The Urge to be Someplace Else

Welcome to a compilation of several of my recent Sweet Spots.

Cousins

The first is a recent visit to Fort Myers, FL, to touch base with my snowbird cousin, Peggy Peterson and her husband Roger.  Joining us were my brother Roger and wife Beth, from Gainesville. It’s always a fun time when the six of us get together and I usually come away learning something I never knew about the family, even after all these years.

Gone

One of my favorite pit stops in my rambles around Florida is now gone forever.  That’s right, the famed Desert Inn at Yeehaw Junction, just 90 minutes north of me, is now a vacant piece of land up for sale.  The demolition job started five years ago by a wayward semi was finished recently by a wrecking ball and a parade of dump trucks.

High School Classmates

A handful of the alumni from my high school class in Bradley, Illinois, get together in Florida in the spring for a lunch, an afternoon of visiting, and dinner up in The Villages, that mega-complex about sixty miles northwest of Orlando.  I got some special treatment this year because it fell on my birthday. I got serenaded twice, once upon arrival for lunch and then again at dinner, when the restaurant presented me with a small cake with one candle on it. These mini-reunions are always a pleasant occasion with some nice folks.

Arbuckle Creek

This is a pleasant narrow waterway lined with massive old cypress trees and passing through undeveloped rural Florida just east of Avon Park, which is a couple hours south of Orlando.  I like to go there but it’s a haul to do it one day from Lantana so I combined it with the visit to The Villages and filled out the weekend. Tap any photo and you can scroll through the larger versions.

I watched the end of an era last weekend and didn’t even know it.

It was the final Park Road Parade in West Hartford, CT, after 25 years.  I don’t make going to parades a habit, except for July 4 in Contoocook, New Hampshire, of course, but I went along to this one because granddaughter Margeaux was marching in it with fellow musicians from the Hartt School Community Division of the University of Hartford.

Truth be told, the parade was pretty interesting and diverse, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  In fact, I got so wrapped up in watching the karate school students performing that I almost missed Margeaux’ appearance.  Hence the not-so-great photos of her. She’s behind and to the left of the red-haired violinist in the last photo below.

Another highlight of the event for me was the four fife and drum corps from various parts of the region.  For my Florida friends: it’s a northeast thing, something about an event a long time ago.

The Park Road Parade started in 1999 as a fun way for business owners along the blocks-long commercial strip to celebrate completion of a two-year road construction and neighborhood beautification project.  The mile-long pageant quickly became a popular West Hartford event.

But it’s not easy planning a parade in a state where, according to the local public radio station meteorologist, “the weather changes every minute.”  Just organizing the thing is a year-long volunteer effort and there are too many moving parts to just cancel and reschedule it at the last minute if the weather turns sour.

Covid killed it in 2020 and rain drowned it out in 2022 and 2023, so this was only the second parade in the last four years.  This final year allowed the planners to complete two goals that have been put off by the rains:  The long-delayed honoring of the parade’s founder, Rob Rowlson, then West Hartford Director of Community Services, who died in 2022, and showcasing longtime TV and radio personality Renée DiNino as Grand Marshall, a role she was first cast in back in 2022.

Plans were made long ago for this to be the final year and in future to have several, smaller events for the Park Road community. 

I’d say I’ll miss it, but I’d be fibbing.

Here are some more photos from the day:

I drove through Northampton, Massachusetts, the other day on my way up to Ogontz in New Hampshire and came across a pair of cannabis dispensaries located just blocks from each other.

The photos below tell you where this is going: Each of them is in a former gas station!

For my complete collection of repurposed gas stations, go here. 

I didn’t take any photos of my visit to Ogontz this year.  It was pretty similar to last year’s visit, except the grandkids are a year older and better musicians.  I even got in a paddle with friend Leslie Dreier again while in his neighborhood.

My delightfully foggy paddle on the Swift River in Belchertown, Massachusetts, began with a downpour that started right when I drove into the launch site parking lot and ended fifteen minutes later.

It added enough mugginess and cloudiness to the already-warm day to set things up nicely for a thick bank of fog to form over the river’s icy cold water.  In years past I had seen only very faint patches of fog here and there, never a blanket like this time.

