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Written by Michael

A Mysterious Phone call!

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Colonial Inn Construction

Due to the magnitude of the project of constructing the Edgartown Residence Club over that winter, we decided that we needed a maintenance man on hand  to answer questions on where the water cut-off is, where the circuit breakers are, etc. He could also learn where the new installations would be for electricity and water. It would help with his maintaining of the building in the future; therefore, we asked Jim to spend the winter…

Jim is a Snowbird. He departs for warmer climes as soon as the hotel closes for the winter months. He reluctantly agreed to stay on and assigned himself tasks to keep himself busy. Intrepid Man of Maintenance that he is…he keeps busy well, but in a Curious George sort of way…forcing me to don a yellow hat to contain the wreckage.   The beginning of our enigmatic events occurred while the digging underneath the porch wing was going on.

Now, a hotel closed for the off-season is a creepy place, exactly in a Jack-Nicolson-The Shining kind of way; but when you’ve emptied a wing and there are new creaks and groans from excavation, and people you don’t know wandering about constructing or de-constructing things, it gets creepier?…more creepy?…Extra creepish?

You find doors UN-locked that should be locked. You hear movements from the floors above where you didn’t think there was anyone working.  But take my word for it, when you get a phone call on your office phone that your console tells you is from the abandoned wing…that tops the Casey Kasem Weekly Top Eerie.
It’s not just the fact that it’s post-season (we closed the hotel and there should be no calls from that wing). It’s the fact that we removed all the actual phones and brought them into the main building where they lie in state, still cocooned in plastic bags.

Theory: What if someone got into that wing AND brought their own phone with them just to creep us out? Plausible but for that fact that Jim…superhero of the maintenance world…removed all the phone jacks so there is nowhere to plug a phone in.

Whence came the call, I ask you? What are the odds that a practical joker would know which wires to splice a phone just to dial ‘0′?
It was all very puzzling.

Then we found the skeletal remains…

 

Go Exploring with the Best Martha’s Vineyard Tours
Treat Yourself to Fine Dining at the Top Edgartown Spots
Check Out Things to Do in Oak Bluffs on a Memorable Day Trip
Celebrate the Fourth of July with Martha’s Vineyard Events
Live like a New England Local This Spring
Martha’s Vineyard vs. Nantucket: Which One Comes Out on Top
Treat Yourself to Something New at Martha’s Vineyard Shops
A Guide to Martha’s Vineyard Weather through the Seasons
QUMOO-boomtruck3_1
Construction at the Colonial Inn

Editor’s Note: Just in time for Halloween… this 3 part series is about the spooky events surrounding the 2006 construction of the Edgartown Residence Club on North Water Street, at The Colonial Inn.  If you are interested in more spooky (but true) Martha’s Vineyard stories, you should check out some of the books by local writer Holly Nadler, including Haunted Island.

Once, upon a time, there was no Edgartown Residence Club! We have been operating for so long now that it is hard to remember back when it was simply the Porch Wing of the Colonial Inn. The creation of the Edgartown Residence Club involved a major restructuring project. The Porch Wing was an annex to the Inn with fifteen rooms on three different floors. The project was this: to change these fifteen rooms into six luxury suites that would be available for fractional ownership. Easy enough with an industrious crew; but the building was on sand, which means there were no true right angles left in the building. Designs drawn to shore everything up and put some beams underneath the building also included plans to replace the crawlspace underneath the entire building with a full basement.

We closed the hotel for the winter so this was the sole form of excitement for us, not to mention the entire town. (A beach town in the winter is an easily entertained entity.)

We spent the month of December in a frantic scramble to empty the hotel rooms in that wing. When you look at a hotel room, it really is more full than you realize. Stationary, ironing gear, fridge, phone, toiletries, TV, bathrobes, coat hangers, shower curtains, towel racks, pillows, bedspreads, mattresses, end tables, chairs, armoires…they all have their place and they look great where they are. However, they all take up loads of space when you take fifteen of any one of those items and put them somewhere else. In fact, they seem to grow in mass.

Now, add in the fact that the armoires weigh approximately as much as a small moon. In addition, the stairwells were too narrow to allow the armoires to leave. (They originally entered by means of a huge crane jacking them up through each floor’s porch doors, and that was how they left in the end.)
The next step was to call one of the few moving companies on the island. They sent a crew of workers who may or may not have understood a word I was saying. I had to monitor each person’s load and tell him where to put it (so to speak) on almost every trip up and down stairs.  Eventually the building was empty of everything we wanted to keep. Our maintenance man, Jim, removed sinks and toilets, as well as light fixtures, mirrors, towel racks and phone jacks. It was a maintenance man’s buffet of spare parts.

