July 27: Another literary hero and two months on the road as of today

Today I drove more winding backroads, crossing into New York state, until I reached a bridge over the Hudson River. My photos of it aren’t very good, but I tried…

Another state. I think this is #19? 20?

Over the Hudson River.

A view of the Hudson from the other side.

Then I wound down the eastern side of the river until I got tangled in some serious traffic, er, made it to Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, where Washington Irving built his house, and set the most famous of his short stories.

No, that so-ridiculous-it’s-fun (at least for the first couple of seasons) TV show of the same name isn’t filmed here. It’s actually filmed in South Carolina, but it is set here. And apparently there’s been a small Twilight-esque run on this place in the last few years because of it. Not to the extent that Forks, Washington, has been taken over, but enough that the lady who sold me my ticket to visit the house looked like she wanted to roll her eyes at me when I commented on it.

Irving was the first person in the United States to make his living writing fiction. He wrote a lot of other things, too, history and satire and so forth, but it was his fiction that made his name. His house was the second most visited home in the 19th century, after Mount Vernon.

It’s a pretty cottage (Irving’s word), described by our guide as a pastiche of many architectural styles, from Dutch to Spanish. The front door is all but encased in wisteria, ivy, and bad hair day (trumpet) vine, and it took an act of will for me to get through it [wry g]. I did remember that from my first visit here, in April, 1981, with my mother while I was visiting my parents during the year and a half they lived in Connecticut.

According to the plaque, this sycamore tree on the Sunnyside property was alive during the Revolutionary War.

The front of Sunnyside, almost smothered with wisteria on the left and trumpet vine on the right.

The back of Sunnyside, with the docent who took us through.

Believe it or not, this is Sunnyside’s ice house.

It was fun to see the house again, though. It stayed in the Irving family (Washington Irving was a bachelor, and he left the house to his nieces) until the 1940s, over a hundred years after it was built, and it was purchased not long after that by the Rockefellers and preserved as a historic site, so it’s in much the same condition (and filled with much of the furniture) it was in when Irving died.

Anyway, I enjoyed it, as I always do this sort of thing. The last time I was here it snowed that night and knocked the power out at my parents’ house. Too bad we couldn’t split the difference between that visit and this one. The house itself isn’t air-conditioned. Thank goodness for thick stone walls. It could have been much worse inside than it was.

After I left Sunnyside, I headed for Danbury, Connecticut, and listee Irene, who offered me a bed for a couple of nights. Her parents hosted the listee curry party at Denvention in 2008, which was great fun, and we’ve corresponded off and on ever since. She has a nice place nestled on a hillside, and I hope she’s having as nice a time hosting me as I have being her guest.

Tomorrow I shall explore around Danbury (Irene has to work), and then on Friday I am headed for the Connecticut coast and Mystic Seaport. Beyond that, we’ll just have to see.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

July 28: Wandering around Danbury, and state parks that shouldn’t have historic names

Last night, Irene and I walked around her neighborhood, which has houses built over 200 years ago. That was fun, if a bit hot and sweaty, and dark by the time we got back. We also ate Thai food for supper, which was another first for me. I’d always thought Thai food had to be really hot and spicy, so I’d always avoided it. Turns out I was wrong. I had pad thai with shrimp and lots of bean sprouts, and it was quite delicious.

This morning I was looking at my map and noticed a state park named after Franklin Delano Roosevelt that was only about thirty miles away, so I decided to go check it out. Irene tells me that it’s only a ten minute walk to the train station and a two-hour ride to go into New York City, but NYC intimidates the heck out of me. Someday I’ll fly into JFK and actually stay in the city somewhere, but for now, no. By the time I got there I’d only have four hours or so to do stuff before I’d have to turn around and come back.

Anyway, so it turns out because the roads are so twisty and turny and go through so many little 30 mph towns, thirty miles took about an hour. And when I got there, it turned out that it wasn’t a historic park at all. In which case why name it after him? Oh, well.

I came back and went to the Danbury Railway Museum, after getting a recommendation for the diner across the street where I ate a huge Italian grinder for lunch. Grinder appears to be the local term for a sub sandwich. Anyway, it was good.

And the museum was fun. It had four working model railroad setups, and lots of railway artifacts, and, outside, at least twenty vintage rail cars, engines, and cabooses, some of which you could go inside of. I went in a couple of them, but my nemesis the weather drove me back inside, which was fine.

The Danbury Railway Museum.

A whole rack of antique railway brochures. The one fourth from the right in the fourth from the top row is for the Spokane, Portland, and Seattle Railroad [g].

One of the four model railway layouts, each with a button to push to make it run.

Some of the many antique railway cars in the museum’s yard.

I’m not quite sure what the purpose of these pink pigs is, but I thought they were cute.

A slightly more than 100 year old steam engine.

I came back to Irene’s and now I’m catching up on things and figuring out where I’m heading tomorrow and where I’m going to spend the night. It’s supposed to be cooler in general tomorrow, and cooler on the coast than here, so I’m going to see about camping for the first time since I fell out of the van. We’ll see how that goes.

Heading east by north. It’s funny how the coastline runs east-west in this part of the world.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.