For The Love of Travel

Nantucket is an island 30 miles (50 km) south of Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. With a resident population of 10,000, it swells to 50,000 during the summer months! Ugg!   Nantucket has long been a vacation destination for America’s wealthiest and most powerful figures, including billionaires like serial entrepreneur Wayne Huzienga and Google‘s Eric Schmidt, banking scions like Barclay’s chief Bob Diamond, and politicians like former presidential candidate Senator John Kerry.  Your basic 3-bedroom, 2-bath with a tiny lawn in the middle of town lists for $1.5 million. Dozens of houses are listed at more than $10 million. The ex-president of Goldman Sachs recently listed his for $55 million.

I arrived in late afternoon and it was drizzling, so sorry about grey photos, but I loved the little downtown village immediately!!!!  I went for a walk. I found the stained glass windows of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, they are rare in an ecumenical setting, for they depict landscapes and flowers with no figures. They are fabricated from a rich and varied palette of opalescent drapery, and mottled and flashed antique glass held in a lead came/copper-foil matrix. There are seven layers of glass in the window.  Walking up Main St to the end away from the seaport….Lordy!!   Lots of money here!!!! Staying in a really nice B&B …Roberts House. I was delighted to find more fresh seafood, essentially a happy journey through oyster and prawn cocktail deliciousness. http://metonmain.com

 

Started the day with an emergency, with fire engines arriving and evacuation from the hotel. That suited me as we were on our way to Provincetown by ferry.  A lovely day strolling through a picturesque seaside hamlet with lots of galleries and yummy places to eat.

 

A sleep in and relatively late start as tourists this morning.  First on the list….the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She was a woman of vision – art collector, philanthropist, and one of the foremost female patrons of the arts. Had a zest for life, an energetic intellectual curiosity and a love of travel. She was a friend of noted artists and writers of the day, including John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler and Henry James. Gardner created much fodder for the gossip tabloids of the day with her reputation for stylish tastes and unconventional behavior. Her surprising appearance at a 1912 concert (at what was then a very formal Boston Symphony Orchestra) wearing a white headband emblazoned with “Oh, you Red Sox” was reported at the time to have “almost caused a panic”, and remains still in Boston one of the most talked about of her eccentricities. Passionate about Renaissance and Venetian art as well as horticulture, her museum houses her significant collection of European,  Asian and American art from paintings and sculpture to tapestries and decorative arts. In 1990,thirteen of the museum’s works were stolen; the high-profile crime remains unsolved and the artwork’s location is still unknown. The courtyard; Spanish cloister; tapestry, gothic and long rooms were my favourite spaces.

Then, I decided to see city views from the Prudential Tower, aka colloquially, The Pru, a skyscraper 228 m tall, with 52 floors. The Skywalk Observatory on the 50th is currently the highest observation deck in New England open to the public. Gorgeous views of the crowds watching the Red Sox and NY Yankees baseball match at Fenway Park (I could have been there had I been prepared to pay $300 for a seat!!). Also of a yacht race on the Charles River, pink sails! And palatial buildings along Commonwealth, Malborough and Beacon Sts!!

Got a ticket for the 5pm Sunday performance of the Blue Man Group, that combines music, technology and comedy to create a form of entertainment that defies categorisation. They are percussion proficient on drums as well as PVC pipes! And they have have great comedic timing in other sketches. Unpredictable and funny! I was so glad I was able to see a performance after the cancelled Melb concert!