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.

My 26th Birthday In (and Around) Boston [part 2]

I took this on Cape Cod, it's going the wrong way and it's from an airplane
but it seemed appropriate considering all the Bewitched stuff we saw.

On Friday we decided to take a bit of a break from the city and see a bit of the outlying touristy type stuff. We started with Salem.

It sucked.

Well, it didn't all suck, but it wasn't like I was picturing it and it was WAY overpriced. I'm not that interested in the kitsch and hype about witches, I am more interested in history and Salem doesn't seem to have a lot of that left. Or if they do, they are going to charge you out the ass for it.

The House of the Seven Gables (3 of which are visible here) as seen from the shore. 

Les pretending to drive a pretend boat

We started out at the House of the Seven Gables, which was pricey, but considering what you get to see on the tour and the amount of information both historical and literary, not overly pricey. The tour guide was very knowledgeable and gave information about how the reality of the history of house differed from that in the book. And it was restored quite well, you get to walk through it, even a secret staircase. We also visited the Friendship of Salem, a recreation of a trading ship from the local area that epitomized the Great Age of Sail. It was kind of interesting and Les had a good time playing the kid's guessing games on the walk out to the lighthouse (see photo).

After that we decided to look into going to the witch museum. It turns out there are like 6 of them.  So I looked up the admission for each of them and they were all about the same. Then I saw the information about the Witch House. It is the only structure in Salem actually connected to the witch trials and they wanted $11 a person for a self-guided tour and $14 for a guided one, ridiculous.  That told me that all the other museums were probably going to be spouting psuedohistory and sensationalizing.

The Friendship of Salem

And psuedohistory and sensationalism would seem to fit with what we saw just walking around town. The restaurant we had lunch it had the Bewitched logo on the wall, there was a statue of Samantha from Bewitched in the green space nearby. Every business we passed either had something to do with witchcraft on their sign or in their name. And I get it, people who are into the sensationalism of witches are going to pay money for that kind of thing. And people who take the occult seriously probably get a kick out of being pandered to and spend money. But I was pretty disappointed in the lack of real history in the place. Maybe I didn't give it a fair shot and if we had gone to one of the museums I would have found it interesting, but based on the rest of the town (and the kitschy webpages and signs for the museums), I highly doubt it.

So we left Salem, we had planned on spending all day there but barely made it through lunch. We were  at a bit of a loss for what to do next, we didn't want to drive the car to Boston, we read many things and spoke to many people who told us not to do that. We didn't want to stay in Salem and we weren't ready to go back to the hotel, so we decided on the other touristy thing near Boston - Cape Cod.

Our first time at the beach together.

Nauset Lighthouse

It was a bit of a drive and we did end up going through Boston, but not on surface streets. We didn't get to the beach until nearly dusk, but we had a great time there. Les was willing to drive back in wet shorts so he went out in the water a little bit. Actually it was supposed to be a little bit but ended up being more like a lot.

He put his shoes and socks up on the beach and put everything from his pockets in his shoes. My pockets weren't big enough for my phone ('cause girl pants suck like that) so I added my phone to his shoes as well. Then he wandered out into the surf while I took pictures. We even saw some seals or porpoises or something jumping around, it was really cool to see them out in the wild like that, unfortunately it was too dark and they were too far away to get any photos.

Then, right as we have decided that it was getting too dark and we should go take a photo of the lighthouse all lit up and head back to the hotel, a giant wave came up farther than any other wave had come in quite a while (I could tell from the dry sand) and washed away Les's shoes and all their contents. We were able to retrieve everything although the pen he had in his pocket was ruined from sand and the screen on my phone became unresponsive.

Nauset Light Beach at sunset.

It was the first time we have ever been to a beach together and Les's first time in the Atlantic, it was a great time and I am so glad we went there after the disappointment of Salem. It was a little stressful not having a phone for the rest of the trip, or rather having a phone that could take calls and receive messages but not being able to answer or read them. And Les had to drive back to the hotel in wet shoes and socks because apparently he hates driving barefoot (which I don't understand at all, I drove barefoot for 90 percent of our cross country trip). But it all worked out, my phone was damaged by sand not water, the water damage indicator hadn't changed so I got a replacement phone for free after we got back home and we made it safely back to the hotel despite Les's wet socks.

On the trip back that night we realized that we were near the conclusion of US Highway 6. We both wanted to go to the end of the highway and, since we had a ton of fun in just one hour on the beach, we decided to come back to the Cape on Sunday before heading home even though it was in the wrong direction.

Nauset Light Beach at dusk.

To be continued...

My 26th Birthday in Boston [part 1]

Our first night in Boston, taken near Boston University.

