Abbie's Real Life Blog

It looks like Tracy will do her fellowship in Kansas City, after all that traveling and flying around the country for interviews.  Kansas City!  I will have to carefully break this news to my family, who are all fervent MU supporters, but they will probably just pity her after this weekend’s likely bloodbath of a football game.  Gosh, it’s nice to be an MU fan right now!

We got home from Massachusetts and Connecticut on Saturday night, not too late.  We had time after we landed to run by Trader Joe’s, so I’m stocked with sparkling cranberry juice and Tofurky for the big day on Thursday.  I’ll just have to get up early and make the Tofurky before I head up to Centralia.  Tracy is leaving that day to go to DC, so it won’t be too big of a deal.

It will be a small party at my parents’ house on Thursday, apparently, with most of the family coming from Kansas City.  I did invite and will bring my Chinese friend from the International Center program and her Chinese roommate.  I really hope that goes well, but I assume that if they don’t like the food, they can eat later, and if they don’t like the company, they can talk to each other.  But my family will be very friendly and the food is very basic (we aren’t crazy gourmet Boil-The-Turkey, Put-Curry-in-the-Potatoes type people) and always plentiful, so I’m sure it won’t be a problem.

I had a really nice time in Massachusetts and Connecticut.  We flew into Bradley International Airport, which is in Hartford, Connecticut, and just twenty minutes or so south of Springfield, Massachusetts, where Tracy’s interview was.  I had never been to central Massachusetts or to Connecticut at all, so it was exciting to see another new state.  I did almost no research until last Wednesday afternoon, when I just started my Googling for vegetarian food and making my lists, which I do every time I travel anywhere anymore.  I make up lists of vegetarian-friendly restaurants and tourist attractions and the hotels, and then put them on a custom Google map and print it out to take with me.  I used to print out directions to various things as well, but since Tracy got her navigational device, this hasn’t been necessary.  We can just plug that sucker up and it takes us where we want to go.  I think my iPhone will do it as well, in a pinch.

Tracy interviewed on Friday morning and I drove down to Hartford.  I took a few pictures along the Connecticut River, but not too many.  I was fascinated by the Connecticut River and how the buildings were built all the way to the banks, and how wide and flat the river was, when we would never have that kind of thing in the Midwest.  Our rivers flood, if you don’t know.  I just don’t understand how they do that there.  Does the Connecticut River never flood?  Even with the snowmelt from the mountains in Vermont?  I don’t understand!

After I drove by the pretty state Capitol, I went to the Mark Twain House and took the tour.  Mark Twain is from Missouri, you know, and I share his birthday, and he is our Native Son, even nearly 200 years after the fact.  I liked the house and enjoyed seeing that aspect of him, since the aspect we have here is his birthplace and childhood home in Hannibal.  It’s not the same picture.  It was a nice house in good shape, with a pretty spectacular visitor’s center.  I guess it’s having some hard times, money-wise.  But I hope they fix their troubles.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe house was right next door, and I walked around it but didn’t go inside.  I meant to drive by the Noah Webster birthplace, but I was pretty hungry and started on a quest for food that landed me in Farmington, Connecticut, which was farther than I thought it would be.  I ate what was supposedly vegetarian duck at a Chinese place in a strip mall, but that was either some amazingly fantastic vegetarian duck or there was some kind of poultry broth on top.  I would hate to think it wasn’t vegetarian, because they made quite a show of their vegetarian menu, but it tasted very real to me.

However, you can’t believe anything I say on that matter anymore.  It has been about five years since I’ve knowingly eaten meat, and I often annoy waitresses by picking at an obviously vegetarian burger because it tastes too good to be fake.  Any meat eater could tell it was fake in a heartbeat, but I just become positively certain that it must be real until I spot a flake of carrot or an actual grain of rice or something.  Until then, it’s suspicious.

