It’d been a long day doing random things around Wilton. First it was failing to hike a trail that was blocked off, then it was visiting a nearby cemetery, then it was getting lost trying to find tiny free libraries and having a lively discussion with a vibrant hippie woman and now… now I was in the center of the town at their absolutely tiny but truly adorable park after having deposited a book in their little free library.
Since I was here anyway I might as well look around. There seemed to be two antique stores, a chocolatier, and a cupcake shop. Today was not really the day for sweets but why not look at the antique stores? My mother peered into the Winding River Antiques window which looked super dark.
“I don’t know if they’re open.”
Someone inside waved her in. See, if you’re going to be all creepy about it you’re going to gain someone’s attention. So we walked in. It was a small antique shop, the sort of thing you’d expect on a main street of a small town. Everything was well organized and displayed. But the two shop keeps… oooh boooy. They were throwing off some fiercely negative vibes. I think they had regretted letting us in. My mother with her doddering social inequities and myself with blazing orange hair drenched in sweat from the heat and looking like death had rolled over. The orange hair throws people. In small towns like this it causes a lot of people, and let’s be honest a lot of old men people, to instantaneously distrust and hate me. It’s fine. I find this sort of hilarious because I am the least likely person to cause an actual fuss.
Still they both watched us until my skin started burning from the searing eye contact. I took a few photos and they acted like I was trying to case the place. When my mother took a few photos herself that was apparently the straw that broke the camel’s back because one growled at her to stop taking photos. Like OK dude, was just trying to give you some exposure but if you don’t want that it’s fine by me. I’ll be just as happy to write up how ungrateful you are for customers…
And so we shuffled out without buying (or stealing!) anything. (Not to be bitchy but there wasn’t anything there worth stealing in the first place. It was all very common fare.) My mother was so put off by this experience that we didn’t go into the other antique store which I presume was probably a lot friendlier.
So I was in Wilton today to revisit the Vale Cemetery but also to check out their many little free libraries that live there. I had decided these would be great receptacles to get my name out there if I donated my own books to them. It was one of those days though – one little library was defunct and the second one I couldn’t find. And somehow as I got lost I ended up behind an old wool mill. There were signs everywhere for “artists” and I… wanted to fall down this rabbit hole to see what it was.
As it turns out there’s a little community of artists and practitioners over there. There’s artist studios, massage parlours, tarot readings. Somehow, I had found the hippies in this town. I knew it. I knew they had to be somewhere providing a delightful counter to the tightwads who made the cemetery so… rule bound and uniform. And were they ever!
I walked in and immediately noticed a few cases full of miniatures. I don’t know what it is about miniatures but the well-done ones can really suck you in. And these were definitely that quality. There was also a few racks of gorgeous hand sewn hippie dresses, a display of glittery resin planchettes and mini spirit boards, and a table full of postcards and of course a rock shop vendor that was the only one I could see that was peopled. The woman at the counter was hilarious. She told us this was her last day until September as she was taking her goods on the road before “spooky season” hit. She lamented she was trying her damdest not to have a “real job” and doing every gig she could find vending but that she had learned her lesson that “some gigs are just not for me.” She described for twenty minutes one such event which was laden with country music that “compared women to trucks.” She just had stories to tell about drunk frat boys, terribly formulaic country music, and Christian fundamentalists who probably thought she was peddling Satan’s goods. And she did have some really nice new agey rocks. Pendants, spheres, polished rocks, natural rocks… and one that looked like a bowl of marbles. OBVIOUSLY I had to come home with the orange marble. And an orange fidget rock. But I left the orange pendent and a much bigger orange rock behind for next time. Most people are attracted to shiny things. I am attracted to orange things. Every. Damn. Time.
While talking to this delightful woman she told us there was actually a lot more here. There were three floors to check out as well as more studios on this floor. She pointed at the miniatures and joked, “I HAVE to show everyone the cat poop. It’s super realistic, absolutely perfect tiny little spiral of cat poop in a perfect little cat box. She does amazing work. Intricate tiny lace with such details! But I can’t get over the cat poop.”
