Well yesterday was about the dreariest day ever in the history of the world. Not the saddest day, of course. It was just an awesomely, perfectly crummy gray-white-misty day for a drive. We left the rain behind us along the south shore and ended up pushing through endless fog and drizzle for 400 miles out Route 2 to Deerfield, Sunderland, Montague, and Turner's Falls. Bleh.

We had a wonderful day! Somewhere on Route 2 between Orange and Erving we saw a juvenile Bald Eagle right across the highway, and that wasn't the last of our winged wonders. Our destination was the Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory in Deerfield, MA - a huge greenhouse filled with tropical plants and swarming with butterflies. It's a sure-fire way to get a dose of summertime in the dead of winter.

The conservatory is basically a huge tropical garden, so it remains at (reasonable) tropical temperature and humidity year-round. You can't wear your winter coat in there...a t-shirt is fine. There are orchids and other tropical flowers everywhere, and the hundreds and hundreds of butterflies everywhere.  

After the butterflies, we visited the celebrated (among UMass alums) Bub's Bar B Que in Sunderland for a deservedly celebrated and very generous lunch of pulled pork and Blue Seal Kielbasa (for me) and a half a barbecued chicken (for Mrs Pilgrim). Mine was accompanied by a very local Berkshire Brewing Company Cabin Fever Ale, hers by a Coke, and both enjoyed the companionship of Bub's endless and excellent sides. I particularly enjoyed the collards and the slaw; she thought the baked beans were very good. There were more, too many to sample and still do justice to our lunch: hickory-smoked potatoes, orange-glazed sweet potatoes, pasta salad, fries, soup, and more.   

From Deerfield we took a circuitous route across the broad flat country north of Amherst and east of the Connecticut River, mostly exploring but also seeking the Deerfield Spirit Shoppe, where I had a date with a torpedo-keg of their Dean's Beans Coffeehouse Porter, and then up to Montague to the famous Montague Book Mill "books you don't need in a place you can't find"... especially in a spooky dusky fog! But we found it, and then I had to stay out of mischief while Lorna shopped for books. Fortunately the book mill includes the awesomely locavore Lady Killigrew Cafe which has draft Lefty's Breakfast Stout and West County Ciders from nearby Colrain.

We did some more driving around the countryside, starting to get distressed by the pervasive grimness of the atmosphere. When we finally needed some dinner, TripAdvisor pointed us to The Rendezvous in Turner's Falls. 

What a find! It looks like a sports bar from the outside, and frankly it looks like a sports bar from the inside. The lighting is harsh and the space cavernous, the decoration is all-basketball-all-the-time, but the food was excellently prepared and artfully served. We had a salad of chevre with arugula and strawberries, the mussels mariniere, and a chicken quesadilla that looked more like Greenwich Village than the village of Turner's Falls, MA. The bar was brilliant, too, with three types of bitters, Fernet Branca, and all manner of other excellence, and local Element beer on draft. Bartender Casey had never made a Sazerac, but I described it and she made it expertly - so Casey and the Rendezvous get Best of Show for this weekend's expedition!