Maggie's Farm

There seem to be just a few things a 3-day visitor to Newport can do to get the most out of the visit. (Like a real travel writer, I like to figure out the essence of a place quickly. I know that is not really possible without friends who live there, so I may BS a bit.)

Here's what I figured out:

1. Take a stroll down Thames St. and look at the boats and all of the cool piers and pubs.

2. Bike or take a hike down Bellevue Ave. from town out to the end, or, better, continue on and make it a bike ride all the way around the Ocean Drive back to the harbor. It's only about 12 miles.

3. Walk a few segments or more of the Cliff Walk. Do it early in the morning and beat the rush. 

4. Scout out the antique areas of town where the tourists and drinkers don't go, and there are no shops. The Point is one such neighborhood. Also, around Spring St. Probably plenty more nooks and crannies we didn't find.

5. If you must, check out the interiors of one or two of the grand "cottages." ("Cottage" means that they aren't really winterized. Summer places.) I don't really like them or want to see the insides, but it gives one an idea of what life could be like for an ambitious entrepreneur before the income tax, the corporate tax, and the SEC. And with 20-30 servants to keep things functioning smoothly.

6. Rhode Island seafood always seems to have a Portuguese spin on it. Even a bowl of steamers has hot peppers, red peppers, chorizo, and onions in it. Not bad at all, but not my favorite. Mrs. BD loved her grilled salmon with sweet barbecue sauce on a bed of pickled red cabbage. People say The Mooring has the town's best seafood. It is housed in the old Station #6 of the New York Yacht Club, which has moved to a quieter side of the harbor.

7. On a rainy day, I'd probably stop by the Tennis Hall of Fame, right on the main drag.

Photo from along the Cliff Walk, facing the Atlantic Ocean on the right. I think that is the charming Little Compton in the distance.

More random Newport pics below the fold.

A re-post -

The Greeks colonized Poseidonia - now Paestum - on the south-west coast of Italy (90 miles south of Napoli) around 650 BC. Poseidonia became the Roman city Paestum in 273 BC.

Paestum contains the finest complex of Greek temples in the world, which was discovered in 1762 by a road crew. They were built before the Parthenon was completed in the 400s (BC).

The modern town of Paestum is a seaside resort, but the reason to go there is to see the Greek temples outside of town. Our Dylanologist did just that (and brought me back a Paestum t-shirt!).

The splendid, if heavy-looking, Doric temple in this photo is known as The Temple of Hera ll.

Here's a photo of the 450 BC Temple of Hera l, later rededicated to Neptune. More info on the Hera l temple here.

Here's a photo bank of the contents of the Paestum Archaeological Museum.

A bit of commentary from the Great Buildings Online website:

When the ruins of Paestum were 'rediscovered' by 'antiquaries'�chiefly Johann Joachim Winckelmann�in the 1750s, "the ruins [were] then made widely known, and an enthusiastic appreciation of Greek art and architecture was also sparked...Because of Paestum, the Classic Revival was born with Greece, not Rome, ascendant."

� Deborah Fritz from G. E. Kidder Smith. Looking at Architecture. p16.

The three Paestum temples are all in the Archaic Doric style of heavy columns with capitals that are squat, or as Goethe termed them, 'oppressive.' By the time the Parthenon was finished (438 B.C.), columns were elegantly slender, capitals had an alert, load-bearing profile, and refinement attended every detail. Moreover, they were carved from Parian marble; Paestum's now crudely exposed shellstone shafts, it is only fair to say, were originally covered with lime stucco. As in Greece proper, the temples at Paestum face easterly so that the rising sun will awaken the statue within."

� G. E. Kidder Smith. Looking at Architecture. p16.

In a chat with an Italian guy from Torino with his two little kids and wife on the flight to Milan, he said "You are only visiting for ten days? In Italy, we have 8 weeks of vacation. We have been in the US for a month, two weeks in New York."

In a chat with a Brit on a ferry on Lake Como: "When you travel with a wife, you see villas and gardens. That's just what you do." They were on a one month trip around Italy.

