whee! fun on the cape!
Jul. 22nd, 2005 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swingchickieoh my god, my surprise trip to the cape with D was SO much fun...
got up early on saturday morning and headed out at 7:30 to beat the traffic down to the cape. D had no idea where we were going (yay), and didn't ask for clues or anything... typical D, he's so laid-back he was like "sure, i'll go anywhere, it'll be fun." we were in bourne by 9:30 and i treated him to a huge breakfast at penner's. this place has a massive breakfast menu, with all sorts of crazy stuff. you can get fish cakes, baked beans, cornbread... all with your eggs and bacon and such. over breakfast, i revealed that we were indeed going to the cape, and handed him a list i'd printed out of all our options for the day -- lectures in different towns, museums, the barnstable county fair, miniature golf, beaches, you name it. he was totally psyched... picked a few things he was interested in, and by 11 we were on our way.
first stop: the green briar jam kitchen, an old farmhouse that has a 100-year-old jam kitchen inside and a wildflower garden outside. (gardening and food -- 2 of D's favorite things.) we started outside in the garden, looking around... after only a minute or two, a sweet elderly woman came over and asked if we had any questions about the plants, and ended up spending about 45 minutes showing us around and pointing out intersting things about the different flowers... turns out she was dr. shirley cross, the now 90-year-old botanist who planted the garden several decades ago. what a sweet and interesting woman -- when she realized that D knew a lot about plants, she started breaking off seed pods from different interesting things and giving them to him to plant back home. :) the jam kitchen was neat too... we got to go through the actual kitchen, and see some jams being made... they have an interesting process for some of them, where they cook all the fruit and sugar up and then put it in this glass-topped box outside one of the windows to cook for a few days more in the sun. standing at the window, looking at these big dishes of warming fruit, you just got these occasional intense whiffs of warm apricots. it was heavenly.
after our time at the jam kitchen, we headed up-cape to the edward gorey house... after he passed away in 2000, his home was made into a museum of his belongings and works. it was incredible... first of all because, it turns out, when i worked on the cape i looked at his house all the time! i used to use his street to do u-turns when i was driving to customers, because i loved the houses there... and his was just really nice and cape-y. :) it's a good thing i didn't know he lived there at the time... i probably would have been an ass and left stalker-y fan notes on his doorstep or something. *chuckle* the whole place was just fantastic... it really gave a good insight into his life. it turns out he was a big collector of interesting objects, and would go to yard sales and just buy odd little things like old cheap rings or keys or whatever, and then would group them in little displays around the house. he was also a huge animal lover, and had a number of cats... particularly funny was this beautiful old wooden-framed sofa of his, that when you went around the back had big chunks of stuffing coming out from where his cats scratched the hell out of it. lol but the best part of the place was the display of his work on "the gashleycrumb tinies"... OMG it was so cool, i started to well up with tears. we saw all of his original drawings of each page, and even some of the sketches that he scrapped to try something different... the typewritten page with the original poem, before he drew everything out... some of the little hidden stuff in the drawings... the different cover sketches his did with the title "the something tinies" because he hadn't come up with "gashleycrumb" yet. *grin* a really cool touch was the little unexpected gashleycrumb references hidden throughout the house -- a bottle of lye ("I is for ida who took lye by mistake") on a mantel... a pile of his cats' mousie cat toys ("X is for xerxes devoured by mice")... i actually got startled by 2 that i discovered -- at one point, you walk past a staircase that goes up to the 2nd floor, roped off to visitors, but they put a doll there tumbling headfirst down the steps ("A is for amy who fell down the stairs")... also, if you look out a certain window, you can see the upstairs windows of the other wing of the house... and in one of the windows is a little drawing of neville ("N is for neville who died of ennui") peeking out. scared the crap out of me. lol
there was also a little graveyard out back, with headstones of all the children in the book... if you look closely in this photo, you can see the drawings on some of the headstones (note the axe on kate's in the foreground, the peach on ernest's in the back)...
here's basil's! ooh, the bears! whee!
