This may be a little more mundane than usual, but it went so quick I wanted to write it all down so I remember it MYSELF........

We were off from Saturday through Wednesday. Saturday we just sat and watched the rain--except when the gutter filled up and I had to go up on an aluminum ladder during a thunderstorm to scoop it out.

Well no, that's not entirely true--we did do something Saturday. Since we were on vacation we elected to do something really unusual, something we never do. So we went to Paramus Park Mall--on a Saturday. (Home, you'll recall, to Dean F***ing Friedman and Ariel. No fault of mine.) We also went to Home Depot. And we had lunch at Nathan's, at the FOOD COURT. Wheeeee!!!!

We also noted that, in this mall, the Yankee Candle Co. has their own little shop. They're those folks that make overpoweringly scented candles in a couple of dozen flavors. We also hooked one of their little brochures, and that'll be important later. We came home with a few new candle flavors, including Patchouli. I'm saving that one for whenever we entertain officers of the DEA. See if it reminds 'em of anything.

It really takes so very little to make me happy.

Late that evening our friends in Pennsylvania called and we made arrangements to go out and see them the following evening. They took us and their kids to a Tex-Mex place called Jack Creek's, which we had coincidentally enough already eaten at, with our OTHER friends from Pennsylvania. That's right, we're personally acquainted with the only four people from the Lehigh Valley who are NOT card-carrying Nazis. But that may have something to do with them all coming from elsewhere originally. Matt, along with being my ex-bass player (that's him with the gray hair in that marvelous wedding video) is also my ex-wife's cousin--which does not make him a Nazi necessarily, but you have to be careful about these things. His wife Patty is from Nutley NJ; which, if you're from around there, is properly pronounced with a full glottal stop in place of the "T". Also you can always tell people from suburbs of Newark because they pronounce it "Nork." Was this more than you needed to know?

Anyway we had fun, we came home. The next morning we set out for....where? We had vague ideas of tooling through Massachusetts and Connecticut, areas we have not really explored 'cept for Boston, and we decided to just wing it. Sort of. Wendy had saved a whole shopping bag full of travelogues and articles, which we brought.

And didn't we just happen to notice that the Yankee Candle Co. is HQ'd in Western Massachusetts? The perversity of visiting it was undeniable. Here we were, eating up extremely precious vacation time in such a silly fashion. Well, anyway.

We went over the Bear Mountain bridge and thence up the Taconic. We were gonna ring your doorbell and run or something but we didn't want to waste any time. We were heading to Stockbridge and Housatonic--mainly to locate the Alice's Restaurant church, which we did--only after several blind alleys. We had once again been visited by a horrible scourge and severe test of our marriage, which keeps recurring as some sort of Seraphic Practical Joke, I'm convinced: I call it WMS, or "Wendy Map Syndrome."

For literally several years, whenever I was driving and she was navigating, we'd get lost. The conversation would usually end up something like this: "CAN'T YOU EVEN READ A F***ING MAP???? WHAT ARE YOU, RETARDED????" I know it's difficult to imagine me saying such a thing. For these purposes, stretch it.

It wasn't until several years went by--I mean that, SEVERAL YEARS--that she forced me to actually look at the map that was currently causing such trouble, and I found to my consternation that the map was wrong. Way wrong. This kept happening, over and over. There was one instance, a couple of years ago, when we were trying to find my brother-in-law's Shore House in Barnegat. We had an actual municipal street map of the town, and the entire development his house was in was beautifully laid out on the map. Except it showed a thru street where there wasn't one. She had me going around and around and around this big suburban whorl until I was screaming my fool head off at her. Then we stopped and I looked at the map. Duh.

So, anyway, we have this book that states quite clearly that Arlo's church is on a road that's "East of Route 183" when in fact it goes SOUTH (parallel) off the WEST side, and is of course unmarked. So WMS hit us again, and I drove back and forth MANY times over a very large area. We finally stopped in a bookstore back where we started and got a map, on which I couldn't find the road. Wendy found it, of course. But at this point I was afraid that if I listened to her the car might explode or something. We drove to the church. So there.

