Weekend Adventures

Somehow, in all these years of Sean's Notre Dame pals being friends, we've never gone on any kind of group trip or group vacation, and in general, I'm really OK with that. A month or so ago, however, we discovered that everyone was interested in a visit to Hyde Park to see FDR's presidential library. Sean and I went last summer, and Jordy brings her students there every spring, but the others hadn't been. We joked about spending a weekend upstate together, which turned into me perusing AirBnB to see what was out there, and--lo and behold--a three-bedroom house on 75 acres with a pond, waterfall, and a kitchen that looked straight out of a Nancy Meyers film. I was sold, and so were they, so we enjoyed a long weekend together there with the Quinns and Pintos.

The property was amazing! This was actually our first time using AirBnB in the US, as I was reminded when the owner, Peter, jokingly said he couldn't actually read any of my profile reviews since none of them were in English. He explained to me later that he and his wife, a crime novelist (a stack of her books were in the living room) had bought the entire property a few years ago. They live in "the big house," a sprawling building by the road, while the building we were staying in had clear been converted out of part of a barn, and at the time of their purchase was occupied on weekends by a group of women who came up from the city to ride their horses. (Every property we passed up there was a horse farm, a polo training farm, or a llama farm!) This explained why the AirBnb listing included the option to stable your horses on the property. Once these women were no longer tenants, Peter and his wife decided to try Airbnb, starting only this year--something you would not have guessed, given how comfortable the whole set-up was.

Friday night, Sean cooked pasta alla matriciana, followed by a cheesecake he had made the night before, and we played Exploding Kittens. We went to Hyde Park on Saturday, and I once again found the library not only historically fascinating, but a deeply moving experience. We were having lunch  when the heavens quite literally opened up, so instead of visiting the Vanderbilt mansion up the road, we went back to the house for a combination of napping, cards, and--for me--once the rain had stopped in the late afternoon, a few hours in an Adirondack chair by the pond, re-reading Julia Childs' My Life in France, courtesy of the house's well-stocked library. All of the day's humidity vanished, replaced by a cool breeze and even some sun. The rain fed the stream into the pond, at the far end, where a very large, elegant stork waited for lunch to no avail, and then poured into a short but surprisingly loud waterfall near where I was sitting. A group of large, brilliantly blue dragonflies raced each other up and down the edges of the pond, every so often flitting to the surface and causing tiny ripples. At distant intervals I would hear a gurgle and look up just in time to miss one of the pond's denizens disappearing under the surface--and no matter how long I tried to pay attention, it never came back to the same spot while I was looking. It was truly peaceful, and a pleasure to re-read the book itself under those circumstances. I told Sean on our way home that I don't really have any desire to learn to cook French food, because it's so rich that if I ever got good at it, we'd wind up suffering the "biliousness" that Julia and her husband were constantly struggling with! But I do love to read about it.

Saturday evening we drove up to Rhinebeck, where we stopped at the little candy store owned by Paul Rudd and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (alas, nowhere in evidence) and had a delicious dinner at Gigi's, a place I've had lunch with Carin and wine with Leslie, on different occasions. Our waiter was a charming (and loquacious) French-Canadian named Michele, who sold us on a future group trip to Quebec City! Four of us ordered the bolognese, which was delicious, and thanks to the large, late lunch one of those meals that I wasn't overly hungry for and thus could savor every bite. Afterward we drove to a local DQ-type place called Holy Cow for ice cream (no vanilla! A sacrilege. I declined to partake).

It took until just before our departure on Sunday to meet Toast, Peter and Cornelia's friendly black cat. He turned out to look exactly like Sapphire, but was much more partial to men than women. He also loves to jump into guests' cars, as Peter warned us as we were packing up. The genial Peter, in fact, was the final surprise of our weekend. As we were all driving home separately, Jordy texted us--she had decided that his face was familiar, and wondered if we thought he looked like an actor from Animal House. Sean agreed, but IMDB gave no information on his current whereabouts or marital status. Nicole did some phone sleuthing and found a local paper item, identifying our Peter as the actor, along with his wife Cornelia the crime author. Jordy was aggrieved that she hadn't known this before we left, while Sean was tickled to know that a Hollywood actor would be enjoying the gift we had left behind: the final quarter of his honey-ricotta cheesecake. This morning, Peter sent along a private note via AirBnb thanking Sean for his culinary gifts, haha.

Perhaps Quebec City will be next?

Le Petit Cafe Redux

We visited Le Petit Cafe for the third time a few weeks ago, in celebration of Sean's birthday. This time, we went with Linda and Gary, and, as I had predicted, the pleasure in sharing such a good meal and overall wonderful experience with them helped return some of the initial wonder we felt upon our first time there. It also helped that the pork loin entree that I chose on our first visit was once again on the menu, and the sauce was, again, revelatory in terms of flavor. I even liked the wine! This is a rare thing for me, since I almost always find French wines lacking in character, intensity, or something else ineffable, but we chose a bottle of 2012 Saint-Emilion and it was superb. We visted Saint-Emilion while we were staying near Bourdeaux, but I don't recall being particularly interested in their wine at the time. In fact, I only ever enjoyed 2 French wines while in France: the first, a red produced by a vineyard down the street from the B&B in Naujan-et-Postillac, which our hosts informed us was sadly entirely bought up, and second, a rose left in our AirBnb in Menilmontant in Paris, which was probably nothing special but which I could never locate again to test. What I remember about Saint-Emilion, beyond the picturesque nature of its hilltop streets, is a few caramels topped with sea salt, a local specialty--divine. 

It's also a rainy day, and I've spent it re-reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, an epistolary novel that was made into a wholly unsatisfying Netflix film. There was never going to be any way to do justice to the novel's structure, given that the main character, Juliet, never even sets foot on Guernsey until halfway through the book, but the casting of the movie was the worst part. They picked Lily James, the girl who played Cinderella, to play Juliet, and I just couldn't buy it. She looked about seventeen and like a stiff breeze would topple her! According to IMDB, previous efforts to adapt the book were going to star Kate Winslet (yes please) or Rosamund Pike (also great), but instead, we wound up with this limp waif. And yes, they had to shoehorn in a mystery and a romantic triangle that's handled much more amusingly in the book, as well as cut cut out nearly every hilarious and heartbreaking story of the Guernsey Nazi occupation--otherwise the entire thing would have been watching people write and read letters, and occasionally look off into the distance. Honestly, though, that might have been an improvement.