Many large, loud pieces of equipment then came in, tore everything in our front courtyard out, dug twelve feet straight down and suspended the entire wing on big Jenga-like block columns. Our neighbors, who were earlier so pleased to gawk at the goings on, now turned against us. Local restaurants claimed we were driving away business, and neighbors reported that the shaking of the ground from the equipment caused stress cracks to appear in their walls.  In other words, the site had been thoroughly disturbed at this point.  That’s when Jim got bored and things got weird…

 

Go Exploring with the Best Martha’s Vineyard Tours
Treat Yourself to Fine Dining at the Top Edgartown Spots
Check Out Things to Do in Oak Bluffs on a Memorable Day Trip
Celebrate the Fourth of July with Martha’s Vineyard Events
Live like a New England Local This Spring
Martha’s Vineyard vs. Nantucket: Which One Comes Out on Top
Treat Yourself to Something New at Martha’s Vineyard Shops
A Guide to Martha’s Vineyard Weather through the Seasons

sleepy-child

This article is not about something to do or see on the Island. I have no secret places to recommend, no hot spots that are ‘the place to be this week’. It is concerning a moment of crazy, random happenstance, an act of kindness from unseen strangers.

We are still in the experimental stages of crib to ‘big girl bed’ transfer with my daughter, Katerina, which means that every bedtime is a unique array of settling-down rituals. Like a sunset, no two bedtimes are alike. There are nights that she tumbles like a sack of potatoes into the bed and passes out instantly; and somewhere the attempts to get her to sleep rapidly approach ‘rigmarole’ levels: all singing, all dancing entertainment to no avail.

Sunday night, August 16th was such a night, with a dose of teething crabbies thrown in, just so I didn’t get too bored, apparently. She rolled and flopped, cried and called for momma, ignored my singing of ‘You are my Sunshine’ (which was, if I may say, not too shabby!) and finally ended up knocking herself in the head against the rail o’ protection.

I bit back what would be a useless ‘I told you so’ and scooped her up to soothe her. The shrieks drew momma back into the room and my wife and I BOTH sang to her while they sat in a chair near the window.

Then, from the street below, we heard voices.

We always hear people coming and going through the Edgartown downtown from our second floor window. Many times, it’s drunken revelers, or bands of running teens after a movie lets out, sometimes just the talk of folk passing by the windows of shops below.

This was different. A group of women was singing on the porch below us. Four or possibly five voices were singing ‘You are my Sunshine’. In harmony, even! I assume they heard the wailing of an anguished toddler and our desperate singing and were inspired.

My wife opened the window to listen to the song and my Little Fusspot, with a wide-eyed smile poked her face against the window frame and looked to the sidewalk. We could not see the chorus due to the awning below, but she still turned back to us and pointed. “Happys singing down there,” she said several times. During the rest of the song we could hear Katerina chuckling out the window. She called out a ‘Thank you’ or two, but I don’t think they heard us. A taxi appeared and they were gone. It calmed Kate right back into her bed and a sound sleep, tears forgotten and it was all we talked about the next day.

Anyone who lives and works on the Island during ‘the Season’ can tell you tales of woe and indignation, frustration and apathy. In the hotel industry, I interact with folk at all points on the mood spectrum. That evening was such a surprise to my wife and I that we still smile to think of it. It was, in a word, LOVELY!

TO: The Musical Ladies of Winter Street: Our hearty thanks for a wonderful and helpful surprise. You made it a very special bedtime for our Miss Crabby-Pants.

Image courtesy of Tina Keller

 

Go Exploring with the Best Martha’s Vineyard Tours
Treat Yourself to Fine Dining at the Top Edgartown Spots
Check Out Things to Do in Oak Bluffs on a Memorable Day Trip
Celebrate the Fourth of July with Martha’s Vineyard Events
Live like a New England Local This Spring
Martha’s Vineyard vs. Nantucket: Which One Comes Out on Top
Treat Yourself to Something New at Martha’s Vineyard Shops
A Guide to Martha’s Vineyard Weather through the Seasons

ice-cream1Okay, yes. We are Newbie parents. We kept as much sugar our of our baby girl’s life as possible during the first year. I have already received mockery from friends and family for this (no TV either. How shocking…) so no taunting the blog-guy!

Now, however, we have discovered the joys of “Icey Creeem” as Kate calls it. We can no longer share a cone with her. She seizes the cone and burrows into it. She can spot an ice cream shop at a hundred yards it seems and gives us a look that says: “So where’s my cone?”

Therefore, our quest for the Best Cone Ever began. So let me review the Shoppes we have purchased our bits ‘o freezy goodness from so far. I will list them from my least favorite to my most. Although I bear no ill will to any…someone has to be last! Remember: I am evaluating by Travelling-With-Toddler criteria. My main concerns are: how hard is it to keep track of Kiddo in this shop and how expensive will this child’s new outfit moistening snack be, since she will wear most of it (not to mention anoint us as well).

Mad Martha’s- This is a popular spot on North Water Street and has a wide array of sundaes and frappes available as well. It shares the space with a sandwich shop so it is usually crowded. The ice cream is great but a tad pricey. (Okay it is the Island so everything is a little more expensive than other places, but I dislike waiting in a crowded shop to pay quite a bit more for ice cream.) They also have no kid’s cone option.

