Oh, right -- there was a vacation

Life has been so busy that I've been totally neglecting posting here, and there is a huge backlog of Things I'd Like To Talk About Here. I'm sure that many will get neglected, but hopefully I can knock a few out this weekend.

First, though: Kate and I actually got a vacation in, a few weeks ago. The original plan (for the family to go to Italy this summer) got scragged for obvious reasons, so we started thinking about how to get something that would feel like a good vacation, while not causing quarantine headaches. The right compromise, we decided, was the Berkshires.

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We rented an excessively-large but gorgeous house (I just posted photos to Instagram), set on a really steep hill. Like, the driveway is steep enough (and long enough) that the handyman who came by one day admitted that, when he has to plow it, he sometimes winds up just praying that the berm at the bottom is deep enough to stop his truck. Like, the third floor of the house is below the road -- so they built a turret on top of the house, and a bridge from that out to the hillside path, where it is only twenty more feet up to the road. It's wild. If you ever want to stay in Great Barrington, and can afford something a little pricey, I can recommend it.

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The point of going to the Berkshires was, of course, hiking -- while Kate and I aren't in remotely the kind of shape that my brother (the mountain climber) is, we do 4-5 mile hikes on easier trails routinely, so we looked forward to some fun there.

We succumbed to a bit of hubris, and started out trying to climb Mount Greylock, the highest point in MA. By mountain standards it's pretty modest, but it's still a mountain, and the trail we were on was very steep by our standards: no clambering up huge rocks, but at points it was a good 30+% incline, and the whole thing was a steady uphill for almost 3 miles.

I figure we got more than halfway along, and more like 2/3 of the way up (something over 1.5 miles and 1500-2000 feet of elevation) before Kate's lungs noped out -- between the exertion, the humidity (it was a pretty damp day for September) and the altitude, it was turning into a problem. And my heart was hammering hard enough that I had no objections to stopping: it was probably the single hardest physical exercise we've ever tried together, and the hardest I've done, period, in some years.

It was comforting to then drive to the summit, and realize that the 2.7 mile climb we had tried corresponded to about 8 miles of pretty steep road.

Lesson to myself: climbing up is hard; climbing down isn't nearly as hard, but it is sometimes terrifying. I eventually realized that my old fighting/fencing habits were helpful here -- when I dropped into a lower, wider stance, I was way more secure on the way down. (My thighs did give me hell the next day, though.)

Later in the week, we did a longer but milder hike, all the way around Bear Mountain pond, with a mile or so detour up the Appalachian Trail. The latter bit was back into Really Steep, but not nearly as ambitiously long as Greylock had been. That was a really lovely day out, highly recommended and not so hard.

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Us being us, we Foodied our way around greater Great Barrington, and were not disappointed. We hit a pizzeria (Baba Louie's), an Indian restaurant (Aroma Bar and Grill), a relatively authentic Mexican restaurant (Xicohtencatl), and a susherie (Bizen) -- all were innovative and high-quality enough that they wouldn't be at all out of place in Davis Square. Given the circumstances, we did everything take-out at the house, but it all traveled decently well.

The place we kept coming back to, though, was Patisserie Lenox -- the pastries and macarons were our desserts pretty much every night, and the sandwiches we got for sidewalk lunch our last day there were very tasty.

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Overall, it was a beautiful five days (even with one day that got somewhat washed out due to rain). It was the very end of September -- not yet what I think of as leaf-peeping season here, but at the higher elevation there it was getting close to peak, so it was utterly beautiful, a chance to get away from the city and soak up some nature for a little while. Not enough to entirely relax me, but at least improved things to the point where I no longer felt like I was going to imminently explode from the ambient stress...