Day 4 – Monday, June 22nd – Our first
full day in the Vineyard!
We woke up to no hot water –
actually I woke to Amy yelling that the hot water would soon be working… they think
the outages tripped a special breaker for the water heater – but by mid-day we
still don’t have hot water. There is a weird
switch in the kitchen that we hit when we were testing lights – we weren’t
supposed to touch that, it’s the gas line, and without it on, no hot water. Also, the toilet just off the kitchen has been
running all night, overflowing and the water has run down into the basement
where it drips right onto the electrical box.
Oh goody! So it’s going to be a
beach day, we’ll get wet in the ocean and hopefully have hot water by the time
we get back.
We head out to Oak Bluffs, the beach
there is formerly known as “The Inkwell”.
Back when the beaches were segregated, this was the blacks only beach –
Hallie Berry made a movie called “The Inkwell”.. but it wasn’t actually filmed
there. For shame. The water is cold – it’s early in the season
– we head out for limited runs to cool off, but it’s refreshingly cold. And these are rocky beaches, at least – the
rocks hurt your feet as you get in and out, and we all regret forgetting our
beach shoes at home. Basically we chill,
reading, chatting, sunning and people watching.
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| Big rocks! |
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| The Inkwell! |
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| First beach day! |
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| Amy working on the umbrella |
Amy runs into the family from the
ferry again (the one with the well behaved kids) and finds some sorority
sisters - they have a special call they make to each other – so at first we
just thought she was making bird noises. J
But she chats with them for quite a while, always making friends
wherever she goes. We haven’t made it
to the “real” grocery store yet so we didn’t have anything to pack for lunch,
and by about 2:00 we’re getting hungry and we head out to find food.
There is a big shopping center with
restaurants just down the road in Oak Bluffs – we take the car and head to the
city center. We scope out some
restaurants, and Patti and I have our eye on some lobster potato skins and
lobster mac and cheese… the other three have been talking to a guy one
restaurant down who is selling his place well.
They have award winning chicken wings and a lobster roll special for
just $15. All the restaurants have an
open patio area with bar style seating that faces the view on the marina. It’s a great atmosphere – while we’re
deciding, we see a loon out on the water diving for fish. They really go deep and then he comes back up
with a fish in his mouth.. Patti treats
us to some On Golden Pond moments with the loons…
We decide to split up for lunch –
Patti and I get our lobster potato skins, lobster mac and cheese and fried
clams and split them all – and Dana, Amy and Sandy all get the wings. Amy had some nice oysters… we tell our waiter that we’re racing another
party that is eating at the next restaurant over. I don’t even know why I said that, we’re in
no hurry – it was just one of those awkward things that comes out of my mouth
sometimes. He was asking us if we wanted
the bill and being chatty, and I just said something to sound interesting and
get the bill to us quicker.
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| Good beer... nice view... |
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| Lobster mac and cheese |
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| Lobster potato skins |
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| Proof that great minds think alike... Dana's pic of her view and her drink (which was really good!) |
We head over
to the other place and chat a bit, we look into some shops that are right there
– there are Black Dog shops everywhere and each claim to be a little different with
the specialties (beach gear, kids, etc).. and this one is an outlet/sale
shop. We’ve been looking for our 2015
Black Dog shirts – they have just the black dog on the front, and the year and
Martha’s Vineyard on the back – but this place is an outlet, so they have the
2013 and 2014 shirts, but no 2015. We
get some ice cream – yummy… and then walk up to Circuit street. It’s street that is just lined with cute
little shops that you love to look at but really rarely get anything from. We left the beach at 2:00 and it’s now about 5:00 by the time we get through the shops and get back to the car, and we still
have to get to liquor store and the grocery store before it closes at 7.
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| The Oak Bluffs Marian |
We make a brief detour to the liquor store -- Dana finds those mango Mike's lemonades... mmm... and I get some too. Patti and I also get some Summer Shanty, and Amy and Sandy find a nice red wine. On to the food store!!
