Escape from the heat

Today we are in east Hampton visiting our friends Laura and Sandy. They have a wonderful house on a gorgeous, might I say backbreakingly beautiful lot. I say that because it's a huge lot by my standards and most of it is planted with interesting things. We got up at 6 am to go to Penn station to take the train out here. Once they call the train, about 400 30-something beautiful bodies make a mad rush down the stairs to the platform and cram themselves onto the train. We old farts really felt our age amongst all that beautiful flesh. We did NOT feel bad plunging our elderly half price-paying butts down on the only available seats though. We had to change trains at Jamaica station but even after that we were halfway out to east Hampton before we could sit together, 

Indian Wells Beach as a watercolor

Laura met us at the train and we started a whirlwind tour of the area. She first cleverly told us to use the machine to buy our return tickets for Manhattan, and then took us to a produce store with really good bread and veggies.  We went to their house, where Sandy cooked us a fabulous breakfast, and then spent the afternoon  looky-looing at homes of rich and famous -- Jackson Pollock lived just down the road from them-- and visiting this wonderful garden called Longhouse.

   We spent about three hours there. Lovely gardens. The designer of the house and gardens was a textile designer, Jack Larsen.  He was originally from Seattle and was a friend of Chilhuly so there are a number of Chilhuly installations there as well as some really interesting sculpture by other artists.

Alex, John, Laura & Sandy

For dinner we went to Sag Harbor which is another delightful town very close to East Hampton and had dinner at an adorable rstaurant called Il Capuccino. The food was yummy and more importantly they had garlic bread with about a pound each of butter and garlic. 

Sag Harbor as a watercolor

After dinner we walked around the town and went to the harbor. From a distance, I thought there was a ferry in the harbor but it was a yacht, one of several.

Sunday we got up at 9 and went swimming.  It was so wonderful to be in the water.  We swam on the bay side of Long Island, so there was very little current.  The water was cool enough to be refreshing, but not cold.  I didn't have to keep swimming hard, but could just float and relax.  Heaven. 

After swimming we went back and Sandy made us another delicious breakfast with broccolini and scrambled eggs.  And more good bread and California Humboldt cheese, which we'd never had before.  Laura said we needed to go back on the 2 p.m. train, which I thought was excessively early, but it was a good thing we did, because it was very crowded again, and the people who got on at the next stop had to stand up.  And this was a double decker train with at least eight cars.  This is a line of people buying tickets back to NYC.

Fortunately, when we got back to NY it is nowhere near so hot as when we left.

I posted some of my pix as watercolors today because after all, we were at an area ripe with artists.