The four views

There are two cities that I have wanted to visit because I've read books where the city was as much of a character as as any of the people in the book. I've read a lot of books where that happens, but with these two cities it seems to happen in every book they are in, or should I say, that are set in them.

from the four

Those two cities are Boston and San Fransisco.

Yeah, sure New York is unique and "the best city in the world." A lot of people are in love with the it, dream about it, and there are plenty of books set there. I've read many books that are as much about New York City as they are about people. But in every book New York is different. Maybe that's because it's so large and there are so many different ways to experience it. Maybe New York is only what you make of it. I've read plenty of books that are basically love stories about Paris, but they are always so idealized that it doesn't come across as even a real place. Joyce's Dublin feels like a very real place, but different from every other book I've read about Dublin, even if I enjoyed as much.

sides of the

 Somehow every book I've read, every movie or television show I've seen that is set in Boston or San Fransisco feels ... not the same, because that implies boredom, but similar in an amazing way. Like every story set there could be happening simultaneously with the next. And it's wonderful. It seems to me that every author who falls in love with one of these two cities is able to perfectly capture the essence, the spirit, of the city and put it into words. From the most basic internet short story to masterpieces of literature, from colonial times to futuristic sci-fi, Boston and San Fransisco come alive in a way that other cities just don't.

Bunker Hill Monument

That is the reason I have always wanted to visit Boston and San Fransisco. And, honestly, I was expecting to be disappointed. These amazing cities that remain the same, that have this almost palpable spirit,  personalities even - would they be the same in person as they are on paper? I'm not really a writer, would I be able to experience the city I've read so much about? Would I get that feeling of familiarity I get when I read a book set there even though I'd never been? It didn't seem possible, like maybe it was all in my head. I'd get there and it would be the same as when I went to Seattle or New York, fun and exciting, but just a cool city with an interesting history. It wasn't, it was amazing.

Possibly the best photo I think I have ever taken. The only edit I did was to crop out some sky.

I can't speak for San Fransisco since I haven't been there since I was about six weeks old. But for my 26th birthday Les and I went to Boston. And I felt like I'd been there all my life. I didn't know the streets very well and I mispronounced a few things that I'd only ever seen written, but that spirit that comes through in all those books and movies and shows was there. I heard people speak that hyper-local accent, I saw landmarks that didn't just bring history alive, they brought some of my favorite characters to life. And it made me want to live there. But enough waxing poetic, we saw some really cool shit and had a great vacation.

I guess I should say our trip made me want to live there even more. Les and I have talked about living in Boston since we got together eight years ago. But that was more a political and lifestyle thing that some mystical, literary fantasy I have. Aside from electing Mitt Romney, Massachusetts is a pretty damn good fit for us dirty commies. And one thing I noticed on the first day and that we kept track of for the entire trip, was that we saw more same-sex couples holding hands than we did people smoking. Kind of a random thing to notice but it made me happy. (Moving to New York after living in Utah, it seems like EVERYBODY smokes, and I hate it. And living in the "boonies" of New York state I see a lot of casual racism and homophobia and I hate that too, the number of times I've had to say, "That isn't appropriate for the workplace and I don't want to hear it," is absolutely disgusting to me. ) And we both miss mass transit so much.

The 6 towers of the Holocaust Memorial

Inside a tower.

We stayed in a cheap hotel outside of the city, drove to the end of the Green Line and took the T into the city every day. On our first night in Boston we walked around downtown and saw the Holocaust Memorial and some other stuff on the Freedom Trail.

That night was Open Public Night at the observatory at Boston University. So we went to check it out. I was pretty excited about it, having never looked through a real telescope before, but it wasn't that great. There were a lot of people there and the lines were really long. We gave up on it after only looking at Mars. I also thought the grad-student (I assume) running the thing was a bit of an ass.

After we left there we walked around for a bit and I took the photo that is across the top of this entry from a boardwalk under the Boston University Bridge. While there we were nearly run over by several asshole cyclists (the kind of cyclists who treat pedestrians the same way shitty drivers treat them but then turn around and bitch about how drivers should be more respectful of cyclists), said hi to some nice cyclists, were stared at by joggers and nearly killed by the thousands of spiders that were everywhere. But I got a pretty good photo out of it.

The next day was my birthday and quite a full one at that. We started out the day at the Samuel Adams brewery tour. I don't really like beer (and no, it's not just because I haven't tried the right beer yet, it's a smell thing and I don't like it and I'm not going to like it) but Les is a pretty big fan and his favorite is Sam Adams so I didn't think we should skip out on a free tour with free beer. And since I didn't like the beer, as is pretty obvious from the photo, he got double since I gave him mine. We got three samples and I did give each one an honest try, I could taste the differences between them but I still didn't like it.