When do these folks ever work? We talked with plenty of friendly people on our trip, including a Swiss gal who had come down from Bern to the lakes with her dog (travel in Europe is very dog-friendly) for a long weekend.

Some more Italy photos - a cafe in a pleasant piazza in Stresa with a bottle of our staple - the local Barbera:

 Another shot of the Isola Bella gardens:

A view from the funicular which connects Stresa with the ski village of Motterone. In the "Borromean Gulf," the left island of the triangle is Isola Pescatore, the far one is Isola Madre, and the one on the lower right is Isola Bella:

More photos on continuation page -

A re-post from June, 2008. Was it that long ago? Seems like yesterday...It was a fine trip.

We took a day, last week, to hop the train over to Lake Como (and to stop by the Como Duomo), and took the fast ferry up to Villa Carlotta in Tremezzo - and then across the lake to Bellagio to see the equally renowned gardens of Villa Melzi.

The 17th-18th century Villa Carlotta and its gardens were a traditional and necessary stop on the "Grand Tour" of "the Continent." We anglophiles like to follow in those old paths.

It is impossible to capture on camera the feel of such vast and varied gardens, which are, in effect, both botanical gardens with worldwide collections of plants, and ornamental gardens designed to impress as much as to delight - some formal Italian and some English-style.

For example, these gardens have bamboo groves, Sequoia groves, acre-sized plantings of azalea, palm collections, collections of cacti, citrus arbors, etc. Even a turtle pool with happy and smiling American southern Red-eared Sliders and Cooters.

This photo is the entrance:

More of my mediocre photos on continuation page below -

The Pisa Mountains, on the road to Lucca in the Arno valley. It's too hazy to see Pisa in the distance.

If and when you visit Tunis, you will go to the Bardo Museum. The buildings themselves are a 13th Century Ottoman (technically, Husseinite) palace which has been a museum since 1888. It contains the world's largest collection of Roman mosaics, but the buildings are wonderful too.

This Mom and daughter were boat friends.

 More Bardo photos below -

Less than an hour outside Tunis is Sidi Bou Said, the blue and white waterfront town made famous by artists and writers. By remarkable coincidence, our Dylanologist had just been reading a piece on organic urban development in Sidi Bou Said: Decoding Sidi Bou Said at Emergent Urbanism.

It's the city of the Jasmine flower. I only took a few snaps, but there are more here. I was too busy bargaining with the Tunisians. In North Africa, nothing has an assigned price. It's all negotiation, and in the souks of Tunis it can get a bit overly-aggressive - almost physical. No, it does get a bit physical at times when they grab your arm to pull you into their shop, or try to block your escape. I did accuse Mrs. BD of possessing Berber blood because she is so good at the game, but I did need to assert a masculine presence one time when the guy didn't want to give her her change for her twenty.

The temperature was 110 F. I sweated until my body ran out of sweat.

Women were advised to wear modest clothing when visiting Tunisia, but the sexy outfits of these local young local women surprised me. However, about half of the women there wore scarves or burkhas.

The isle of Capri (in Italian, accent on the first syllable) helps form the Bay of Naples. It is all steep granite mountains and crags rising out of the sea. The beaches are rocks. You get there from Napoli via high-speed hydrofoil ferries.

Roman emperors (Tiberius, Augustus) had get-away villas there, but the Brits re-popularized it as a fashionable summer spot in the 1800s. We found it to be full of Brits and Italians (the Italian women dressed to the nines, of course and the American women dressed for a visit to WalMart) on holiday.

From our ferry, here's another Capri ferry passing in front of Vesuvius and Naples suburbs in the background. (We opted out of Herculaneum or Pompeii - been there, done that.)

Besides Capri pants and their ceramics, the island is famous for their hand-made women's sandals. Thus Mrs. BD spent a few hours sandal-shopping. Here's the workbench at a sandal shop, when the guy stepped away for a minute. His sandals cost around 160 Euros. He will make one for your feet, with your choice of design and decoration, in about an hour. I guess he makes close to $200/hour or more with his talent, skill, and fashion sense.

