We Like to Be in America

Getting the house ready for our vacation to America was a lot of work because, as usual, we made it a much larger job than it really needed to be.  (That’s my interpretation.  Trine’s may differ.)  In the course of our two-day housekeeping operation, we swapped Maddie’s old kiddie desk and chair out for more grown-up versions of the same.  We didn’t plan to do it: it’s just that in the course of cleaning her room Saturday night while she slept over at her best friend Astrid’s, the opportunity presented itself and I jumped.

She was thrilled.

At about 5 o’clock on the evening of the 21st we set out from Værløse train station for the airport with help from Mormor.

Check-in and security were unusually quick, so we had plenty of time to browse duty free, and have little sandwiches, and browse around aimlessly, and start to get bored, and get impatient, and restless, and exhausted from all that restless impatient boredom…

…but Maddie finally came up with the idea of doing jumping jacks to burn off all that anxious excitement!

And after an uneventful eight-hour flight, and an uneventful hour on the tarmac at JFK, and an uneventful two-hour drive, and much too little sleep, we were happily if groggily having breakfast with Nana and Pop-Pop in Deep River.

Nana took the girls out to the Essex playground, where they ran into what looked like a Didi clone from about the same time last summer.  Her owner said she was a “Nordic Golden Retriever.”  Her name was Molly.

Nana also took the girls’ shoe shopping.

That evening, or the next morning, or at some point in between, Molli told me she’d found a wild turkey running around the area.  We went looking for it.

I was sure Molli had just seen a big squirrel or mutant pigeon, but suddenly there was a rustling in the rhododendron and then — behold!

Nana and Pop-Pop informed us that they had only just noticed the other day that this sign had been hanging on the guest room door for the last two years.  Still not sure I but it, but the girls were giddy to see it.

We made several trips to the local lake, as usual, and the weather and water were perfect every time.

We had a great seafood lunch at Bill’s, where I tried to get pictures of everyone enjoying their seafood.  Everyone will thank me for not posting any of those pictures, but the selfie I took of Maddie and me came out tolerably, and there are so few pictures of me on this blog that I reserve the right to post all in which I don’t look like a big bumbling idiot.

Even on vacation 3762 miles from home (yes, I looked it up), some things are still the same:

…although the Deep River Wii seems to get a lot more action than the Værløse Playstation.

I didn’t realize until the end of the trip that the girls had been calling Winnie “Vinnie” half the time.  She gave no sign of objection.

We gave minigolf another shot after the horror-show of two years ago, when it had been so hot we’d been forced to give up after eight or nine holes: we’d cowered in the shade of the connected restaurant until we regained our strength through the healing power of ice-cream.  This year the weather was once again hot (though nowhere near as scorching), and we chose a more pleasant course abutting the Sound.  We made it through all 18 holes.

I love something about the picture below but I can’t put my finger on it.  It may just be the nice aesthetics of the way the flag and Molli’s ponytail are blowing in the wind and the way the picture, when you let your eyes linger, can find so many vertical lines despite a diagonal background and a horizontal layout.  Or maybe it’s just ’cause I’m a dad who loves all pictures of his daughters.

I also like the way Maddie is in the exact same pose as Nana in this one (unless that’s not coincidental but mimickry, in which case bad Maddie!):

By the time of our next expected visit to the states Maddie will be eight.  I’ll miss having a minigolfer among us who swings her club likes a hammer and shrieks with delight every time she actually makes contact with her ball, regardless of where it ends up.

After the heat of the links it was nice to have twenty minutes in the air-conditioned car on our way to the Book Barn, which grows so prodigiously between our visits that by 2017 I expect it to have its own airport.

Maybe SAS or Norwegian will fly direct!

Some pictures need no explanation.

And some do, which is a shame when you forget what that explanation is.

The lobsters have arrived!  Molli accompanied Nana to the store to pick them out and couldn’t wait for the biannual lobster races.  Unfortunately, all but one of the lobsters had apparently snipped throught their rubber-band claw restraints, so there was only one lobster to play with.

Another swim.

