My 26th Birthday in (and Around) Boston [part 3]

Sea lions playing with keys, my favorite from the aquarium.

Rays in the touch tank, almost Les's favorite from the aquarium (he liked the bigger ones in the middle tank, but my camera died and these are similar. 

This guy is grooming himself,
he is at the aquarium because he is blind.

Saturday we headed back into the city to do thing second most recommended to us, visit the New England Aquarium. It was a little pricey, but worth it (and it would have been more so if all the penguins hadn't been gone and the first floor virtually empty).

We saw the feeding with the trainers, very interesting. 

Les touching the ray in the touch tank,
I chose to abstain from such icky things.

Little Blue Penguins, the only
ones left at the aquarium.

I thoroughly enjoyed the marine mammal exhibit, we watched the seals get fed and the sea lions playing. The center of the aquarium is a giant cylindrical tank with a ramp around it. It has all manner of fish, big to small, really cool looking to really, really ugly, sharks, rays, a giant turtle and, at one point, a scuba diver. Les found this tank fascinating. He was like a little kid. Every time the turtle would come by he would get excited and he was fascinated by how the stingrays moved. I took a video with my iPod but it didn't work out all that well.

The sea lion just loved these plastic keys,
she would throw them and then chase them.

Because it is the end of mating season the males
pretty much stayed out of the water, in the wild
they would be protecting their area of beach
 from other males. 

The hardest thing about doing stuff like this, for me, is all the children. I know when I go to an aquarium or the zoo or an amusement park or something that there are going to be lots of children there, I shouldn't expect otherwise. And I don't, but it's still overwhelming. They are so loud and sticky (and they have no concept of personal space) that I often find myself not enjoying whatever I came to see or do. This wasn't too bad as far as that goes, or rather it was but in small doses. The touch tanks were near panic attack inducing with all the screaming toddlers, even the handlers were going a little nuts trying to calm people down so the sharks and rays didn't start biting little fingers. But then we went and saw the marine mammal show and it was better, everyone was sitting and watching and I only got my hair pulled two or three times. The tanks around the outer walls were horrible, "Get in there little Suzy/Johnny, look at that cool thing! Oh you're too short, just stand the feet of that lady behind you or pull yourself up on her shoulder." But that was really only a problem at the tanks with popular things in them and the middle tank was large enough that we were able to find a few spots pretty much to ourselves.

The last photo I took before my camera died. 

Of course halfway through our time at the aquarium (we wanted to have plenty of time to get our money's worth) the battery in my camera died. And my phone was still dead from the day before at the beach. Luckily my 365 project made a real photographer of me and I had a third camera with me, my iPod, so the rest of the photos from Saturday aren't great quality.

After we left the aquarium we spent some time just wandering around the city and headed to some of the Boston landmarks we hadn't seen yet. We started with some old cemeteries on the Freedom Trail, the Granary Burying Ground and King's Chapel Burying Ground, we skipped Copp's Hill. We saw some famous people's graves, Samuel Adams and Paul Revere and the like, but what I found most interesting (other than the number of people willing to walk around in the middle of summer wearing period costumes) was the artwork on the headstones.

Les took this with his phone, it has all three of the common
symbols we were noticing, the skull, angel wings and an hourglass.

Compared to the Victorian cemeteries I am familiar with, the imagery is much more direct and I found it fascinating. Victorian headstones pull from Greek myth, Biblical allegory and just random period symbology and are always pretty and nice, look at the photos from Mt. Hope in Rochester or Green-Wood in Brooklyn, everything is gorgeous. The earlier headstones we saw in Boston had realistic looking skulls, angel wings and hourglasses, very dark and deathly symbols. The earlier style is very obvious that this person is dead, they ran out of time, we are sad about it. The Victorian stuff is pretty but doesn't convey the same sense of grief to me.

This squirrel would NOT let go of this
apple, it was bigger than he was.

