Une Envie de Sel

A bit more of Mohonk...just because it's so, so beautiful.
You really don't get the sense, from these pictures, of just how profoundly hot and humid it was on this day. Born and occasionally, at least for brief intervals, raised in the region, I have since forgotten the extremes of the climate. Fortunately, since we now inhabit a very livable and homosapien-friendly climate, I am much more capable of really appreciating the aesthetic beauty of the East Coast. In small, survivable doses.
It looks so very tranquil and idyllic, doesn't it? Fortunately you can't see the sweat that plastered our clothes to our bodies, and our hair to our foreheads.
I'm hoping, for the sake of these tranquil canoeists, that there was a bit of a breeze out there on that lake.
I'm really not sure, in this photo, whether Q is holding her hand to her heart in breathless reverie at the stunning view, or whether she is feeling like she might have a very early coronary due to the heat. This is a girl born in one of China's most extreme climates (and extreme it certainly was). Still, living for two years in Colorado, she may have lost a bit of her tolerance for the extremes. And btw, she is not wet from the lake. She is wet with sweat.
Inside the lodge at Mohonk, a fabled place of much venerable history.
I stayed in this lodge once, many many years ago. But these days we can't afford the entry fee, and are consigned to passing through quietly and with alacrity so as not to be charged above and beyond the "hiking fee" that we pay to walk the grounds from the lower parking lot.
It is, however, truly a magnificent place in so many ways.
The lake is stocked with trout so large that one would have a hard time lifting one from the water, even though they are also so tame as to be easily seduced with a handful of trout chow (at 25 cents a handful.
Q has not yet reached the age at which we might be able to trust her not to stand up in a boat, so the gorgeous, lacquered wooden canoes are still off limits to us. Maybe someday...

I love how the buildings are the same color and tone of the moss that clings to the shale rocks that rise out of the lakebed.
A stone gazebo is like something out of a fairytale.

Mohonk is perhaps most famous for its exquisitely curated gardens, but I have spent so much time on these gardens in posts from other years that I will just give them a brief nod in this post. I would actually very much love to see them someday in winter, when crests of snow top the arched gateways and the cypress trees of the ornamental maze. But that's for another year and another post.