Summer Roadie Notes 4: Cottage Notes

There is a first time for everything, and having never stayed at a Bed and Breakfast, it was time to do the B&B "thang." The B&B Ann and I stayed at was just outside of Ithaca proper and was constructed with stones from the nearby quarry. Sometimes you have to read the tea leaves, or look carefully for the messages that are hiding in your environment, and this was the case in our little stone cottage. There were two interesting opportunities to do just that.

Things with messages in our little stone cottage:

First, on a shelf in the kitchenette was a small plastic container about the size of a small cooler which had been labeled neatly with black marker “COMPOST.” Laminated and heavily taped below were directions:

What to Compost
Kitchen Greens: fruit scraps, vegetable scraps, houseplant cuttings, coffee grounds, rice & pasta, egg shells, tea bags
Kitchen Browns: coffee filters, stale bread, paper napkins & towels, dryer lint, hair

Don’t Compost
Meat, fish or bones, diary products, oils or fats, sauces, ashes, pet waste, diseased plants, matures weeds with seeds

Each of the directions was accompanied by a crude illustration depicting the “do’s and don’ts”, and inside the composter it was primed for action with a single paper towel in which to put all the compostables…

By the end of our stay one day later, we had contributed one coffee filter, grounds, and a partially eaten tomato to the cause. I also will be looking into composting at home, too.

Secondly, the mugs were talking, too. Specifically, the coffee cups we used in the morning (whoever made the cups did not check the capitalization as after each line "return", the computer capitalized the first word of the next line, unnecessarily. I guess an English teacher doesn’t take the summer off! ;-)

The message printed on them as as follows:

The Finger Lakes Region of New York State
Taughannock Falls
Located in a State Park seven miles north of Ithaca,
NY this 215 foot high waterfall plunges into a 400 hundred foot
Deep natural amphitheater. Taughnannock Falls is
Higher than Niagara and is the highest waterfalls east
Of the Mississippi. It was called Taghkanic, or Great
Fall in the Woods, by the Indians.

We went into this roadie with no real plan, but thanks to the mugs, we would soon be on our way to Taughannock State Park, just outside of Ithaca smack-dab in the middle of the western side of Cayuga Lake's Wine Trail...