Apparently Arlo's various businesses are all run out of that building now, and there was a sign up front that said, "Visitors ring bell." I did this but nobody came.

"Waiting For Goduthrie."

So I took pictures of the outside and we sped back into town. Before locating a suitable hostelry we made a quick side trip down the road a few miles, to a town called Otis. Turns out that when my bride was in high school, she and her family stayed there, in a vacation home owned by some photographer her mom worked for. She had no idea where the house was or what the address might be, and against all odds we FOUND IT. So she wandered around the grounds for awhile and then drove back through Stockbridge to Great Barrington, found a motel, killed and ate the concierge and checked in.

This motel was right on the edge of the parking lot with the bookstore where we bought the map. It was dinnertime, so we walked to the nearest non-McDonald's eatery, a little restaurant called "Jodi's" across the street. Nice place. Why I'm mentioning it at all is because of what I ate.

I am definitely not Mr. Adventurous when I'm spending my own money in a restaurant. Please sir just bring me a nice large slab of something red that turns brown and crackly when you heat it up, and that'll do. Oh yes, and a potato. But for some reason the last item on the menu caught my eye. Ostrich. I had to ask the waitress, first of all what it was doing there and second what it might taste like. She obviously answers this question quite a bit. I was expecting the usual "tastes like chicken." Beef, she said.

So I ATE IT. It was great. Like beef but softer. And considerably less fat, apparently.

(Considering "Jodi's" just in general--go there. Breakfast also was excellent. They had James Taylor on the Muzak. "Oh, the Berkshires seem dreamlike...." Yep--there they are right there out the window just past the syrup.)

Afterwards we walked across to get milk at a place called, and I'm not kidding, "Price Chopper." We thought that an unusual name, so we started calling it other, similar names. Price Murderer, Price Ax-Wielding Maniac, Price NRA Lobbyist, Price Virus, and my favorite: Price Entropy. "Welcome to Price Entropy! Everything must go! Or NOT!!!"

If you think that's funny, imagine two people walking across a parking lot in Massachusetts HOLLERING it.

So we're waltzing down the cookie aisle, and I natch went straight for the Chips Ahoy--there IS no other cookie as far as I'm concerned, although I have developed a taste for the "Reduced Fat" version, which are just fine. So Wendy was considering some other kind of cookie and I demurred. She, in a classic case of Good Point Badly Timed, said "You never wanna try anything different!" I replied, of course, with "I JUST ATE A F***ING OSTRICH!!!!"

And if you think that's funny, imagine two people in the middle of a supermarket in Massachusetts HOLLERING it.

So we got our milk and cookies anyway, and we had 'em while we watched Comedy Central, which we cannot get at home. Every place we ever go on vacation, they have Comedy F***ing Central and I can't get it here in Bergen County, where cable TV costs $884 a month for twelve channels, six of which are FOX affiliates.

The next morning we went back to Jodi's for breakfast (a KILLER omelette, as aforementioned, I must go back there) and then hit the big highway outta town. We always make a point of avoiding major highways and interstates whenever possible, preferring to see how the PEOPLES is. Especially on a fall foliage vacation like this one here.

We squiggled through the bowels of Western Massachusetts, on our way to South Deerfield and--Yankee Candle!

They have a huge Xmas shop, and an old-time candle dipping demonstration, and the actual "factory works" are behind glass so you can gape at the workers. All of this, which should by rights be totally stultifying, was really quite interesting. Then there's that big room in the middle......

Turns out they don't, in fact, make dozens of flavors as I said earlier. There are over a hundred. Grape to Rosemary to Coffee to Licorice. Most are really quite faithful, except for the citrus ones, which have an unmistakeable touch of St. Joseph's Baby Aspirin. Why is that?

