Turn by turn

When James Taylor sings about “the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston” in Sweet Baby James, he is describing nearly all you need to know to drive from our old home to our new one — well, if you flip it. It is a straight shot.

Nearly. Coming out of our apartment, take a right after two blocks onto Clarendon, a right after three blocks onto St. James Ave., and then bear left after one block onto the turnpike ramp.

Then drive the length of the state, like James says.

Then get off just before Stockbridge at exit 10 (Lee/Pittsfield), following signs for US-20 W. After 3 miles on that, turn left onto MA-183 S and follow that past the obelisk dedicated to revolutionary Major General Paterson and Major Egleston. As you’re passing Tanglewood on the left, there’ll be a very acute fork. To the left is Kripalu, the hippie yoga center; to the right is a sign for the Apple Tree Inn.

As a child of the GPS age, I generally make no attempt to make any sense of roads. I follow each instruction and forget each name as soon as I hear it. The names are mere implementation details.

But I now find myself precisely at the antipode of a specific route constructed (at the expense of Black neighborhoods) in the late ’50s to advance Boston’s tenuous postwar relevance and immortalized in a song by a man who will be performing across the street in two months. I did not merely incidentally take “I-90” to get here, though I only realized it when my musically inclined Texan coworker Ananya asked me if I had taken the turnpike. Yes, it’s not just a number; I took the Massachusetts Turnpike to my new home, and it matters!

When you see the Apple Tree sign, notice how cracked the paint is; it probably dates back to a couple owners ago, and the branding is no longer in use. But Danny asked me to trace it in Figma and is going to put it on a hat. And we’ll switch our social media accounts to that for now. Anyway, take a right up the driveway, up the hill.

On the left are at least a couple of literal apple trees. On the right are around four gently leveled terraces, not used for much. You may spot the concrete plugs of the old septic field; the previous owners got off it onto town plumbing, and we could not be more grateful for that.

Atop the hill on the left is the main building, a late 19th century manor with a big porch and a strange late-20th octadecagonal protuberance bulging out at you.

The driveway forks several times.

Turn left at the first fork. (The right would take you to the less-quaint motel-style “lodge” which we’re trying to steer people away from, so long as we have the rooms in the main house. Beyond that, the carriage house, above which I’m sitting in the owner’s apartment. Beyond that, the pool, which we haven’t gotten open yet, but which has the best view on the property.)

Turn left again at the second fork. (The right would take you to the upper parking lot, which is totally unnecessary at our present occupancy levels, and to the wood shed and trash pile, where Memo says a black bear and her cubs have been hanging out.)

Basically take every left you can, looping around the main house to park behind it. The main entrance is there on the back. Well, “main” in the sense that it’ll get you in front of the front desk, there on the back of the house.

(There is a side entrance that’s more visible and more manicured if you’re walking up to the front of the hotel. But it’ll have you enter between the tavern and the side of the lobby lounge, facing the kitchen, out of sight of the front desk. Many people come in that way. It’s like the whole inside of the house is twisted around to face the parking instead of the street.)

If you came in the correct door, the front desk will be on your right. It’s a real proper built-in front desk: a waist-to-ceiling aperture opening onto a small office, with cute curtains and a beautiful vista visible out the window behind it and a dutch door around the left side.

During the day, there’s a good chance Claire will be sitting in there at the desk on her ThinkPad. If not, there’ll be a piece of heavy paper stock folded over into a tent with a printed message “I’ve stepped away from the desk but I’m close by. Please feel free to text or call,” and her cell phone number. The idea was that she’d put it out when she stepped away, but in practice the asymmetric payoff means we always leave it there. If she forgot to put it out, it’d be bad, whereas if you came up and both the sign and Claire were there, you’d hardly notice the sign.

There’s also a physical phone in the office, but we have no idea how to call to or from it. The number on the website goes to a call center in the Philippines. She’s paying Verizon for six additional lines but they’re all supposedly for the fire alarms.

Unfortunately, you can’t see the fire when standing in front of the front desk. You’d have to go into to the lounge to the left and look left.

Fortunately, people are drawn to the left anyway because you catch a glimpse of the panoramic views from the octadecagonal protuberance. Claire will tell you breakfast is served there from 8 to 10. So you go peek at that, and then turn around and see the fire. Your eye is pulled around pretty effectively.

The tavern (left of octadecagon) been closed for lack of staff and license and it’s still too cold for the porch (right of octadecagon) to be popular, so we haven’t really seen how people move around those yet.

All the rooms are up the stairs to the right of the front desk. Claire will ask if you need help with your bags; I haven’t seen a soul say yes yet.

The rooms on the third floor require more turns than the Turnpike. The somewhat hidden staircase from two to three sorta coils around a chimney, creating all these weird half-step spaces. It’s a very cozy attic vibe, under the eaves of the roof or whatever you call it. There’s one room visible from the fire escape that nobody has a key for and nobody has gotten into in memory.

Time for me to turn in!

Changelog

The sign to the upper parking lot now features a little removable flap blocking the arrow so we don’t lead people farther away when there’s room right behind the main building.

Danny has “edited” (culled) many of the framed drawings of “vermin” around the lobby.

He has decked out the tavern with a flag, a lovely drawing of Koussevitzky Music Shed at Tanglewood, a painting of a wintry scene, some old vinyl albums, and an ad for Pine Spring Ginger Ale — “Makes the thirsty happy!”

He found a nice vintage chess board for the secondary lounge seating area and has tactically placed an old copy of The Queen’s Gambit (the book) nearby.

Memo moved the large mirror from the entryway to the secondary lounge seating area.

The email address on the website has been updated to one that works. More to come!

Announcements

Our liquor license has been granted by the wise and beneficent and prepossessing licensing board of the Town of Lenox and it is looking likely that we’ll hit our Memorial Day target for reopening the bar in at least some limited capacity.

We could not see any evidence of the aurora.