At the Cranberry Festival

I slept fairly late this morning. When I finally got myself up and showered and went inside, I found Gen relaxing with the papers and Patrick catching up on his email in the other room. Pat is a military historian specializing in activity around Trieste, Italy in WWII. I'm not a big history buff, but I found his website interesting—especially the "Puptent Poets" page (unfortunately no longer available), which featured such gems as this:

ORDER

"At eight AM we're pulling out,"
The general sternly said,
So the colonel sent the order down,
"At five we leave our bed."
Well, the captain took no chances,
Because captains never do,
And so he told the topkick,
"Have the men get up at two."
At midnight the sergeant woke us,
And here we sadly sit,
Because it now is noontime,
And we haven't pulled out yet.

— T-5 Carl D. Westerberg

Some of the poems made me laugh, while others made me cry. All of them were engrossing reading, though.

Touring the Turtle

After breakfast we walked out to Pat's Xplorer motorhome, christened "The Turtle," and Pat and Gen gave me the grand tour. The Turtle is a stretched van that packs much of Gertie's equipment into about half the space. I alternated between marveling at how cleverly the manufacturer had shoehorned everything in...and feeling claustrophobic because I felt shoehorned myself! I tried to take some pictures, but even my 24mm wideangle lens was not wide enough for the cramped interior. This awkward diagonal shot, a vain attempt to show as much as possible, was the best I could do. The best way I can sum up my impression is to say that the Turtle's entire bathroom would fit in Gertie's shower stall—if you lowered Gertie's ceiling by a foot or two.

Pat uses the Turtle as his only transportation, so it's more than an RV to him and Gen. Despite being a van conversion, it's 21' long—only a foot shorter than Gertie—but it's considerably narrower (as well as lower), so it's easier to maneuver and park in small Massachusetts towns. He's put plenty of miles on it in the 18 months he's owned it—he's been all over the country to various military history meetings and other destinations.

The Cranberry Festival

The three of us piled into the Turtle and headed to nearby Harwich for the Cranberry Harvest Festival. This annual celebration has some of the county-fair aspects that you'd expect, complete with cotton candy and lost kids looking for their mothers. But the big attraction for us was the crafts show—housed in a huge tent or series of tents and stretching on seemingly forever. I've been to craft shows before, but I had never seen one this big!

Pat had dropped us off and gone to find a parking place for the Turtle, so Gen and I wandered the aisles looking at all the handicrafts and tasting the homemade jams and spreads. Gen knew many of the sellers, as they show up regularly at affairs like this on the Cape. Some are "snowbird" RVers who head south in the winter and sell their wares in Florida or Arizona until New England returns to more livable temperatures.

One pair of middle-aged women offered such delicacies as "Apricot Jalapeño Jelly" and "Red Onion Garlic Jam." I passed up the chance to try these exotica, but Gen is more adventurous and sampled away with gusto, even though some of the comestibles were strong enough to pucker anybody's mouth. (I was tempted to add steam coming out of her ears in this photo!)

Pillow quilts

I don't often buy anything in these sorts of craft shows—I'm more likely to just look, hoping to find inspiration for a project of my own—but at this one I came across a table where two women were selling an item that I loved at first sight: a "pillow quilt." By day it's an 18" x 18" pillow, but by night it unfolds into a 4' x 5' quilt. Come morning, it folds up neatly into its own pocket and turns back into a pillow. I'd been carrying a couple of comforters in Gertie, but they took up space when not in use. These pillow quilts do double duty, which is exactly what you want in anything that goes in an RV. I bought two from the huge variety of colors and patterns they had (there must have been sixty or eighty, no two alike). Here are my instructions for making your own.

Back at Gen's house in Pocasset, we chatted for awhile and then headed out for dinner at an Irish restaurant called Liam McGuire's. McGuire is a singer with a number of CDs to his credit, and we listened on one of them on the Turtle's CD player on the way there. One song in particular caught my ear. It was a tale of the Protestant/Catholic Troubles, where brother turned against brother and friend against friend. Having listened for the past three days to the US government rattling its sabers and threatening dire revenge for the terrorist attacks, I was struck by one line in the song:

'An eye for an eye' was all that filled their minds
And another eye for another eye...till everyone is blind.

Liam McGuire's was a pleasant place, full of laughter and Irish music...although the pervasive odor of seafood was a bit of a turnoff for me. I know it's irrational, but I hate the smell of seafood of all kinds. This is not a good attitude to have when dining at restaurants along the New England coast, but what can I do?

If I were like most people, I'd have been taking advantage of the opportunity to get really good, affordable lobster. But that too was wasted on me, because I have a phobia of things with more than four legs, and I cringe at the thought of eating one. To me, a lobster is just a giant underwater cockroach. No thank you, I do not eat insects.

So I had a club sandwich and enjoyed it very much, trying not to inhale too much of the fishy aroma around me. Halfway through the meal, the owner's wife stopped by the table and chatted with us for a few minutes, asking how everything was. And then we walked out into the suddenly chilly twilight and piled into the Turtle for the drive home.