Anyway, when all this s**t hits your nose at the same time, it's quite overwhelming. Then, of course, you stupidly start picking them up, one by one, and sniffing them to see which ones you like best. Well, by the fifteenth or twentieth sniff, you literally can't smell it anymore. You have to take 3, 4, 5 drags, and you wonder "What is this doing to my lungs? My blood? My brain?"

So we copped a little sampler box of 18, (assorted), and got back out into the oxygen. My sinuses were actually burning. But it was fun.

From here we headed down some local highway, to Sturbridge. I had gone on a class trip to Old Sturbridge Village when I was about 8 years old, and remembered liking it--Wendy of course had a brochure, why wouldn't she, so we went there. We were getting a little short on time, though. They close at five and we got there at 3:30. But we whipped through it fast and managed to see the whole thing, in time. Also very neat.

If you take a look at a map and try to chart our progress (remembering that it was all on little local roads) your head will be spinning much as ours were. The choice, at 5:15 PM, was to find a place to stay or Get Outta Dodge. Our final tentative destination was Hartford, and we decided we could make it by dinnertime if we booked. So we went.

This is where the trouble started. We had been remarkably lucky thus far--when we needed a place to eat, there'd be one. When we needed a place to spend the night, there was one there. But that's because we had been in tourist areas outside of major cities.

We came into Hartford from the East side on the Interstate--no avoiding it in this case--just as it was getting dark. I veered off into the city proper. The tape we were listening to was Tom Waits singing Diamonds On My Windshield.

We had the AAA tour book to aid us in finding a place to stay, and as it turned out the ramp dumped us into the middle of town right by the Hartford Civic Center. This'll be easy, I figured. So right after that we passed a Ramada Inn, and I was going to stop--but Wendy said to keep going and head for the outskirts of town and find something cheaper.

This would be the part of the movie when the Ominous Music Cue comes in.

Very quickly we got smacked on the head, hard, with another case of WMS. She was trying to juggle two small and incomplete maps, each of which had about half the useful roads. Hopeless. Of course I. as usual, am not looking at said maps, and as usual I figure that my bride has left her brain in her other pants.

We continue on, thoroughly lost. The city turns after only a couple of blocks into some sort of Depressed Area, and a few blocks after that into an extremely ritzy suburb, and then dead-ends into a golf course. I briefly consider burying my bride on the 18th green until I realize that it's only WMS. That doesn't, of course, make us any less lost, but it does prevent mayhem at least. We back out and veer off into an adjacent town and sit in a parking lot fuming over the AAA book. We briefly consider some really cheap place and finally elect to go BACK TO THE RAMADA INN.

We, of course, get lost AGAIN trying to get there, but we get there. We check in, and walk up to the Civic Center to find a place to eat, and end up in their little food court at "Wendy's." There's a huge crowd milling around at the Civic Center, people of all ages, and scalpers doing whatever it is they do. We're looking for some kind of sign to tell us what might be going on here tonight. All I'm sure of is that it's not Metallica.

We finish eating and wander off down the street. Some helpful lady sees us looking up at the sign and brightly chirps, "David Copperfield tonight!" DAVID COPPERFIELD???

She asks us if we're here to see the show and I say we're just "wandering around." She helpfully says, "Well, be careful wandering around Hartford!"

I was successfully able to overcome the temptation to honk "We're from New York, you Rube!" and just thanked her. Besides, what do WE know? Maybe we're stomping around a part of Hartford that is in fact the "turf" of The Savage Republican Crips or some such.....

Well, we repaired to our room after wandering around the Civic Center Mall for a bit.

The next morning we elected to walk around the middle of the city for a bit and have breakfast, then head out for our ultimate destination, the Mark Twain House. So we walked up the hill and tried to go have breakfast--can you believe there is not one single place in the entire Center City of Hartford where you can sit down for breakfast and have a waitress hand you a menu? There was one place that looked possible, built into a glass pedestrian overpass, but it turned out to be a self-serve cafeteria. No. So after searching for an hour, we elected instead to just check out and DRIVE till we found a place to eat. THAT would be easy, right?