in the backyard, the MSPCA had set up a tent with a bunch of kitties, bunnies, and ferrets in cages to be adopted. since gorey was a huge animal lover, a couple of times a year they do animal adoption days there. of course it was a bad idea for me to go look... i wanted to adopt every little creature there. especially jessie, this sweet gray stripey cat that reminded me of my own little monkey... she was really vocal, yelling that she wanted OUT of the cage, NOW. my heart just broke for her, and for the fact that i couldn't help her. *sigh*
after that, we headed to hyannis to check in at our hotel (also a secret to D). i was totally psyched, because D and i have been making fun of this place since we started dating... it's billed as this romantic getaway on the cape, with jacuzzis in every room and lovely victorian decor... but you can just tell that, with a name like "cuddle and bubble", that's it's going to be gloriously cheesy. *grin* so D and i drove down main street, and i was looking for the darn place... when i muttered, "i wonder if we passed it... i don't think it's down this far." there was a moment of silence, and then he blurted, "OH MY GOD, ARE WE STAYING AT CUDDLE AND BUBBLE????" i nodded yes and the 2 of us dissolved into hysterics. hee hee! i have to say, the place is even cheesier and more awful than i'd thought, if that's even possible. first off, i think that the reason we had to wait until 3 to check in, instead of 2:30 when we got there, is that they wanted to finish smoking in our room. the room reeked of smoke, as did the hall way and, well, most of the hotel. *sigh* but they were full up for the weekend, so no switchin'. the room itself was this horrid medley of mismatched furniture (think florals and 1980's-style pastel southwestern), a tile floor instead of carpeting in most of the room, and plywood (i guess we weren't good enough for crown molding and the like). we laughed until we had tears pouring down our faces. oh, and the beds... yes, there were 2... one king-sized one with a canopy (notice the plywood where it joins the ceiling)...
then there was the, um, other bed... up against a wall of mirrors... *cringe*
after our laughter died down, we took a nap (on the non-mirrored bed... i wouldn't be able to sleep thinking about what went on in that other one) for a couple of hours and then showered for dinner. there was a clam shack down at the marina that we thought would be fun... we figured a few drinkies out on the deck, and some steamers and lobster rolls, would be a perfect cape dinner. of course, i had some added pressure, in that i had to get him to the cape cod melody tent by 8pm to surprise him with tix for the lyle lovett concert. even at 6pm, the clam shack was mobbed. darnit. we grabbed a drink and sat outside while we waited for a table... but the estimated 30-minute wait time turned into over an hour. so it was 7:15pm, the concert was in under an hour, and we still weren't seated. D saw how antsy i was, and didn't know why... here he was thinking that we were going to have a nice leisurely dinner out by the water, and i was jumping out of my skin. so i gave him his birthday card... and when he opened it and saw the tickets, he completely freaked. :) he's never seen lyle lovett in concert, and lyle's one of his favorite performers, so he was totally psyched. we finally got seated, practically ordered before our butts hit the seats, and within 10 minutes we had a massive bowl of steamers and 2 of the biggest lobster rolls i've ever seen. we wolfed it all down and then speed-walked the mile to the melody tent, and got there just as lyle was taking the stage.
the concert was fabulous. the melody tent is a really small venue (we had 17th-row seats, and there were only 2 more rows behind us), and in the round with a rotating stage, so you can see everything. lyle sounded phenomenal, and talked to the audience in-between in his sweet, easygoing lyle way. there was a particulary funny bit halfway through, where we had to play "truck or no truck"... lyle would point to each musician, and say where he was from, and the audience had to guess whether he drove a truck or not. there was the steel guitar player who lived in austin but was originally from wyoming... "TRUCK!!!" the audience screamed... "no truck!" he crowed into the mic, and the whole place devolved into animated boos and hisses. (how can you be from wyoming and not drive a truck?) then there was the horn player from california... "HYBRID!" the guy behind me yelled. "truck!" he announced, and the place applauded. then came the bass player, this bearded zz top-looking guy from california who looked like he'd be on a motorcycle. "TRUCK!" yelled the audeince... "TWO trucks!!!!!!" he yelled back, and the place erupted in delighted screams. it was absolutely hysterical.