And finally: lobster time!  Molli Malou has become a champion lobster eater and now eats virtually everything but the nasty goop that Nana likes.

Maddie needed help.

…no, actually, Maddie needed another entrée.

There was a bit of awkwardness as a dessert of s’mores was suggested and I said I was too full to eat another bite.  I was told I would most certainly have a s’more.

I politely insisted I really was full and couldn’t possibly.

I was pleasantly told to shut up and sit down.

Oops.

Saturday morning (the day after Sophie’s 16th birthday) we got a Skype from the Lees and Sophie invited Molli Malou up to see Taylor Swift at Gillette Stadium!  I drove her up to exit 97, where Gene and Sophie met us and whisked Molli Malou away.

To compensate for her being too little for Taylor Swift, we spoiled holy hell out of Maddie for the next 24 hours.  We took her to Inside Out, which was not only a brilliant movie but the first big-screen, feature-length movie I think I’d ever seen with Maddie.  It was definitely the first movie Trine and Maddie and I ever saw in a theatre without Molli.  I liked the symmetry of that: the first full-length movie Molli Malou ever saw on the big screen was Up.  Same studio, same director, same genius.

But I have no idea why Maddie and Trine look so terrified in this picture taken on our way out of the theatre!  Was there a fire I was unaware of?

…and I love this shot of Maddie explaining the movie to Pop-Pop as we make our way to the car.

AS SEEN ON FACEBOOK: Over-the-counter meds at the Deep River Walgreens.  Seriously, what the hell is going on in that little town?

MEANWHILE, IN FOXBORO:

(We would later learn that some of the opening acts had been too loud for poor Molli, but the discomfort she experienced was apparently completely outweighed by the joy of Taylor Swift.)

Back in Deep River, we went out and bought Maddie a lot of crafts and let her go to town.

…and then around mid-afternoon we made our way up to Chelmsford, where the Bouncy House from Sophie’s party was still on hand.

2013:

2015:

Sophie was so eager to drive with her new permit that we were all constantly being asked if we wanted to go to Starbucks.  I was very honored to enjoy such a ride with Sophie, until she heckled me all the way home for having asked for a large coffee instead of a vente.

We took the girls to a place called Altitude and all four seemed to be having so much fun I had to bounce around myself.

I don’t know how she did it, but Trine apparently caught all five of us in a photo burst, so I made the 5-6 pictures from the series into a gif.  (If the picture below isn’t animated on your screen, try clicking or tapping it to see if you can get the gif to launch in a new window or something.)

Hannah duelled Maddie on the balance beam.

I don’t take many pictures while shopping, but sometimes I feel like I have to.

Maddie and Molli both enjoyed shooting hoop so much that I’m going to have to figure out where to set up a basket here on Hybenvej.

Sophie prepared for us the Carribbean chicken recipe with which she had so impressed her immediate family the week before, and it was every bit as delicious as it had looked on Facebook!

I think I have a picture like the one below from every single visit we’ve ever made to the house on Maple Avenue.

We played a lot of Apples and Oranges during the course of the visit, which we were informed was the “kiddie version” of a game called “Cards Against Humanity” that they had, but which could not be played around children.  Unless you’re a child, in which case it cannot be played with your parents around.

Tuesday afternoon Trine and I fled the domestic bliss of Chelmsford for the rural bliss of Loon Mountain, where we’d rented a condo for two nights with Adam & Mary and Mike & Leslie.  And thanks to Mary and Leslie, there are actually pictures of me for once!  I actually exist!

It was spectacularly unexciting.

And that evening Adam & Mary said, “Hey, guys, we brought this great game you probably never heard of… it’s called Cards Against Humanity…”

Aunt Deb’s friend Kristen, who’d rented us the place (which is familiar to readers of this blog as the place we’d spent four or five days in back in 2011), had told me about a secret swimming and whitewater tubing spot known only to locals.  We found it.

We’d all been excited to tube the rapids:

…but I was the only one fool enough to try it.  I could tell the water was shallow, of course, but I thought the tube would keep me above water and would float over the large stones creating all the whitewater.

Man, was I wrong.