Cronig’s Market is the larger store
in the area, and last time we were here I wanted to keep one of their paper bags
just because I like the look of their design, and I was sad that they didn’t
have a cloth grocery bag because I would like it as a souvenir. Patti made fun of me for that – it’s ok, we
have fun kind of laughing at the silly things that we do, I get my laughs in on
her too, and it’s actually rare that she’ll be the one poking fun. Which is what makes this even more fun,
because a couple of years after that, Cronig DID make a cloth bag and Amy
brought one back for me. When Patti saw
it.. she wanted one. I’m sorry,
what? Oh you WANT one? The thing that it was silly to get as a
souvenir, now you want one? Ahhhh… ok… So
Patti is eager to check out their bags.
They do have them, but they’re not the same at all – these are black and
made of thin cloth (mine is “oatmeal” colored and made of a strong canvas) –
and mine was like $2 and now they’re $6.99 – Patti is sad and she doesn’t get a
bag. And actually we’re pretty disappointed
with Cronig’s in general. The Stop and
Shop that is half the size had better selection and better prices – the watermelon
is a full dollar more at Cronig’s. We are all over the place in this store,
getting things, and then deciding not to get things because the other place is
better – and 3 out of 5 of us have carts… it’s just a mess really – and then we
also see the family from the ferry again and Amy goes up to talk to them
again.. they really must think that we’re
stalking them.
We get a few things, some stuff to
make spaghetti for dinner - but we want to go back to the other store to get
sandwich stuff and some other things. It’s open until 11, so we could go later
tonight, but for now we just want to get back to the house, it’s past 7 now and
we’re beach tired, shopping tired, and hungry.
No movie tonight, we just watched TV
– the Island – hung out… and Amy made us a nice spaghetti dinner with a good
loaf of bread. By the time we finish eating we realize we’re
not making it to the grocery store tonight – what’s one more day…
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| Spaghetti dinner selfies! |
Day 5 – June 23 Tuesday - Soon it's gonna rain... I can feel it...
Once again we take our time in the
morning and just hang out - we sit on the
back deck and have our coffee and bagels… and we feel that storm wind pick up.
You can feel that a storm is brewing. We
know that there is supposed to be rain today because we watched the new last
night – but there is a conflict, some say we’re in for a wall of water from
1pm-6pm– others say scattered chances all day – the internet says that it will
be windy at 1pm but won’t rain until 5pm…
so the weather is up in the air, and we decide that we don’t want to be
at the beach, or even out shopping when it decides to start pouring on us. Even in the short time that we’re sitting
out on the deck we feel a drop or two hit us, but the rain doesn’t come.
We drive down to the grocery store
so that we can finally get supplies for lunch and other meals. Sandy and Amy are the people who cook, and
Sandy is really policing Amy’s food intake because of the scare at the
hospital, so they’re put in charge of dinner.
We want to try to look at the Vineyard Haven Black Dog because that’s
the original store and we think they’re the ones that will have the 2015
shirts. We decide to go there before we
go to the grocery store so we’re not carrying all that around or leaving it in
the car for too long. On the way down to the store we see a big group of wild turkeys just roaming the streets, I didn't realize that happened here...
We’re in luck with the shirts! We find our 2015 shirts – and they’ve
improved on the shirt material since 2007 – the sales girl explains that this
is brushed cotton, and it’s SO soft, one of those shirts you just can’t stop
touching. Amy finds a tote bag that she
really likes but she wants it in the colors of her sorority (red and white) and
we hear someone say to the manager, Frank, that someone wants to see him –
turns out that it’s Amy. She wants to
talk to him about this bag – and it turns out that the bag does come in red and
white – and it’s the give away bag. If
you just spend over $125 in any of their stores in the course of one day, you
can show your receipts, and combine them, to get this bag for “free”.
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| Black Dog layered look turns it into a wiener dog |
We crossed the street and did our
food shopping – but Sandy and Amy want fresh fish for dinner, so they’re going
to go by the fish market on the way back home.
