Welcome to Yale-ville

The trip across country was relaxing when contrasted to the lead-up days and the big wedding event.  We got to eat at two of our favorite restaurants.  The first is in Holbrook, Arizona.   It's a third generation Mexican restaurant right on old Route 66 that has the best Tex-Mex I've ever eaten.  The second place, amazingly, is in Dickson, Tennessee.  Lugo's is a fabulous 4 star restaurant opened by a culinary trained chef and his wife in this dink town because they wanted a small town atmosphere in which to raise their children.  This place is about 25 miles outside of Nashville, and each time the food shines.  I've never eaten better food anywhere including New York, San Francisco or New Orleans.

We rolled into New Haven, Connecticut and have spent the first two days getting settled.  Sarah and Jay did a great job getting their apartment ready for us to sublet.  The apartment was built in 1929, and had all the mod-cons of the era.  There's the original elevator complete with the wire grate you have to pull across when you enter the telephone booth sized box.  (Thank heaven this apartment is on the second floor, so we haven't bothered with the 80+ year old contraption.)  The apartments include a built in bathroom, hardwood floors, 10 foot high ceilings, electricity, AND a built in ice-box (and I mean an enameled box lined with wood that you cooled with ice).  The kitchen has its original cabinetry - not wood, but metal painted with enameled paint - like those old fashioned turkey roaster pans.  The doorknobs are glass.  There's a brass circle about 3" in diameter cut into the front door with a little piece of swinging metal, so you can see who's calling at your door before opening it.  The windowsills are about 8" deep.  Everything has been painted about a million times, but the interior of the apartment and the exterior of the building and the common spaces are surprisingly clean, neat and bright.  The apartment is chopped up into tiny rooms, but the 10 foot high ceilings keep it from being claustrophobic.  Believe me when I tell you I've lived in much worse places than this.  Our apartment when we first married was 1/2 of a detached garage built in the 1930's.  You could laughingly call it a 'studio'.  We called it Crazy Betty's garage. 

One of the perks of living close to Yale, and I mean spitting distance, is we are on the free Yale Shuttle route.  Mysteriously, there are no paper maps of this system.  Everyone has helpfully explained that all we have to do is go on-line, and there's everything we need.  Yeah, everything EXCEPT where the Shuttle stops.  One of the things we quickly learned is there's no place to park a car.  We haven't been able to find anywhere legal to park in the SUMMERTIME when no one is here.  I can't imagine what the parking problem is like when all the students are here.  Sarah got us a parking permit for our car in the Yale garage that serves their apartment building, and her friend, Meriam, got us a second permit for our trailer.  Our hope was that the car and the trailer would be housed in the garage right across the street, and we would use the trailer like a big closet.  

It was a good thought.  The trailer was 2" too tall for the garage.  At this point, we figured we were screwed.  As we traipsed up to the building where all the Yale parking is assigned, paid for, and denied, we weren't hopeful.  Our expectation was to encounter the parking counterpart of Lily Tomlin's character Ernestine.  (This famous character was a woman who worked for the one and only telephone company, and who loved denying service to customers because "We're the phone company, and we can".) Instead, we encountered Linda, a Yale employee who worked very hard to find us a space that would work for our trailer.  Ironically, we wound up in the postage stamp size hidden parking lot of the School of Forestry and the Environment which is one of the schools who will be issuing a Master's Degree to Sarah in a couple of years. 

We took the free Yale shuttle all day long our first day in New Haven.  It seemed like we would just walk up to the intersection where we thought we could catch it, and the one we wanted would be pulling away from the curb.  There was a lot of standing around admiring the architecture.  And let me tell you - there's architecture coming out the wazoo in this place.  I noticed there's a tour of the Yale architecture this coming Saturday, and I think I'm going to hook on.  There are buildings on top of buildings here all crammed together.  As we rode the Shuttle from place to place running our errands, I quipped to Drake that this was the poor man's Greyline tour. 

Another smooth spot of this visit is the giant cat.  Jackson (who I call Alice half

the time), is HUGE.  He must weigh 20 pounds, and his tail is 18" long.  He is magnificent looking, and he's really been lonely since Jay and Sarah have been gone so much.  Now, he's deliriously happy there are people living with him who talk to him and pet him and tell him what a great cat he is.  Actually, he's a little flatulent, slightly stupid, and shedding so much that you'd swear you can see the hair wafting off him as he walks.  Well, today we upped the grooming, and I combed about a pound of hair out of his coat while Drake vacuumed the entire apartment.  We have been looking forward to having a temporary pet.  We've almost always had a pet - first there was Fanny who lived with us for 12 years, and then Alice who lived with us for 19 years.  My only complaint about the cat is he thinks he's going to sleep in the bed with us.  Nope.  He keeps trying, and he hasn't realized that it's never going to happen.  When Sarah comes back, he can resume his place which seems to be on the pillow.  Until then, he's banned from the bedroom at night.  

We're settling in nicely here.  I've been sleeping more than eight hours a night, and I'm starting to feel rested after the wedding madness.  I'm looking forward to the day trips.  I picked up a bunch of Connecticut tourist literature, and in the fourth smallest state, it's pretty easy to go anywhere and back in a day.  One of the things I've had to learn is that every paper state road map is the same size.  However, what may be 300 miles on the paper map of Texas can easily be only 30 miles in these tiny states.  No matter how small, these states all have stuff they are proud of.  Like who knew there were 24 wineries in Connecticut?  I see a wine tour in our future.  There's a bunch of history here - New Haven is 375 years old.  There's an old cemetery in the middle of Yale, and there are free tours on the weekends.   I also found the Yale Caberet which is apparently a summer drama club of Yale students who are putting on a season of plays this summer.  I've barely had time to look around, and I can already see lots to do.  For now, I'm just glad to be feeling well, have a cat to pet, and a new place to explore.