boston

Hi there!  Today I'd like to share a few pictures and memories from a trip to Boston that my boyfriend and I took a few weeks ago. 

  

 I took the train from New York, which was completely pleasant.  The views out the window were beautiful.  This was also my first experience with something truly spectacular:  the Quiet Car.  I can't even describe how wonderful it was to sit on a train knowing that nobody would be yelling into their phone as though they were screaming across a football field, or-- actually, I can't even come up with an 'or.'  The cell phone thing is what gets to me.  Anyway, it was marvelous.  I listened to podcasts and knit the whole way to Boston, and I had my own seat the whole time.  Apparently, not everyone is crazy about the idea of sitting in a train car where you can't make noise, but to me, it was ideal.  I love train rides, and this was one of my favorite ones yet.

  

 My grandmother used to take my mom and my brother and I to Boston every year, and every year I was so excited to go on the Swan Boats in the Boston Public Gardens.  It turns out that I get just as excited about them as an adult!  Since we went on a grey morning with some sprinkles of rain, there was no line at all.  It was just as lovely as I remembered.  There was a pair of nesting swans next to the lake, and the swan who was on the nest moved just enough that we could see the eggs!  It was very exciting.  I didn't want to disturb them by trying to take a picture, so instead, I just hissed "Look! Eggs!  Look!  Eggs!" repeatedly to my boyfriend, who had, in fact, pointed out the eggs to me.

  

Completely by chance, we came across a rose garden on our way to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.  I've never seen so many roses in one place!  And I've gotta say... There aren't too many things better than walking hand in hand with someone fantastic through arches of roses.  I highly recommend it. 

  

We also went to two Red Sox games!  I hadn't been to a baseball game in years, and it was my boyfriend's first time at Fenway Park.  He's an avid Red Sox fan, and David Ortiz hit a home run on his birthday.  So that was pretty great.  It turns out that I really like baseball!  I've known for a while that it's my favorite sport, mostly because it's one of the few sports where I am both interested and can figure out what is going on, more or less, but it turns out that I really like it.  I wore a baseball hat twice and I've worn it to the grocery store since.  I even have a favorite player!  (It's Jackie Bradley Jr., in case you're wondering.  I like him because he has cute chipmunk-cheeks and because the first few measures of his walk-up song sound like they're being sung by Alvin.  I obviously have very strict priorities for choosing favorite players.)

 

We had such a wonderful time.  It was a perfect blend of revisiting my favorite places from previous trips and going on brand new adventures and making brand new memories.  Boston is definitely still my favorite city (sorry, New York) and it was so much fun to experience it with such a special person.  

Where are you all traveling to this summer?  I hope your week is off to an excellent start!

♥

the wayside inn

     A few weekends ago, my mom and I headed up to The Wayside Inn, in Sudbury, Massachusetts-- the same Wayside Inn that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote about in his famous Tales of a Wayside Inn.  We were there for the Sudbury Colonial Faire, a fife and drum muster that also has a full-blown colonial gathering with period-appropriate dancing, food, and crafts.

the man of the hour himself

uh-oh.

     There was also a reenactment of a Revolutionary War skirmish-- it was pretty intense.  I was standing near a little boy and his dad, and the father kept trying to explain what was happening in a historically unbiased manner, which doesn't necessarily compute with a four-year-old who's used to having clearly defined 'good guys' and 'bad guys.'  

I really like weathervanes-- there were some beautiful ones around The Wayside Inn.  This one was on top of a church.

this little pathway looked completely untouched by time, it was like something out of a fairytale.

did I mention that there were a lot of guys firing muskets?  well, there were a whole lot of guys firing a whole lot of muskets.

I love old stone walls-- I love imagining how many people in different time periods touched this one as they were out for a walk in the woods.

these golden berries were growing everywhere.

This is one of my favorite weathervanes ever-- simple and clean and pretty.

heading to the parade-- I've gotta hand it to this guy for marching barefoot, because it was not a warm day.

I hope you've enjoyed a peek into my trip to The Wayside Inn!