We put our food in the car and we decide to look at a few more shops and
let Amy and Sandy take the car. We’ll
walk back up when we’re done, and they can take the car to the fish market. We find some cute whale shirts, Dana gets one
and I make note of some super soft hoodies that I may be coming back for.. Dana even finds a book on searching for sea
glass, one of her favorite things to do.
But it’s not island specific and doesn’t list any place to find it here –
in fact they say that it’s harder to find these days because things just aren’t
made out of glass these days.
We get back to the house and there
is some kind of construction happening in the street out front and a police officer seems to be overseeing it
(they don’t have much else to do with the island crime rate) and the cop said
that we just missed them. We think it’s
funny that the police officer knew who we were looking for… and must have
talked to them a bit because he also told us they’d be back soon. Later we hear from Amy and Sandy and
apparently they put on quite a Lucy and Ethel show of unloading the car, and
then figuring out that there was other food in the trunk, and backing out of
the driveway to head out again while trying to maneuver around the
construction, with Amy driving like Mr. Magoo, barely visible behind the
steering wheel of the car. We head around back and go in the back door –
which isn’t locked.. it’s the Vineyard.. .
Amy and Sandy get back with the fish
for dinner – and we’re not making any plans to go to any other part of the
island today because we’re still just waiting for this rain to happen, and
really the radar looked scary with this big wall of water coming our way and
tearing up trees and houses in it’s path.
So we walk back down to the Black Dog Tavern to eat lunch – Amy’s family
doesn’t like to eat there and Amy does, so we indulge her. Really, they have good food there and it’s
down near the water and the pirate ships, so it’s a pretty cool view. We get seats inside but with a nice cross breeze,
and we’re still feeling that “it’s gonna storm” cool updraft happening. While
we sit and chat we’re treated to a great dog playing fetch with it’s
owner. This is one of those “ball, ball,
ball” dogs. When she’s getting ready to
throw it he is on point, so focused, and as soon as she draws the ball back
behind her, he just lights up like, “YES!!!”.
She’s throwing it out into the water, so the dog is having to swim out
and get it each time – and you can tell that he could do this all day. Lunch was great – some get BLTs, burgers, I
get the fish and chips and chowder and Amy gets this huge salad in an effort to
get her greens in.
We all walked back and chilled for
bit at the house and then Amy and Sandy head to the firehouse to get Amy’s blood
pressure checked - she met some very “nice”
firemen there…she would like to take one home please… and they walked through
the cemetery. By comparison for steps,
today we get about 9,
600 steps… (and really these are Dana’s steps – but we’re all pretty much
making the same trips – so it’s an estimate for the group) – but it’s no 27,000
steps.
Sandy is busy in the kitchen and firing up the grill on
the back deck – while the rest of us watched Wild and sat around. Sandy made a great dinner oven baked seasoned
potatoes, a great salad and three kinds of fish: Bluefish, Haddock and Fluke. The bluefish is Amy’s favorite fish because
she used to have it for breakfast when she came to visit the Vineyard (it’s an
oily fish, but Sandy found a recipe online that said to soak it in milk first
to get some of that fishy flavor out), the fluke is a nice piece of fish too –
we all get to sample each kind of fish.
I have pictures of the potatoes and the salad, but we have no pictures
of the fish for some reason – I took pics of it cooked and even pics of Sandy
with it, and my phone ate them I guess.
Bummer. . Patti, Dana and I
cleaned up since they cooked… and we lost electricity again. But by now we have it down, Amy has marked
the breakers and just goes down to flip the switch. They really need an electrician.
We were going to go down to Back Door Donuts for dessert, but we don't want to risk getting caught in the rain and we're all just ready to be in... it's about 8:00, so we decide that the watermelon will be a perfect dessert!
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| Sandy gets the grill going |
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| Salad and potatoes |
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| Nice watermelon for dessert! |
The storms finally come in – about 10pm, after waiting all day for them to happen – and they are
loud, scary loud – but only last a few minutes. It never really gave us a good rain, but it
would have been a little chilly for the beach anyway. Tomorrow is supposed to be super nice, and now we have food to pack for the beach - so looking forward to a day in the sun!
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