I tumbled painfully down the rapids like an oversized ball in an undersized pinball machine.  My wife and best friends watched through their fingers, wincing, as I was tossed from abrasion to contusion to concussive event.  I was black and blue and bleeding before I made it even halfway down the run.

Later I saw a man of about my own age and his daughter carrying an inner tube and looking the river up and down… but not inner-tubing.

“What’s the secret to tubing here?” I asked.

“No secret,” he said.  “You do it when the water’s about two feet deeper.  Water this shallow you’ll just get slammed around on the rocks.”

Smart man.

Trine borrowed someone’s hat.  I think bathing-suit-and-hat is a damn good look for her.

After all those hours drinking beer in and beside the sun-dappled river, there wan’t much doubt what to do next.

Oh… we needed dinner, too, but another barbecue felt like too much work.

Standing up felt like too much work.

The sun had really wiped us all out.  That evening we did a whole lot of nothing went to bed surprisingly early (given the crowd) and suddenly it was the morning of our last day.

Meanwhile, the Lees were off at the same studio where the girls had been photographed two years ago.

Compare and contrast:

Wasn’t that fun?

I could do that for more of the pictures, and would like to, but it takes time and if you really want all the images from 2013 and 2015 side by side you can access all of the pictures from this blog post and the one from July 2013 and then mash them together at will.  (But remember these are only 400-500 pixels on their longest side, whereas the originals are thousands of pixels to a side.)

So here we go.

Oh, hell: just one more compare and contrast:

And now the full ensemble!

Another thing the Lees did while Trine and I were so busily, nay, frantically doing nothing in New Hampshire was to bring the girls to Inside Out.  Maddie was determined to be made up like Joy, whose face she insisted was yellow (it is not, dear future Maddie, it simply is not!) and so her cousins and sister gleefully concocted some kind of yellow face-paint — apparently out of oatmeal, sawdust, and sticking paste, — then slathered it all over her face.

And she loved it.

On Thursday afternoon Trine and I returned from all our frantic goings-on back to the relatively docile Chelmsford, where instead of frantically doing nothing, the order of the day was leisurely doing everything.  (I took the picture above myself on Thursday evening; we pick up below at some point Friday.)

Friday saw the arrival of Nana and Pop-Pop as well as cousin Pam and the 3½-month old Ramona.

Later in the day, Aunt Helen arrived with proud newly-minted big sister Roxanne.  And yes, things are pretty mixed up chronologically at this point because everyone’s cameras apparently timestamp things without respect to timezones and I don’t have the patience to straighten it all out — there, I said it! — so we’re just going to have to accept the cognitive dissonance created by chronologically-mish-mashed photojournalism.

My first road-trip with Hannah!

I love the picture below (taken while Hannah made a deposit at her bank, a phrase that seems crazy to me in itself) because it’s so American.  Even more: it’s so New England.

Ah-ha!  Now it’s Saturday night — or late afternoon — and the Hannah graduation party begins in earnest!

Stunning to me that the lovely and amazing young woman we are well-wishing off to college in these pictures was just about Maddie’s age when this blog began…

I included only that one picture of the “ceremony” from my own camera because Aunt Deb’s were all so vastly superior, but they come later on account of Photo Tagging Chronology Issues.  That much said, I don’t think much narration is required to enjoy the photographic retrospective of the evening.

I love that Hannah played for us, and I love everyone’s expressions in the shot below.

Fun fact, future Molli: you actually wore the hipster garb pretty well.  But you nearly killed us all with laughter by adopting a Jamaican accent for your hipster persona.

Ya mon, little hipster!

OK, so those were my own lousy pictures.  Now prepare to be blown away by Aunt Deb’s pictures of (mostly) the same events.

(Yeah, okay, they went to Canobie Lake while we were at Loon.)

An aphorism attributed to many begins by observing that if you are not a socialist at twenty, you have no heart.  That may or may not be true, but if you not love these next pictures then you have no heart.

And yes, yes indeed, that is actual rosé champagne Hannah is toasting with so seriously….

…sort of seriously, anyway.

Hey, look, it’s me!

Oh, man — me and Uncle Gene!  Are we slick, or what?