More Capri snaps and comments below -

Among other cool places, I am headed for Carthage in a week or two. 

It's called Tunisia now. Phoenician imperialists colonized the place. It was once the bread-basket of the Roman Empire. Wheat.

Today, the people there are mostly Berbers. St. Augustine was a Berber as was, of course, his Mom, Saint Monica.

I am studying up, as I always do before I go somewhere. The way I approach every subject is to begin with the big picture, and then to work my way into the details as time and interest permit. For me, the history Big Picture is my 5000 BC to 1900 AD time line.

Will bring cameras, fully charged. With the strange DC currents and strange plugs over yonder, you cannot expect to recharge the batteries. I guess I do need a third camera or spare batteries for a trip like this, but it seems like a waste of money.

Maybe I can find one of my old ones somewhere but who knows if I can find the chargers for them?

Here's St. Vincent de Paul Cathedral in Tunis. St. Vincent de Paul was sold into slavery, and ministered to other Christian slaves in north Africa. The country is now 98% Moslem, but they have a tradition of tolerance to their Christians and Jews, and their Islam is not of the hateful sort at all.

Plus I just learned we are stopping by Capri too. I haven't been there, but my kids have. What next? She has constructed this trip to be a surprise for me, and gives me one detail at a time so I can learn.

We'll recycle things from the archives, but nothing new during vacation break.

Here's my final big batch of Wellfleet architecture photos. Our prayer is that Wellfleet be never yuppified, and that it remain ramshackle, weather-beaten, weedy, and perfectly imperfect. Like Nantucket, before the Beautiful People discovered it in the 1980s as an alternative to the Hamptons.

Hatch's has been there since before I was a little kid, with the same sign with a Striper eating a lobster. If you ask them to keep some Toro (Bluefin tuna belly), they will have it for you the next day, if not sooner. It's the best food in the world (flash-grilled over charcoal, not as sushi).

This grand old boathouse on the harbor is a great place to rent for the summer, but it's booked years in advance, and it ain't cheap. Yes, that is�low tide. There is water against the pilings at high tide:

�Lots more photos below the fold on continuation page -

Back by popular demand!

This funny but handsome hodge-podge of a place�is called Morning Glory, now undergoing long-delayed major renovation and necessary graffiti:

�I like this simple�look very much. It could use a garden, though. Or maybe not.

More on continuation page below -

Back from my annual trip to family-friendly, glitz-free�Wellfleet on Cape Cod, whence no opportunities for fresh posting. You talk about Obama stickers - good grief. Never saw so many of 'em. Just a solitary NOBAMA bumper sticker, and�one Ron Paul sticker on a plumber's old F-150: the self-employed are an independent lot.

Only regret: no time to stop by and visit with our friend�Sipp on the way. With the vacation traffic, the drive took us 7 migraine-inducing stop-and-go traffic�hours.

Despite the drive, the Cape is where I need to go to clean my brain with (all-organic)�cold salt water and to refresh my innards with fresh Wellfleet oysters.�Here's where we stay:

�Here's the view of the harbor and our�home beach�from our deck, with its tiny boardwalk across the little�salt marsh:

More photos of the place on continuation page below -

A re-post from last spring:

Mohonk. My Gramp's favorite place, and one of my Pa's favorites, if you don't include Tuscany or Norway. When you arrive, your first view of the place in the woods�is astonishing. Great rock-climbing in the Gunks.

Tanglewood. Stay in Lenox, or at the 200 year-old �Red Lion in Stockbridge, not too far from Maggie's Farm.

Chatauqua.�Yes, it still exists and is going strong, with mental stimulation.

The Mount Washington Hotel. A grand year-round place, if you ski or snowshoe.

Chatham Bars Inn.�Mostly summer, on the elbow of the Cape. My preference for the Cape is early September: water is warm, the crowds thin out, and the migratory birds are everywhere.

Monhegan Island. Get away from it all, even more so than Cuttyhunk.

Wellfleet. The real old regular-folks Cape, without the nouveau riche of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard and their Hummers.

Photo: Monhegan Island, from this guy's photo site