Wednesday 10/15/08

Stockbridge and Rockwell

This is not starting well. In addition to the aforementioned problems with our room, Mary’s bath towel this morning has a large hole in it along with a suspicious looking stain. When Mama ain’t happy, etc. We go up to the main house for breakfast and find a little buffet of eggs, sausages and grits along with some cereals, coffee and juice. It’s OK but certainly not up to the standards of the last couple days. Mary is noticing the chipped china which is not raising her mood. One more night to go here.

We take off right away to Stockbridge, a few miles south of Lenox. The Berkshires are the summer playground of the Boston crowd and nearby Tanglewood is the summer home of the Boston Pops. As spin-offs there are bunches of theater and music venues along with assorted schools and workshops. There are a couple $1,000 per night hotels and a fancy branch of the Canyon Ranch Spa.

Stockbridge has become famous through the work of Norman Rockwell who spent the last thirty years of his life here and used lots of local folks and scenes in his illustrations. Our mission today is the Norman Rockwell museum. We have been to Stockbridge many years ago but never made it to this new facility (because it wasn't built until 1993) and it has been on our list of things to do. This turns out to be a much better experience than we hoped. Rockwell’s work spans six decades of the twentieth century and is a visual history of our country from the 1910s into the 1970s. He completed more than 4,000 works, and a few hundred of them are housed here. We pop for the audio tour that explains the paintings as we wander through, and there are also guides who are more than helpful. A few of the guides, now moving into old age, had actually been Rockwell models as children which adds to the flavor of the place.

Time gets away from us here and we grab lunch at their little food area. Mary has a pre-wrapped egg salad sandwich and John has the Grilled chicken with pesto and they are just what you would expect them to be. We take a little longer to explore the grounds of the museum where they have moved and reconstructed Rockwell’s studio. It is another perfect and warm day so we move to downtown Stockbridge and spend another hour wandering around town and peek into the Red Lion Inn where we stayed on our first trip to the Berkshires 20+ years ago.
It is late afternoon when we get back to Lenox, but being unwilling to give up on this day we grab our books and move down to the village green where we sit on benches, read and watch the world go by until the sun starts to get low in the sky. Dinner tonight is at Alta, one of the recommended Church Street restaurants. Mary has a Lentil soup and a real Caesar salad (even with anchovies) while John opts for the mushroom soup, and roast chicken with mashed and spinach. The food is very good but we get overcharged on the wine and the "boss" is having trouble trying to figure out what he is supposed to do about that. It finally occurs to him to adjust the bill accordingly.

Back to our room where we are assured that all of the market gains from Monday are now gone and we’re poor again. These daily swings are the equivalent of annual moves in most years. Ouch!