we were exhausted after the show, but we wanted to try out that jacuzzi in the room... so D and i stopped at the liquor store on the walk back, got some bacardi ices, and went back and fired up the hot tub in the bathroom (yeah, bathroom. woo, romantic.) as we were soaking and drinking our cold ones, D noticed 2 mini bottles of bubble bath on the side of the hot tub. bubble bath for a hot tub? okay... i put a bit in near one of the jets, and it barely bubbled up. hrm. well, we figured, the bubble bath is as crappy as the rest of the room. so we put the rest of the little bottle in, and sank down to soak. but after a few minutes, i realized that i could barely see D across the tub... there was a massive wall of bubbles that was practically suffocating us! oops. so we had to stop the jets, drain some of the tub, stomp down the bubbles and fill up the tub again, in order to save ourselves. there was a death-defying moment at one point, when the alarm clock went off at midnight (damn hotel) and D had to jump out to shut it off... covered in a mound of bubbles, he walked out of the bathroom and shot across the tile floor of the bedroom like a rocket, almost breaking his neck. (again, damn hotel and their tile floors. damn them i say!)
not 2 minutes after i toweled off from the hot tub, i was snoring. between the long day, the booze, and the hot water, i was a goner. slept like a rock for 8 hours, then got up this morning and walked down to "the egg and i" to get breakfast and read... D joined me an hour later, and after scarfing down a breakfast sandwich, we hit the road to head back to boston. it's amazing -- we were only gone overnight, but i really feel like i was on vacation for several days. i feel so relaxed... hard to believe that i have to be up at 4 tomorrow morning to drive to vermont for a meeting. maybe i should stop rambling in this post and go pack... :)
got up early on saturday morning and headed out at 7:30 to beat the traffic down to the cape. D had no idea where we were going (yay), and didn't ask for clues or anything... typical D, he's so laid-back he was like "sure, i'll go anywhere, it'll be fun." we were in bourne by 9:30 and i treated him to a huge breakfast at penner's. this place has a massive breakfast menu, with all sorts of crazy stuff. you can get fish cakes, baked beans, cornbread... all with your eggs and bacon and such. over breakfast, i revealed that we were indeed going to the cape, and handed him a list i'd printed out of all our options for the day -- lectures in different towns, museums, the barnstable county fair, miniature golf, beaches, you name it. he was totally psyched... picked a few things he was interested in, and by 11 we were on our way.
first stop: the green briar jam kitchen, an old farmhouse that has a 100-year-old jam kitchen inside and a wildflower garden outside. (gardening and food -- 2 of D's favorite things.) we started outside in the garden, looking around... after only a minute or two, a sweet elderly woman came over and asked if we had any questions about the plants, and ended up spending about 45 minutes showing us around and pointing out intersting things about the different flowers... turns out she was dr. shirley cross, the now 90-year-old botanist who planted the garden several decades ago. what a sweet and interesting woman -- when she realized that D knew a lot about plants, she started breaking off seed pods from different interesting things and giving them to him to plant back home. :) the jam kitchen was neat too... we got to go through the actual kitchen, and see some jams being made... they have an interesting process for some of them, where they cook all the fruit and sugar up and then put it in this glass-topped box outside one of the windows to cook for a few days more in the sun. standing at the window, looking at these big dishes of warming fruit, you just got these occasional intense whiffs of warm apricots. it was heavenly.
