Category: Travel
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When nights are cold and daytime temperatures rise above freezing, sap starts to run, and buckets hang from maple trees all over rural New England. Visitors, eager for some diversion between ski season and summer, flock to sugarhouses to watch the evaporation process, buy maple products, and eat at sugarhouse restaurants. Colonists first learned about…
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My favorite city in Japan made the news a few months ago, following a burst of lava from the side of its volcano, Sakurajima, sited in Kagoshima Bay. Sakurajima has had small eruptions for some time now, which are of concern because a nuclear plant lies only 30 miles away. For me the concern is…
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In John Ford’s enormously seminal film The Searchers (1956), two men spend five years searching for a young girl who has been abducted by Indians. When they find her, she has entered her teens and become one of the chief’s wives. At first she declares her allegiance to the tribe but later changes her mind and…
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Gould's, the iconic sugarshack restaurant on Route 2 in Shelburne, has closed. Gould's has served tourists and locals alike since 1960 and will be sorely missed. Davenport Maple Farm Sugar Restaurant But off Route 2…
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Outside the store at Pine Hill Orchards No country experience satisfies like picking apples in the fall, especially when it’s followed by pies, soufflés, pancakes and every other sort of apple delight. In Charlemont we’re favored with four orchards in three nearby towns, Shelburne, Colrain, and Ashfield, and they all offer “Pick-Your-Own," from mid-September through late…
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Observing my china cabinet, a friend who knew my mother once observed that I had inherited her love of dishes. It’s not as though I never met a dish I didn’t like, but I do like far too many. Sifting through all the dinnerware suddenly available to me at Mill Brook House, it seems…
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I came around the corner of the house and stopped. A young bear, shiny and slender, a perfect ingénue, was crossing the road. She hung in the middle for a moment as she turned back for one, two, three (!) reluctant cubs, who came tumbling out of the underbrush and followed her across the road…
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The excitement from Labor Day’s shoot (2012) had barely settled down when another movie crew came to Shelburne Falls to film The Judge, a melodrama set in Indiana. Mistaking Shelburne Falls for a town in Indiana requires considerable suspension of disbelief, but, as Irving Thalberg told his art director, who complained about using an ocean…
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Arthur A. Smith Bridge, Colrain, MA The Arthur A. Smith Bridge is accessible from Route 112 and Lyonsville Road in Colrain. Unless on foot, you’ll need to choose one way or the other to go in because the bridge, which spans the North River, is today open only to bicycles and foot traffic. Named…
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For the first time since we bought the house, we made what used to be our annual trek to Tanglewood. Armed with eggs (boiled) and cheese from Goat Rising and bread and muffins from the Country Store, we headed southwest to the music camp. Arriving around 10:30, we found a shady spot for the…
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