We spent the weekend on the other side of the state visiting my brother in law, sister in law, and their twins. They have a lovely old farm house not too far from Philly or NYC. The area is loaded with towns dripping with quaint, old world atmosphere. And lots of expensive but cool shops. Instead of stopping at any of these little towns, we went here:

New Hope. I had dinner at an inn in New Hope when I lived in NJ many years ago. My memory of it is that it was also a charming little upscale village. Now? Not so much. It still looks charming if you can see past all of the people, motorcycles and cars lining the streets. But the shops are, for the most part, a big disappointment. Very little cool, very little funky. Mostly just crap. I was very sad. There were 3 stores I saw that I wanted to check out. One was a shop called Mexican Artisans. It was out of business. Another was called Made In Italy. I saw a cool Italian pottery plate hanging outside. I love pottery so I thought maybe I would find some neat pieces. Inside the store? There were less than a dozen pieces of pottery. I liked 2 plates. They were both about $150. These were dinner sized plates, not big platters. They were nice but not that nice. The rest of the store was filled with bad costume jewelry, leather masks, and wallets. The last store was an art gallery filled with original paintings. 75% of the paintings were copies of famous paintings (many bad interpretations of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Degas’ ballet dancers, some Georgia O’Keefe-esque flowers). 23% fell into what I like to call motel art – just bland vanilla scenes that evoke no reaction or feeling from the person viewing it (I put Thomas Kincaid into this category – art is subjective so don’t take offense if you are a fan, as well as kids playing on the beach, kittens and puppies playing in fields of flowers, etc). The last 2% was actually some original stuff. I wasn’t particularly impressed with most of it but there was one little painting we had to buy. It looks like our puppy, Angus, and makes me laugh. Tacky, kitschy, and silly but we love it.

We didn’t have time during our visit to go back to any of the cool little towns we passed on our way to New Hope. But as my SIL said, it is a good reason to go back for another visit.