Nantucket

"If you liked Chatham, you'd love Nantucket," I told Camille.  "It's just as cute and stylish, but there's a whole island of it."  Our Salt Lake neighbor, Carol Garza, visited Nantucket often, on her way home to Nova Scotia.  When I asked Carol if she loved Nantucket, she said, "No.  It's not real."  So there you have it--a cute, stylish place that doesn't feel quite real.  When I got home, I even found a romance novel titled, "Hotel Nantucket."  On June 24, 2022, we took a high speed ferry to Nantucket and spent the day.

Nantucket is 30 miles of open sea from the Cape.  Land completely disappeared from view for much of our one-hour sprint across the ocean.  We took the high speed ferry; regular ferries take four hours to reach Nantucket.

After walking onto the dock, we first bought ice cream—a scoop of black cherry chunk in a homemade waffle cone at a tiny shop.  There was a poster on the wall of the owners’ two boys holding surfboards at the beach. 

Flowers bloomed all over Nantucket on the June day when we visited.

The bakeries even sold cakes in the shape of hydrangeas!

We visited the Museum of Whaling.  It had many wonders.  There was an entire bleached whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling, with a whale boat beneath it—the vessel in which seamen swam up to the whale and harpooned it.  

There was a gallery of Nantucket's famous men and women.  Lucretia Mott, a prominent suffragette, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, came from Nantucket, as did British and American naval officers.

Scrimshaw, or engraving of walrus bone, was an art form perfected by sailors on long whaling voyages.

There was a "widow's walk" on top of the museum, from which we could look out to pier or down to the red brick sidewalks of the town.  Some of the streets were still covered with cobblestones.  Nantucket was a prominent whaling town from the 1740s until the Gold Rush of 1849 and then the Civil War.  As its young men went prospecting or fighting, and as the country turned from whale oil to coal for its energy, Nantucket faded into oblivion.  It was resurrected in the 1900s as a swank tourist haven.

We took an island van tour, with Roxie as our tour leader.  She drove a school bus all year, and she was as talkative and charming as any school girl, although she must have been in her sixties.  We drove through Nantucket town, past First House, and to the western end of the island.  We drove past summer house colonies, boats, and a chowder house/bar where summer folk and locals gathered.  

We then sat on the balcony of the Tavern in downtown Nantucket to have lunch, as we watched the yachts in the harbor and the ferry from Hyannis unloading its latest group of tourists.  

It costs $400 to bring a car on the high speed ferry, but only $70 to transport a person.  Most tourists, even those bringing luggage to stay a while, come without their cars.  The luggage is wheeled off the pier in a train of little blue trolleys.  Passengers then reclaim their bags on the main street, below the balcony where we ate lunch.

We were done with lunch by 3 p.m., and our ferry didn’t leave until 5:45.  We hiked up Main Street to the Hadwn House, an elegant, white Grecian-style home owned by Hadwn, one of the whaling captains of Old Nantucket.  

On the way, we passed many Colonial mansions.  On the ferry to Nantucket, we met a real estate developer from Boston who owned a home on Nantucket, in which he and his wife spent their weekends.  Perhaps one of these fancy houses was theirs.

The Hadwn house.

Inside, there were portraits and antiques owned by the whaling captain owner, as well as collections of china from England and the Orient.

There was also a collection of the island baskets which now sell for thousands of dollars, and a demonstration by a basket maker.  She was a retired Air Force officer with whom David struck up a conversation.  She had lived a fascinating life, serving as a flight nurse in the Philippines, Alaska, and numerous bases in the U.S.

As we strolled back to the pier, we passed by the old jail.

Dave has teased me about the absurdity of my suggestion, when we were remodeling our house, that we dig underneath to create a larger basement.  We saw contractors doing that very thing in Nantucket!

Boston VIII: Beached

Dave and I have a lot to learn about traveling.  On June 23, 2022, Camille and her children taught us how to spend a relaxed day strolling, shopping, lunching, and beaching.  
 

Camille, Sophie, Ezra, and Mia met Dave and me in Chatham, a stylish, upscale Cape Cod village just east of our very ordinary time share in South Yarmouth.  South Yarmouth had miniature golf putting greens and "pirate experiences."  Chatham had yachts and  designer clothes stores.

All the villages on the Cape have boats, hotels, beaches, and lots and lots of shops, but the quality varies.

We wandered along the main street of Chatham, with its white-painted boutiques and pastel valences.

"Violet's" was a typical store, with a window box and artistically curated clothes and gifts.

Dave didn't find anything of interest there.

You know you're in a stylish place when there's a blue-tiled dog bar on the sidewalk.

We paused from our shopping to share a box of fudge.

We paused again to eat lunch at one of the many cafes serving fish.

We found a long, deserted beach, took off our shoes, lay out beach towels, and sat and talked, as the gentle waves rolled in.   Sophie, Ezra, and Mia went exploring.

Since we were looking, rather than swimming, we didn't worry about the sharks looming offshore.

Boston VII: Mark Twain's Hartford

Dave and I visited the home of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) in Hartford, Connecticut, on June 21, 2022.  We found the visit very meaningful, partly because the house was beautiful and we love Twain's books, such as "Huckleberry Finn."   The visit was also meaningful because we learned more about Twain's tragic life.  His life story showed how unpredictable the world can be and that no one is immune from sorrow, no matter how successful in the world’s eyes.  

 

The home was a gorgeous, Arts and Crafts creation from the 1870s, which sheltered Twain during the happiest 17 years of his life.  Twain lived in the home from the year after his marriage until his three daughters were teenagers.

Twain left the house after bankrupting himself through his investment in a high-tech printing machine.  One of Twain’s three daughters died in the house while he, his wife, and their two other daughters were traveling around the world.  Twain made back the money he lost through his lectures during his round-the-world tour, but he never went home to Hartford again.  Twain’s wife also died while he was abroad, and then a second daughter died after Twain bought another house in Redding, Connecticut, for the two of them to live in.  The third daughter married and moved away.  Twain died at 74, the year after his second daughter’s death, a lonely and broken man, despite his brilliant career. 

Hartford is a strange city.  There are comparatively few tourist sites for the capital of a major state, and the ones it has have short hours.  The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford’s large and excellent art museum, is only open from Thursday through Sunday.  Connecticut's capital building (above) was described in our guidebook as "a beautiful ugly building."

The Museum of Connecticut History, which I visited, was a sparse, old-fashioned collection of portraits of its all-male governors dating back to the 1600s, when the governors were appointed by England.  The only other displays were random—a collection of Colt pistols, a group of posters showing the history of the WASPs (women pilots during WWII).  The economic statistics on the internet show Connecticut as 15^th last year among U.S. states with strong economies, yet central Hartford has a 14% unemployment rate and many downtown shops were boarded up.

After we discovered we could not visit the Wadsworth Atheneum, we drove to nearby New Britain to visit the unusually good American art museum in this small town. 

The art ranged from this early painting by George Catlin, who depicted Indian tribesmen, to modern American art.

There was a whole room of murals by Thomas Hart Benton, the regional painter from Missouri.

Many of the art museums we visited include special exhibits challenging the world view of classical painters.  This painting, by the American colonial painter, Ralph Earl, is titled "Gentleman with Negro Attendant."

Modern painter Titus Kaphar created a companion piece, "Joavan and the Unknown Gentleman."

This statue of a policeman was so realistic that we nearly asked him for directions!

In the evening, Dave and I attended an endowment session at the Hartford Temple.  The temple was in a suburb, Farmington, in a building with classical touches, including Greek columns.  Its style matched the churches which nearly every small New England town is built around.