The Great American Road Trip: Day 72

To Boston at EveryTrail
EveryTrail - Find the best Hiking in Massachusetts
Distance - 117 miles
Time - 2 1/2 hours

Sorry it's been so long since I've updated! On Wednesday I woke up and packed, then took Kayleigh out with me to Egg and I. I've seen other "The Egg and I" locations around the country over the years, but I'm pretty certain this is an independent one that happens to have chosen the same name. The crew team would occasionally caravan over here after Saturday practice, taking up several tables or just pushing together all of the round ones to fit everyone. I think Mya was the first person to order a muffin, and when they asked if she wanted it grilled, she wisely replied yes. I still get a grilled corn muffin every time I go - I don't even want to know how much butter they've melted onto it, but that's why it's exceptionally delicious! Kayleigh pointed this out and I completely agree - it's the kind of neighborhood breakfast place you envision when you think of western Massachusetts - a counter sitting area with spinning stools around the kitchen, vinyl-upholstered booths, bright food-themed decor (mostly in shades of white, pale blue, and red), a cork board with local advertisements and fund raisers, and an efficient but friendly staff of servers who I still recognize from college.

After finishing our omelets (and corn muffin!) we headed over to UMass. Kayleigh was going to her Organic Chem lab, in the building across from where I took Physics my senior year. It's always a bit of an overwhelming campus after visiting the relatively small and navigable MHC, but it does have it's perks - my favorite being the not terribly aesthetically pleasing but still awesomely impressive 27 story library. I don't know if it's actually true, but rumor has it that the library is sinking because when they put in the foundation they didn't account for the extra weight of the books that it was going to hold! I drove back to Mount Holyoke to pick up a copy of my transcript to scan and send to my grad schools, then visited to the crew boathouse.

For decades the team rowed out of the marina next door, but my senior year we moved into our very own beautiful boathouse just up the river. One of the many land-impact studies had found an endangered species (of plant? of toad? I don't remember exactly) and it meant that we had to have as little impact as possible on the waterfront, meaning we couldn't cut down any trees. Which would have been fine, except how do you get a boat down to the water and back through a thick grove of trees? They solved the problem by building a deck from the top of the riverbank, attached to a hinged ramp that connected to a floating dock - as the river rose, the angle decreased, and as it sank, it increased - genius! In reality it can be a little difficult at times to navigate with a 55 foot, 200 lb boat, but it certainly does the trick. The dock had been disassembled and put on the shore for the winter, but I did go down to the ramp and take some photos - the river's edge was already starting to ice over.

I didn't want to pay the toll road, so Martha took me on a very beautiful detour around the Quabbin reservoir to the North, then gently south-east down to Boston - I finally drove through a good dozen small towns that I'd heard of over the years but had no idea where they were located! I had quite the interesting time in Boston - I had no idea that so many highways were underground. My poor gps was hopelessly lost, I almost missed several turns and exits, but I finally made it above ground to the 'correct' address only to realize that I might still be lost. Mary had mentioned a large Victorian house co-op that she shares with no fewer than 10 other people. This was the heart of downtown, seemingly some apartments next to a hotel and across from a Thai restaurant. I parked (because it seemed hard to find spots) and just stuck around for a bit. Mary called in response to my text and clarified - her address was in Cambridge, not Boston! I later noticed that Boston seems particularly prone to having the same street names in every neighborhood, meaning that this sort of thing happens very easily and frequently. I happily went back underground in order to exit the crazy city traffic, and found myself in Cambridge next to Harvard's School of Divinity.

Mary is another college friend who I met through crew our first year, and is also from Denver - you might remember the photos of us in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science from September with the mule deer ears ;) She moved out here a month ago and took a job with a group that invests in and helps develop locally-run microfinance groups in developing countries. She found this particular co-op online, it sounds like there are a number all over Boston - this one just celebrated it's 50th anniversary. It did seem like each one has it's own vibe - this one is a little more individualistic in that most people are very busy and do their own thing, but the night I arrived was their weekly house dinner. Nancy was cooking a delicious smelling vegetable soup, and took us up on our offer to help by having us make the fruit salad. I've added lemon juice to fruit salads before to stop it from browning, but she asked us to add cinnamon as well, to cut the acidity. I've never tried that before but it did work nicely, adding an impression of sweetness without adding any extra sugar.

Not everyone was home that night for dinner but I did get to meet a majority of the household. It's an interesting mix, ranging in age from mid-20s to mid-80s, with a similar range of professions - I met a grad student, a woman who works getting high school kids to work with local gardens, a human rights lawyer who works part time in Thailand and Burma, a busker/musician/one-man band, a retired professor, and several others whose jobs I didn't get to ask about. I liked the feeling of the house and the way they had it structured, and staying there for a few days gave me a much better idea of things to look for should I ever decide to seek out a house share or co-op living situation in the future. All of the residents live on the top two floors, but the first floor has a single bedroom that they use as a guest room - an unexpected luxury of my own space.

Pictures:

Gnome made it to the corn muffin just in time before I devoured the rest of it

With Kayleigh!

I finally realized when I was researching this place online to see if it was connected to the chain of restaurants with the same name that we've been misnaming it all these years - it's just "Egg and I" not "The Egg and I"

The MHC gate. They say that you should walk in through the center your first year, but after that you should only use the little side gates, otherwise if you walk out through the center gate before you graduate, you won't end up graduating. They said the same thing about if you kill your first year plant that the greenhouse gives you for free, but thankfully that dead aloe didn't haunt me and I still got to walk out of the gate after graduating ;)