Travis and Tara's New England Adventure
March 22 - 30, 2002



On Wednesday, equipped with the local equivalent of a Thomas Brothers, Travis and Tara set off in search of Boston. It was a little wet outside, but it at least did not rain.




First we visited the USS Constitution, the oldest active US navy ship. (Bunker Hill was in the background). We were subjugated to "security" checks before getting on this old ship. Interestingly, right across the dock was some (Tara inserts the word "boring") WWII ship that we could walk on, without any security checkpoints. (Travis was more interested in that ship than Tara was).
 From the Constitution and that other "boring" ship, we walked to Bunker Hill. The streets were very quaint, and had faux-gas lamps lighting them. Bunker Hill was a good value (Free!!!), and had lots of interesting models of the battle.


 

This is the view from one of the windows at the top of the Bunker Hill Monument, looking out over Boston. The bridge in the foreground looks very beautiful at night, with brightly colored lights illuminating the white ropes.

After resting at the top of the monument, we went down and then ate at a very quaint pub at the bottom of the hill. Tara had some pretty good crab cakes and cider.

  We then decided to head up to Salem to see witchtrial stuff (we had heard it was a good place to visit), but unfortunately, most of the museums and stuff didn't open until April 1. Tara found it surprising that there was so much occult and witchcraft stuff, considering that the original trials found the defendants to be innocent of witchcraft (all accounts indicate that they weren't witches at all). It reminded me of nothing so much as going to a Chinese restaurant, and thinking that we were eating stuff that the Chinese would actually eat.

a witch museum

Getting back to Rusty and Wendy's house was an adventure in itself - the mapbook we were given may have been the equivalent of a Thomas Brothers, but it wasn't the same. Each page was a different city (listed alphabetically), and all were different scales*. One of the interesting features of Boston streets is that they change names when they enter a new city (and a new city comes along about every mile or so). So, trying to find our way from point A to B was quite a challenge, as we had to figure out what city we were entering, and what the street name was changed to. In addition to this, it was often not permitted to get on the highway in a certain direction (ie, you could go east from one street, but not west), and one wasn't able to get off the freeway at an exit to turn around and go the other way (we tried this several times). The streets on the maps also didn't follow with turns in the street very precisely, which threw off navigating even more. On the other hand, we couldn't tell how far we didn't go, as the maps had no consistent scale from page to page. We did eventually make it back, and were rewarded with a nice dinner with Rusty at a local Italian restaurant.



Next Day: Cape Cod
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* This reminds Tara of how in the South, 1) all the streets have the same name, and 2) The intersections don't bother with street-name signs. Tara has always suspected that in the South it was to foil "Yankee" attempts at future invasions. Perhaps it is a common defense tactic to confuse would-be invaders. I guess here in San Diego, the defense is to have the street names in Spanish, to defend against an invasion from the south... Oh, nevermind.