Following that we had a traditional Boston Lunch of Dunkin' Donuts. Then we made our way back to the Freedom Trail and the Bunker Hill Monument. There was a presentation from a Park Ranger going on out front about the historical details of the battle and the myths that came out of it. (There is no record of anyone actually saying "Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes." But if there is one thing America is good at it's patriotic propaganda.) Then came the fun part, the 294 steps to the top. The first 100 were pretty easy. the next 100 were not so easy. The last 94 were pure torture. But the view from the top was amazing, the smell at the top not so much (small room and lots of sweaty, out-of-breath tourists). The windows at the top are old and so dirty and scratched, which you can see from the photos higher up on this post, but you can see so much.

Les took this photo of me at the top with his phone. It looks so glowey for two reasons; the darkness in the chamber against the brightness outside and me sweating from climbing nearly 300 stairs.

After a shaky descent of the monument we followed the Freedom Trail again and found ourselves on the last tour of the day at the USS Constitution. It was interesting to be on such an old ship, the world's oldest commissioned naval vessel afloat in fact. It came with a heavy dose of that good ol' American propaganda history and a tour guide who was mostly in period dress (at least I hope they don't make Navy people wear all those buttons on their crotches these days). And aside from hearing him slaughter the memorized "history" lesson and poetry recital it was pretty cool to see what it would have been like on a ship more than 200 years ago.  

The moon over the Custom House tower.

After the tour we decided to do the thing most recommended to us by people when we told them we were going to Boston, we walked through the North End and picked a restaurant. I would like to interject here to say that of all the places we've ever gone we had the best food in Boston. It might be because we had a little more money on this trip than we have on previous vacations, it might be because we made a real effort to not eat fast food and stick to local places (Dunkin' Donuts counting as local seeing as how there are as many of them as there are Starbucks in Seattle, I can think of at least 5 places where I could see 2 of them from where I was standing). Whatever the reason I have never had better meals. For my birthday dinner we settled on seafood. The place we decided on was not exactly what I had in mind, it was a little louder and smaller than I was thinking but it was right on the harbor and the view, even while waiting for our table, was spectacular.

And the meal itself goes down in history as probably the best vacation story Les or I will ever tell. I had made it to 26 years old without ever tasting lobster. So I ordered lobster and Les ordered swordfish with the understanding that we would both share. Our food came and I really liked the lobster, it tasted great, but the process of eating it disgusted me so much that I don't think I'll ever be ordering it again. Because I was so grossed out by digging the delicious flesh out of the abdomen of something that was staring at me and in an attempt to share, halfway through the meal Les and I switched plates.

The view from the restaurant.

This might not sound like much but it wasn't all that easy to coordinate because, as I mentioned before it was louder than the romantic dinner I had in my head. In fact the table next to us was about 15 businessmen, most of whom were rather intoxicated and boisterous. Other than the number of them at the same table, they weren't any louder than the rest of the patrons, and they weren't particularly bothering us. It was a little bit of a relief when they left right before we ordered dessert, but only because we could talk to each other.

We walked around the North End after dinner.

And dessert... I'm drooling just remembering it to write about it. We shared Boston Cream Pie and it was the best dessert either of us has ever eaten. It was the first time I've understood what those cooking shows mean when they say things like hint of this and undertone of that. The flavors in it were delicate, cinnamon and vanilla, with an amazing chocolate ganache, it was fantastic! In fact, if it weren't for the next bit it would have been the highlight of the trip.

Then the waitress brought us the check. And it was only for $6! Apparently the loud businessmen were all being paid for by one guy, I'm thinking it was a work party and he had an expense account or something, and he felt bad about how loud the people at his table were being so he paid for our entire meal and for the table next to us, a family of four from Italy. Ours was probably at least $60 for two people, I assume theirs was double that, plus the 15 or so at his table who all had a meal and multiple drinks, I hope he had an expense account. The people next to us were happy, they didn't have to pay at all. We were happy, we only had to pay for dessert. And the waitress was ecstatic, I'm sure the businessman tipped her extremely well on top of the automatic gratuity on large parties plus we tipped her on what our bill would have been.

After dinner we did the romantic hand-in-hand walking around the city thing. We walked along the water for a while, through Quincy Marketplace and eventually found ourselves facing the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge. It caught my eye, I can't really explain why, maybe because I've read about it so much, maybe it's the interesting lines created by the cables, but I really wanted to photograph it all lit up. We spent a long time on the pedestrian part of the parallel bridge waiting for lulls in traffic so I could get a shot with no vibrations. And eventually I did get some good ones, the second big photo in this post being my new favorite of anything I've ever taken.

To be continued...