Duke Ellington/S. VT Tour Post II

We arrived back to the sweet-smelling state of Vermont yesterday afternoon, two hours later than anticipated due to "white-plate" traffic, as Tyler called it. We were tired but had lots to do at home after being away for a week. We are very thankful to Pam, Lonnie, and the boys and to Tom and Donna for babysitting our house/chickens and Fred.

Sunday morning (June 26) we stopped back at Hildene to spend some time touring the gardens and house. We met the Hildene historian who even offered to take us to the archives to look at more cool stuff, but we had to get on the road. What a bummer. While there, I picked up a baby tick on my leg as well as some cute bird postcards that I plan to frame for the baby's room. We left (stopping for a photo-op at a cheese shop) and continued our scenic route to Fairfield, arriving half an hour late. It took about 1.5 hours longer than we expected.

At Fairfield we met the professor and some of our classmates and then settled into our dorm room which was quite large - 4 bedrooms, living/dining room, kitchen and bathroom with two toilets! Our first night we had an amazing lecture on the history of jazz by Brian Torff, who is a jazz double bassist and composer. Monday and Tuesday were busy days filled with lectures - sometimes lasting as long as 3+ hours without a break. It was incredibly difficult to sit that long but we did get a ton of information. We listened to speakers like Gary Giddins, a jazz critic for the Village Voice (who wanted $5,000 to speak to us for a couple hours!) and Monsignor John Sanders who played trombone with Duke Ellington from 1953-1959 and who had an incredible life story to share with us. (It happened to be his 86th birthday when he visited us but he still stood and lectured non-stop for over three hours!)

On Wednesday we went to NYC for the day to visit Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Paley Center for Media Studies (to view film/tv clips of Duke) and Birdland for dinner and live music. Thursday brought us more lectures, but Friday we were back in NYC to: visit the Jazz Museum in Harlem, tour Harlem in general and Sugar Hill specifically (which never happened because we ran out of time), have a soul-food lunch at Spoonbread, get lost riding the subway (that was just Tyler and I - we spent about an hour trying to figure out how to get to Grant's Tomb - we never got there), visit The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine (the largest cathedral in the world and the location of Duke Ellington's funeral), and finally, dinner, jazz and swing dancing at Swing46. At 10:30 we left the club and spent the next 45 minutes squeezing our way through the mass of humanity in Times Square (a nightmare) to get to Grand Central Station and our train back to campus. We got back to the dorms around 1:30AM - the longest day I can remember in recent history!

Yesterday we got up around 8AM, packed up, and were on the road by 9AM... however, we weren't back to Derby until close to 4PM! There was so much traffic and construction, as well as lots of time spent looking for bathrooms for me (which was another issue in NYC as well - it gave me nightmares!). As I said on Facebook last night, I have never been so thankful to live in a place where there is no traffic, no crowds of anything but cows, and fresh smelling grass to walk barefoot in.

Some pics from the trip: