Salem and Rockport

09 Aug 2019

In the morning we headed to Salem, which was more interesting than I expected. We went to a little spot there for breakfast called the Ugly Mug Diner, where they actually had "egg in a basket" on the menu. This is one of Heather's favorite breakfast items to make at home and the first time she had seen it in writing.

Well apparently Salem was once very wealthy, and there are lots of very cool old buildings. We did a quick self guided tour of the poor folks accused of witchcraft, conveniently located next to the graveyard. It seems like in retrospect many of the people accused had land wanted by people in power, or were in some other manner in the way of the powers that be. Some things never change.

Then we were on to Rockport, which we had been to a long time ago but I had mostly forgotten. It was still very pretty, and Heather was not able to resist buying something.

Next was up the road to the Lobster Pool, an old school seafood shack on the shore. M & D had recommended it, and H completed her lobster three-peat, a personal best. I picked at some clam strips. The view and the atmosphere were great, as well as the drive up there from Rockport, which we likely wouldn’t have thought of without their recommendation.

Then we went back for our last night in Boston.

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Aquarium

08 August 2019

We had breakfast in a little strip mall at the Iron Town Diner, getting a table across from a couple of older women who left soon after we arrived, forgetting a bag. I found them in the liquor store next door. The diner had treats like stuffed French toast but I was not feeling gastronomically adventurous yet.

I was still trying to be a trooper that morning, but as we were walking to the whale watching tour booth down by the waterfront my bowels had another tsunami of unhappiness and I had to scramble to the toilets in the basement of the Faneuil Hall. For the folks in stalls on either side of me, I deeply regret what transpired. After that I was out of the whale watching business and we went to the aquarium, which was great, and a really interesting design, working to use that expensive waterfront real estate as efficiently as possible by going vertical.

 

For dinner we went across the street to the Legal Seafood, which here are almost as numerous as McDonalds, with about the same reputation, but to Heather it is the promised land. She continued her lobster streak, while I had a chicken caesar salad I couldn’t finish.

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Old North Bridge and All That

07 Aug 2019

On Wednesday we headed into the greater Boston area towards Margaret and Dave’s. I've known Margaret for decades from the composite meetings I go to.

We had breakfast at a little family diner called J&M, named after the founders two daughters at the time (although now they have more, daughters, not diners). It was really fantastic. They had another location which had burned down a few years ago so they relocated. They rebuilt into a really cute place. Our waitress turned out to be J (or M, I forget which), but one of the three or so daughters. The parents were out of town. Nice place, atmosphere and food.



M and D were going to take us along to some of the sites outside the Boston city center, which is pretty much all we had done before. They took us through Concord, and to the old north Bridge. It was a great time and great to see them. Being the social spaz I am I didn't get a picture of them.

We had a hotel a little north and east of there. On our way we tried to go to a little place in the Cambridge area. Heather wasn’t quite hungry so I quickly hit up a little used record shop down the way. Well, by the time we got to the lobster place they were close enough to closing they were no longer steaming lobsters and such, so we both had a huge lobster sandwich, which was very good, and probably more lobster than I had had in a very long time, if ever. That turned out to be not such a good thing. My seafood allergies have been slowly getting worse as I’ve gotten older, and since I usually just had a bite or two of Heather’s lobster I guess I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten. It was a good night to not be on a boat with a low flow toilet. I really didn’t feel like myself for a few days.

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Boston Road Trip - Mystic

06 Aug 2019

In the morning we picked it up again, having breakfast at a little hole in the wall place, with actual holes in the wall, then on to Mystic. I had been here in the late 80s and they have done a lot of good work developing the area. The view below is from the overlook across the river.

Mystic Seaport had a very nice visitor center that I didn't remember at all, so I'm guessing it came sometime after the 80s.

There were boats of all sizes, most of which to me now looked like a lot of work to maintain, much less operate. Fiberglass rules!

The old rope making loft had a lot of the same functionality of today's composite facilities. And it was at least as clean as some of them.

They had a little shop for maintaining the boats they rent out for the day.

In addition to the blacksmith below, there was a cooper we talked to for a while. Using traditional techniques, she had spent about a week making a bucket. Yay industrial revolution!

More boat repair and maintenance shops.

There was a huge diorama of what the area looked like during its heyday.

The wind started picking up and the lines were bound up somehow so the volunteers had to go up top to pull in this sail. This looks like an insurance nightmare.

We spent longer in Mystic than I had planned. We pointed the car north to Newport to have dinner at Winner Winner, which specializes in, you guessed it, chicken dinners. It was very good and very different, with a heavy application of chunks of garlic cloves. I just saw it on a list of best chicken places for each state. We liked Newport a lot, and now that we've reached Annapolis it is our stretch goal for heading north in the boat next year.

Then we were on the road again, past the Providence area, for the night at a Holiday Inn resort style place that time forgot. I’m sure it was pretty awesome in the late 70s or early 80s, and it was relatively cheap for the larger Boston area.

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Another Month in Annapolis, so Another Road Trip

Early August 2019

Heather loves a good festival, so when we saw signs for a peach festival we made plans to go. It was a little smaller than we had expected, pretty much an oversized church bake sale, but it was worth going to, and we had to bring home a peach pie to avoid appearing rude.

The next day was the First Sunday Street Fair. To avoid parking we just took an Uber, who dropped us off at the top of main street.

The festival was several blocks long down West Street and pretty good, but it was just so brutally hot it took a lot of the fun out of it.

A few days later we left for our last summer road trip from the boat, to the Boston area this time.

On Monday we finished packing and cleaning the boat, loaded up the car after checking the oil, and headed north. We weren’t really sure how far we would make it the first day. Heading north toward Baltimore was pretty routine at this point, and I was very familiar with the NJ turnpike from when I was doing a two weeks on, two weeks off tour for work out of CT. On the weekend in between I would drive down to Annapolis to take a boat class.

So I was familiar with the NJ turnpike and its rest stops with the, shall we say, unusual clientele, especially at night. But this hot mess below was worth a picture. Yes, that's a pony. No, I don't know why. His little stall sidecar is built up to look like another motorcycle. Okay, that's clever. It's hauling the largest trailer I've seen hauled by a motorcycle, with piles of bags and, just in case, a complete drum set at the back. And a spare bale of hay on the trailer hitch. The finishing touch was a Trump bumpersticker. Truly an HL Mencken moment.

We decided to give NYC a wide berth, mostly for traffic reasons, but also because Heather cries every time we drive through. She thinks it is a very sad place, and for a lot of people, I guess that's true. Well, we had to get across the Hudson at some point, so this time we took the new Tappan Zee bridge. It was put up over the last few years alongside the old bridge, and finally opened in 2017. It still had that new bridge smell.

We kept going north along the Merritt Expressway to the Stratford area, then continued through New Haven. Once we got to the north side of New Haven that was pretty much the extent of my range and we were covering new territory. We kept on for a little longer and made it to one of the Indian casino resorts, the Monegan Sun. I love me those gambling subsidized hotels.

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