For July 4th this year, we were lucky enough to be invited to a firework-viewing party at UN Plaza. A friend of ours lives in a building with the perfect view down the Hudson, and after a couple of very pleasant hours eating, drinking and chatting in her apartment, we all eagerly headed up to the roof.
In an attempt to banish my really-not ready-for-it-to-be-December-yet feeling, I should finally get around to writing about Thanksgiving. Obviously this is not a holiday we had any previous experience of celebrating, but we’re very much in favour of cooking and eating extravagant meals so have enjoyed getting into the Thanksgiving habit over the last few years. So much has happened since I wrote about our first one here in the US, including meeting all sorts of lovely people who are happy to trek across to Hoboken to join us for dinner, and this year we had a lot of fun preparing and sharing a feast with some good friends.
(Interrupting the coverage of our holiday with a post about the long weekend.) Memorial Day is one of the few holiday weekends which coincides with a bank holiday back in the U.K., and it always feels rather nice to be doing long weekendy things at the same time. Unlike back in the U.K., when our bank holidays usually used to involve heading out of town to visit friends or relations, go hiking, or lengthen a trip to somewhere in Europe, here we often tend to use them as an excuse to veg out at home. Not so this time, however, when each day involved something fun with different sets of friends, although we did still manage a decently lazy morning on Monday!
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When Tom read my last New York post, about all the fun things we got up to with our recent visitor, he suggested that I was making our lives sound far more glamorous than they really are. I certainly don’t invent any of this stuff – we genuinely do go for rooftop cocktails, visit museums, enjoy walking tours, and so on – but of course the majority of our time is usually taken up with far more mundane things. I imagine you knew that already, but just in case I have deceived you into thinking that we live a more glamorous or exotic life than is really the case, I thought an account of our Thanksgiving weekend might present a more balanced view…
We mostly missed the Garden Street Halloween festivities this year, although we’ve been admiring the decorations going up over the past few weeks, because the return journey from our Kentucky trip had us arriving home just after 8pm last night. (Yes, we’ve been away again! Full details coming soon…)
We managed a quick look at the street in all its splendour as we walked up to collect a takeaway dinner, wending our way around the last remaining groups of trick-or-treaters. I did take the camera with me but was more focussed on food than photos, so here are just a few shots of my favourite displays:
Late last July we joined some friends on a weekend trip to the Berkshires, some beautiful hills in Western Massachusetts. Tom enjoyed it so much that he campaigned for another visit this year, and so it came to pass that last weekend saw us hopping in yet another rented car and heading northwards. Continue reading
In between the national parks, we’d decided to spend a couple of days driving through Montana. That is to say, given that we had to drive across more-or-less the entire state anyway, we opted to do this in a more leisurely fashion in order to break up the driving. This turned out to be a really good decision, as we visited several attractive little towns en route, and were able to enjoy the journey.
With my ongoing quest to visit all the States in mind, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to hop across into Idaho and add a third state to this particular trip (thereby bringing our current total up to 24). Consequently, the morning of July 4th saw us crossing the state line to take a float trip on the Snake River in Idaho’s Targhee National Forest.
Our latest excursion was a truly epic roadtrip between Grand Teton, Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. As always, it was a treat to get out into the wilderness (especially as we apparently missed the first proper heatwave of the NYC summer), and we spent a most enjoyable 9 days driving just over 1300 miles through mountains, forests and plains.
I recently returned home after almost three weeks in England. Tom was there too, but whilst he spent a fortnight mostly working in London, I was able to zoom around the country visiting friends and family, enjoying old haunts and taking in some new sights along the way.
Shockingly, and despite fairly regular visits to this part of the country, I had never been to Chatsworth. It was a delight to rectify this glaring omission, but next time I’ll have to go back to see the grounds – the pouring rain and chilly temperatures deterred us from lingering outside on this occasion.
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Leaves from the big apple 