The Great American Road Trip: Day 69 - Around the Pioneer Valley

Since Kayleigh was being a good student and working on her Organic Chemistry labs, I decided to get out of her hair for a bit and drive around on the winding narrow roads that connect the small towns out here in the Valley. I don't know many (any) students still on campus, but lucky for me I have another college friend who lives less than an hour away who was willing to drive up to meet me for brunch and wandering around Northampton. Daisy and I were neighbors my senior year, sharing a love of tea, hugs, and general nerdiness - mine in biology, hers in computers. She lives just little south in Connecticut, working at a company that sounds challenging, maddening, and even fun on occasion - I'm hoping that she can eventually work her way high up enough so that she can move wherever I end up and work remotely instead ;)

We started by putting our names down at The Green Bean, a lovely little nook of a restaurant with a line all the way out the door that I somehow missed over the years when I was a student. We intended to just walk around the main street area until our name was called, but then ended up at the Mosaic Cafe, a little off the main drag, because I remembered the delicious crepes there. It's another tiny restaurant that serves an interesting combination of crepes and Mediterranean dishes - I don't know anywhere else where you can have hummus, brochettes, and a Nutella crepe all in the same meal, but everything I've had there has been very good. We split a salmon and caper omelet with a crepe each, then just caught our reservation at Green Bean. We split an order of the chocolate chip banana pancakes - they were fluffy and absolutely wonderful, but be warned, they're plate sized - don't let them convince you to get the full order of three unless you're really hungry, two was more than we could finish!

After our two-part brunch/dessert we braved the chilly fall wind to wander through some of our favorite NoHo stores, like Faces and Thornes. It was interesting to see little things that had changed - a few restaurants had moved or been replaced by other ones, Faces got rid of their photo booth, and the movie theater just off of Main was replaced by an Irish pub. But a lot of things were the same - there are easily 5 sushi restaurants in this little town of less than 30,000 people, even in the cold weather there are a number of musicians playing really well, and there's an independent coffee shop about every 3rd or 4th store. We didn't make it up to Smith College but maybe I'll get to visit before I leave - I occasionally went there when I was in the area but after reading Augusten Burrow's "Running With Scissors" when I was in Burkina, I kind of want to check out some of the parts of campus that he mentioned that I only vaguely remember.

Daisy had to head home, so I settled myself in the studious air that Kayleigh had created in the living room and finally started working on my final two grad school applications while she pondered the NMR spectra of unknown molecules (oh boy!). I had a super gratifying moment when she was trying to explain why the spectrum looked a certain way when, after a good bit of fumbling, I was able to remember enough from my summer course that I could piece together a pretty decent explanation! After how much I struggled with Orgo the first time around, it was a pleasure to realize that this time it had made enough sense to have stuck with me for longer than 10 minutes after the exam. I finished most of one application and made progress on the other - not bad for an evening!