New England this time
Way back in 1986 I went to visit Merrie Olde England, but until a month ago I’d never travelled to the New and Improved England, in the northeast part of our country.
That changed when we stayed in Cape Cod, the Peninsula slash Island slash Cape that juts out from Massachusetts. We used that as our base to brave Boston traffic in order to look at some historical sites. Thank heavens for the GPS programs on our phones.
First of all, just a general observation. Everyone in Boston expects you to be a mind reader. You’re supposed to know where they were intending to move without the benefit of signals. Boston drivers scream and shout at each other. They use the familiar single finger hand signal as if they invented it. Now mind you, Jennie and I both grew up in Southern California and also lived in the Chicago area, so we know what big city traffic is like. But Boston drivers are nuts.
Just saying.
Now if you live in Nappanee and a tourist stopped you and asked directions you’d give them, and you’d probably also ask, “So where you from?” and try to figure out if you both know someone that knows someone that has a cousin in common. By contrast, when we asked people how to find the John Adams Historical Park people stared at me as if they had never heard of the Second President of the United States. Two cops on bicycles acted like I was nuts for asking, and another resident walking by thought I was a member of a cult. No one, it seemed, knew where anything was. Even our phones didn’t know where to send us. We finally found the birthplace and the homestead two days later on our second try.
Even so, we enjoyed standing on the Old North Bridge where somebody, who knows who, fired “The Shot Heard Round the World.” I also found the spot where Paul Revere was arrested, preventing him from making the Midnight Ride (“The British are coming! The British are coming!) made famous by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poet actually wrote about Revere because his name rhymed with “you shall hear”. Otherwise, he’d have written:
Listen my children, at the threat of claws
Of the Midnight Ride of William Dawes.
The John F. Kennedy Library and Museum provided a fascinating walk through the president’s life and times and in the final room, where we watched Walter Cronkite on an old black and white recording tell us that as of 2 p.m. Eastern Time, Nov. 22, 1963, the president had died, I was suddenly dropped through the ground floor of memory and sobbed once, like the grade school student I was when I heard the awful news..
I took photos of the shark warnings at the Cape Cod National Seashore and got my feet wet in the Atlantic less than two months after we’d done the same at the Pacific in San Diego. I also took a selfie next to the sign marking the end of US 6 in Provincetown. That’s the same road that runs through Nappanee. Here, at its terminus, there’s nothing beyond but three thousand miles of the Atlantic
We kept busy, and saw pretty much everything we’d planned to see in our trip, but we also did something very important: set aside time for rest. There were two days we sat around, read, watched TV, went out for breakfast at 11 a.m., and in general, did nothing.
That’s what I call a successful vacation.