I left on a Friday, and one JetBlue flight from Ft. Myers later, I landed in New York, at the Kennedy Airport, where it was a beautiful sunny day, perfect for walking and seeing sights, but instead I was vaguely queasy from the flight and anyway, the plan was just to take a bus into Manhattan to meet Lisa at Grand Central Station. One Grand Central Station pita and one small Coke later, I found Lisa, coralled my complimentary airline headache with the aid of the food, and took the ever-exciting commuter train ride to Greenwich.
One late night of talking later, we got up in a drizzle, loaded her Ford Exploder in a heavier drizzle, and drove north in a still-increasing drizzle. We stopped at a Burger King (notable in my personal mythology because I hardly ever eat there, though they have very good fries), gawked at the nutrtion information posted near the door, and continued on, in heavier rain, to...
Walden Pond State Reservation (another page), home to Henry David Thoreau for a couple of years back in a time when people still lived in one-room houses like this. Actually, in a somewhat disappointing move, this replica of Thoreau's cabin is not situated at the original site of Thoreau's actual cabin. |
Lisa found a statue of Thoreau around the front of the house and wasted no time in making friends. |
In a steady, determined rain, but yet not such a rain that attacks with pea-sized droplets, nor yet such a soaking rain that lets fly many tightly packed mid-range drops, we scarpered down the trail to Walden Pond itself.
The tiny faint speck you see out in the middle of the pond is the Loch Ness Monster. Or it was one of the pain-loving swimmers who donned black dive suits to swim across the pond (though, by its size, I would tend to think of it as a lake, if it weren't already Walden Pond). |
Bear witness to the strange human compulsion to have pictures taken in front of famous things. |
Now Lisa succumbs. According to the map, up around the bend behind Lisa and a little farther on is where the original Thoreau cabin was. |
After the sojourn at Walden Pond, it was time to scurry back south to Newton Highlands, which is not famous, so you shouldn't be scrounging through any remaining colonial history memories. Driving though some of the worst rain yet, we arrived at the New Repertory Theater to see Sweeney Todd, which was featuring in the lead role the by-now infamous Todd Alan Johnson. Lisa had bought the tickets, and she can arrange the purchase of all my tickets from now on because she got front-row seats, from which we were treated to an excellent production (and performances), made even better by the rainy day atmosphere and the clever, moody use of the theater's small space. The show being the excuse for the New England touristing, we'd let TAJ know we'd be there, so we said hi and etc. briefly afterwards in the lobby (it being a late matinee, the evening show was to begin in 45 minutes, ouch!), and afterwards, acting on his advice, ate dinner at a nifty bakery/deli-style restaurant, whose waitstaff I confused by ordering a turkey club sandwich on a wrap.
One Travel Lodge in the Framingham/Natick area later, we drove back through Newton Highlands (there was some kind of street fair going on, despite threatening skies) for a breakfast of the bakery's cookies (they'd looked really good the previous evening), on our way north to see Lexington and Concord. The day was gray, but this time without rain. On the way we detoured through the Wellesley College campus, where Lisa went to school. There was an alumni reunion going on, so it was somewhat crowded, but we drove through and around it, including down a narrow, scenic road that cut through an undeveloped, wooded portion of the campus.
Coming out of the bakery/deli, we pause for a picture of the church where the New Repertoy Theatre is housed (it looked like the theater was a wing, or something). It's great--and funny--to see a church housing a play that's full of...cannibalism! Too bad none of the street booths seemed to be having a pie bake sale, it would have been perfectly appropriate. |
Back on the road, after a detour at a garage sale where an old man was sporadically playing the accordian and where Lisa gave in to a collecting instinct and bought two cool little sets of spoons from Thailand, we made it to Lexington in time for lunch. Somehow, whenever traveling, food becomes the center around which the day revolves. After that the rest of the day was taken with driving west toward Concord through Minute Man National Historical Park (which I had last visited as an eight-year-old much interested in all things colonial), stopping at nearly all the pull-outs along the way to view various historic sites.
Among the first stops we made was at Hartwell Tavern, which is a historic...tavern! It dates back to the late 1700s, and was one of the many farm houses and what-have-yous that the British first marched past on the way to Concord, and then retreated past during the Battle of Lexington and Concord. |
Having looked at a schedule at the visitors' center, we made it to Hartwell Tavern in time to catch a musket-shooting exhibition and talk given by park employees dressed in authentic colonial garb. The strangest thing about it was that, whereas every other time I've encountered authentically-garbed park employees it has been sweltering hot and drenchinly humid (Colonial Williamsburgh, St. Augustine, naming no names), this day was cool, overcast, and surprisingly appropriate for poor historic re-enactors wearing woolen fabrics.
One tour of the tavern and its associated barn and grounds (including a coop of black and white hens and roosters) later, we went on to other stops, which included a stroll to the less-interesting Job Brooks House (you can't go in it), near which we encountered an orange tabby cat. Foolishly, we patted it, so it followed us, dog-like, hoping for more until its cat nature reasserted itself and despite offers of further attentions, it quit following.
After several more stops, we came to the day's highlight, The Wayside, the house of (among other literatti of the age) Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne is responsible for naming it Wayside and making some of the stranger additions to it, but its other residents, the Alcotts (of Little Women fame) called it Hillside, and its final literary residents, Margaret Sidney and her family preserved it for posterity before the Park Service snarfed it up. For those who like me were in the dark, Margaret Sidney is the author of the children's classic Five Little Peppers. At any rate, everyone in the 1700s and 1800s knew everyone, and people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville dined at the house. Which made touring it a lot of fun. Arriving on a gray afternoon, we were the only tour-takers at 4 p.m., so we enjoyed an uncrowded tour and saw various seminal sights, such as the table at with Hawthorne and Emerson dined, the writing table in the garrett at which Hawthorne wrote most of his novels, and the blue and white china of Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne becomingly displayed in the kitchen.
Unfortunately, we were not able to tour Emerson's house (though we drove past it, it was too late in the day), but we did stop for a brief look at another Alcott house—this one apparently the one in which she lived most of her adult life—and made it to Concord and North Bridge, the site of "the shot heard 'round the world" and also the site of a statue of a minute man, which is so high up on a pedestal that it's quite hard to see. In all, there's enough historical sightseeing/gawking in the offing in just twenty miles' space, that you could easily spend days there, snapping tourist photographs and pausing in awe in front of the desk from which The Scarlet Letter may have issued forth.
Finally, with the drive back to Greenwich to come, we headed back to the Mass Pike. The following day I spent mostly in transit, except for the hour or so I spent loitering, reading, and people watching in Grand Central Station's food court level while waiting for an airport shuttle. And that's it, really, the page ends mainly textually, with a link.
Page created June 16 and 17.