(front view)
(side view)
after a late-ish start we talked the wonderful staff at a local burlington diner into fixing breakfast, even though they were already on their lunch menu.
(shepard's pie -- and no, i had an omelet, thanks.)
karpov, the accomplice and i talked about heading to schwartz's in montreal for smoked meat sandwiches (we'd even all brought our passports, just in case), but decided it was too big a time sink compared to the things we wanted to do in the lower 48.
the stop of the day was shelburne museum. sort of a hearst-castle-meets-sugar-barons-in-a-cow-pasture kind of place. with over 20 buildings and 45 acres, it's the kind of place that you could drag a steamship and actually manage to forget where you put it.
as an aside, when JB offered the AYCJ pass, part of the reason i jumped on it was because it was taking place in my absolute favorite time to travel in the northern hemisphere -- september. shoulder season. all the tourist things are still open, and yet the crowds are gone. those that have to deal with the incessant grind of tourists have lightened up and the weather isn't fully capable of killing you yet. the shelburne museum showed exactly why that was so great today -- it's clearly set up to handle people by the thousands -- and yet the vast majority of the time we found ourselves wandering the grounds alone. we definitely saw more maintenance staff than fellow travelers.
when we first walked into the giant round barn/entry way, we were greeted by one of the temporary displays of the moment -- motorcycles. a little disorienting at first, it harkens immediately back to the display the guggenheim several years ago (although way more chopper-centric. my brother's work at indian has warped me badly enough that i can't even look at choppers without laughing or cringing (depending on how cool i want to act), but there were some great stand-out "normal" bikes.
one was this 1940's indian. a bike my radical grandfather would have loved, but drove the purists at the time insane because it was becoming too harley.
another was the rotary engine suzuki. i can think of a lot of things i'd like between my legs, but this one is far far down.
and then there was the pee-wee herman on steroids bike:
we had 'em fire up the carousel and things were slow enough that after a few probing questions they invited us inside to look at the werks.
a large semi-circular building next to the carousel houses "roy arnold's miniature parade." model madness from the kind of person you're glad never took to automatic weapons. hundreds of extremely intricate pieces (60 parts for just one circus wheel) built entirely by pen knife and jigsaw. the following are just a smattering of the dozens of items on display.
i know, i know, none of these pix are that great, but that's not the point. the point is, as karpov put it, "i normally don't like miniatures, but this stuff is amazing." amazing, as in, if i had to do this, my life would be over in about a week.
here's some detail of a sinbad wagon. demons and eagles. you know, the normal totally deranged kind of stuff:
there's also lots of other big carousel memorabilia around ... originally the proprietress wanted to build a full carousel, but liked the one she bought so much that she turned it into museum pieces. they went out and bought a cheesey little carny one later, because, you know how it is, once you get in the carousel state-of-mind, you just have to have one.
here's a nice stylized alligator. (got a little too much reflection off my flash, so i played with a bit -- you do get the mood, though.)
nice vertical standard:
a collection like this wouldn't be complete without the kirk brothers circus. hand crafted by a single guy over 40 years and containing 3500 individual pieces. this crappy picture here is about 1/3 of the center of it:
what i wasn't expecting was some of the great (and super-famous) paintings they have there. monet's most famous haystack and his copy of charring cross bridge. degas's most famous ballet painting and the runner-up. what's weird is the stuff is just hanging in rooms, almost without explanation, often near other things - like some goofy vase - that are described in detail. at least half a dozen times today i actually said "oh my god" out-loud and then grabbed whichever was the closest of my two traveling companions to explain the significance.
here's a close-up from a wyeth that i wasn't familiar with. i think i shot it with the pinhole effect on my camera (i took about a dozen using different tricks, but liked this one best):
there was a large (i think temporary) exhibit of western american castings. including, of course, the three most famous ever made. here's the russell and the fraser. i couldn't get a good shot of remington's "rattlesnake" because it was encased.
a really nice temporary display about tiffany (whom i always assume was parisian, but actually is a local here). here's his wisteria lamp (and a really nice treatment by the low-light/high-action setting on my camera). be sure to look at the groovy roots on the base.
a large display of warren kimble. a local folk-artist whose style you'll almost immediately recognize -- i think this stuff is permanent -- the collection here has to be the best of his in the world.
i saw so damn much stuff i got trigger happy and just started firing away. here's a small assortment of some of the miscellaneous stuff i shot during the day ...
after a solid five hours of the shelburne we were winding down only to have morgan johnston make his great posting here about gravy fries at nectar's, so off we went. we wanted to jam through it pretty fast because we were still trying to make ben & jerry's last tour at 18:00 -- we had about an hour, with our BJ a solid 30 minutes away.
i still had the shutter bug while waiting for our nosh, so i snapped these:
and then we got this:
yummy, yummy and now in our tummies, we jammed to B&J to, literally, be the last people on to the last tour of the day. i was disappointed (a little) in that when i went years ago they used to haul a bucket down to the working line and you could taste ice cream straight off the line ... it may sound like no big deal until you consider the fact that all commercial ice cream you ever eat has been deep frozen ... the stuff on the line (at that point) hasn't been below about 22 degrees F ... at the risk of sounding snooty, it gives a completely different flavor bouquet.
karpov and i had had a discussion about whether there would be any other all-you-can-jetters in the tour. i said yes based on the tweets that had been passed around in the early stages of all-you-can-jet. he said "no," because he's an actuary and a fairly steady alcoholic. at the end of the tour, i took the guide's microphone and asked if anyone was AYCJ.
no.
that means i had to buy karpov his ice cream.
that, combined with seeing the tomb of one of my favorite B&J flavors would have had me openly weeping, had i not just had the perfect antedote -- a scoop of peanut butter cookie dough ice cream.
we rolled into our hotel in white river junction about 20:30, not particularly hungry, but if we didn't eat now, we were going to be out of luck for later in the evening. things in this neck of the woods stay open fairly late (the later places seem to shut about 22:00), so we picked a wood fired pizza place based on nothing more than an ad in our room.
after living on the planet of super-high expense for the last 20 years i'm shocked when a soda and two pieces of (extremely good) pizza run US$3.50.
but what shocked me even more was our server. you know the shroud of turin? well he was wearing the polo shirt of lebanon (NH). you be the judge. (my apologies for the photo being blurry, but as you know, religious events often are.)
a fitting end to a great day.
