We've spent the last couple of days here and late this afternoon (Sunday) we will be flying to Texas. We'll be in Texas until Friday before heading back to Florida where I know the jacket can get a well deserved wash and some rest.
Thankfully since our frosty greeting Thursday evening it has warmed up a bit although it's still been chilly and windy. We've spent quite a few days in Boston over the years. It's a pretty compact city and the historical areas along the Freedom Trail are easy to navigate. We did a little roaming around Friday.
https://www.thefreedomtrail.org/
One neat thing that we walked up on was the coolest trophy in all of sports, The Stanley Cup. It is on a tour of cities that have hockey teams in the upcoming playoffs and just happened to be in downtown Boston Friday. There's a lot of sports geek history and tradition that goes with that trophy that makes it so unique. The one I like best is that every player on the winning team gets to keep it for 24 hours. They can do pretty much anything with it during that time. It's been in some interesting places and has the battle scars to prove it.
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/791267-stanley-cup-16-craziest-things-ever-done-with-the-stanley-cup
Even though it was still pretty chilly and windy yesterday (high 40's) we took the opportunity to explore some new territories. We took the commuter rail train from the North Station of Boston to a small city about an hour away call Newburyport. This little town located at the mouth the Merrimack River fits the image a small New England town. It was fun to spend a couple of hours looking around. We even had a fairly decent Cuban sandwich at a small place called the Purple Onion Café. Even though it was quite lively, Beth and I agreed it would be a place that we would like to see again on a nice warm summer day once the leaves are on the trees and the flowers have bloomed...........and the snow that has been piled up in the corners of the parking lots has melted!
https://www.newburyport.com/
On the train back to Boston we stopped off for a couple of hours in Salem. Not to be outdone by all the efforts to get rid of witches that the British were using in the 1600 and early 1700's, Salem had it's own witch trials. Sadly, twenty people were executed because they were found guilty of being "witches". It's a little bit ironic and sad that the city has now turned these events into it's main tourist attractions. There are ghost tours, witch museums, witchcraft stores, clairvoyants, palm readers and everything else you can imagine. Oh well, it's capitalism at it's finest and hopefully everyone visiting will stop and reflect a few minutes on what really happened back at that point in history.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-salem-witch-trials-175162489/
It's now Sunday morning and it's a beautiful looking day outside. The temperature today is supposed to get up into the low 60's and I know these Bostonians are going to be loving it. We'll get out there amongst them for a few hours. We'll probably end up in the Boston Commons which is Boston's equivalent to New York's Central Park.
This has been an amazing journey. We were talking this morning about where we've been on the last six Sunday's. It's been London, Polperro, Bath area (Cheddar and Wells), The Lake District, Dingle (Ireland) and Boston. Looking forward to the next six........the journey continues!
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| Thus sayeth the Lord! |
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| You can't see it real good but it's a statue honoring the TV show Bewitched...........only in Salem would they have such a statue! |
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| This is the Clipper City Rail Trailhead. It's a one mile walk from the Newburyport rail station to downtown along this trail. There are a number of sculptures along the way. |
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| One of the Rail Trail Sculptures. This one was titled "Sparrows" |
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| A nice casual place to eat along the waterfront in Boston |
