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My husband and I recently went to Lenox Massachusetts for some R & R. It’s about a 3 ½ hr drive from where we live. The first hour of the drive was rather uneventful until we encountered an 18 wheeler. There we are driving along in the left lane and the truck was in the right lane. All of a sudden the truck starts to move into the left lane and my husband has to veer onto the shoulder slightly and while this is happening at 65-70 MPH, I start to see my life flashing by. I’m thinking this is it, we’re going to crash!!!. The truck immediately gets back into the right lane. My husband stayed calm but I on the other hand was furious at the truck driver. I was cursing him out left and right and as we passed him I flipped him the bird!!. So we continue on hoping we have no more episodes like we just had.

I think we were on the Mass Turnpike (or it might have been the NYS Thruway) and we had to look for exit 21A. We see a sign for exit 21 so we thought, ok exit 21A should be right after this exit. We pass exit 21 and the next exit sign we see is for 21B. We both look at each other and say “did we pass exit 21A”. I said there was no sign for exit 21A, maybe exit 21 was 21A. We keep driving and we finally see an exit sign for 21A. Our immediate thought was how stupid that was. We’re used to seeing signs like exit 1, 1A, etc not 1, 1B, 1A. Anyway we finally get to our destination safe and sound. We check into our room and get some brochures to plan our days ahead.

Thursday we spent the morning hiking in the Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary. We were hoping to see some wild life but didn’t . There were a number of hiking trails and we tried to do most of them. It was so peaceful in the woods. About ½ way into the hike I said to myself “uh oh” I have to go to the bathroom but kept on walking. I casually mention to my husband that I have to go. He asked if I wanted to head back and I said no, lets just keep walking maybe the urge will pass. Well, the dam urge wouldn’t pass, it kept getting stronger and stronger. I start looking around to see if there is any place I can go. I start getting the sweats and I can’t hold it much longer!!! I tell my husband, I have to gooooooo real bad!!. We pass a big tree and I tell him to walk ahead and look out for anyone coming. I get behind the tree and do my thing. Ah relief!!! I catch up to him and he said did you go ? I said yup and he asked me what I did. I asked why and he goes I just want to know. Well if you must know, I pooped I said. He gave me one of those looks like “no you didn’t” and I said would you like to go back and look? I said good thing I had tissues with me

Our next excursion was to the Edith Wharton Mansion. I had no idea who she was but I’m not the literary one in the family. I forgot how many acres the mansion is on but it was beautiful. We went on a tour inside the mansion. The rooms were gorgeous but what was creeping me out was all the bugs inside and outside the windows of every room. It started to remind me of the movie the Exorcist or was it the Amityville Horror. At that point I kept saying this house is EVIL and I want to get out of here!!


Shaker Village For those not familiar with the American Shakers, they were a celibate religious community. It was founded by Ann Lee of Manchester England and established in America in 1774. Their basic principles were purity of life, confessions of sin, consecration of strength and time and talent.
There were about 10 houses on the property that you could go into. The main house had several floors. Men lived on one side of the house and women on the other side. The architecture was amazing. I had joked to my husband that he wouldn’t have made a very good Shaker, too much manual labor.

Norman Rockwell Museum
I for one am not too thrilled with looking at paintings or pictures in Museums but to me this was different. I actually enjoyed looking at all his work. I might have to start collecting Norman Rockwell pictures.

Shakespeare Company We were lucky enough to get tickets to see the Hound of the Baskervilles Saturday night. It was done as a spoof of the Monty Python genre. It was actually quite funny.

Friday night we splurged a little and went to a real nice Steak house. The place was crowded so we had to wait abt ½ hr to be seated. It went downhill from there. They sit us in the back of the restaurant where there was a table of 15 people celebrating a birthday. It was very noisy and I had to raise my voice when talking to my husband. It got so bad I said to our waitress “you know they shouldn’t have sat anyone else back here”. All she said was “I know”. My husband was annoyed because they overcooked his steak and he never got his sour cream for his baked potato. Oh well!!!

All in all we had a very nice time. The weather was perfect except for Saturday when it rained all day and we were still able to catch the changing of the colors. We would like to go back since there were things we didn’t get to do or see ( Tanglewood – summer home of the Boston symphony, more hiking and such).