Road Trip, day 2

On Tuesday morning I woke up foolishly early and, figuring I might as well make myself useful, picked up some breakfast. After eating and making ourselves presentable, we headed for Boston.

Boston is a city full of churches.

Some are famous, others less so. (Seen here: the Church of the Covenant door.)

We parked the rental car and set out to walk the Freedom Trail, a tour of the most famous sites in Boston and chock full of Revolutionary War history. You follow a red brick (or sometimes red painted) line on the pavement, occasionally pointed out with these trail markers. I didn't know what the insignia in the middle represented until I saw the weathervane of the Old North Church. Then it made sense.

We walked first through the Public Garden and saluted the statue of George Washington.

Curse you, squirrel! Curse you and your flagrant disregard for propriety!

Then on to Boston Common. This poor little kite was straining to be set free. The wind was doing its best to spring it from the clink, to no avail.

The Massachusetts State House. The dome is covered in 23 karat gold, and it gleams rather delightfully in the light of day.

A bronze statue of Mary Dyer stands on the grounds of the State House. Mary Dyer was hanged for the wretched crime of being a Quaker in Puritan New England.

One of the oddities of Boston is the placement of its graveyards. The Granary Burying Ground was originally on the outskirts of town, but over time Boston grew up around it -- and thus this graveyard is now right in the middle of the downtown.

I love some of the gravestones at Granary. This one for Captain Nicholas Gardner is especially wonderful.

There are numerous famous people buried at Granary, including Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin's parents, John Hancock and Paul Revere. Over time, the pathways and headstones at Granary have been moved around, so that the headstones don't necessarily match the bodies buried beneath them. Thus it is now possible to see:

The Paul Revere Memorial marker...

...and the dinky Paul Revere tomb marker...

...sitting cheek by jowl.

Moving on. A bit of the interior of King's Chapel, featuring the organ. King's was originally an Anglican congregation, but has since become Unitarian Universalist. This has been your Useless Trivia Moment for the day. (You're welcome.)

I seem to take more interest in the graveyards than in the churches themselves -- probably because of awesome gravestones like this one.

A detail of the stone: Father Time tries skunking Death, without much success.

Behold the grandeur of Old City Hall...

...which is now a Ruth's Chris steakhouse. Heh.

Out in front there is a bronze statue of a donkey, with a pair of cast footprints set in front of it and the words "Stand in opposition" next to them.

So I obliged.

Here's the Old South Meeting House, probably best known as the place where the Boston Tea Party originated.

It's since become a bastion of free speech; people who can't get the time of day anywhere else usually have a chance to voice their ideas at Old South.

Before the advent of Starbucks, Americans definitely loved their tea.

The Old State House, site of the Boston Massacre, now a museum.

I like the lion and unicorn detail on the roof.

Paul Revere's house. It's much more interesting inside than out, but once again they didn't allow photography in the building.

This town is chock-full of Paul Revere, by the way.

Speaking of which, here's the Old North Church, where they hung lanterns to indicate which route the British were taking -- "one if by land, two if by sea."

It's rather beautiful inside.

One more graveyard, really quick: the Copp's Hill Burying Ground.

At this point we'd had enough of the Freedom Trail, so we repaired to Mike's Pastry to drown our sorrows in chocolate cannoli.

I realize that by admitting this, I've probably drawn down the whole never-ending Mike's Pastry/Modern Pastry jihad on my head. Meh, so be it. Next time I'll go to Modern. Ya happy?

Before leaving the area, we had to at least take a peek around Harvard. Here's the exterior of Memorial Hall.

And here's some of the interior. Groovy.

Having taken the whirlwind tour of Boston and Cambridge, we headed back for New York. The next morning I left LGA for Seattle, by way of Denver.

Hail and farewell, Denver!

Road Trip, day 1

(I've split this up into two entries. One was just too long.)

After Bengal Tiger I knew I'd have a couple of days to kill before I headed home on Wednesday. And at one point or another I mentioned to Julie that I was writing a story about a location in Massachusetts, and I felt like a big fraud because I'd never even been to Massachusetts... and Julie, who used to live in Cambridge, immediately suggested a road trip. Purely for research purposes, of course.

So on Monday morning we rented a car and made for the Bay State with all due speed.

First we went to Salem, home of the infamous Witch Trials of 1692, and of a big gothic-looking former church now housing the Salem Witch Museum. The area which had once been the chapel or sanctuary was kept under very low light conditions, and there was a red circle on the floor containing the names of those who had died. All around the perimeter of the room were cells in the walls, in which there were wax figures to represent those who figured in the witch trials, and there was a somewhat histrionic voice-over discussing what happened. (Some of the details in this presentation are less than accurate, but hey, whatever.)

The most lurid wax figure was the first one: Satan, the Prince of Darkness himself, shown flying through the air complete with horns, cloven hooves, a spear and glowing red eyes. In the half-darkness he already looked considerably creepy, and at various times during the narrative, when people were up to no good, his red eyes would glow out of his little twilit alcove in the wall. The whole thing was full of cheesy goodness. Less fun but still pretty cheesy was the section on the changing face of witchcraft, which was heavy on modern Wicca and lightweight on actual history. I wish I could have gotten some pictures, but they didn't allow photography of any kind inside the exhibits. Pity.

This is the Jonathan Corwin House, more popularly known as the Witch House. It is the only building still standing in Salem with direct ties to the Salem Witch Trials, thus its popular name.

The Corwin House was moved to its present location and restored in the 1940s. It was opened as a museum of 17th century life in 1948. We didn't go inside on this trip, but if I should come back I think I'll have to check it out.

After stopping at a local bakery for some delectable pastries and hot chocolate, we went over to take a look at the Burying Point, Salem's oldest graveyard dating to 1637. A number of its past upright citizens are interred here.

What you will not find inside this graveyard, however, are the graves of any of the people who were executed as part of the Salem witch trials. Most of these were immediately buried after their executions, in unmarked graves somewhere on or near Gallows Hill.

Right beside the Burying Point, however, is a rectangular recessed plot of ground with 20 rough-hewn cantilevered benches sticking out from the walls at regular intervals. Each bench has engraven into its face the name of a person who died, his or her means of death, and the date of execution. You walk into this memorial by stepping across the words of those who were tried. All proclaim their innocence.

Goodman Corey endured two days of agony, having heavy stones placed on his chest in an attempt to force him to plead innocent or guilty of witchcraft. His last recorded words were the defiant phrase, "More weight."

As the fog began to gather, we visited a local state forest to get a feel for its environs...

...and visited a local public library. This happens to be the Flint Public Library in Middleton.

Two of the stained glass windows facing the front of the building.

As you can probably tell from the pictures, it was an idyllic library of awesomeness.

Our founder. Thank you, founder!

I am a bibliophile, so many happy sighs were exhaled here.

Julie and I then went candlepin bowling. Or more specifically, we would have done if it hadn't been bowling league night in the alley we visited; all the lanes were taken. I went over and examined a candlepin bowling ball, which has no finger holes and is about the size of a hulled coconut, and thereby attracted the attention of one of the local bowlers.

"Where you ladies from?" he asked me. I'm sure my curiosity over the ball broadcast the fact that I wasn't local. I smiled and told him I was from Seattle. He urged me to ask again about getting a lane opened up; I think he figured that if I bowled a string or two, I'd be hooked.

We drove around Boston and Cambridge, some of Julie's old stomping grounds, that evening. Picked up (and inhaled) a lamb curry for dinner, then drove back to our hotel in Danvers and promptly hit the hay.