Mystic Seaport

 

Mystic is a place where dreams do come true.

Mystic Seaport Museum has basically taken the old town, put a fence around it, restored the buildings and added a lot of old sailing ships.  You could spend a day or more.  Depends on how much time you spend at the Wall of Fudge.

You can sail around the harbor in sail boats

or just wander among the buildings and sailing ships.

It has the original wharves and businesses that supported the sailing days.  And there are people makings barrels, ropes, and iron work with tools from days of old.

 

I enjoyed the rope house.  It is over two hundred feet long.  It has to be as long as the longest rope that you are going to make.  You could see hemp being spun into twine, the twine being spun into strands

And then three to five strands are then twisted into rope.  How  fibers a few inches long can be spun into rope several hundred feet long is still magic to me.  I also learned that in the 1870, there were two types of pharmacists.  Those who went to college and more or less knew what they were doing, and those who just mixed interesting things together and called it a medicine.  The degreed pharmacists would display bottles of bright liquids in there windows to show there skill at mixing.  The brighter and clearer indicates the better pharmacist.  You also went to the pharmacist for dyes, paints and varnishes.

They had a cooper make making barrels and buckets with just a draw plane and wooden vice to hold the staves.  It is more difficult than it looks.  The sides of the staves are not straight. Remember a barrel is wider in the middle than at the ends.

And you can top the entire day off with a great pizza, though you will probably not be served by Julia Roberts.

If you are ever in Boston or New York, I recommend the short drive to see Mystic Seaport.  It’s your chance to experience the life of  a sailor with out getting sea sick.

Mystic Seaport

Into the Berkshires

The Berkshires bill themselves as America's cultural play ground. Bold statement, but Herman Melville, much to the regret of high school seniors every where, went there to write Moby Dick. Robert Frost and Emily Dickenson were there along with illustrator Norman Rockwell. And if that isn't inspirational enough for you retirees, Grandma Moses became famous as a painter after starting to paint at age 78. But we just found them  beautiful.  At least in the fall.  Seattle gets six months of rain.  Vermont seems to get six months of snow, though it is sunny a lot of those days. On our drive we went for a hike at Napgood Pond.

Photo's of Napgood Pond

We stopped at a Shaker village.  The Shakers believed in total celibacy, which makes it difficult to raise your children in the faith.  It is also a birth control method that hasn't proved to be wildly successful with teenagers.They relied in converts which dropped of dramatically once they were no longer allowed to run orphanages.  They used all of that pent up energy to do some beautiful hand crafts.

They did a lot of weaving.  Of course there was the usual wool, but they grew flax to make linen and they even raised silk worms.

The farms were very intelligently laid out. The circular stone building is the barn.

The cows are on a circular platform around the barn, the hay is stored in the middle.  Every five feet is a trap door to shovel cow manure down into composting pits.  All very clean and efficient.

Shaker Farm Photos

Weston vermont

We spent the night in Weston, home of Vermont country Store.

If you can't find something to buy at the store, you have no secret desires or vices.  Harvest festivals are big in this part of the country.  Houses are all decorated for the season.

And since this is Vermont, there is a small stream with a dam and mill with a waterwheel.

Weston Mill

Vermont

Vermont is what Disneyland would like to be if it could be real. Vermont is too cute, to relaxing, and too beautiful.  Every town square has a church

But not to worry.  Around each square is at least one pub.

And the place is beautiful.

New Hampshire Pictures

New Hampshire

We headed off to New Hampshire which will always be beautiful to me if for no other reason than the sun was shinning.  It made me a little giddy. The first place we stopped was Salem which seems to have made peace with witches and magic.

Salem had a lot of history, but there is not a lot of it left in place.  There is only one house left from the time of the witch trials, but the house of seven gables is still there.

Nathanial Hawthorne's house where he was raised and wrote is still there. 

He never lived in the house of seven gables.  In fact, when he lived in Salem the house only had six gables.  One of the gables was removed because the owner thought it was "too complicated." Hawthorne never lived in the house, but his cousin Susan Ingersoll  and she told him great stories.

Pictures of Salem

But we did love Portsmouth.  It is a wonderful old town with brick two story buildings.

It has a section on the water called strawberry bank that has old homes from the middle 1600's until after the civil war.

The older buildings have the siding pegged.  Nails were too expensive, because at the time the buildings were made, nails were made only in England.

Portsmouth also has a beautiful little harbor with the original warehouses.  The top part of the warehouses were built out over the water so small boats could have their cargo lifted directly from the boat into the warehouse.

Pictures of Portsmouth

William H Gates Building

I was wandering around the MIT campus and ran across this great building.

It is the William H Gates building.  I think it is a library, but it has great spaces to wander around.

Part of it is brick and part is polished aircraft aluminum.  The shiny aluminum has great reflections such as this self portrait of the author.

 

Photos of the Gates Building

Boston

Actually, we are staying in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston.  We are in a lovely B&B built into an old fire house located at the edge of the MIT campus.  Across the street is the college book store with an entire table of books with Math Jokes for Engineers.

We went into Boston and followed the Freedom Trail. It is around Boston Commons

We saw Granary burying ground where John Hancock and Paul Revere are buried. A burying ground is different from a cemetery in that it is not connected with a church and is not hollowed ground.  The Puritans did not care about dead bodies.  They were worried about souls.

