Dinner and a barn dance
So yesterday we spent the afternoon in Ascutney, VT at donated church space for the weekly homeschoolers co-op. It's a loosely organized thing where an assortment of homeschool families (some right wing, some left wing, some "damn hippies") go and take turns attending and teaching little classes in such topics as clog dancing, introduction to Spanish, African drumming (did I mention hippies?...don't get me started about African drums and hippies...), introduction to reading music, and New Hampshire history. Guess which one I got volunteered for? I'll give you a hint: it isn't "African drumming".
It's not exactly my idea of a good time, but Wendy and Caleigh enjoy it, so I behave myself when I am there. I don't even pick on the hippies. Actually, I think the whole premise is kind of dumb. Once you organize a group of children into classes and set them up in a building chosen just for that purpose, it isn't quite homeschooling any more. My feelings about it are kind of irrelevant, because there is a block of time on the schedule marked "History with Pete", so once a week, it's off to Ascutney I go with maps, artifacts, notes and whatever else I can use to try and quickly explain 10,000 years of human habitation.
After class this week, we were planning on going grocery shopping, but instead elected to go for a drive over to the Newport area to see if there was a decent looking restaurant over there. There didn't seem to be, so we kept driving to Sunapee. Sunapee has been a summer vacation destination for 100+ years, ever since the railroads first started to bring summer tourists to the wilds of NH. You can read about Lake Sunapee and Mount Sunapee here and here.
We had dinner at a cool "country dining" restaurant called the Appleseed Tavern. It was a refreshing change from the Chinese food/Pizza that are pretty much your only choices close to home. They actually had seafood! The dining room is in an old barn and is decorated with typically eclectic "country" stuff, and a cool feature was a big collection of old NH vanity license plates.
I got to teach Caleigh about vanity plates and how to decipher them. The Rosetta stone for her was the one that read L8R BUD. Once she figured that one out, she went on to 0U812 and suddenly she had a new car game to play.
Appleseeds has a website. http://www.appleseedrestaurant.com/ From May to October, they also run dinner cruises on the lake on a replica Victorian era cruise boat.
After dinner we went to a "barn dance" in Bradford, NH. We had seen the sign at the side of the road and decided to check it out. It was being held not in a barn, but in the elementary school gym. The dance was a fundraiser for a local community center that was in financial trouble. Instead of doing the Massachusetts thing of just appropriating more public money (they are just tax dollars, we can print more...), they did the New Hampshire thing and started holding fundraisers. This month, they are having two barn dances.
The dancing was contra style, and there were all ages at it. There was live music (a keyboard, two fiddles and an accordion). Caleigh has done this before, so she jumped right in. She even won a door prize of four little toy farm animals. They were also having a bake sale and had some really funky looking desert treats, but I was stuffed from Appleseeds and didn't partake of any.
Dinner and dancing? Sounds almost like a date! Yeah, we live in the country, in a place where people go on vacation to, and yeah, we are self employed and theoretically have the flexibility of time that goes along with it, but on the flip side we work long days every day and don't get to play much. About the only "free time" I get is the 1/2 hour a day that it takes to take care of the critters. Going out to dinner and a barn dance may seem like a lame excuse for fun to many people, but to us it is like a four-day weekend!
It's not exactly my idea of a good time, but Wendy and Caleigh enjoy it, so I behave myself when I am there. I don't even pick on the hippies. Actually, I think the whole premise is kind of dumb. Once you organize a group of children into classes and set them up in a building chosen just for that purpose, it isn't quite homeschooling any more. My feelings about it are kind of irrelevant, because there is a block of time on the schedule marked "History with Pete", so once a week, it's off to Ascutney I go with maps, artifacts, notes and whatever else I can use to try and quickly explain 10,000 years of human habitation.
After class this week, we were planning on going grocery shopping, but instead elected to go for a drive over to the Newport area to see if there was a decent looking restaurant over there. There didn't seem to be, so we kept driving to Sunapee. Sunapee has been a summer vacation destination for 100+ years, ever since the railroads first started to bring summer tourists to the wilds of NH. You can read about Lake Sunapee and Mount Sunapee here and here.
We had dinner at a cool "country dining" restaurant called the Appleseed Tavern. It was a refreshing change from the Chinese food/Pizza that are pretty much your only choices close to home. They actually had seafood! The dining room is in an old barn and is decorated with typically eclectic "country" stuff, and a cool feature was a big collection of old NH vanity license plates.
I got to teach Caleigh about vanity plates and how to decipher them. The Rosetta stone for her was the one that read L8R BUD. Once she figured that one out, she went on to 0U812 and suddenly she had a new car game to play.
Appleseeds has a website. http://www.appleseedrestaurant.com/ From May to October, they also run dinner cruises on the lake on a replica Victorian era cruise boat.
After dinner we went to a "barn dance" in Bradford, NH. We had seen the sign at the side of the road and decided to check it out. It was being held not in a barn, but in the elementary school gym. The dance was a fundraiser for a local community center that was in financial trouble. Instead of doing the Massachusetts thing of just appropriating more public money (they are just tax dollars, we can print more...), they did the New Hampshire thing and started holding fundraisers. This month, they are having two barn dances.
The dancing was contra style, and there were all ages at it. There was live music (a keyboard, two fiddles and an accordion). Caleigh has done this before, so she jumped right in. She even won a door prize of four little toy farm animals. They were also having a bake sale and had some really funky looking desert treats, but I was stuffed from Appleseeds and didn't partake of any.
Dinner and dancing? Sounds almost like a date! Yeah, we live in the country, in a place where people go on vacation to, and yeah, we are self employed and theoretically have the flexibility of time that goes along with it, but on the flip side we work long days every day and don't get to play much. About the only "free time" I get is the 1/2 hour a day that it takes to take care of the critters. Going out to dinner and a barn dance may seem like a lame excuse for fun to many people, but to us it is like a four-day weekend!
posted by MVTCoPete | 6:25 PM
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