After the burial grounds we headed to Boston Common, and on a Saturday afternoon, it was packed. We sat and relaxed for a bit. We people watched a little bit, saw the fountain, the kids playing in the wading pool, a squirrel eating an entire apple, some performers, a drum circle whose weed you could smell from half a mile out, the monuments and memorials. And in true form, the State Capital Building, which we got a history lesson on from a very loud passing bus driver with a very thick Boston accent. We might have stayed longer to take some people watching photos if I had my camera, but with just the iPod it doesn't really work.

Gates at Harvard

We decided after seeing Boston Common that the only big thing missing from our trip that we had to see was Harvard. So we got on the T and headed to Cambridge. Because we did this trip for my birthday it was also move-in weekend for Boston's 250,000 + college students. The campus was crawling with students moving stuff, parents saying goodbye and tourists forming lines to take photos of famous Harvard landmarks, I'm sure there was more than a little crossover between the latter two.

We wandered around Harvard for a little bit looking for a snack and a bathroom when I finally gave in and stopped at a bookstore. We spent quite a while there and I forced myself down to only one book, Les bought it so it counted as a birthday present. 

After that we were pretty tired and since we had decided that we had to go back to the cape and see the end of Hwy. 6 before heading home, we called it an early night so we could get everything packed up.

Provincetown

On Sunday we checked out of the hotel ridiculously early, makeshift beach clothes set aside and headed for Cape Cod yet again. We saw the end of the highway and took some photos as proof (some people in Price don't think the damn thing ever ends). Then we explored Provincetown, an awesome, quaint little New England town, we liked it quite a lot.

We did a geocache near Provincetown that took us to Shank Painter Pond, which is the largest known quaking bog anywhere in the world. It was pretty cool, we saw some interesting plant life, a cross-country cyclist taking a bath, a great blue heron taking flight and a giant butterfly.

Shank Painter Pond

Cape Cod Lighthouse

After Provincetown we headed to the beach. On the way we stopped at the Cape Cod Light (aka Highland Lighthouse), the oldest lighthouse on the cape and took some more photos. We walked around but decided that we would rather spend more time at the beach than go up in the lighthouse for the tour.

Picking up rocks
for the Taylors

Eventually we stopped getting distracted and made it to the beach. We walked around barefoot in the sand and Les convinced me to get my feet wet this time. I didn't have any shorts with me, but I had leggings and a tank top I wore underneath another shirt earlier in the week, Les just wore the same shorts from before and we went in the ocean together for the first time. It was the first time I have actually gone in the ocean since sometime in either 1990 (I only remember that Jason was a baby and a seagull stole a chip out of  his hand when we lived in Florida). I went to the beach in California when I was in high school, but it was a school trip and we weren't allowed to go in the water.

Whenever we go on a trip Les likes to send something to his sister and her kids, when we went to Vancouver he wrote on a map of Stanley Park and mailed it to them, we sent them maple candies from Vermont, that kind of thing. They had recently gone to visit his brother in Seattle and had gone to the coast. So he decided we should send them some shells from the Atlantic to go with anything they may have picked up from the Pacific.

It turns out that there weren't all that many shells on this beach, there were a few broken mussel shells and the occasional crab claw, but all very delicate, nothing that would survive 2,000 in the US postal system. So we picked up really cool rocks (at least they looked cool when wet, they turned out to be kind of plain once they dried out) instead.

We sat in our chairs on the beach for a little longer. I remembered how much I love the feeling of burning hot sand on my feet and Les reminded me that he is a big giant baby when it comes to hot things and then, unfortunately it was time to head home.

But we didn't.

We stopped at the visitor's center to take some photos of the dunes and read a little bit of the history of the area. I found it particularly interesting that the entire area was covered in forests when the pilgrims arrived but they cut them down so fast that the first environmental laws to prevent erosion and the spreading of the dunes was enacted in the mid-1600s.

Then we did have to head home. Because we spent so much time on the beach we got caught in a bit of traffic, but it was totally worth it.

I was unprepared for how my feet would sink when the
wave hit and I nearly fell flat on my ass. And I was buried
up to my ankles in sand.

Les had more experience and was
able to remain upright.

Best vacation so far.