Thursday, May 22, 2014

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Please bear with me with this post, it will be a long one. As mentioned previously, last weekend, being a long weekend in Canada, my family and two others go away to different places each year, this year being Watch Island. This post includes the photos I took.

I didn't manage to get a photo of the boat we took to get to the island as I was too busy packing it. Here is a subset of all of our stuff - we packed clothes, sheets, pillow cases, games, food and other miscellaneous objects. Each of the three families had filled our cars to capacity.

The day we arrived was cloudy and rainy though it wasn't actually raining (fortunately) when we were either loading or unloading the boat. In this photo you can just barely see our island in the distance.
And in this one we get closer and can now make out the house.
Walking from the dock adjacent to the boathouse, up to the the main house, this is the view we get. To enter the house we climbed the steps that are on the right side of this photo.
One thing we noticed was wherever you looked on the ground could be found goose defecation, so we had to watch where we stepped. There were two couples of geese nesting on our island, both with eggs brewing. Here is one half of one couple.
And here is the nesting one of the other couple.
On entering the house up the stair case described above we enter immediately into the kitchen.
It isn't a particularly nice looking kitchen, but with two fridges and two dishwashers it handled our group of 13 people quite well.
In the back of the kitchen was this stairwell that led upstairs.
That stairwell led up to a hallway that has a few bedrooms.
At the end of that hallway if you turn left you come to this large landing on the second floor. Most of the doorways from this level lead to bedrooms, with two of the doors leading to bathrooms.
From this large landing there is a short stair well that brings you to this intermediary landing between the main floor and the second floor.
Looking down from that intermediary level we can first see the piano.
Then the antique desk area.
Then one of three sitting areas in the living room area of the house.
Looking back up the stair case we can see the intermediary landing.
Now on the main floor, to the right of that first seating area, is a doorway to the gazebo style part of the house; it is a little dark as it was a bright day when I took the photo.
Here is the gazebo area; the kids played here a little bit but it wasn't otherwise used.
The left side of the gazebo area had some toys that the youngest of the children in the house played with.
Under the intermediary landing is a cozy spot with a sofa, some benches and a fireplace.
Turning slightly to the right of the cozy spot under the intermediary landing is the hallway that leads back to the kitchen.
The living room area that saw the most action in terms of usage was this one. The first photo shows the door, closed, that leads to the gazebo area.
Here is the same living room area facing the entry into the dining room. The little TV in this room was the only TV in the house; this house is clearly not in the 21st century. The only use the TV really got was to watch the Canadiens get pummeled in game one of the Eastern Conference series against the Rangers on Saturday.
Here is the dining room, the table held all 13 of us easily. I missed taking a few photos from this room as the view from the windows was quite impressive. It is from this room that we would spot the big ships that would be passing along the St. Lawrence seaway.
Here is one of the big boats we saw.
And here is when two, traveling in opposite directions, come close to each other.
Here is the longest side of the island that we didn't spend much time in as it had the most goose poo.
Here is a view of the Thousand Island's bridge from our island.
The closest house to us, on a different island.
Here's a different side of the house that had no goose poo, and so it is here that I set up a simple obstacle course to get the kids running a little. With some rope and four small pilons, we created a track that the kids would run and I would time them.
Finally, a couple of photos of the balcony that straddled two sides of the house.

We had some really gourmet meals, the kids all played nicely together; as adults we all got along quite well. I got to have a nap on Sunday afternoon.

We took the boat back on Monday to our cars and from there (Clayton, NY) drove south to Ithaca to eat a late lunch at the Moosewood cafe. Moosewood has made a number of cookbooks of which our three families own one or more and the recipes are all really good so it was a treat to be able to get to eat there. From Ithaca we drove to Syracuse to shop at the Destiny USA mall, mostly for kids clothes as we are entering the summer season and our kids are low on summer clothes. From Syracuse we stopped in to a truck stop in Mexico, NY, where my brother-in-law had stopped as he is a long distance truck driver. This way the kids got to see their uncle. Next we drove back to Clayton to do some grocery shopping. Groceries in US supermarkets are different from what we have in Canada, so it is neat to wander through and get some things. Next we drove home arriving at our house at about 2:30AM Tuesday morning.

3 comments:

Debstar said...

It looks like a fun place to stay for a short time. That kitchen and it's lack of bench tops would drive me nuts after awhile.

Zhoen said...

Oh, what a warm and lovely house. Such light, I'm quite envious.

Phil Plasma said...

Yes, the very limited about of surface area for preparing food did prove challenging, especially with three cooks in action.

It was indeed a lovely house, it was very wealthy people who built it. Considering the property and house are up for sale for almost two million dollars, it shows what money can do.