I will confess, I have never been to the Hamptons. Not once in all my life long years as a New Yorker. When we think of Long Island beaches, we usually head to Robert Moses or Jones Beach as it’s a quick drive from my parents’ house, but when we want to spend a day tootling around the island for some peace and quiet, we head to the North Fork. It’s kind of like the anti-Hamptons and it might just be one of our favorite places to go. Things are quiet out here. Yes, you might hit some traffic as there really is only one main road going all the way to the end until there is no more land, but by and large there are less people on the North Fork as there is on the south. There are a ton of farms and farm stands, wineries, and places to picnic. The one challenging thing is to find a public access beach as many of the parking lots are by permit only for residents and house-renters, but it’s not impossible. And when you do, it’s not unusual to have the entire beach to yourself.

We haven’t been back to the beach by the house we rented since we stayed on the North Fork 4 years ago in 2009. This was before we were going to Seattle every August, so it does stand out as the year we spent August a little differently. Claudine doesn’t remember the house at all, nor anything else from that summer, but it did make a strong impression on Mia and she talks about it now and again. We did a lot of fruit picking and farm visiting and when I think back to that summer, I think of the lavender fields; I can almost smell them again.
 
One of my favorite memories was stumbling on a boat race on our last evening there and meeting some of the town people who live there year round. While in town this last weekend, we visited the fish market where we would often buy fresh seafood for our dinners. Mark picked up some oysters and bay scallops and we recreated one of our favorite dishes from that trip for dinner that night.

Some photos of our day at a farm on the North Fork of Long Island last Sunday. Picking season isn’t nearly here yet so we wandered the grounds, tasted wine at the winery, smelled the flowers, watched a border collie herd some geese and ate some crepes. A quiet day out in nature seems like the best way to end a busy week.

I think I’ve decided that I kind of dislike zoos. The kids like going to zoos, so we go, though not often. I think the last time we were at the Bronx Zoo was about 5 years ago when Claudine was a baby, though Mia’s been much more recently through camp. All those animals in cages. I guess it was a reflection of my own mental state when we went over the weekend that made it a bit of a downer. That and getting that Smashing Pumpkins “despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage” song stuck in my head over and over again. Sheesh.

I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries lately, some on second and third viewings, finding comfort in watching the creative process of others: The September Issue, Beauty is Embarrassing, Bill Cunningham New York, and Last Days Here (interesting even if you don’t like that genre of music). I always admire people who have lifelong passions and I think about this guy I knew back in art school days who had volumes of sketchbooks with nothing but Grover drawings in them. Can you imagine? But you sort of have to be in awe of something like that, no matter how crazy it is.
 
You know something? I never try and take myself too seriously. I look at the future and see a big question mark, but for now, I just take it one day at a time and sometimes, all it takes is a long talk with a friend to see things a little more clearly. What would we do without our friends?

Cherry blossoms are now at its peak here in the city, and like thousands of other New Yorkers we flocked to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens to revel underneath fluffy pink and white blossoms. It was sandal weather too, and the girls and I walked a million miles over the weekend. Along our walks, they like to collect clusters of blossoms that have fallen off trees and bring them home to place in shallow bowls of water.

The blossoms will probably be gone in another week or two. After that, summer isn’t far behind. 2 more months of school left in the year. Time doesn’t stop for anyone, does it?

Do you know about the Gold Coast Mansions on the North Shore of Long Island? If you’ve read the Great Gatsby, then you do. Yes, the Gilded Age, where new fortunes were made in steel and other industries. These were the lavish homes of some of the wealthiest American families like the Astors, Whitneys, Guggenheims and Vanderbilts. At one point there were over 500 mansions built along this 16 mile stretch, but less than half survived; only a handful are open to the public.

We’ve been to 2 of these mansions located near my parents’ house a number of times – Old Westbury Gardens (where the family threw me the best birthday surprise) and The Nassau County Museum of Art. On Saturday, we visited the Vanderbilt Museum.
 
When William K. Vanderbilt II passed away in the 40s, his will mandated that the grounds be donated to the county as a museum for his collections. Sometime in the 70s a planetarium was built which reopened last month after major renovations. We took the girls to a show at the planetarium, but we weren’t expecting to see such an extensive collection of taxidermy, marine and ethnographic objects housed in the main mansion and other buildings. Apparently Vanderbilt was quite the explorer and collector and he built natural history habitats for tigers, polar bears and other mammals, much like you would find at the Museum of Natural History. The Hall of Fishes was quite impressive, as was the room of birds, insects and butterflies. Some of the objects on display are quite odd, including 2 large rooms full of hundreds (thousands?) of aquatic specimens preserved in jars and a 32 foot long whale shark, thought to be the world’s largest mounted fish. Oh, and a 3000 year old Egyptian mummy. Oh, rich people…
 
The financial struggles of the museum have been well documented and the renovation of the planetarium is to bring more visitors and revenue to the museum (there are areas of the estate that are boarded up and in disrepair, like the boathouse pictured above). We’ll certainly be going back. On a warmer summer day I can imagine exploring the grounds a bit longer and perhaps taking a tour of the 24 room mansion. While the kids were in one room upstairs looking at this huge stuffed alligator, I saw a room off to the side with the door ajar on the other side of the hallway. What did I see when I peeked inside? A wall full of shoes, presumably dated from the 20s and 30s. I’m certainly intrigued.

The air was amazingly still at Jones Beach. With the sun warming us, we didn’t feel cold at all and it was nice seeing the ocean again for the first time since August. Evidence of Sandy destruction lingered, with all the facilities and concession stands fenced off and 4 of the 6 fields closed. There were dunes where there were none before, as tops of buried wooden fences peeked up from sandy mounds. Despite that, it was nice to see that there might be beaches to enjoy this summer as repairs get underway. We weren’t really sure what to expect from those aerial photos we saw 5 months ago after the storm, but one after another we are seeing announcements of hard hit areas reopening – The Statue of Liberty, Coney Island, Fairway Market in Red Hook – while others like Ellis Island remain closed indefinitely.