After buying our new (to us) car, we headed north for about an hour, and landed at the Crane Estate. Really, I should have taken a picture of the house for context, but I was much more pleased with the back yard.
In this first picture, the house is behind me, three hills roll out in front of me and that's the ocean in the distance. The small blue smudge in the middle is Frances, for a sense of scale.
Everyone was happy. I think Mark has wanted to visit the estate for a while, but we usually just visit the beach down below the house. The Olmstead Brothers designed the grounds. They were Not At All Bad.
This is the casino, between hill one and hill two. The hills and valleys are so high and deep that the casino isn't visible from the house (at least not from the back porch where we were; I'm guessing a hint of the casino is visible from the upper floors).
Frances on the left; Chandler on the right.
Looking out at the ocean.
A little bi-plane was doing aerial stunts for us while we walked to the ocean. That was...thrilling. No one I know and/or love is allowed on a bi-plane ever, ok?
The estate has four miles of hiking trails, so we meandered. Frances and Chandler are the teeny, tiny blue spots in the middle of the photo.
Then we found the beach and...
...the clothes started to come off.
I had to stop taking photos at this point.
When Chandler was good and soaked, we loaded the kids back in the car and headed for Russell Orchards. Mark and I bought ourselves a little picnic dinner. And the girls had apple cider donuts and ice cream for dinner. We were shivering with cold by then, because it's May in Massachusetts, but still you could do so much worse.
Why did we never go there when I was a kid?
ReplyDeleteWhy did I never take you kids there?
Weird......absolutely gorgeous.
The kids look so wonderful!