ANYWAY. I did move on and met another lovely artist in a studio full of paintings and little scrap book type things. She’d just moved here from the south and was starting to offer classes on how to make different things. She shared the space with someone else who had some terrific Americana tattoo flash on the wall which I was again very attracted to. It was interesting.
The only other studio open was a jewelry maker at the end who’d been there the longest but I didn’t go in. It just seemed socially odd to wander in (there was a doorbell.) The three floors above… no one was in today. So I got some great exercise and took a photo of their gorgeously utilitarian spiral staircase but that was it for that…
This was a fun distraction. I really enjoyed it but I think you have pretty offbeat to find this sort of adventure worth finding this place. It’s… unique. Perfect for the eccentric.
I admit I don’t do too many eateries on this blog – but it’s not because I am not a foodie at heart, it’s just I usually can’t afford it. WELL, last night I was along for the ride and what a ride it was!
I have nothing against Warwick RI but it is a very busy built-up area humming with plazas filled with the usual chain stores and restaurants. Because of this I wasn’t expecting this new place to be any different but WOW… it was different alright!
The Tree House Tavern runs out of a repurposed 1800’s farmhouse which does in fact have a tree house out in the front yard. The parking lot is…. as a friend would say “Byzantine.” A real confusing jumble of possible parking spaces that somehow works. And once we popped out of the car and started to look around we realized just how odd and unique this place was. Set aside from a very busy roadway it was like we just fell down the proverbial rabbit hole. This didn’t look like anything else in the area. Bedecked with fairy lights to the hilt and supporting an odd country chic it beckoned us to come in. Inside the ceiling was absolutely plastered with brightly colored and open umbrellas mixed with other eccentric decorations. It was…. distracting but only in the most wonderful way.
We were given the choice of indoor or outdoor dining and we decided to go outside. It was a gorgeous evening after all. And so we found ourselves nestled outside amongst a series of little entertainment centers. Little firepits were everywhere, it looked like baskets full of snuggly blankets were on stock for chilly Autumn nights around these fires. There were several more private areas including a little patio with seating for a single couple. Flowers bloomed everywhere amongst even more fairy lights and chaotic decoration.
We sat down across from a somewhat judgmental deer head mounted on the wall of a little roofed outdoor area. Our waitress was young and perhaps a little new to the job but was excitable and happy. She handed us a menu and we gave it a once over. It didn’t have a whole lot of options but the ones that it did have were… something else. And what kind of food was on offer here? I guess my companion had it nailed with his description, “American Style Food Fuckery.” Pretty much the first thing I read was Sweet Potato Pizza and I was way too curious to even care what else was on there. I mean what on earth is a sweet potato pizza??? Meanwhile my companion was having a hard time deciding between a series of options which was made even more difficult when the waitress suggested a special of a crabcake surf and turf. Ultimately that’s what he chose and ended up with half a cow on his plate. No complaints here.
But first we had to try the appetizers! They had a plate of honey orange wings so we went for that, saying that maybe if they were good we’d come back and try the most adventurous appetizer on the menu – the peanut butter and jelly wings. We didn’t wait long at all before they were brought out and they were hands down the best wings I have ever eaten. And I am usually not a fan of wings (I mean there’s not a hell of a lot of meat on them.) They were crunchy, warm, delicious, and STICKY. Holy crap were they sticky! I had an ex once who would get pissed off with me for having sticky hands and this sort of thing would have made him flip right the fuck out. As such it gave a deep perverse joy to be making such a mess. That’s bliss right there. And the waitress was sweet enough to bring out some wet naps for after.
I could have walked out right then and there and been happy but no… there was more. As we waited for our entre I admit I was doing some eavesdropping of other guests and the absolutely bonkers conversations being had fit right in with the decor. My favorite was a whole discussion on a summer camp for horses where humans weren’t allowed and could only reach it by dirt bike after leaving their cars and horse trailers behind. A summer camp for horses. Now I’ve heard it all.
