Luxurious Flying

We just got back from the East Coast and took a non-stop from Seattle to Boston and back. While not a bad flight, regular class is always a bit cramped and a strain. At least we had the means to make the flight. Today we received this magazine that couldn’t be farthest from our style but it ends up in our mail every so often. (Just call us uneducated and uncouth, but outlandish jewelry dripping with gems and uber-fancy resorts with not a soul in sight just don’t register.) The magazine is called Departures. (It’s so exclusive you can’t even see its Web site without logging in, so there!) In flipping through the magazine we just had to share these two advertisements for a type of flying that is a world apart from what the average person experiences. Welcome to the world of luxury flying. In the first ad, check out the size of those seats! A family of four can easily fit in one. In the second ad, you might think it’s an ad for a hotel room and you would be partially correct. It’s a “personal bedroom at 35,000 feet with dual sliding doors”! What if you have a really loud person one “personal bedroom” over? Diminishes the $9,000 or so for the space. Stick to economy, set your expectations low, and hope to be pleasantly surprised.

New England Architecture

These two photos were taken in a small town called Pine Meadow, CT (map). I have gone past this house and church a thousand times, but this is the first time I ever got out to look at them closely and appreciate the architecture. One of the photos is a church and the other is a house for sale. (Hmmm, wonder how much.)

Blind vs. Hidden Driveway

 

Driving around residential Connecticut we saw a lot of blind and hidden driveway warning signs. After a while, we started to wonder what the difference is between a blind driveway and hidden driveway road sign. Our guess is this: to the driver on a road, a driveway can be hidden (HIDDEN sign). And, that same driver should be careful because drivers emerging from the driveway are blind to what’s coming on the road (BLIND sign). In general, it's best to interpret both as BE CAREFUL. 

We never did find a suitable but did find some fun sites where you can learn more about traffic signs: 

• Manual of Traffic Signs
• Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD)
• Wisconsin DOT says signs like HIDDEN and BLIND are not in MUTCD. 
• Overview of diamond signs - the photos here are from this site

New England State Nicknames

Do you know the nickname of your state? Your neighboring states? Didn’t think so. While in New England this week, we got to thinking about state nicknames. The “official” nicknames for some New England states are: Connecticut the Consitution State, Maine the Pine Tree State, Massachusetts the Bay State, New Hamsphire the Granite State, Rhode Island the Ocean State, and Vermont the Green Mountain State.

An unofficial nickname for Connecticut is “Nutmeg State” which always baffled me. It’s not because nutmeg (Myristica fragans) was grown there. The common explanation is that shrewd peddlers would sell small carved nobs of wood shaped like nutmeg to unsuspecting customers wanting a little something from the spice islands. Try grinding that for your pumpkin pie. [ref]

Cape Cod National Seashore Park

We experienced the Cape Cod National Seashore Park in two ways (map). One day we just wandered around in the dunes just north of Mayflower Heights, with no particular destination. The next day we rented bikes and biked in the part called Province Lands Trail (pdf). There are several places to rent bikes; we rented at a place called Gale Force Bikes and had a good experience. There is a little market/deli in the same building where you can grab some snacks and water. The ride was a blast. There were six of us and a young child. (You can rent trailers for kids naturally.)

Much of the area we walked and biked in was completely deforested by European settlers from 1650 and 1900. Some of the forest has grown back.

Quahog Clam

After just a few days in the Cape and you can’t help but run into the word “quahog” - pronounced "ko-hog". It is a type of clam that are particularly common from Cape Cod to New Jersey. Quahogs can also be referred to other names based on their size, e.g. littlenecks, topnecks, cherrystones, etc. The distinctive name comes from the once-extinct-and-now-partially-revived Narragansett (Algonquin) language.

The bucket of quahogs attached to this post are from a clambake we had on the beach. Tough life, we know.

Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum

We are in Cape Cod for the weekend. Today we stopped by the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum for a few hours. The museum is in Provincetown, Massachusetts – at the tip of Cape Cod (map). The 252 foot Pilgrim Monument is an orienting landmark that can be seen for miles around and beckons you to climb it. The tower was built between 1907 and 1910 to commemorate the first landfall of the pilgrims in 1620. It was build to resemble the Torre del Mangia in Siena, Italy (all the more reason for us to climb it). The Siena tower is about 335 feet high.

The climb to the top of Pilgrim Monument tower is relatively easy; there are 60 ramps and 116 stairs (all inside). There is a nice view from the top as a reward. You should set aside about 20 minutes for climbing the tower and looking out from the top in all directions. Besides the monument there is the Provincetown Museum that you can easily spend about an hour looking through. (One ticket at $7 gets you both the monument and museum.) The one thing that we remembered the most from the museum was the exhibit on Donald B. MacMillan, a native of Provincetown. MacMillan journeyed to the North Pole with Peary in 1909 and then went on to explore Greenland, Nova Scotia, and Labrador (Atlantic Canada) among many, many other accomplishments. The main pier in Provincetown is named after MacMillan.

Path to Work

One of my favorite parts of the daily commute is walking through a field (map) to get to my final destination (a nice, but windowless office). The field has a few well-worn paths through it. I'm sure in time, this field will have some more office buildings on it. The picture above was taken on a recent fall morning.