Hudson in a New York Minute

I knew around Thursday that my September blues had settled in, but I didn’t realize how strong of a grip they had on me until I noted how little I felt like keeping up with the blog. I’m back in Columbus now, and the skies are blue and cloudless, so I’ll try to summarize the last days of the trip. Let’s call this Hudson in a New York Minute….

Thursday drizzled into Friday. Between the raindrops, we slogged back to Heaven for breakfast then pulled ourselves together for the drive to Hudson. Somehow, we have more bags coming than we had going! Leaving fairly early in the morning (early for the Provincetown whoopsies, that is) gave Mark a shot at driving Commercial Street without feeling like a car in “Frogger.” Loaded up. Dropped the keys and parking pass. Got underway. On the way out of town, we saw a fox shaking off the rain. I’m not sure if foxes are good signs or bad.

I’m unused to the—I guess “zoning” is as good a word as any—on Cape Cod, or at least in the area of the cape that we passed through. Lots of driveways and small roads opened to the left and right on curvy route 6a, and the vegetation was so thick that we couldn’t see houses or shops until we were right at their turn-ins. The “secretiveness” of the area reminds me a lot of Costa Rica—casas and tiendas hide like animals among the trees and overgrowth, and there seems to be little regulation about what can be built where. The “whats” here, though, are definitely not like the “whats” in Costa Rica. In one clearing, I spotted a rafter of wild turkeys.

The road around Brewster is chock full of art galleries (hidden from view except for their signs and mailboxes) and law offices. We didn’t stop, though (at the galleries, not the law offices), because so many of them looked like they were in private homes. At the time, I was feeling particularly moody and didn’t feel like imposing on anyone. Now I wish we had stopped. Very few galleries followed Brewster until we got to Barnstable where we stopped at the Tao Water Gallery. As I mentioned, the Tao Water Gallery in Provincetown is closing after this season, so we thought it would be fun to stop at their other location. They have my email address, and I expect I’ll be getting notifications of upcoming shows. Mark and I were hoping to see a smaller painting (read: “a painting that we could afford”) by Meghan Hinton, whose work we really saw in Provincetown and really loved, but she wasn’t represented in the Barnstable location.

Just off the cape, we stopped for lunch. Of course, I screwed up the directions and got us into Bourne, MA, which we were intending to pass, but it worked out alright. We grabbed lunch at Leo’s Breakfast Restaurant and then got straightened out.

As we got into New York, both the weather and my mood started to improve. Off I-90, we pretty quickly found ourselves on country roads. The Taconic State Parkway to SR203. 203 to SR9. Pick up SR66 in Ghent. Lots of dappled light and picturesque, winding roads.

This last leg to Wally and Yoshi’s place in Hudson was a comparatively short hop; we pulled up at around 4:00—about six hours after leaving Provincetown. Their place is a cute, deceptively large blue-collar home built in 1914 on a quiet street just about a block and a half off Warren Street—the main artery through Hudson. It’s sparsely decorated in a clean, modern style. The editors at Dwell magazine would be proud. (My photos of the house sucked; these are Wally’s.)

Wally was due at 7 and Yoshi sometime thereafter, so we freshened up and decided to go for a walk while the sun was still shining. The river was our first destination. I took this shot on Saturday rather than Friday when we arrived, but it’s the first thing that caught my eye when we climbed up to Riverfront Park.

It’s the Hudson-Athens lighthouse. It seems so iconic sitting out there just south of the Middle Ground Flats. The photo is a little blurry partly because of the haze in the air and party because my best zoom lens could only bring the building so close.

Here are some shots of Warren Street. Again, not great. Rain returned in earnest on Saturday when I shot these. It’s really a cute town, though, with lots of antique shops and galleries; don’t be fooled by the gloom.

Parts of the town are still recovering from the economic downturn in the 80s. A lot of neat architecture needs a lot of love.

When Wally’s train finally brought him to Hudson, it was as if no time had passed since we last saw him (Five years? It can’t be that long!). We just settled back into our joking and talking like we’d seen each other just yesterday. The three of us hustled off to dinner at Red Dot and then came back to find Yoshi had arrived. Here are the boys and Mark.

One of the neighborhood cats, Kiki, paid us a visit. Wally is infatuated with him and invited him in for a game. Yoshi was somewhat less than amused, but I have to admit that Kiki is an unusually friendly cat. More talk and fun and then bed at 11:30—well past Mark’s and my bedtime!

On Saturday morning, Yoshi and Wally left us to play tennis. That’s when disaster struck. See the silver cube in the photo below?

That cube rotates to direct water from an overhead rain shower to a shower wand or a bath faucet. Until I got a hold of it that is. I jumped in the shower to rain falling on my head—not a favorite shower position for me—so I tried to change the outflow to the wand. The valve stem behind it is pretty tight, and just when I got the water flow stopped between the overhead and wand settings, the cube snapped off in my hand. Little is worse than breaking the only shower in your friends’ house in such a way that no one else can take a shower. On a Saturday. In a sleepy town with very few plumbers. I was mortified. I wanted just to fix it myself, but I didn’t want to take a chance of making matters worse by damaging the valve stem.

Sigh. I’m an adult; I knew I had to admit to the accident. I didn’t care about the cost of fixing it; I just felt bad about breaking my friends’ house. I left Wally a text and a voice mail so that they wouldn’t come home and be surprised. With our only options being to sit there and fret or to get breakfast, we opted for breakfast. We found this cute (and apparently quite new) coffee shop/patisserie/bar just around the corner. I guess the name is “ör“—like “or.” It was fine for me, but a lot of Yelp users obviously didn’t care for the attitude of the baristas.

We returned to the house to find that Wally and Yoshi had beat us home. Yoshi was in the shower! Yay! Wally claimed that they, too, had snapped off the outflow selector and that it wasn’t a big deal. I don’t believe him, but I appreciate the kindness. A pair of pliers and a little elbow grease, and the water was flowing again. The picture I posted above is from Sunday; after we left, Wally (or Yoshi? probably Yoshi) was able to fix the apparatus.

We spent the rest of Saturday puttering around between rain showers. The boys kindly made us lasagna for dinner; it was nice to eat in for a change after so many meals out. Most people know that Mark and I eat out a lot, and I’ve started to realize just how limited restaurant menus are. No one serves tuna and noodle casserole, for example, or chicken and stuffing, or a simple, unfussy pork roast.

We had breakfast Sunday at a little French place called Tanzy’s and then got ourselves on the road. Here’s a picture of Yoshi in traditional dress wishing us goodbye.

Just kidding. A Hudson resident stores puppets used in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade at his house, and this is one of them. Most of the windows in the house had odd faces staring out at the passersby.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. We drove to Niles and spent Sunday night with my mom and dad. Mom had another very welcome home-cooked meal waiting for us when we arrived, and as I generally do, I ate too much. Monday morning we left for home, and by 3, I was back at work catching up on emails and getting things out to clients. By 9, when I knocked off for the day, I felt like I was back to normal. When are we traveling again, Mark?