Wait, what?  We’re back to the candle-lighting ceremony?

Then let me take this moment to explain that each guest lit a candle on the cake and made a wish for Hannah’s future.  It was very touching but leavened with the ridiculous sense of humor shared across every layer and stratum of our family.

Oh… and I didn’t mention before, despite my own lousy photos of the same “event” pictured below, but while party shopping for Hannah we also picked up some face paint and hair dye to help Maddie be the kind of Joy she wanted to be.

One day — maybe when I’m putting together Maddie’s 10-year birthday book? — I really am going to photoshop the balloon pictures to put actual memories into all of the memory balls.

Oh, man.  Here comes Sadness.

Funny thing about Party City blue hair dye: if you apply it to a pony-tail, you can remove the elastic and the pony-tail still stands.

Now I think we’re back to my own pictures of our last day in Chelmsford.  We spent the afternoon at Kimball Farm:

Then blam, much too abruptly, that was that.  Back to Deep River.

We arrived late Sunday night, and on Monday we went out to Hammonasset Beach.

And finally got around to those s’mores.

I don’t know when the photostrip below was taken, but I freaking love it.

Tuesday morning we piled into a car — a Chevy Suburban — that had twice the size and four times the amenities of some of my early apartments and made our way into New York.

Yeah: that New York.

Our hotel was the Manhattan Hotel in Times Square, but we stopped first in Astoria to show the girls the home Mor and Daddy had started their life together.

Astoria was a much spiffier place than it had been when we’d lived there; we ate at some kind of organic-oriented café-diner about a block off Steinway.  It probably used to be a hookah-parlor or a gyro joint.  Now it’s a foofy place charging eight bucks for a bottle of Budweiser.

I’m in New York.  I got a Bud.  Of course I’m happy.

The view from our hotel room.

Molli Malou and Maddie couldn’t get over the hotel room.  They were thrilled by the luxury of it all: it had its own bathroom!  With a bathtub!  And they even had free soap and lotion and stuff!  OMG!

I think they’d have been perfectly content to spend the evening in the hotel room (and would later pamper themselves with luxurious baths with scented oils), but we inisted on taking them on a walking tour of Times Square.

The M&M store could have been fun.  Right?  I mean, it’s a two- or three-story boutique dedicated to just one kind of candy.  That candy is called M&M.  The girls like that candy.  Both of their initials begin with MM, and the two of them can be referred to collectively in abbreviated form as M&M.

But they didn’t warm to the theme.

Blondes of New York:

My old friend Chris Peditto met us along the way: it was the first time he’d ever seen Maddie.

We’d had such a late lunch we saw (and felt) no real need for dinner, so we just got a couple of pretzels and some drinks from a corner cart.  Note to self: next time, save yourself a lot of agony and get each kid their own pretzel.

Molli Malou likes Jimmy Fallon.  I don’t know how she came to know of him, but a few weeks before the trip I’d been watching his stunt with U2 on television and Molli Malou had entered the room just as the camera panned from U2 playing in that remote corner of the Times Square subway station over to Jimmy Fallon, and she squealed: “Is that–“

“It is,” I said, “it’s U2, and they actually disguised themselves and–“

“U2?  What’s that?  I meant, is that Jimmy Fallon?!”

So it was herself who took the following shot.

And apparently a selfie with her mother, which I was surprised (but so happy!) to find in my photos.

By this point both the older and younger Nagan generations had had enough of walking around, so they retired to the hotel.

Trine and I retired to Jimmy’s Corner with Chris.

We had a spectacular dinner of appetizers at Akdeniz, a Balkan restaurant that the suddenly Balkan-enraptured Peditto insisted (correctly, as it turned out) that we would love.  (19 W 46th, if you’re in the neighborhood.  That’s between 5th and 6th.)

Afterwards we agreed we just wanted a nice quiet but comfortable place to have a scotch or two and plenty of time to catch up.  Peditto suggested a place called “The Blue Room.”

I had never heard of the place before.

As we settled into our places and ordered our drinks Peditto rhapsodized about its history.  He was stupefied I’d never heard of it, and the more he described it the more I realized I was pretty sure I had heard of it… just not in any recognizable way.

