Second Day Tourism

Well, the visas didn't come through on time and the new flight plan has us leaving next Tuesday, so I needn't have rushed to go anywhere! The P family are all really busy, so I'll likely end up just doing my computer work at their house for most of the time. Being this close to Boston is so tempting, but there's not any reasonable train service from Hartford and taxis and rentals are way too expensive. So here I am!

Anyway, speaking of sight-seeing today some of the P family and I drove(In the Toyota Highlander) up and over the Massachusetts line to Old Sturbridge Village. OSV is a village made up of various early nineteenth-century buildings that were moved to the location to make a living history museum.

There were two church buildings- a Congregationalist church and a Quaker meeting place. This is the Congregationalist church(Have I mentioned that I am Presbyterian?). All the buildings were fairly simple and I would say perhaps not completely furnished; some of the houses were set up more like museums while others were more like the living history sites I know.

Here's the entrance to the Parsonage. Most of the homes had wallpaper of this style; some of them may have been stenciled. The Village was pretty quiet, since we went on a weekday and school is in; so that was nice. However, because of that and because it's off-season, there were fewer reenactors about.It might be worth it to go on a busier weekend just to talk to more reenactors.

Most of the homes had bread ovens in the kitchen fireplaces, which I thought was nice. The Fort back home is too rustic to have bread ovens. There were some fireplace spiders for sale here, but the cheapest was $60. I don't know if that's normal or not, but that's too much for me to pay at present just to simplify my rare fireside cooking.

 

Mr. and Mrs. P outside of the Parsonage. They've been so gracious to have me, especially since my planned four day stay has turned into ten.

This was the grandest house among the lot; it had Masonic paintings all over one big room upstairs which made for a rather creepy dance hall. There was also a basement kitchen that had a low ceiling- I touched it.

 

There were several very nice herb gardens around the Village that must have taken a great deal of upkeep. Unfortunately by the end of our tour it was raining rather steadily, so only one garden was photographically captured.

Many of the doors and woodwork trim were colorfully painted. I liked that, but I think overall the overdone multi-colored paisley-floral prints, wallpapers, curtains and clothing of the 1830's are not quite my style of choice. It totally made me think of the "Cranford" busybodies.

I like wood.

There were several spinning wheels, but none of them were in use. There was also a very interesting water-run carding machine(for carding un-spun wool), a gristmill and sawmill. It took us nearly all the five hours we planned for to see most of the Village. We did pause for lunch at the "Tavern" which actually had pretty good food. I had New England chowder for the second time in my life, only this time I had it in New England. So it was a good long day, well spent.