And then the waitress brought out a huge show and tell platter full of desserts to show some of the other patrons and I was just sitting there with my jaw agape. So many absolutely beautiful desserts to choose from! According to their website they rotated and changed depending on the mood of their baker on any given day (and SERIOUSLY how cool a job would that be to just bake whatever the fuck you want from day to day?? The freedom! The creativity!) Oooh lord, we’d have to save room for something delectable.
By the time our main course came out I was already having a wonderful time. My pizza was beautiful – a thin crusted prosciutto pizza with little cubes of sweet potato smattered about for some color and maybe to a lesser extent some flavor. My companion’s half a cow and a crabcake was also beautifully presented and he seemed to be enjoying it to the hilt.
We tried to eat slowly to save room but to be totally honest I was already mostly full from the appetizer! So I ate 2 slices of my pizza and waited for my belly to settle a bit. And when the dessert tray came out there was a lot to choose from – from a rather ordinary vanilla creme brulee, to a S’more cheesecake, to some sort of mutant whiskey filled chocolate ball, to some sweet little macaroons. I let my companion decide on something to share because honestly I would have accepted anything on that platter (save for the whiskey thing as I am not fond of the taste of booze. Yick!) We ended up with some sort of pink cake with green stuffing. It was a berry cake of some sort? I don’t know. It was cute looking and damn was it moist and delicious! Another win.
We were so full by the time we left I am pretty sure we were both waddling like penguins. And we had spent so much time there the mall closed. We’d actually came to run an errand at the mall – this…. was a distraction. A fantastic one at that!
ANYWAY. This was a delightful adventure. I’d HIGHLY recommend this place, especially if you’re looking for something “a little different.”
Sometimes it’s nice to have outside influences give me leads on where to go next. This was the case for Pine Grove Cemetery which I had never heard of and certainly wouldn’t have sought out on my own. The reason it had come up was because it was the burial spot for Major General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain who was the Lieutenant Colonel of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry which fought at the battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War. Apparently we’ve been half-hazardly stalking him and his men since last summer….
But anyways… this cemetery was easy to find but hard to get into as there was a lot of traffic on that road and the entrances were narrow and graveled. I pulled in and parked at the back hoping I wouldn’t be in anyone’s way. Instinctively I had somehow found the oldest part of the cemetery and the exact row we needed to find the grave we were searching for! And that was cool and all… with a big dramatic tree nearby. Upon finding Chamberlain we left a penny and discussed quietly how neat it was that he lived a LONG life after the war eventually settling and becoming a college professor here.
So that’s why we were there. What was harder to explain was why we happened to have a cat in a bag wandering the cemetery with us. Or why she seemed so entertained by the experience. That’d be Stormy, short for Stormaggedon Dark Lord of All. She’d come with us to Maine but now we wanted to stop by a cemetery on the way home (two hours from where we started that morning) she couldn’t be left in a hot car – obviously. So she found herself the proud new recipient of a cloth carrier and guess what? This turned out to be just her thing. She’s apparently just as morbid as we are, just chilling in the cemetery.
And since the cat wasn’t taking offense to this interlude we decided to keep ambling and see what else this place had to offer. Most of it was very standard fare – plain stones, the occasional mourning woman, some angels…. and then something wildly bizarre – a modern slate stone with a crazy assortment of carvings ranging from the traditional (a skeleton at the top) to the downright bizarre – a flipped VW Bus on the back. Yes, both back and front were decorated with poems and insignia. Obviously, this peaked my interest. WHO ARE YOU?!
Turns out this guy was a real local character. His name was Walter Stauffer Skold and he was the founder of the Dead Poet’s Society (not that one – although it was named after the movie!) Apparently he made it his life’s mission to find the forgotten and lost graves of poets in the state of Maine. He found more than 600 of them before commissioning this stone to be made for himself. The artist in charge of the project was the grandson of John Updike the famous author. Sadly he died unexpectedly a month after it’s completion and never saw it in his lifetime. But wow – it’s a lovely stone and a great story!
I was delighted by the colorful personalities laid to rest here and took a number of whimsical photos including one of a big tree changing colors (HELLO, it’s not autumn yet!) It was a great way to end our little trip to Maine.
