line stretching from ceiling to floor, was my trip.
Bring it on!
If you want to read about the river trip and see the photos, start here.
I was back up in tiny Contoocook again this year to carry on our traditional July 4 parade pattern.
Kids’ Parade at 11:30 and Regular Parade at Noon, rain or shine, and smack on July 4, whenever the day falls.
We had lots of rain and no shine this year, but thankfully it didn’t really pour down until AFTER the parades were over. We even thought we were going to miss the rain entirely. Even a half hour beforehand there were no umbrellas being used as kids gathered to register for the parade.
All the photos from this year are below. And if you want to browse through former Fourths, start here.
Sister-in-law Ginni Houston, a mover and shaker in her community, represented well this year with a recycling tent on the town square.
The kids’ parade included the newest addition to the Rick and Ginni Haines family, grandson Everett, seen in the stroller below with his mom. Offspring of Jon and Georgia Haines, he has a big name to fill as it has history on both the Haines and Houston sides of the family.
Representing the Ford limb of the family tree were Margeaux and Simone (in red shirt) and the newest addition to their clan, a black lab named Nina.
All of the other kids’ parade photos are here:
The adult parade included the regulars of course–the color guard, town band on a trailer, an eclectic assortment of old vehicles and a loud bevy of fire engines. But special for us this year was a celebration of the Houston family’s nearly 100 years of farming (Pine Lane Farm) and one of its restored tractors and a modern one.
The Urge to be Someplace Else 