“Oh my god, Sprig, it’s such a literary landmark!  How can you not know it!  All the great writers of the teens and twenties and thirties and forties — Jesus, Dorothy Parker practically lived in the joint!”

“Dorothy Parker,” I said, “was the Grand Dame of the Algonquin Round Table.  I never heard of–“

At this point Peditto burst into laughter.

“Where the hell do you think we are?” he asked.  “This is the Algonquin!”

Yeah.  Good ol’ literary Sprig didn’t know the Algonquin had a bar called the Blue Room.

So I insisted we take our second drinks in the Algonquin proper.

A mere walk down any Manhattan street with Chris Peditto is an event in itself.  (Believe me, that’s not a yawn!)

It had been a long day, and despite a couple of beers at Jimmy’s and a couple of scotches at the Algonquin / Blue Room, I can assure you that I was doing much better than my camera:

(But I still love the picture for some reason.)

The next morning was Nana’s birthday, and we celebrated with a brunch at a restaurant near the hotel.

Afterwards we took one of the cruises around lower Manhattan.  Worth noting: it was scorching weather and we had forgotten sunscreen.

Seasick and sun-scorched, Molli Malou had had enough by the time we rounded Battery Park.

But Nana cheered her right up!

There are never any pictures of me, so it was nice of Nana to take this shot of “Psycho Daddy.”

Trine bought the beige hat.  I still think the Blue one was better.

Maddie didn’t get any hat, but was sure cute in the Love hat.

Bags, hats… this is where I begin to drift off and lose focus…

CANDY!  Okay, I’m awake again.  It was called “It’s Sugar” and was the coolest candy shop I’ve ever been in.  I took about thirty pictures in there, but there is no need for any of them here.  Except one.  Just to remember the place.  A block or two north of Wall Street, and just one block in from the East River.

The heat caught up with us.

…but eventually we found Chinatown.

The girls were enchanted by Chinatown, but they considered the dining options more visually stimulating than appetizing, so while Nana and Pop-Pop enjoyed a lovely Chinese lunch, we made do with good old American diner food.

The most memorable thing about the diner — the thing the girls will probably remember far longer than anything else about that lunch — was the bathroom.

When I asked our server where it was, she said: “just through that door and down the stairs.”

Which led to this:

(The dark crypt in back is the bathroom proper.)

Best of all was the prison-grade door at the head of the stairs:

Fortunately we were dining customer, not dinning customers, so we were not compelled to use the bathroom.  We just peed in the alley.

(I kid, I kid!)

After lunch we cabbed it up to 59th Street and made our way to Central Park.

Animal whisperer Molli Malou spotted and tracked one of the indigineous species and helped me get a shot of it.

Yes: a rat.

And at last it was time to head back to the hotel, which meant it was just about time to get ready for the airport.

This is only funny to Danish speakers: at tisse is the verb for peeing.  A Tisserie sounds like a place to pee.

Back at the hotel we had our luggage loaded into the Mobile Apartment and were on our way to JFK.

Kind of.

And then, all too soon, it was goodbye.

Our flight was delayed about an hour, but we made up for that by giving the girls lots of juicy drinks and ourselves lots of less-juicy drinks.

…for patience was truly wearing thin.

Molli Malou fell asleep not long after take-off and slept through the entire flight.  Even fidgety Maddie got about four or five hours of sleep.  And I got to watch The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (can I ever get those 100 minutes back?!), Horrible Bosses (which was actually surprisingly hilarious), and Horrible Bosses 2 (which was even more surprisingly hilarious — unless it was just the utter exhaustion making me giggle).

But not much more than eleven hours after the picture above was taken, the picture below was taken.

# # #

We’re home.  Been home almost a week now, in fact.  Molli Malou has started fifth grade, and Maddie has started first.  Trine and I are back at work.

Already hard to believe that none of the preceding pictures are more than a few weeks old, and already sad to think it’ll (probably) be another two years before we return.  But how fortunate we all were to have such a visit!

Thanks and love to everyone for making our visit so great!