On Wednesday after Memorial Day, SeaQueen and I went to her parents’ house on Cape Cod. I’ve been to their house in Woods Hole many times, but she and I had never really toured around the Cape much. This time, we had planned on going out to Martha’s Vineyard, but the weather was supposed to be stormy on the day when we had time to go (Wed afternoon and evening). So, we ended up visiting with her neighbor, going to a local gardens, going out to eat, baking cookies (the kind that come in a tube of dough), and we watched a Sandra Bullock movie that night.
This is the place that had the neat millstones in the landscaping.
It also had some anchors and an old bell.
Once again, the rhododendrons and azaleas were blooming.
It was really neat having the gardens be right next to the water.
All of the anchors were really interesting.
One of the paths started out simply enough.
And rapidly became a bit more interesting.
I definitely didn’t want to lose my footing and go tumbling down the hill!
It was really lovely.
As we were leaving, there was a wild rabbit in the grass eating his supper.
He was so teeny-tiny compared to Max!
Here is a photo of Max – I know there is nothing in the photo to give you a good reference for his size – but that willow-cube toy is about 3 inches in each direction.
The next day was the last day of our vacation together, and SeaQueen and I drove out to Provincetown. I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.
I’m continuing my story about my vacation out east to Rhode Island and New England to see SeaQueen and go to a scientific conference. There are additional posts about our trip on Memorial Day to the azalea garden and to the Gilbert Stuart birthplace.
Upon leaving the Gilbert Stuart birthplace, we headed back to SeaQueen’s place via a scenic route. We were just going to drive past Narragansett Pier and beach, but it looked so neat, that I convinced SeaQueen that we should park and walk around. We ended up checking out the surfing, paddleboarding, and the two towers.
It was really fun to be at the ocean and hear the waves crashing.
There was also a certain energy at the beach that I can’t quite put my finger on; it was an air of excitement, but also something else. Maybe exhilaration? It was that feeling of people desperate to squeeze every last drop of fun out of a weekend that was rapidly drawing to a close. There were definitely a lot of people who were checking out other people, so maybe it was sexual tension too. Whatever it was, it made for an interesting energy.
I don’t have any photos of our evening spent with SeaQueen’s friends and newborn baby girl. We had a fun time visiting with each other; we ate good food and played Apples to Apples, which was rather funny.
I don’t have any photos of our Tuesday trip to Six Flags New England. But it was AMAZING!
We were convinced that since school was still in session (recall that this was the Tuesday after Memorial Day), all of the kids would still be in school and the lines would be miniscule. Well, imagine our surprise/disappointment, when we got to our first ride of the day – a coaster, of course – Bizarro – and the line was over 30 minutes long! Bizarro is the ride that replaced Superman. It was our absolute favorite ride at the park. We ended up starting our day with Bizarro, and ending it with two back-to-back rides on Bizarro. By the end of the day, the lines WERE miniscule, because the kids had all boarded their buses and gone home.
What did I love about Bizarro, as opposed to Batman or others? Well, it was FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAST and it went HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGH!
I just looked up some stats and it goes up 20 stories and the first drop is 221 ft.
It goes up to 77 mph!
Boy did it get my adrenaline flowing! So much so that I felt a little ill when we road it back-to-back at the end of the day. But it is just an incredible, incredible coaster.
Also, the restraints on it are MUCH better than any other coaster I’ve ridden.
The restraint is this huge padded yellow thing that covers your midsection (you can see it on the screen capture above). I don’t like the ones that come down over my shoulders, like on Batman (see below), because I end up banging my head against them too much. The designers of Bizarro really solved that problem well.
We rode coaster after coaster that day.
We also went on some water rides, because it did start getting pretty hot about halfway through the day. We really got soaked on the river rapids ride. We rode the swings, which was quite breezy and relaxing.
It was the first that I’d been to an amusement park and rode coaster after coaster in a really long time. It was a blast!
After leaving the azalea gardens (described previously), SeaQueen and I ventured to the birthplace of Gilbert Stuart – portrait artist (painter). This is a place that SeaQueen had not heard of, but when we were worried of being rained out at the beach (and I went searching online for tourism), I spotted the entry in the “museums” section. I had no idea who Gilbert Stuart was, but I saw that it had a gristmill and snuff mill with functional waterwheels, which was enough for me to want to go see it.
(snuff mill on left, gristmill on right)
I’ve always been fascinating by mills and the workings of mills.
The tour guide was fabulous! Here he is describing how millstones have grooves in them.
