Vacationland!

We went to Maine! We picked up Duchess (fresh from three weeks in Sweden) in the airport in Boston and headed north to visit family, experience the heat and humidity and mosquitoes of an East Coast summer, and have some classic Southern Maine adventures.

We spent a week by Sebago Lake, with appropriate amounts of swimming, kayaking, beach-sitting, shuffleboarding, ice cream-eating, LL Bean trips, and tennis. 

We played a round of traditional family Extreme Croquet, which Papa Big Cook won, AS ALWAYS. Antarctic Uncle gave the girls impromptu driving lessons in a stick-shift beater over the grass on his property. We got to take a sail on Casco Bay. We ate fish and chips and lobster rolls and soft-serve ice cream. It was a delight.

And then we spent half a day in Boston, revisiting a few places and recreating some photos from a visit a decade ago. 

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Stockholm

I went to Sweden! I had to pick up Skipper from camp, and I did some touristing on my own in Stockholm and also got to visit some family and friends as a wonderful bonus. 

I really enjoyed poking around Stockholm on my own and with Skipper. The transit (including ferries!) is fantastic, the public spaces are abundant and delightful (if short on public bathrooms), the bike and pedestrian infrastructure is good, and the cardamom buns are delicious. Skipper declared that Stockholm has "cool old stuff and nice new stuff" and she's not wrong.

I stayed part of the time in a hostel in a former prison in Södermalm. 

Katarina kyrka

City Hall

Bonkers statue of St George and the dragon in Storkyrka. I loved this dragon, which was carved in the 15th century and has spikes made of antlers and generally is extremely cool.

Gamla Stan

The rest of Stockholm.

I got to visit museums, wander around on my own, eat a million cardamom buns, and spend time with family and friends I haven't seen in over twenty years, and that was all wonderful. 

Summer

 It's summer. It's a weird one. The day after school ended, Cook and Skipper went to Detroit, realizing a longtime dream of Skipper's. They watched three baseball games at Comerica Park, and of course the Tigers lost every game badly. Fortunately, Cook and Skipper were emotionally prepared for that outcome, and took it in stride. They did some other touristing - they saw the Little Caesars global headquarters, and looked across the lake to Canada. They seem to have had a very good time. They even got to attend a game with one of my excellent cousins, who schlepped up from Champaign for the occasion. He's a White Sox fan, but Cook and Skipper forgive him. While they were gone, Duchess and I ate snacks for dinner. It was delightful.

Once the dust settled from that adventure, Duchess started work (as a camp counselor at the Dungeons-and-Dragons-in-the-wilderness program she used to attend herself), and moved into her boyfriend's family house to dogsit for them while they were in France for 2 weeks. She found this much more taxing than she expected - long days of non-stop child-wrangling followed by dog-wrangling and house-keeping feels like a lot. And then a crow got stuck in the chimney at the house, and died slowly and horribly over three days (in a heatwave) while we slowly figured out a) that something was in the chimney,*b) that it was a crow, c) that it couldn't get out, d) which organizations/companies will remove a live crow from a chimney,** e) that the company that WOULD remove a live crow from a chimney couldn't come onto the property without signed permission from the homeowner, who was asleep in France at the relevant time. It was awful. And then their refrigerator died, and Duchess and Cook spent hours cleaning up the mess. The lesson here is NEVER HOUSESIT.

And then we sent Skipper to Sweden. By herself. For a MONTH. She was very clear-eyed in the planning that it would be challenging and lonely for her, but she wanted to do it. However, as the date approached, she felt increasingly terrified, and so did I. But she set her shoulders and got on that plane, and launched into the unknown. She is spending a couple of weeks couchsurfing with our generous relatives, including a long stint at the family summerhouse, and then attending a 2-week Swedish language camp in Stockholm. (I'm going to Sweden for the last week of her tenure, to see friends and family and do some touristing in Stockholm before retrieving her.) Here she is (photo courtesy of my mom) with another of my excellent cousins. 

And here is that same cousin with me and my brother at the summerhouse a long time ago.

And here she is with my mom (photo courtesy of my excellent cousin).

We miss her terribly, and it's really weird being without her. Duchess is still housesitting, and Cook and I are getting a preview of empty-nesting (except that Duchess comes over for dinner and drops off her dirty laundry, and needs our help with crows and other crises). It is clear that I need something to do with myself in the post-children-in-the-house era; I think I need to invest over the next few years in figuring out some hobbies.

* Please, for everybody's sake, CAP YOUR CHIMNEYS.

** Chimney sweeps, for example, won't remove a live bird.

Vacationing far from home

 We did it! We left the Pacific Northwest!

Day One: Flying For A Very Long Time. Flight was fine, transit was a struggle, but we finally made it to the hotel in the evening, and sallied out into Midtown Manhattan. 

Day Two: A View, and a Lot of Walking. We ate Bagel #1, went to the Top of the Rock to see the view, and made a loop of St. Patrick's, Grand Central, and the public library. (The public library! And there was an awesome exhibit!) We rounded off the day with a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the girls spend a weirdly long time looking at armor.

Day Three: Boats, Immigration, and George Washington. We did a classic tourist trip to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and then visited the Fraunces Tavern to think about George Washington. (Skipper, who had finished an 800-page biography of George Washington just in time, regaled us with oddball factoids.) We spent the evening in Jersey City with family, and Skipper resolved to start that author's biography of Alexander Hamilton. 

Day Four: The Future, Central Park, and Moving to Chelsea. Duchess and Cook went uptown to tour a college that Duchess is interested in, and Skipper and I went uptown to stand in a really long line to get a really good bagel. This bagel, Bagel #2, was the best of our trip and possibly my life. We met up at Central Park for some wandering, and it turns out that Central Park is very lovely. We went to Chelsea to check into our vacation rental, and spent the evening enjoying having separate rooms with doors. Three days in a single hotel room is a lot. We also bought the Alexander Hamilton biography. 

Day Five: East Village. We ate Bagel #3, visited Washington Square Park, Union Square Park, Tompkins Square Park, and a lot of things between, including the Strand Bookstore and a stop to try Bagel #4 (my second favorite of the trip). We ate some kind of delicious stuffed flatbread. 

Day Six: High Line and Then Culture. We spent the morning on the High Line, which is beautiful and incredibly good civic infrastructure. We visited Little Island, which is just fun, and then hustled back uptown to drop the girls off at Hadestown (birthday present for Duchess, who loves Broadway). Cook and I went to MOMA, where we discovered a mutual fondness for the kind of art that involves big blocks of color. We wrapped up the day with ramen.

Day Seven: Thanksgiving, I Guess, and Brooklyn, and a Long Trip Home. It made our plane tickets substantially cheaper to fly home on Thanksgiving day, so we spent one last day in New York before our 8pm flight home.  We ate Bagel #5 (it was okay), crossed the bridge, walked along the Heights and then across the Squibb Bridge to the waterfront, all of which was lovely. We went to a bakery and then made one last long walk back to the luggage storage place to soak up just a little more New York ambiance. And then we came home, to pick up our real life again!

It was a great trip, really dense with experiences and carbohydrates, and if I ever go back to New York City, I will know exactly where to go for my bagels.