Massachusetts last weekend

We mightacoulda seen my friends and painting mentors, John & Beth Sanden, if I'd only thought better ahead. As it was, we stopped to see our friends at Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson on our way up through New York. We wandered upward, cutting across the northwest corner of Connecticut, arriving at Red Lion Inn before sunset. Had a lovely reception and dinner with the other speakers there. Then next morning Cal went to the conference in Great Barrington while I saw the Norman Rockwell museum (half of which was unavailable for remodeling!) and fell in love with the painting of Aunt driving niece to town for new dress fabric:

After the museum I returned hoping to see inside the church where Jonathan Edwards once preached, but it was closed on Fridays, so I only got to take pictures:

Returned to Red Lion for a bowl of clam chowder before an afternoon of reading and napping. Drove down to Great Barrington to the AIER estate to meet Cal for reception and dinner, meeting again a Christian woman I'd met the evening before. We talked about kids and births (she was a neo-natal intensive care nurse) and teenagers. After the dinner Cal and I drove back roads back to Red Lion Inn where he kept us up till midnight preparing his talk for the next morning; he'd already written most of it but had to tweak it for responding to much of what he'd heard that day at the conference. I packed for check out and watched a movie while he wrote. Next morning we enjoyed breakfast in the Red Lion Inn dining room again and got to know a meteorologist from Canada that Cal has worked with long distance. The conference finished with two sections, the second one being a theological examination of the global warming stuff. Cal did very well, of course.



And then we finished with a delicious lunch in the mansion, the dining room window from which you can see this giant tree in the middle of a hill in the Berkshires. I went out afterward and got a 360o view with my little camera video machine. It is so lovely up there. Cal and I returned to the airport via the Taconic Parkway and into NYC to cross the George Washington Bridge. It was nice to see the colors and the seasons and feel the crisp air again, but I am so glad I live down here after all these years. The gentle warmth that met us getting off the plane, mildew ignored, is lovely.

From Newark airport I took a bunch of cool photos of NYC in the sunset.

We met a woman on the way back with whom we shared the gospel and with whom we struck up a wonderful friendship, I hope, to last forever. She promised to come to our church the next morning, but neither she nor I (sick and Grace sick) got there.