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return to Mountain Gate
Saturday, July 16 2016
After Saturday morning coffee, Gretchen went on an epic bike ride today down to High Falls and back on the rail trail with some of her lady friends. Meanwhile I took a nap[REDACTED] that didn't leave me feeling especially refreshed. Later I drank some kratom tea in hopes of getting some energy. It felt good for awhile, but eventually gave way to dysphoria later in the evening after Gretchen and I went to Woodstock.
Gretchen had suggested we try out Mountain Gate, the Woodstock Indian restaurant we went to 13 years ago and vowed never to return to. I thought she was joking, but she was serious, saying people had recently started saying good things about the place. On the drive into Woodstock, I say a woman with her young daughter on the shoulder of 375 looking at the their smartphones. They looked to be playing Pokemon Go, a brand new game that superimposes virtual entities on the real world. I don't really know much about it and don't care to learn, though if it gets people out in nature, perhaps people should invest in calamine lotion futures. Also, there might be some cold cases solved as people stumble upon skeletonized human remains.
Our first impression inside Mountain Gate was not a good one. There was a tray of haphazardly-arranged toothpicks just inside the door, and it wasn't clear whether this was where toothpicks were to be taken or dropped off. There were also a number of random bottled products in the window that had nothing to do with Indian food or even food at all.
Today's incarnation of Mountain's Gate does not seem to have a liquor license, so it was just water for us. The kratom tea had me craving a depressant, but without any I suffered my mild dysphoria in silence. Meanwhile Gretchen was trying to talk about recent academic feminist interest in her poem "Love This," and I was having trouble coming up with anything to add to the dialog. As for the food, it was better than expected. The mulligatawny soup was good, and there wasn't much to complain about with the vindaloo vegetables or the chana masala. The lime pickle was terrible, and the service wasn't great, but most of all there was a sad dreariness to the atmosphere. It would've helped had the place not been so dead on a Saturday night, but I don't know. A lot of what one pays for in a restaurant experience is ambience, and Mountain Gate really doesn't have much to offer in that department.
Our plan was to meet Eva & Sandor at a new bar called Curio that had been set up in the old train station (which never actually served as a train station in Woodstock; supposedly it was trucked in from somewhere else). First, though, we stopped at the Garden Café because Gretchen wanted strawberry shortcake. But they didn't have any. Someone did have a number of puppies, but they weren't from a rescue. They had apparently had the idea that the world needed more dogs in it.
Gretchen and I walked to Curio. The train station is beautiful and I'd never really noticed it in the past, though I've driven past it many dozens of times. There was a serious audience watching a serious jazz band performing out by where the platform would be if the it were an actual train station. That wasn't a good place for socializing, so we went indoors, where the mix of hipness and antique accents reminded me of Outdated in Uptown Kingston (it reminded Gretchen more of Huckleberry in New Paltz). Now that I think about it, the vibe it had most of all was Portland, Oregon. It felt like an adult playground in there, with several different little rooms and nooks to hang out in. The best nook of all was quickly occupied by someone else, but we ended up securing a nice circular table near the bar, though this meant one of us had to sit in front of the output of a window airconditioning unit. Eva & Sandor were delayed more than usual because they'd had to help a stranger jumpstart a car. They're much more concerned about stranger danger than we are, so what would have been routine for us had been something of an adventure for them. By now I was slowly drinking an IPA from Catskill Brewery that was rich and complicated and probably very alcoholic given that it was served in a smallish glass. I had another wave of extended dysphoria that lasted most of the time Eva and Sandor were with us at Curio. We left after someone ordered a roast beef sandwich and the whole place took on that fragrance.
We thought about going back to Eva & Sandor's place but ended up at the Garden again. An aggressive electrical storm was passing just to our south, so we went inside and had another round of drinks (my gut was feeling unsettled, so I had wine instead of beer).
The stormtracking app on my phone had said the heart of a powerful thunderstorm had passed directly over our house, so I expected the worst when we returned home. The power was out, something I hadn't expected, and there was a lot of water to mop up on the floor just inside the door from the dining room to the east deck, but other than that it wasn't too bad (very little water had come in through the north-facing laboratory windows, for example). It could've been so much worse; hail (which had been predicted) could've destroyed our garden and even our solar panels.
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