The bottom stone stays in one place, and the top one is the one that spins and grinds (powered by the flow of water across the wheel, of course). They are both grooved. Millstones can have different groove patterns, as was evidenced by the different millstones that SeaQueen and I saw in a different park/gardens in Massachusetts. At that park, the millstones were part of the landscaping which was really unique and creative (shown below).
The story of Gilbert Stuart is rather interesting. He is the artist who painted the (unfinished) image of George Washington that is used on the dollar bill.
This is a sheet of one dollar bills from the mint that have not been cut.
Gilbert Stuart also painted images of many of the early U.S. presidents. I like the one he did of Dolley Madison (below).
All of the paintings are reproductions, because his art is too valuable to be housed at the birthplace where there is poor temperature and humidity control and inadequate security. I guess someone on the trustees committee for the birthplace once had the bright idea of housing an original on the grounds; they advertised it, and it got stolen!
Anyway, the story of Gilbert Stuart is also linked to the snuff mill, which made it very interesting to me. Snuff is the powdered tobacco that men and women used to stuff up their noses to get a buzz (before smoking tobacco became more common). This will be no surprise to my fellow lovers of historical fiction who are familiar with characters who kept their snuffboxes handy and who always kept a handkerchief handy for their brown dribbling noses (rather disgusting sounding – but isn’t smoking just as disgusting? – I digress).
Anyway, prior to this time period (mid 1750s), there were zero snuff mills in the U.S. So, any tobacco that was grown here in the states had to be shipped to Europe to be ground into snuff and then shipped BACK to the states for sale. Well, a rich person in Rhode Island (RI) decided that he was going to make a bunch of money by bypassing the shipments to and from Scotland by building the first colonial snuff mill in the states that could mill the locally-grown tobacco. He needed someone experienced to run the mill. So he recruited Gilbert Stuart’s dad and family to move from Scotland to RI to run the mill!
Gilbert was born at the snuff mill in RI and grew up in this relatively wealthy family. He showed a tendency to draw and color. A visitor from Scotland who was an artist, recognized Gilbert’s talent and convinced Gilbert and his family to allow Gilbert to study with him in Europe when Gilbert was in his teens. On the voyage to Scotland, Gilbert was tutored and mentored by this artist. However, the person either died on the voyage or died shortly after their arrival in Scotland! I don’t recall when the tutor died. What I distinctly remember our tour guide telling us was that Gilbert was all alone in Scotland with no money, no credit, and he knew no one! Also that he “must have” been getting some training on the long voyage from the states to Scotland, because his painting improved in just that short period of time. Gilbert ended up getting various odd jobs and (literally) working his way back to the U.S. again; I think he may have worked on the ship in order to have passage. When Gilbert was 20, he moved to England to study with Benjamin West, a famous painter.
His early work was not very good, compared to what he would be capable of later in life.
And then with time he was capable of this kind of work:
That one is my favorite. It is called “The Skater” and won him acclaim in 1782; he was 27 years old! The original is actually really large; our tour guide showed us a photo of him (I think) standing next to it in the gallery where it hangs.
The Wikipedia entry for Gilbert Stuart says that over the course of his life, Gilbert painted over 1,000 portraits. You should check out that entry if you want to see a list of the names of people whose portraits he painted and images of his paintings.
The other thing that was really neat about the birthplace was all of the aspects of colonial living that were on display. There are too many photos for me to post here but they are in a set here.
Herbs were dried behind the fireplace in the fancy, upstairs, rarely-used, living room.
A bench with a nanny board (like a short fence) allowed a woman to sit on the bench and have a small child next to her; the nanny board would keep the child from rolling off of the bench. The board could be removed so that a couple of adults/older children could sit on it.
This next photo is fuzzy, because I took it really fast. But the idea is that a well-made bed was so expensive, and fire was so common, that people kept the tools for dismantling the bed hanging on the bed post. If a fire would break out, they grabbed the tool and dismantled the bed quickly!
Can you imagine living in an age where fire is so common that you have to be able to quickly dismantle your bed for safe-keeping?
I liked the bedside table, because it had eyeglasses, old books, and a neat candle stand on it.
The spinning wheel was very large
as was the loom (sitting next to the grinding mechanism of the snuff mill).
My absolute favorite part of the whole tour was seeing the snuff mill actually be put into gear so that the pestle grinds the mortar (probably not the correct terminology). There is a video in the set on Flickr that shows it in action. Here is the video embedded in this post (hopefully one of those will work for you!):
Here is a photo too.
All in all, it was a really wonderful day! I learned many new things about colonial living and mills, I learned about a famous american artist, and SeaQueen and I had a lovely picnic on the grounds. It was quite a nice way to spend our Memorial Day in lieu of going to the beach!