This is Paul Revere's foot stone.  In days of old the grave was marked with a head stone and a foot stone.  His head stone, made of slate and the most popular theory is that it was used as the bottom part of a brick Pizza Oven. People throw pennies because he was a metal worker. BTW, grave markers were not put in straight lines until after the lawn mower was invented in the 30's. So when you go into an old cemetery with the grave stones in straight lines, the grave stones are likely not over the bodies.

The old south meeting house where the Sons of Liberty left after a meeting and dumped the tea into Boston harbor.

 

Pictures from Freedom Trail

Into the Country Side

One measure of the maturity of a person is the sophistication of their humor.  A joke to a three year old is any sentence that ends in the word "underwear." But as we get older, we get  more sophisticated.

 

We headed out into Amish country, but apparently it isn't open on Sunday. Seems like they all go to church and then spend the day with their families.

So we headed down to Gettysburg. Below is cemetery ridge where the Union Forces had their lines.  It is high ground, but only by about 100 feet.

Here is a picture of Devil's den where there was fierce hand to hand fighting between the union and confederate soldiers.

On the third day of the battle, General Lee wanted to break the union lines.  Twelve thousand men broke from the trees in the distance and poured across this field in a battle known as Pickett's charge.

The were met by 100 union cannons with canister shot and 6000 Union soldiers.

By 4:00 6000 Confederate soldiers were dead and the battle of Gettysburg was over.  Ironically at the end of the war, General Pickett became a life insurance salesman.

Philadelphia

 

We took a tour of Philadelphia and it is a very pretty city. On a sunny day anyway.

You go to New York for a deli, but Philly is for the Philly Steak and Cheese sandwich.But people kept telling us what great Dim Sun there was in China town. Philly has the third largest China town in the country after San Francisco and New York.

The row houses look a lot better than they ever did on the Cosby show.

 

 

And apparently they spend a lot of time in church

 

Streets of Philadelphia

And since we are museum geeks, we went to the Rodin Museum

And the Philadelphia Art Museum

It has a great art collection, but it is probably better remembered for the stairs that Sylvester Stallone ran up in the Rocky movies.  there is a statue of him by the stairs.  There was a line of thirty people waiting to have their picture taken with the statue. And there is Love Park. It is the brain child of Edmund Bacon father of Kevin Bacon.  It is one of the 10 best skate boarding parks in the country.  Tony Hawk even included it in his video game.  The sculptor who did the Love sculpture said the "O" was crooked because love isn't perfect.  He had just divorced the third of his four wives.

Public Art

Independence Hall

We got up in the morning and headed to independence hall.  Philadelphia is where they wrote the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, as well as the First ten amendments.  Oh, and congress served there for the first ten years.

It seems like a pretty small room for so many momentous events.  Oh and it had two nice oil paintings of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI.

They were strong supporters of the American Revolution, though less supportive of the French Revolution.  They lost their heads even though Marie was willing to give everyone some cake.

And of course there was the liberty Bell and senate chambers.

Even in the late 1700's the senate chamber looked pretty fancy.

But they deserved it.  They managed to put aside their major differences in things like slavery and do what was best for the nation.

Independence Hall

Chadds Ford

We got up in the morning and the rain was falling very hard.  The local residents tried to feel bad about it, but they've had a drought for two months and were not so secretly giggling with delight.  We headed off to Lockwood Conservatory.  It is 1100 acre flower garden created by Pierre DuPont, but it has a large glass enclosed area full of flowers.

We spent three hours wandering around inside and it is not just because it was dry.  It was really very interesting.  My favorite flowers are the orchids.

but the six foot water lilly pads were pretty cool. n a Jurasic Park sort of way.

They had a great section on how perfumes are made and you can even combine various scents to make your own. Mine was a manly scent with a hint of gentleness. but I favorite has too be this little tree that grows it's own Christmas lights.

 

It is actually a type of pepper and a single plant will have peppers of five different colors on it. They had a great display explaining how perfumes are made. You can even combine various scents to make your own. Mine was a manly scent with a hint of gentleness.  Then you could select a favorite perfume , no proof of purchase necessary, and an explained what the base, middle, and top scents consisted of..

 

Photos of Lockwood Conservatory

In the afternoon, we heade4d off to the Brandywine River Art Museum.  It is famous for its collection of Wyeth paintings.  It has NC, Andrew, Jamie and even a couple of Caroline's, who is Andrew's sister. 

Our tour guide was Victoria Wyeth, who is the grand daughter of Andrew. She is the only grand child and lived with him from age 15 until 29, when he died. She said she was not an art expert, but she knew what her grandfather told her about the paintings and what he liked about them.  It was very interesting and highly entertaining. If you are ever in the Philadelphia area, I recommend taking the time to visit.  You can even visit Karl Kruner's farm and see many of the things Andrew painted. Then you'll see why he considered himself an abstract painter and not a realist.  He moved things around in the paintings to fit his composition and included things that hadn't been there for thirty years.

The next morning we headed into Philadelphia, but it had rained 9 inches during the night and the rivers were flooding between us and Philadelphia.

We were one of the last cars through the over flowing Brandywine River before they closed the road. A couple of more detours, thank you Iphone for the wonderful GPS/map application, and we were in Philadelphia to see the Barnes Foundation art collection.  It is the largest collection of Impressionist art in the world.  Larger than any in France.  It is moving to the Philadelphia Art Museum, a sordid story of trust breaking, lawyers, and politicians, but it should make your visit to see it much easier in the future.