After spending the last couple days doing the Thanksgiving thing with family, Courtney and I, along with her parents, went out around Westport, Massachusetts, today. First we went to a wine tasting. The line for the tasting was so long that the little house it was held in was packed, and we didn’t feel like standing in line forever, so we decided to forgo the wine and just took in the sights and snacks at the accompanying festival at the vineyard, which was actually pretty fun. They had a fenced-in area for kids to have hay fights, and it was great to see little kids dropping big stacks of hay on each other.

After the wine tasting, we went to an auction at Sandwich on Cape Cod. Courtney’s parents are regular attendees, but it was the first time I had been at an auction. There were almost 300 items up for auction, and we stayed for the first 130 or so items. This was an antiques auction, so everything was well out of our price range. We were there mainly to watch. The most expensive item that got sold while we were there was a pair of old French flower pot stands or something to that effect (although they looked kind of like spittoons). The pair went for $48,000, which, with premium and tax, would come out to well over $50,000. It’s good to know that no matter how bad the economy is, some people will always have a spare $50,000 to throw around, and that there will always be as good a cause for that money as a pair of really old spittoons.