♥

westbrook

Good morning!

I mentioned a few posts back that I had gone to Connecticut for a fife and drum muster.  Here are a few of my favorite moments from the weekend!

When I was younger, my family used to go visit my grandparents on Cape Cod, and we always stopped at the Danbury, Connecticut rest stop to stretch our legs and have a picnic lunch.  The ground was always covered with these cool little rock sculptures.  A few years ago the rock sculptures disappeared, but this year when we stopped on our way to the Westbrook Muster, the sculptures were back!  Yay!

I watched the parade next to a very sweet man who had been coming to the muster for over thirty years.  Every year, he checks off the corps that perform, "just to keep track."

Our main canopy ended up right over a little puddle where water from the nearby basketball court drained, so we had eight amphibious companions for the festivities.  It was really interesting to see their behavior-- at any given time, two of them were standing guard either side of the drain pipe.  It was a little strange on the first day, having a frog pond in the middle of the campsite, but by Sunday, it somehow seemed perfectly normal!

I hope your weekend is off to a fantastic start!  

Tomorrow I'm going to a wool and fiber festival, and I'll be hugging alpacas as much as I can.  They have the cutest little faces, how could anyone be expected to resist?

Have a lovely Saturday!

♥

fill-in-the-blank friday!

via the little things we do

1. My favorite place I've every traveled to is Cape May, NJ.  It's so pretty and holds so many of my favorite memories.

2. Someday I'd like to go to Venice.

3. I pass the time in a plane, bus, car, or train by listening to audiobooks and sleeping.  If I'm in a car, there is virtually no chance that I'll be awake longer than half an hour.  

4. My three must-haves when I travel are my ipod, a pillow, and a 'warmie,' as my mom calls them-- either a blanket or a big sweater.

5. My favorite travel companion is it's a tie between my mom and my brother.  My mom and I bop around to carefully curated playlists, until I inevitable start snoozing.  My brother and I mostly just harass each other in the car, making funny voices and asking would-you-rather questions.  Traveling with both my parents and my brother was the best-- my dad would always put a bunch of fruit in his jacket pockets while we were leaving, which made my brother and me laugh, but it was great when we'd start feeling snack-ish and he'd say "Want a clementine/apple/banana/orange?"  So now I'm in the habit of stashing fruit for car trips.  I love traveling with Marissa, too-- we always laugh hysterically.  Which probably contributes to why we take wrong exits pretty much every time we're in her car.  Once, we were following her GPS on the way back from Six Flags, and I was so incredibly car sick, and of course the GPS takes us down this tiny little dirt road that snaked around like crazy.  We couldn't help finding that hilarious, so the conversation was sort of, "Hahahaha!!!!  Can you believe this?  Hahahaha!!!  ...Oh god, pull over..." 

6. The craziest thing that ever happened to me while traveling was when Marissa and I were going to Disney World and we were (naturally) wearing our Minnie and Mickey ears in the airport, along with out t-shirts with our motto, "What could possibly go wrong?" and the most obnoxious baggage guy EVAH was all, "Oh, Florida, huh?  Heading down there for Girls Gone Wild?"  Marissa and I looked at him with perfectly blank faces and I replied.  "No.  We're Girls Gone Mild."  So we thought that was the last of him, and then we got on the plane and surprise, surprise, he was on our plane.  It doesn't sound that crazy now, but at the time it was both hilarious and horrifying.

7. The most exotic food I've tried while traveling was ...hmmmm.  Marissa and I tried a lot of different foods at Disney World, but nothing's standing out to me at the moment.  I tried Mexican for the first time while I was actually in Mexico, which was really delicious, but not anything wild and crazy.  

8.  If I could live anywhere else, I'd live in Boston, I think.  I love it there, I love the history and the swan boats and the aquarium.  It has everything I like about New York City, but in a much quieter, less crowded space.

9.  I have been to eight states in the U.S.  I might actually have been to more, I don't remember all the fife and drum trips I took when I was younger.

it's a fantastic day to enter my etsy giveaway!

♥