August 2-4, 2009... Oyster Bay

Sunday morning was rainy, but the sun soon came out giving us a chance to dinghy to town, re-provision, and get a Sunday NYTimes. Back to Anhinga just in time. The skies opened and it rained ALL DAY. So what. We had a big newspaper, lots of coffee, and a wonderful enclosure that kept us bone dry. Late afternoon and the skies cleared. Yay! Showers for everybody and dinner in town at Il Piatto. We picked this place to eat after meeting the clammer who sold his catch to the chef. Excellent food.

Up early Monday (crack of 10?) for our excursion to Teddy Roosevelt’s house at Sagamore Hill. Dinghied to the road next to the anchorage - no place to dock so we tied up to the guard rail on the road. Seemed ok, except that it was high tide. More about that later. We walked about a mile to the National Park grounds. Sagamore Hill was just as Patti remembered - animal heads and skins everywhere. It is hard to believe that this house actually served as the summer White House. It is kind of small - and there were 6 kids living there at the time. We walked out from the grounds to the Cold Spring Harbor side of Cove Neck and saw a live horseshoe crab -- all the others we had seen for weeks now had been dead. Walked back to the dinghy and found it 15 feet from the water. Oh yeah, the tides. Well it was low tide and we had to drag the dinghy back to the water so that we could get home. Success (we are so strong...) Invited the other Annapolitans (on a Bristol!) in the anchorage over for drinks and had a nice time getting to know them. Simple dinner, beautiful sunset. Tomorrow - kayaking?

Another beautiful day on Tuesday and off we went on a marathon kayak trip around the periphery of Oyster Bay. Up by the Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club, back through the mooring field, around Centre Island to gawk at the mansions, into West Harbor to see more clammers at work, over to Mill Neck Creek and diagonally back across the main harbor to our boat. Three hours later we crawled on deck and collapsed. Next stop, the Oyster Bay library to get internet access and a reward for the day with a New York favorite - Carvel ice cream cones. And, it was cruise night in Oyster Bay - streets blocked off with lots of historic cars from every decade as well as muscle cars of the 60s and 70s. If only one unnamed blogmaster could have been there!