Scoops- They have a great location on the corner of Main and South Water Streets and are a lot roomier inside as you enter. They have a great selection of flavors but not as wide an array of non-cone choices, but that’s okay. They are called “Scoops”. They have a great price on a kid’s sized cone. The only problem I have with their cones is this: they are always super melty. The freezers are open topped and are open all the time and when we buy a cone, it is a race against time to consume any of it before it has liquefied and is dripping off my hands. Maybe the ice cream staying softer prevents the full-time scooping staff from strained wrists or something. (I am not a big fan of sticky mess, as anyone who knows me can attest. Okay…it is ice cream and summer and that combination is never a good combo for anti-sticky lobbyists, but I feel that having to perform bottom-of-the-cone melt control slurps before you have stepped away from the building is asking a bit much of me.)

Carousel- I don’t often get to Oak Bluffs in the summer, but we made a special trip one Sunday afternoon and had a delightful time at Carousel. The kid’s cone was a good size for a great price, the flavors were numerous and the shop was big enough not to seem too crowded. The person who served us was what made us enjoy our “icey creeem” the most. He was more than happy to let us try a few different flavors as samples before we committed to a full cone of that flavor and was more that willing to sell al three of us kid sized cones. Some places have to be cajoled into that deal. (Let’s face facts. I am a large, round man. I don’t NEED three whole scoops of ice milk and sugar in my system…the less I have the better, frankly. A small scoop is treat enough for me). When we said we had experienced reluctance from other shops about small cones he grinned and said “Come on! It’s ice cream! They shouldn’t be so serious. I love this job!”

It was a refreshing bit of friendliness during the busy middle of the summer doldrums and it made us instant fans. So many servers and clerks reach that tired point that it felt good to smile at his enthusiasm. He made our day!

So there you have my findings thus far, from least favorite to most.

“There’s one more,” he says in a whisper, casting furtive glances over his shoulder. “The Quarterdeck has a small soft-serve, $2.50 street value. Perfect for when the kid needs her ‘icey creeem’ fix and yer short of cash. It’s our secret vice! Tell them Kiddo sent ya!”

Image courtesy of tedkirwin

 

Go Exploring with the Best Martha’s Vineyard Tours
Treat Yourself to Fine Dining at the Top Edgartown Spots
Check Out Things to Do in Oak Bluffs on a Memorable Day Trip
Celebrate the Fourth of July with Martha’s Vineyard Events
Live like a New England Local This Spring
Martha’s Vineyard vs. Nantucket: Which One Comes Out on Top
Treat Yourself to Something New at Martha’s Vineyard Shops
A Guide to Martha’s Vineyard Weather through the Seasons

Cape-PogeI have developed a routine. Not so shocking for those of you who know me. Each afternoon or early evening, I’ll pack up my daughter into the backpack and we will walk to the harbor. We will feed the swan, should he appear and watch the boats.

“Boats! Boats, boats, boats!” she chirps in my ear as we approach the water. Anyone with a toddler knows the lure of different vehicles.

I used to think “Chappy Ferry…most boring job on the Island! 500 feet, one minute to cross, BAH!

With my little girl looking on so eagerly, I have started to watch more closely and I have to say that it is trickier than I thought.

Storms in the spring of 2007 ripped a hole in the beach that connects Chappaquiddick to the Vineyard. Rumor has it that ‘Chappaquiddick’ means ‘sometimes an island’. Storms in March 2008 ripped a second breach as well and the constant current through the harbor has caused further erosion.

The Breach has changed the ways the tide flows, caused rip tides, and eddies (which are apparently great, tricky swirly bits.) (You probably couldn’t tell until now, but I am not a boater…)

My new opinion just from watching them with a toddler: Phew! Wouldn’t want to be Captain Wells! They load fast, cars and people, take off and have to turn 90 degrees and slide across the current. If they don’t the current pushes them off course a few hundred feet.

It was busy enough coming and going off Chappaquiddick on Friday that they started running TWO boats. That was fun to watch. Two boats, crossing each other in the current. A Watery Dance of Death. (Except that these people know what they are doing and no one was at risk in any way.)

There are no shops or restaurants on Chappy so what do we send the Colonial Inn guests over there to do? The Trustees of Reservations have a great series of guided and self-guided tours. Kayak or canoe trips, four-wheel drive over sand trips to the last lonely little lighthouse at Cape Poge are available with reservations.

The Cape Poge Wildlife Refuge, the Mytoi Japanese Gardens and the Wasque Reservationare all worth the trip over.

Yes, there is a bridge. No, it’s not the same one. There’s nothing to “see” there. Just enjoy the trip and nature’s beauty!

Image courtesy of The Trustees of Reservations

 

Go Exploring with the Best Martha’s Vineyard Tours
Treat Yourself to Fine Dining at the Top Edgartown Spots
Check Out Things to Do in Oak Bluffs on a Memorable Day Trip
Celebrate the Fourth of July with Martha’s Vineyard Events
Live like a New England Local This Spring
Martha’s Vineyard vs. Nantucket: Which One Comes Out on Top
Treat Yourself to Something New at Martha’s Vineyard Shops
A Guide to Martha’s Vineyard Weather through the Seasons