Next Week - Off to Firenze and Other Fun Places

 
This will be our home away from home next week.  A villa just a few kilometers outside of Florence.  Debbie Meyers, her daughter Emma, and sister Charlie, 3 other guys (Scott, Rob, and Tom) and I have rented it! 

We'll have a chef who will give us cooking lessons, using goods from the local Tuscan markets, right there in our own kitchen.  

Side trips to Portofino, Lucca, Siena, and perhaps other food hotspots should round out our Tuscan food experience.  I'll report back on our culinary exploits before I go off to Rome on the 21st of May where I'm excited to be seeing the Vatican Gardens and old friend Dana English and her family.

More Vineyard Photos from the 1950's

Here we are on a daytrip to Nantucket. I guess the day's dress code was blue sweaters for the boys and head scarves for the girls.

The clay cliffs of Gay Head (when we were allowed to climb them).

The girls are ready for the beach, just waiting for their driver.

The Vineyard in the 50's (i.e. Martha's)

Having gotten a new scanner last week, I've been busy digitizing old photographs and sending them to the subjects in them.

One group I've been working on is a set of black and white and a set of early Kodacolor snapshots taken in and around Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard.

We shared a house up there in the summers of the 1950's with a family of close friends. It was a great old cottage in the campground surrounding the Methodist Tabernacle. (We'd sneak off to the Catholic Church on Sundays!).

Each set of parents had a bedroom, my brother and I shared a bedroom, and my sister shared a room with the 2 girls in the other family.

Lots of swimming in Nantucket Sound or Tashmoo beaches, mucky clamdigging, fishing off the docks of Edgartown or Menemsha, salt water taffy from Heberts, conch shells, rainy day games and Flying Horses, and lobsters and clams after the waves of South Beach. Looking back, life was uncomplicated and every day was another adventure. Some of my most vivid childhood memories are from those summer weeks on the Vineyard. Haven't been there since 1965 when I spent a week on the Shenandoah during its first summer in the water. Can't wait to scan those photos!