In which we drive to Tivoli, NY, try to photograph a seaplane and reboot the Rogue...

Maddy drove up to a place called Tivoli, NY (just outside Rhinebeck) today to visit a place called Beadzo.


It's a really small place, but nice.

The building the car in the distance is in front of is where the bead shop is. Maddy said she remembered it as having more specialty-type and larger beads, but it seems they've gone in a different direction and are far heavier on seed beads now. Which is good if you're into bead weaving, but Maddy says she doesn't have the patience for it. Nevertheless, she got some nice things.

I'm not sure what this is - the flowers look like a hibiscus but the leaves don't.














This building just looked cool. We didn't get a lot of pictures of what served as downtown because we were getting some odd looks with the camera.











~*~

As it turned out, the place opens at noon now and we got there at twenty after eleven, We stopped at a little cafe for an iced tea, but sitting in there was out of the question - there was a mosquito in there that just would not leave us alone. Rather than look like a moron swatting at it, Maddy decided to see what was on down the road.

Turned out the road ended - at the train tracks by the Hudson River.

That little itty-bitty dot up in the sky that probably looks like dust on your monitor is in fact a bright red seaplane. We thought we had at least one good picture of it, but as it turned out, we didn't...

We could just see the top part of a sailboat down this way, but couldn't really get a picture - and we didn't feel comfortable following the road, such as it was, any further down. Those are the Metro-North and Amtrack tracks, and no way were we even thinking of crossing them. There was a marked crossing, but it was where the road ended - and there were a bunch of signs warning about high-speed trains.

We thought it kind of odd that all the bushes on the side of the tracks were dying - it's not like there hasn't been enough rain.

Since we actually didn't see a train, I'll refrain from making any "train song" jokes. Although you know what caption I had in mind if we'd actually been lucky enough to photograph an oncoming train... ;-)

(Maddy - I don't know if I would have called that "lucky." Probably more like scary as heck...)

This one made me think of a line from the Phil Rickman book Curfew: "Under a deeply textured sky, Crybbe looked self-contained, venerable and almost dignified..."

Not that Tivoli is anything like Crybbe.

The clouds looked so strange. Almost more like autumn clouds than midsummer.













It was really quiet.














Almost eerily so....














If we hadn't seen a couple of cars parked on the other side of the crossing we probably wouldn't have hung around to get any pictures.

 But as pretty as some of these came out...













....I'm glad we did. Even if we didn't score the awesome seaplane pic we thought we did.
















~*~

Driving on the Taconic was no fun today. There were speed traps everywhere. Maddy finally set the cruise control for exactly 55 and let everyone pass us. However, we didn't get pulled over....

Then, on the way back, we noticed that the Rogue was getting awfully stuffy. It took a moment before we figured out the air conditioning was no longer on. Not only that, none of the climate controls were working - no fan, no heat, no rear defogger - nothing. Not good with another heat wave coming up. Maddy said she'd call the Nissan place when we got home. Anyway, we had to stop for the mail, and when Maddy restarted the car - presto! The air conditioner came on, the fan started working and so did everything else.

I guess "did you try rebooting it?" also applies to cars.....