Mass. Museums & Adirondack Skiing, Day Two

Saturday, January 27, 2018 - Skiing at Whiteface Lake Placid, New York:


An hour-and-15-minutes to get up to Whiteface, then just over 5 hours to get home. Sleep in my own bed tonight!

Highway 74 West runs alongside a couple of beautiful lakes, frozen in the wintertime:

No time to stop and take pretty pictures, though.

At a rest stop, I think I read about my next hiking adventures:


After I-87, on 73 going through Keene Valley, I passed a REALLY COOL store - The Mountaineer:


It was before 9 AM, and there were a bunch of cars in the parking lot, and at least a dozen people inside. It made me SMILE, and reminded me of when I had breakfast in the Super 8 at Arches National Park - there were people with maps, people with hiking gear, people with high-carb/stick-to-your-ribs breakfasts! I LOVE THAT VIBE!

They had cool "raised relief" maps, and I bought a hiking map of the area.


Saturday morning, 10 AM:


The top of the gondola has a great viewing area

which looks south out over Lake Placid:

and then back up at the summit of Whiteface:


It was a good day for skiing - a little sun, not cold, not much wind:





After 3 or 4 runs, I was hungry, so I went in Boule's Bistro at the Mid-Station:

I was wondering why service was so slow (they were busy setting up pots and pans and various grill stuff), but I just burst out laughing when I checked the time and it WAS ONLY 11:15!!! I got a great cup of chili and hot chocolate, and had a SUPER view from a table at the window:


I did a bunch more runs up and down the mountain, and by 2 o'clock I was ready to hit the road. Drove east through New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and then down into Massachusetts. Guess where I had dinner?


Once again, Thank You God for my health, and for these wonderful adventures!!

After skiing, I listened to the last 3-of-6 cds for C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy, 1955

Chapter X. Fortune's Smile
...
As for the Earth, the country I grew up in had everything to encourage a romantic bent, had indeed done so ever since I first looked at the unattainable Green Hills through the nursery window. For the reader who knows those parts it will be enough to say that my main haunt was the Holywood Hills-the irregular polygon you would have described if you drew a line from Stormont to Comber, from Comber to Newtownards, from Newtownards to Scrabo, from Scrabo to Craigantlet, from Craigantlet to Holywood, and thence through Knocknagonney back to Stormont. How to suggest it all to a foreigner I hardly know. ...

Well, I think "a map" is a pretty good way "to suggest it all to a foreigner":


After C.S. Lewis, Music for today was 3 albums from my orange nano:

Grace Potter & The Nocturnals - This Is Somewhere, 2007

ok, but won't keep.

Dawes - Stories Don't End, 2013

good, and will keep.

Paul Simon - Stranger To Stranger (deluxe), 2016

I like it, and will keep it!

Mass. Museums & Adirondack Skiing, Day One

Friday, January 26, 2018 - Massachusetts Museums (plus a little extra!). Early this morning I took Wendy and Ellie to Logan Airport for a Jet Blue flight to Naples, Florida for 4 days of fun-in-the-sun! I had "the Adirondacks" in the back of my mind, and when I asked a friend about "skiing in the Adirondacks?" last week, he said "Wasn't there a Winter Olympics there? ... Of Course - Lake Placid! [both in 1932 and 1980] The ski mountain associated with Lake Placid is Whiteface, so I went online, booked the Super 8 in Ticonderoga for Friday night, and bought a Whiteface ski ticket for Saturday - a gamble, I know - it could be FREEZING, or raining, or whatever. We'll see.

So I had Friday mapped out:


8 hours and 17 minutes, to go 426 miles - my kind of day!

A couple of years ago Wendy and I went down to New Bedford to see the art at the New Bedford Free Public Library (3 BEAUTIFUL Albert Bierstadt paintings) and the New Bedford Whaling Museum (amazing selection of William Bradford Arctic paintings!!). This was before my "call ahead" method-of-operation, so, of course, all 3 Bierstadt's were out in Connecticut being cleaned; But NOW THEY'RE BACK! After a hot chocolate at the Dunkin' Donuts at 24/495, I got down to New Bedford a little after 9:

The Art Room on the top floor is a pretty cool space:


a combination gallery/working space/storage area.

And the Bierstadts are WONDERFUL:
Sunset Light, Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains, 1861


"Sunset near the Platte River" or "Salt Lick at Sunset Glow", 1870-1886


Mount Sir Donald, 1889

(the space was a little tight to take a photo.)

Additionally there were 3 paintings by William Bradford, and, in another room, an exquisite print of Bierstadt's The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1866 steel engraving.
My photo:

a better image from the Internet:


Then two hours+ to get up to Northampton - the Forbes Library "is supposed to have" a copy of Scribner's Popular History of the United States" (1897), with engravings by Thomas Moran! Unfortunately, they seem to have lost their copy, so I'll have to go into Brookline sometime. Since I was next door, I went to the Smith College Museum of Art - Wendy and I had been here Nov 12, 2016, and I really like their collection:
Works (left-to-right) are by Giovanni Paolo Panini, Lorenzo Bellotto, and Luca Carlevariis:


Giovanni Paolo Panini - The Death Leap of Marcus Curtius, 1730-40 oil


Lorenzo Bellotto - View of a Palace Courtyard, 1765 oil


Luca Carlevariis - Campo di Rialto with the Fabbriche Veccgie di Rialto and S. Giacomo di Rialto, n.d. oil


Claude Monet - Cathedral at Rouen (La Cour d'Albane), 1892-94 oil


Childe Hassam - White Island Light, Isles of Shoals, at Sundown, 1899 oil


I then continued the journey northwest to the Clark Art Museum in Williamstown, MA:
The 5 pieces they have on display by Winslow Homer are exciting


And it was wonderful seeing two other CLASSICS:
J.M.W. Turner - Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water, 1840 oil:


Hubert Robert - Roman Ruins with Laundresses, c. 1777 oil:


An hour west of The Clark is Albany, home of the Albany Institute of History & Art. They have a FABULOUS collection of Hudson River School paintings, and have an "official" exhibit up-and-running:

The exhibition space is lovely:


Thomas Cole - Lake Winnepesaukee, 1827 or 1828 oil

I took pictures of 18 paintings - Highlights include:

Frederic Edwin Church - Morning, Looking East over the Hudson Valley from the Catskill Mountains, 1848 oil


George Herbert McCord - Lake George, 1887 oil


Jasper Francis Cropsey - Dawn of Morning, Lake George, 1868 oil


James M. Hart - The Adirondacks, 1861 oil


It was a 2-hour drive up to the Super 8 in Ticonderoga, with the last half-hour heading east in the dark (I look forward to seeing this country in the morning). Thank you God for a GREAT DAY!

For my listening pleasure, I decided to tackle an audiobook of something that has been on my radar screen for quite some time - Surprised By Joy by C.S. Lewis, 1955. I listened to the first 3-of-6 cds:


After C.S. Lewis, Music for today was an "album" from my orange nano:

various artists - The 70's, 3 cds - I cut it down to 48 songs!