Town #37 Manchester

January 1-3, 2009
Mansion Inn B and B * Hartford Road Café

Bob gave me a two-night getaway for Christmas. He’d done some research and had a place in mind and we decided together to go to the Mansion Inn B&B in Manchester. It was formerly one of the Cheney family mansions, all of which are clustered on the south end of town, where silk mills were once in existence, thus giving Manchester its nickname “Silk City.”

One main purpose of the trip was to unwind after the holidays. A second purpose was to work on a couple projects requiring a computer. I’d given Bob a netbook (a baby laptop with a 10-inch screen) for Christmas, so we wanted to use it to work on the projects without being distracted by other household tasks. So we mostly computed and read, and visited with Bruce Hamstra, our host. Each room has a large selection of books from which to choose and many more in common areas, but as usual we are each in the middle of at least one, so we brought our own. On Friday we used the wifi for the first time in the living room, since our room was too far from the router. We got a lot done on the projects and reading. Bruce’s breakfasts were excellent and we shared them with different couples each morning. Both nights we had a fire in the fireplace in our room and we thoroughly enjoyed our visit.

The only time we went out was Friday night for dinner. We wanted casual, so we chose the Hartford Road Café, less than a mile away, and casual we surely got; it's a bit rough around the edges. It’s mostly a bar but has a few tables, and we were the only customers at first. Bob was very pleased with his steak except for an herb rub that he didn’t remember seeing on the menu. I wanted the chicken cordon bleu if it was made on the premises and not frozen (I can do that at home). The waitress said it was made there, and it was the best I’d ever tasted.

This was a relaxing couple of days and with snow having come just before New Year’s Day, holing up in a big, old, warm house was perfect. ($__ for B and B; $33.12 for dinner) (Jan)