Anyway, after that, I drove out beyond the edges of the Hartford surburbs, looking for Colonial houses and authentic New Englandness or something to that effect, which I did find, especially in the Avon, Connecticut areas.  It was a pretty rolling countryside and, although it was pretty cold and the leaves were all long gone, it felt just right to be there at the holidays.  I was looking for the Connecticut of all those 1940s movies, and I think I found what I was looking for.  It was a nice drive.

And then Tracy called, a few hours earlier than I expected that she would, and I had to hoof it back to Springfield while she waited in the hospital cafeteria or somewhere, because I was about an hour away.

After she changed clothes, we went to a nearby shopping mall that had an Apple Store so I could buy a Speck ToughSkin.  That wasn’t an accident; I had mapped it out just for that exact purpose, and I was successful.

She was pretty tired, so we drove through Northampton after that but we didn’t stop or get out because the traffic was bad and parking looked pretty hard.  We went back to the hotel and got some pizza from a surprisingly packed Chicago Uno’s next door, then ate in the hotel room while watching random game shows on television.  I kind of liked the one with the lyrics and Wayne Brady.

On Saturday, we left the hotel early and took a winding drive north again to Northampton with the express purpose of seeing the Five Colleges and maybe a little more Colonial New England.  We didn’t see much of the latter, even on the out-of-the-way rural drive that I chose, but oh well.  I accept that I probably stumbled on a very pretty area in Connecticut the day before.  We drove by Smith College first and had some breakfast at the Haymarket Cafe in downtown Northampton.  We were surprised by how small Smith was, and how it seemed packed into a tiny corner of the town.  All the campuses were quiet, but it was the weekend before Thanksgiving and I’m sure most of the students had gone home for the week.

Next we drove over towards Amherst, but ended up seeing Hampshire College first (which Tracy loved, loved, loved) and Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, which was my favorite of the Five, and then we went back to Hampshire to go through the Eric Carle Museum.  I love Eric Carle!  I love his work!  I was slightly disappointed in the museum, which had not devoted much of its floor space to exhibits, but I was thrilled with the gift shop, which had stacks and stacks and stacks of all the children’s picture books that I loved as a child.  I could have spent all afternoon in there, but I decided that I do have a library at home in Columbia, and I could spend an afternoon there instead.

Then we drove into Amherst, where we drove by Amherst College (which looked cold and forlorn up on that hill, all Federal style) and UMass Amherst, which was enormous in comparison to the tiny college campuses we’d seen all morning.  If I was picking from those colleges, I would have chosen UMass.  I liked my experience at a huge state school.  But I thought that Mount Holyoke had the prettiest campus.  It wasn’t as pretty as Bryn Mawr, but it was very pretty.

Amherst seemed crowded because there was a Cranberry Fair happening.  We ate a brunchy lunch at the Lone Wolf, and then we walked over to the Emily Dickinson House just down the street.  We didn’t have much time left before we had to get to Hartford for our flight, but I managed to talk them into giving us a tour of the house, which was almost completely unrestored.  I mean, it was still vaguely reminiscent of the right era, and they’d tried to put around some furnishings from the time, but the carpets were new and the wallpaper was from the 1960s, and generally you just had to use your imagination a lot.  They give tours of that house plus the house next door, which is where Emily Dickinson’s brother and family lived, and that house (the Evergreens) is apparently in perfect condition, original furnishings and everything, but we just didn’t have time.  I wanted to see where she wrote, and that was all, and then we left.

And then we flew home.  I finished Touching the Void, which was an awesome book, and I started Roughing It, which is not too bad.

We spent yesterday doing not much until late in the afternoon, when I got a surge of energy to go to the dog park, clean the house, start some laundry, and the like.  By the end of the evening, I felt that I had been pretty productive, all told, even though I hadn’t done much for most of it.

And it’s another short week for me, with Thanksgiving and all.  I head up to Chicago on Friday and return on Saturday night, and then spend another Sunday sitting around the house and resting up from a busy week.