The Hamptons half-explained!

Today began with a solo walk towards Southampton Village coupled with a detour,when the side-walk stopped abruptly, through a new housing development. I should add here, that the traffic along Route 28A was BUSY!! Anyhow, the housing development was beyond nice, it was in effect a collection of big houses that would cost millions of dollars. We had already gleaned the cost of things around here from the glossy catalogues given out freely by the numerous real estates agents. The Hampton's have become a suburb of Wall Street, where the super-rich own cottages (estates!) by the ocean. Not only do the likes of Gerry Seinfeld have homes here, but so do the likes of Mr Bloomberg (billionaires!) Returning to the motel, I called for coffee to go at a neat little Mexican deli, which was busy with its clientele of mainly Hispanic workers, dropping in for a takeaway breakfast. Later, we drove into Southampton Village to get a glimpse of its glorious beach ..... no commercialism here!

Speaking with some locals, it became clear that the traffic enigma was easily explained. They call Route 82A ' The Trade Parad', as every morning an army of mainly Hispanic tradesmen drive up to the Hampton's from New York, to do the building and landscaping for the super-rich! Needless to say the indigenous people of the area are not too happy with their habitat being taken over. (I likened the villages to 'Prestbury-on-sea!) Anyway, from Southampton, we drove to Sag Beach and then to Sag Harbour,another pristine village by the ocean, where the Main Street shops are all 'designer' and where the eateries serve salads that cost more than we pay for an entrée! But we found a superb deli in the village centre and bought a mile-high pastrami sandwich 'to go'. We took off for East Hampton and after our picnic we visited the 'No Place Like Home' Museum, where its director, Hugh, gave us a tour.

Basically the museum is a house built in the 1700s and contains all things collected by the couple who lived there in the 1800s. These include many artefacts relating to the guy who wrote the words for the song 'There's no place like home' (John Payne). The latter was born in New York, but for years it was wrongly propounded that he lived in the house which is now dedicated to his work! We also discovered that Michael Portillo had visited the museum when making the TV series of his travels in the US (which had inspired our trip to Albany!) Driving back to the hotel, the traffic volume had once again increased to madness, as the parade shuttled back to New York!

For no other reason than we heard it on Sirus today (and unlike money around here) I picked Booker T and the MG's as today's musical memory.