Advertisement
Published: November 24th 2009
Edit Blog Post
MASS MOCA
GUY BEN-NER North Adams, MASS MOCA
Tuesday, October 27
This week’s trip we planned to visit the MASS MOCA in North Adams MA, the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury Vermont, and the Connecticut Lakes in Northern New Hampshire, the head-waters of the Connecticut River.
Our first night we plan on staying at the Holiday Inn Express in Amherst while visiting Maxanne at Umass. We booked the room at the Holiday Inn Express through Hotwire.com and it’s one-third the cost of when we stayed at the same hotel last year for Home Coming. The hotel is clean and the staff is pleasant but the “hot” tub is only a “warm” tub and the accessible room has a tub instead of a shower. How come hotels get this so wrong? They put a few handrails in the tub and call it accessible. Don’t they realize that a tub wall is a bigger barrier than a curbstone?
We take Maxanne to dinner in North Hampton to the Eastside Grill. We enjoy a very well prepared reasonable meal and recommend this fine restaurant to anyone visiting the area. After dinner we do some shopping in North Hampton and visit Faces, a great shopping
experience with a large array of unusual items. So we purchase some great Yankee Swap gifts for Christmas. We had thought of staying in North Adams for the night but the only recommended place in town “Porches” a bed and breakfast is expensive and the other hotel and motels have terrible reviews. If North Adams chamber of commerce wants to have people stay in town earning our dollars they need work on improving accommodations.
Wednesday morning it’s still raining when we get up. Maxanne joins us for breakfast then we begin a leisurely drive on the back roads of Western Mass to North Adams. We’re at Mass MOCA when it opens for the day at 11 AM. Mass MOCA is the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art located in the Berkshire mountains in Western Mass. Opened in 1999 the museum is now one of the world’s premier places for displaying contemporary art and performances. Located in a recycled factory complex in the center of North Adams it consists of over 110,000 square feet of exhibition space. There are a real variety of exhibits with many multi- media presentations. I really enjoyed a movie in the round about New Orleans called
“Below Sea Level”. Karen likes the wall drawings by Sol LeWitt and the video about how they were created. We spent hours wondering through the galleries. The maze of a building is as interesting as some of the exhibits.
Lickety Split, the restaurant at the museum serves a great variety of lunch selections so it’s a convenient place to stop for a bite while exploring the museum.
After touring the museum we begin the 180-mile drive up route 8 through southern Vermont to route 91 and Littleton New Hampshire. We plan on staying at our friend Cliff’s house a few nights while we visit the northern region of Vermont and New Hampshire. Wednesday has an unusual amount of rain all day long. It pours from early morning till we reach Littleton in the early evening. The rain takes the beauty out of this scenic drive when most of the day visibility is less than a half-mile.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.164s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 13; qc: 29; dbt: 0.1033s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb