I don’t have much to offer today, but I wanted to share a couple of travel / blog updates. Jill’s leaving this evening for England, where she’ll be running the CAA’s trip (with more than thirty participants) to the Royal Windsor Horse Show. I’m not going to Windsor this year, BUT we’re hoping to have some guest blog photography by eighteen-year-old Finn, who’s on the CAA trip, which is also his first visit to England.

When Jill gets back from Windsor and the CAA’s Windsor-add-on Coaching in Norfolk trip, we’ll both be in the office for two days, and then A.J. and I leave for almost two weeks in Belgium and France. We’ll be making our first-ever visit to the International Traditional Driving Event (CIAT) at Cuts. As you may recall, we went last summer to a CIAT in Celle, Germany (you can see all my posts on it by clicking on Germany in the blog topics). But the Cuts CIAT is, as they say, the grand-daddy of them all … this is the event’s seventeenth year. And we’re super-excited to be going.

My hope, of course, is to share our trip with you here, but I’m not really sure whether we’ll have much in the way of Internet connections in the small hotels (in really small towns) where we’ll be staying. So we’ll have to wait and see.

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cuts 2013 poster

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Oooohhh… pretty …

The May issue of The Carriage Journal (the cover shown here) is now in the mail to all current Carriage Association members / Carriage Journal subscribers.

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If you’re not (yet) a CAA member or CJ subscriber, click here to learn a bit more about the association and our magazine.

And here’s another old photo of Lexington’s downtown …

This is the Lexington-and-Versailles stagecoach, in front of the stage office on Short Street (parallel to and one block north of Main Street, which we saw yesterday).

The building with the porch, to the left of the horses, now houses a fabulous Lexington restaurant called Table 310.

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I had nearly forgotten that I’d found (large postcards of) these old photos at an antique store a while back, and that I wanted to share them here.

Both — yesterday’s and tomorrow’s — were taken here in Lexington more than a hundred years ago.

This first one isn’t dated, but it shows our downtown Main Street, where it’s crossed by Limestone. The big building at the corner — behind the row of trees and where all the vehicles are parked — is the Phoenix Hotel. This area is now a park, an apartment building, and the main branch of the Lexington Public Library.

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Here’s another view of Lakeport, New Hampshire, c. 1907 … which we last saw on Thursday.

Lakeport still looks pretty quiet. But the single horse put to the four-wheeled vehicle looks as if he’s asking whether it’s time to go …