after our time at the jam kitchen, we headed up-cape to the edward gorey house... after he passed away in 2000, his home was made into a museum of his belongings and works. it was incredible... first of all because, it turns out, when i worked on the cape i looked at his house all the time! i used to use his street to do u-turns when i was driving to customers, because i loved the houses there... and his was just really nice and cape-y. :) it's a good thing i didn't know he lived there at the time... i probably would have been an ass and left stalker-y fan notes on his doorstep or something. *chuckle* the whole place was just fantastic... it really gave a good insight into his life. it turns out he was a big collector of interesting objects, and would go to yard sales and just buy odd little things like old cheap rings or keys or whatever, and then would group them in little displays around the house. he was also a huge animal lover, and had a number of cats... particularly funny was this beautiful old wooden-framed sofa of his, that when you went around the back had big chunks of stuffing coming out from where his cats scratched the hell out of it. lol but the best part of the place was the display of his work on "the gashleycrumb tinies"... OMG it was so cool, i started to well up with tears. we saw all of his original drawings of each page, and even some of the sketches that he scrapped to try something different... the typewritten page with the original poem, before he drew everything out... some of the little hidden stuff in the drawings... the different cover sketches his did with the title "the something tinies" because he hadn't come up with "gashleycrumb" yet. *grin* a really cool touch was the little unexpected gashleycrumb references hidden throughout the house -- a bottle of lye ("I is for ida who took lye by mistake") on a mantel... a pile of his cats' mousie cat toys ("X is for xerxes devoured by mice")... i actually got startled by 2 that i discovered -- at one point, you walk past a staircase that goes up to the 2nd floor, roped off to visitors, but they put a doll there tumbling headfirst down the steps ("A is for amy who fell down the stairs")... also, if you look out a certain window, you can see the upstairs windows of the other wing of the house... and in one of the windows is a little drawing of neville ("N is for neville who died of ennui") peeking out. scared the crap out of me. lol
there was also a little graveyard out back, with headstones of all the children in the book... if you look closely in this photo, you can see the drawings on some of the headstones (note the axe on kate's in the foreground, the peach on ernest's in the back)...
here's basil's! ooh, the bears! whee!
in the backyard, the MSPCA had set up a tent with a bunch of kitties, bunnies, and ferrets in cages to be adopted. since gorey was a huge animal lover, a couple of times a year they do animal adoption days there. of course it was a bad idea for me to go look... i wanted to adopt every little creature there. especially jessie, this sweet gray stripey cat that reminded me of my own little monkey... she was really vocal, yelling that she wanted OUT of the cage, NOW. my heart just broke for her, and for the fact that i couldn't help her. *sigh*
after that, we headed to hyannis to check in at our hotel (also a secret to D). i was totally psyched, because D and i have been making fun of this place since we started dating... it's billed as this romantic getaway on the cape, with jacuzzis in every room and lovely victorian decor... but you can just tell that, with a name like "cuddle and bubble", that's it's going to be gloriously cheesy. *grin* so D and i drove down main street, and i was looking for the darn place... when i muttered, "i wonder if we passed it... i don't think it's down this far." there was a moment of silence, and then he blurted, "OH MY GOD, ARE WE STAYING AT CUDDLE AND BUBBLE????" i nodded yes and the 2 of us dissolved into hysterics. hee hee! i have to say, the place is even cheesier and more awful than i'd thought, if that's even possible. first off, i think that the reason we had to wait until 3 to check in, instead of 2:30 when we got there, is that they wanted to finish smoking in our room. the room reeked of smoke, as did the hall way and, well, most of the hotel. *sigh* but they were full up for the weekend, so no switchin'. the room itself was this horrid medley of mismatched furniture (think florals and 1980's-style pastel southwestern), a tile floor instead of carpeting in most of the room, and plywood (i guess we weren't good enough for crown molding and the like). we laughed until we had tears pouring down our faces. oh, and the beds... yes, there were 2... one king-sized one with a canopy (notice the plywood where it joins the ceiling)...
