Day Trips

Hooray for a break in the weather! This afternoon we took J’s first on-the-road bike ride around the neighborhood. She did great. In fact, the whole time I was wishing that I’d taken a camera with me, because she was so cute. She’s quite the style maven, and this afternoon she was wearing zebra-print flats that we’d found at Trendy Tots and a scarf out of the dress-up collection that she put over this Justice t-shirt (although, jeepers, we did not spend $15 on it) that made her look like she was a very small-but-stylish 11-year-old. Alas, no camera.

Toward the end of our trip, we were stalled at a 3-way stop sign because J is still intimidated by going downhill, plus it was busier than most of the other roads that we’d conquered. So M, who had biked slowly and patiently for a good twenty minutes, was a bit ahead and waiting down the street. J and I stopped, and I looked up to see all the friendly neighborhood drivers stopped and waiting for us to go first. So I had to gesture “No-no-no, I insist, you go!” until they did, then I bent over J with more pep/strategy talk. I looked up again and a new crowd of drivers were waiting for us at their stop signs, including a police car. More gestures and a yell to the cop that we just weren’t quite emotionally prepared to go down the hill yet. I parked my bike and moved away from it, hoping all those nice drivers would take the hint.

Finally J negotiated the hill with great success and arrived at the driveway just in time to meet the police officer, who’d double-backed to present us with “Good Driving Tickets” for biking with our helmets: coupons for free ice cream cones at Stewart’s. Yep, it’s a lovely place to live.

Anyway, if you’re in the mood to leave town, here are a couple of suggestions:

A friend told me about Shakespeare & Company’s The Venetian Twins. The theater is in Lenox, MA, but with rave reviews like this one, I’m tempted to go myself. My friend said it was “a hoot.”

A reader passed along information about Railroads on Parade, a new model train museum in Pottersville, NY. If you’ve got a child in that train-crazy phase, it might be worth a trip.

Speaking of trains, did anyone else see that New York Times article about how the New York Transit Museum is so popular with autistic children that they’ve begun developing program specifically for kids on the spectrum? We used to love bringing kid visitors to that museum when we lived in New York City, so I’d recommend it in any case. But this just makes me like them more.