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