Nope. We ended up going back to the mini-mall in whose parking lot we had perused the AAA book the night before--WAY outta town, in West Hartford. But there was a Friendly's there.

I avoid Friendly's, as a rule. I have never found them to be Friendly or anything else desirable, for that matter. The service is uniformly the slowest. You can get old waiting for your food, which is cold when you get it. However, on this day everything was just fine; service, food, "Friendliness." I was just about to unleash a titanic burst of scorn on New Jersey and New York, and say stuff like "You see? People only suck where WE live--here in Connecticut, even FRIENDLY'S has good service!" But then Wendy pointed out the local Friendly's District Manager--complete with Name Tag--having breakfast two booths down. Figures.

We left and hurtled Twainward. I may or may not have mentioned that I owe, at minimum, thirty or forty percent of my grey matter to Mr. Clemens. Upon my high school graduation, my uncle presented me with a hoary old collection of the first-ever complete set of Twain, published by his daughter Clara in 1935. I spent that entire cusp-of-adulthood summer tearing through the whole set--and when I re-read any of it now, it's amazing how much of me came out of those musty little green books. Don't mind sayin'. We, previously, had visited his gravesite in Elmira NY in 1990, on our way home from Toronto, but this was really something. Ever been? The house is just dripping with Twain--you really do get the feeling that he just stepped out for a minute to go set some children on fire or something--that he'll be back any second if you just sit at the billiard table and wait. And what an amazing chunk of brick and wood it is too, on its own merit.

On the tour, of course, were about twelve really old people and us. I hate tours, but that's the only way you can go through this place, which is understandable. Why do I hate tours? There was, as there is in every tour group, one Boring Old Drone, wearing one of those Old-Man Crushed Cheesecake Hats, who feels compelled to show the tour guide just How Much He Knows About The Subject Matter, so he says to the tour guide--TO THE TOUR GUIDE--"Well, you know, 'Mark Twain' is a steamboating term. That's where he got the name." I had a quick Annie Hall flashback--to that memorable scene in the queue at the movie theatre--and was desperately hoping Twain would appear, in his white linen suit, and squeak, "SHUT UP, D**KHEAD! AND TAKE OFF THAT F**ING HAT IN MY HOUSE!!"

But no such.

Literally next door is the Harriet Beecher Stowe house. Normally I would have just as soon skipped that one, but as it turns out Harriet is family. Sort of. Wendy is descended from Mr. Stowe's sister Sara. The little old ladies running the tour group were tickled to death and offered Wendy the run of their research library if she ever feels the need. That was nice.

We were really quite overcome standing on those properties. Kinda like standing on the battlefield at Gettysburg, y'know? Or, you walk up to the bank of the Red Sea, camera hung around your neck, and it parts so you can walk across, and there's a sign on a rock that says, "You found it!! You found THE SPOT!!"

We then boogied out o'Hartford, thru New Canaan on local roads and then down the Merritt Parkway, which I had never been on. Nice road. Once again, we were going to detour over your way and throw sticks at your door or something, but we went home instead.

That's all. Except this morning I found out that the former Village Theatre, the former Saint....that's right, the f***ing Fillmore East, is being torn down to be replaced by, of all things, a bank. Which makes me appreciate all the more being able to trudge through the Twain House at will. Why are we not protecting our MODERN landmarks??

We were in the "Saint" at the end of the 80's--there was a concert there, a sort of dopey tie-dye sixties nostalgia thing with Country Joe, Wavy Gravy, and the Dinosaurs (Cipollina, Barry Melton, Merl Saunders, Peter Albin, Spencer Dryden.) The whole place had been gutted, the floor had been filled with concrete to the height of the original stage, and the upper stage was along the BACK wall where the top balcony had been. The proscenium was intact and the lobby was identical except for having been sprayed black. It was really weird--like going back to your grandparents' house fifty years after they died, and your cousin Mickey has re-decorated the whole place in wicker. You know? But he forgets to cover up that one little bit of print wallpaper at the top of the stairs and you yell, "I remember that wallpaper!!!"