then there was the, um, other bed... up against a wall of mirrors... *cringe*
after our laughter died down, we took a nap (on the non-mirrored bed... i wouldn't be able to sleep thinking about what went on in that other one) for a couple of hours and then showered for dinner. there was a clam shack down at the marina that we thought would be fun... we figured a few drinkies out on the deck, and some steamers and lobster rolls, would be a perfect cape dinner. of course, i had some added pressure, in that i had to get him to the cape cod melody tent by 8pm to surprise him with tix for the lyle lovett concert. even at 6pm, the clam shack was mobbed. darnit. we grabbed a drink and sat outside while we waited for a table... but the estimated 30-minute wait time turned into over an hour. so it was 7:15pm, the concert was in under an hour, and we still weren't seated. D saw how antsy i was, and didn't know why... here he was thinking that we were going to have a nice leisurely dinner out by the water, and i was jumping out of my skin. so i gave him his birthday card... and when he opened it and saw the tickets, he completely freaked. :) he's never seen lyle lovett in concert, and lyle's one of his favorite performers, so he was totally psyched. we finally got seated, practically ordered before our butts hit the seats, and within 10 minutes we had a massive bowl of steamers and 2 of the biggest lobster rolls i've ever seen. we wolfed it all down and then speed-walked the mile to the melody tent, and got there just as lyle was taking the stage.
the concert was fabulous. the melody tent is a really small venue (we had 17th-row seats, and there were only 2 more rows behind us), and in the round with a rotating stage, so you can see everything. lyle sounded phenomenal, and talked to the audience in-between in his sweet, easygoing lyle way. there was a particulary funny bit halfway through, where we had to play "truck or no truck"... lyle would point to each musician, and say where he was from, and the audience had to guess whether he drove a truck or not. there was the steel guitar player who lived in austin but was originally from wyoming... "TRUCK!!!" the audience screamed... "no truck!" he crowed into the mic, and the whole place devolved into animated boos and hisses. (how can you be from wyoming and not drive a truck?) then there was the horn player from california... "HYBRID!" the guy behind me yelled. "truck!" he announced, and the place applauded. then came the bass player, this bearded zz top-looking guy from california who looked like he'd be on a motorcycle. "TRUCK!" yelled the audeince... "TWO trucks!!!!!!" he yelled back, and the place erupted in delighted screams. it was absolutely hysterical.
we were exhausted after the show, but we wanted to try out that jacuzzi in the room... so D and i stopped at the liquor store on the walk back, got some bacardi ices, and went back and fired up the hot tub in the bathroom (yeah, bathroom. woo, romantic.) as we were soaking and drinking our cold ones, D noticed 2 mini bottles of bubble bath on the side of the hot tub. bubble bath for a hot tub? okay... i put a bit in near one of the jets, and it barely bubbled up. hrm. well, we figured, the bubble bath is as crappy as the rest of the room. so we put the rest of the little bottle in, and sank down to soak. but after a few minutes, i realized that i could barely see D across the tub... there was a massive wall of bubbles that was practically suffocating us! oops. so we had to stop the jets, drain some of the tub, stomp down the bubbles and fill up the tub again, in order to save ourselves. there was a death-defying moment at one point, when the alarm clock went off at midnight (damn hotel) and D had to jump out to shut it off... covered in a mound of bubbles, he walked out of the bathroom and shot across the tile floor of the bedroom like a rocket, almost breaking his neck. (again, damn hotel and their tile floors. damn them i say!)
not 2 minutes after i toweled off from the hot tub, i was snoring. between the long day, the booze, and the hot water, i was a goner. slept like a rock for 8 hours, then got up this morning and walked down to "the egg and i" to get breakfast and read... D joined me an hour later, and after scarfing down a breakfast sandwich, we hit the road to head back to boston. it's amazing -- we were only gone overnight, but i really feel like i was on vacation for several days. i feel so relaxed... hard to believe that i have to be up at 4 tomorrow morning to drive to vermont for a meeting. maybe i should stop rambling in this post and go pack... :)
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no subject
Oh, as soon as I read that, I knew you were in trouble!! HAHAHAHA :D
And, what? You didn't try out the mirrored bed for a little *nudge-nudge-wink-wink* fun?? LOL ;)
[or... you did and you just aren't saying! hehehe *eg*]
I think I need a weekend like that [not necessarily with Lyle, his music isn't my style], just some time away from everyone and everything.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 01:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 01:59 am (UTC)And... *ahem*... you didn't really address the other part of my comment! LOL ;)
*ducks from the inevitably thrown pillow* :D
no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 04:55 pm (UTC)