On the way down, we stopped at the Fuel Coffee Shop in Great Barrington, MA. I had the most delicious scone! I remembered (sadly) that the last time I was in Great Barrington was when Rudy was dying -- he was receiving Vitamin C treatments and we had to leave him at our vet in Ancramdale for a couple hours for the infusion.
Bob gave Nolan his vintage ~45-year old Tyco HO electric train set that we have been storing for about 30 years. It's mint, he even saved the instructions.
They live on the campus of the Forman School.
On the way back we stopped at The Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, which is fairly close to home. It was packed with skiers, even more so because of the President's Day three-day weekend, I suspect. All in all, it was a really nice day.
Unrelated: we watched the movie Flight. Spoiler alert! It was a good movie, but very different than I was expecting. The ending seemed off to me, so much so that I googled to see if there was an alternative ending, if perhaps with advance screening it was determined that audiences really didn't like the ending at all and so a slightly more crowd-pleasing one was tacked on instead. I discovered that my sense of the ending being "off" is not uncommon, but I did not find anyone else who also perceived the ending I predicted. Most of the others who had issue with the ending wanted Denzel's character to either walk away a hero, or felt the alcoholism angle was over-played, or the girlfriend subplot was pointless. They felt the direcotr or writer had painted themselves into the corner and may have had no choice but to end it in such an unsatisfying way.
My POV is very different. I think everything after finding him passed out in the hotel was a Hollywood re-write. I believe he was either dead, or would have died shortly afterwards in the hospital. The entire movie had so many religious overtones and a general theme of death, from his crashing near a church, to meeting the cancer patient and heroin addict in the hospital, to the co-pilot and his wife. I have a hunch that he would have been exonerated at the hearing posthumously, but the ending of him dying from alcohol poisoning and drug overdose without eventually shaping up, taking responsibility and making a Denzel speech was not acceptable. So the ridiculous closing scenes in the hotel with John Goodman, at the hearing and in the jail were tacked on. Audiences don't like it much, but it's cheerier than the much more logical one I've described.
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