To understand why the Swift water is so cold one needs to go back nearly a century. 

Three branches of the Swift used to run through the Swift River Valley north of our launch site, but in the late 1800s, Boston was looking for a water source.  Work took decades, but by 1946 the new Windsor dam stopped the flow of all three branches.  Towns were flooded and the valley became the Quabbin Reservoir, with water piped 65 miles east to Boston. 

What remained of the Swift trickled south out of the bottom of the dam, the coldest water of the very deep reservoir.  It joins the Ware River at the town of Three Rivers, about 18 miles south.

The very cold water not only means great fog on a hot summer day, but it also makes the Swift a premier trout fishing spot in Massachusetts, especially the short section between the dam and Route 9, where fly fishing only is permitted. 

Our launch spot is further south, at Cold Spring Road.  Downed trees kept us from getting up to Route 9 but we were able to paddle far enough north to see my favorite things on the Swift: the yard art at a couple of the riverside residences.

All the photos from the trip are below. Click on any one to see a slide show of large images. You’ll notice that I waited until the fog lifted to get decent shots of the yard art. To see Swift River photos from previous visits, go here and here.

I don’t do historical tours very often, but when I do I make sure I go to genuine places.  This one’s from a road trip in 2015 that took me through Long Lake, New York.

I ran across two more giant elephants on the drive up to Connecticut this spring.  They decorate the front of a fireworks outlet located in a former gas station in Hardeeville, SC.  The pump islands are still there and the elephants fit nicely under the roof that once sheltered motorists filling up their tanks.

Hardeeville, settled by Isaac Hardee in the 1800s, became the state’s fastest growing area in 2015 as nearby Hilton Head grew and developers took over vacant property from a declining timber industry to erect massive planned communities.

I’ve been passing through Hardeeville for years, of course, as my annual trips between Florida and Connecticut take me up and down Interstate 95.  In the back of my mind I always figured I’d do a bit of research on it and find it to be the home of Hardee’s Hamburgers.

Not so, it turns out.  That honor goes to Greenville, NC, where Wilber Hardee opened his first restaurant in 1960. The menu in 1964 included hamburgers for 15 cents, cheeseburgers for 20 cents, french fries for 10 cents, apple turnovers for 15 cents, milk for 12 cents, coffee for 10 cents, soft drinks for 10 cents, and milkshakes (chocolate, strawberry, vanilla) for 20 cents.

I fondly recall the tastiness of the hamburgers from my days in Davenport, Iowa.  As a reporter covering a multitude of events in the area I had a lot of meals in my car. They became a staple for a while.  I haven’t had one in years, as there are no outlets near me in either Florida or Connecticut. 

If you want to see more of my recycled gas stations, you know where to go.  For more on large elephants, go here, or here, or here. 

And speaking of those things, do any of you know where to buy one of these huge critters?  I’ve been doing some research and cannot find them on sale anywhere.

My northeast paddling season is suddenly getting busy.  Today I did a couple of small bodies of water, Lake Beseck and Black Pond, both in the Middlefield-Meriden area of Connecticut, about an hour south of Hartford.

Beseck is well populated by houses.  I limited the house pix to just the log cabin.  Most of the other structures were way more upscale.  Beseck did offer some riverfront yard art: a Nessie-wannabe and a plastic alligator.   Black Pond, by contrast, had few houses on it, and thus a bit more wildlife, hence the turtle, cormorant, osprey and swan photos.

These were small areas. We paddled around Lake Beseck twice to get a decent bit of exercise.  I did Black Pond only once, but my fellow paddlers did two circuits.  The day was organized by Tom Ebersold of the Connecticut Chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club.

Saturday was a great outing at Mansfield Hollow, east of Hartford just south of the University of Connecticut Campus.  I organized this one for the Paddle Killingly Meetup Group.  We did the north side, which meant going up two rivers a bit, the Fenton and the Mount Hope.  Because the water was high, we got up the Fenton far further than I’ve been able to do in the past.  A log stopped us.   On the Mount Hope, of course, the end point is the waterfall.

Below are some photos from both days:

Sunday, Lake Beseck and Black Pond

Saturday, Mansfield Hollow North

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.

Photos are below:

And so are my granddaughters! 

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).