Goodbye Summer (Part II)

Saturday of Labor Day Weekend started with a home-cooked breakfast for Teababe as we tried to recover from the previous day's culinary excesses. Lemme tell you, one healthy breakfast cannot compensate for what we did to ourselves the rest of the day...

First, we were off to Sag Harbor to explore and to get sandwiches. Sag Harbor is ridiculously cute and quaint, even for the Hamptons. Located on a harbor on the Peconic Bay side of the South Fork, Sag Harbor today boasts an active public marina. The town, once the main harbor for nearby Sagaponack (eventually yielding the name of the new settlement) is mentioned in Southampton Town records as early as 1709, though it was not permantly settled by Europeans until the 1730s. The previous residents were Algonquins.

Sag Harbor loves its history, and a stroll through town yields many points of interest for future visits - you can barely turn around without running into a historical marker or a museum. The extremely walkable downtown shopping district is a fascinating blend of antique and variety stores, high-end retail, and restaurants from a walk-up pizza counter to upper-end sushi. All is not calm at the moment though: there is a serious battle brewing to "Save Sag Harbor" from a planned large CVS drugstore and other development that has the potential to seriously change the character of this small town. This will bear watching over time... who wins here, the developers who finally got the Town to broaden the main road in to 2 lanes and look to profit from the influx of wealth, or the residents who want to maintain the feel of these small villages?

The Village Cheese Shop is another food stop that is worth the drive (and, I note as I write this, another small independent vendor). Walking into this place almost makes up for missing Artisanal, the French restaurant with the glorious cheese counter, back in NYC. I'm prone to stopping just inside the door to inhale that overwhelmingly delicious smell of dozens of gourment cheeses. The Cheese Shop also carries Vosges chocolate bars - this helps cut down the number of trips I have to make to Soho for truffles.

While the Cheese Shop's speciality is, predictably enough, amazing cheeses from all over the world, they offer a limited selection of sandwiches as well. We obtained a goat cheese and sweet pepper as well as a turkey sandwich To Go, for a picnic at our next stop - Channing Daughters. I've written about Channing Daughters at length in the past, but this time there were several tasty new wines including my new favorite, the Cuvee Tropical.

So that seems like enough to fill a day, right? Nope, not in the Hectic Hampty-Hamps! Teababe is a singer as well and so accompanied me to the next stop, our first gig at the Beach Hut at Meschutt Beach in Hampton Bays. We followed that with a second gig at our old standby, Indian Cove. The Beach Hut was a real pleasure with perfect weather, a large crowd that sang along and thoroughly enjoyed the music, and a backdrop of the water and beach behind us. That is, it was a pleasure until the sun went down and the wind picked up, covering our instruments and ourselves with sand. Never before at a gig have I gone from needing sunscreen and bug spray to a sweater!