I was super happy that during this trip to Maine I remembered soemthing on my bucket list and we actually made it. Not only that it seemed catered to exactly what we were looking for – books, and antiques.
I have passed this place so many times but I didn’t recognize it with new siding this time around! It’s starting to look a lot less like a refurbished industrial chicken coop which is what it is. The area was known for being a large producer of chicken eggs for several decades but most have gone out of business since then which has left a smattering of these huge coops just gathering dust and decaying. It’s really refreshing to see someone use it for something else!
And let me tell you this place was huuuuuuuge. The whole bottom was all antiques of every kind and the top was completely dedicated to books and other media. Just thousands upon thousands of them. You could absolutely get lost up there.
After Fort Knox we both felt like the day wasn’t over yet so we set out to find some antique stores. The first one we stopped at was the Central Maine Antique Exchange. We had half an hour before it closed so our visit was abrupt but not bad. This place was sizable but not enormous – a good collection with the usual mix of haunted dolls, inexplicable buckets of doll parts, and of course a light smattering of offensively racist things – I think the winner of that went to a rubber doll named “Chief Wahoo.” It wasn’t all bad though – there was also a HUGE bucket labelled “peanut butter chips” and a lot of nice artwork on the walls. I don’t know if I would really go out of my way to see this place again buuuut I would stop in if you just happen to be in Bangor.
Fort Knox is never disappointing. It’s a HUGE complex with something for everyone. Not to be confused with the other more famous Fort Knox, this one doesn’t have any gold however it is named after the same guy so that’s something. It was built to protect the entrance to the river and was manned for two wars but never saw battle. And so it stands fulfilling a new purpose – scaring the bejesus out of small children generation after generation which is more than I can say for most museums!
And what is it that is so scary about this place? Well… they do say it’s haunted (though I have never seen any evidence of this on my own visits) but more importantly there are huge sections of the fort that are completely dark – no lighting except from slit windows – what feels like miles of corridors in near complete darkness. And there are also rooms and nooks off to the side which don’t see the light from the windows and are like black voids beckoning you in. It’s suggested you take a flashlight but where’s the fun in that?!
I don’t really recall there being that many dark areas on my last visit but I think I might have just missed them thinking there was nothing there. Another fun change was the fact a lot more of it was renovated so now the barracks were fairly well established with wooden floors and sparse furniture. But my favorite bit may have been the cannon kiln at the very beginning which I got right up to and looked directly into. It was basically a kiln to heat up cannon balls so they could be shot at passing ships and start them on fire. Nasty but interesting. I’d seen it before but never really poked at it up close – this would be my companion’s influence as he is far more interested in military history than I typically am and was reading all the plaques.
I had fun taking random snaps in the hopes of maybe catching an odd orb or two. No such luck! It’s still a GREAT place to practice photography if you’re learning about lighting! This is one of those destinations I suggest to everyone is who is going to be in the area. It really is a treasure.
This week we took our adventures to Maine where I had previously promised to share a few old favorites. One of these was another visit to Fort Knox but I neglected to mention this also would include a bonus ticket to go up to the observatory at the top of the bridge overlooking Fort Knox. It’s only a few dollars more to the purchase of a Fort Knox ticket and it never disappoints. But first I had to drive by the entrance and find myself parked at a roadside overlook of the bridge. I hadn’t taken the time to check this part of it out and it was really quite interesting! It had plaques with the history of the bridge and its predecessor as well as a few photos and a segment of bridge complete with wires which if you could walk up to from the observatory’s parking lot below. Also accessible from this point is a little access road which you can walk on to get under the bridge for an even more unique view.
Apparently, the original bridge replaced a ferry in the 1920’s and was a toll bridge. It was replaced with the current bridge in 2006 which now houses the tallest bridge observatory in the world and the only one in the US. Even better is that most of the journey upwards to see this fantastic view is by elevator. There’s a handful of stairs to get to the last level but that’s it. No gasping for air or clinging to the walls from vertigo as some of my other adventures have been! I was however surprised there was quite a line that day. It was a mix of locals and tourists, adults and children. I was happy to re-do this adventure with an actual professional camera this time and not the tiny cheap-o pre-cell phone digital camera I had at the time. There was even a boat heading up the river leaving quite a wake behind. This proved to be “a happy bonus” for the both of us. Looking directly down at the Prius parked below though… that was probably not the brightest idea but I was able to maneuver my cell phone in a way to catch the moment. Now I have photos of the Prius from every side except its underbelly!
By now the sun had basically come directly into Providence and there was the smell of bacon as people cooked under it. Not really, but it was close. Luckily the gun totem was only supposed to be a short walk down the street from the Edna Nature Lab. And it was! In a park!
Now the gun totem is a concrete pillar filled with over 1,000 reclaimed guns. And I mean I guess that’s one way to use guns that people no longer want or need…
It’s a weird attraction. Not one to specifically go for but if you’re in the area doing other things by all means give it a little looksee.
From here we took a respite in the park under a tree until I could no longer ignore the sizzling noises coming off my arm and we headed directly back into the sun to find the car. This would require not just beyond oppressive heat and humidity but also a rousing jaunt up a steep hill. And as it turns out we walked right by what was supposed to be the last destination of the day – the John Brown House which has been on my bucket list for over a year now. Sadly, we were both probably 15 minutes away from dying of heat exhaustion and my companion did not understand I wanted to go in and kept walking. So this will remain on my list for now… until I return.
And why did I want to go to the John Brown House? Because it’s a super fucked slice of New England history. I remember distinctly being of elementary school age and being taught how to sing “John Brown’s body lied a-moulderin’ in the grave.” And now here I am, an adult, going, “What the fuck was that about?!”
John Brown was a slave trader who realized later in life that what he was doing was deeply ethically wrong and so he became an abolitionist but not in any sane or rational way. Instead he decided he’d arm a bunch of slaves and start a revolt. The only reason this did not happen was because the slaves he approached basically responded to his offer of free guns by saying, “I don’t know you, I never talked to you, this never happened. GOOD BYE.” AS ANY SANE PERSON WOULD.
In addition to this absolutely mental story there is also a root nailed to a coffin board in the John Brown House that was supposed to be the vaguely human shaped root that they pulled out of Roger William’s grave 200 years after his death. But that’s…. another totally bonkers story for another day!
If libraries full of books weren’t enough for us we decided that a library of dead things might round out the day. That’s basically what the Edna Nature Lab is. It’s a large collection of bones and specimens that are there for easy study by the students at the Rhode Island School of Design. And if you follow this blog you might remember not too long ago I was at the RISD poking at their puppet museum. Clearly this is a school for… strange people. And that’s what so amazing about it!
Now when we arrived the door was locked. This was clearly some sort of college building used for different things so we were kind of out of luck until a gaggle of students walked in and we… just followed them. Sorry security! We promise not to do anything bad!
The lab was great. It was a giant room full of bones, taxidermy, insect specimens, you name it. There was even a few cages and tanks with live baby sea horses and a veeeery old and depressed looking degu. Maybe it survived the rest of the colony, I don’t know. My companion had never seen one before and thought he was cute. I… once had one of them escape my breeding colony that I had a teenager and unbeknownst to me it ended up living feral in my lawn until my pit bull was found throwing its carcass violently into the air like a toy. It was a bit of a startling sight to see a Chilean rodent being dug up by your dog in your very American lawn… Such is my life.
But back to the lab! It reminded me of something a Victorian “naturist” would have set up. I was very keen on the bones and bug specimens but there was also a lot of really spectacular taxidermy… and one baby dik dik that looked fucked up. I guess you need one piece of bad taxidermy to make the rest look all the better, I don’t know. Anyway, it was a short visit but none the less super interesting and we left before being removed by security. So that’s always good.
As we left I also noticed they seemed to have a bunch of marine tanks in the basement I could see through a window. Some with little cuttlefish in them and that just made my heart soar a bit. So cute. Remember when we all though marine biologist was like the go to job in the adult world? Those were the days…
