---
title: "New England"
date: 2022-10-28T16:01:10-04:00
draft: true
categories: ["Travel"]
locations:
    - Scituate, MA
    - Boston, MA
    - Massachusettes
    - Portland, ME
    - Maine
    - United States
tags:
    - Friends
    - Family
---

For the second year in a row, a group of high school friends of mine have
planned a trip together for a week in October. Last year, I wrote about [our
trip to the Pacific Northwest][pnw]. This year, we decided on a trip to New
England, splitting our time between Boston and an AirBnb an hour up the Maine
coast from Portland. Our group is a bit different this year -- a couple people
couldn't make it, another joined for the first time, and happily {{< tess >}}
was able to come along too.

## Scituate

Tess and I left a few days before the trip started so we could travel down to
Scituate, her hometown, to visit her family and show me around her childhood
haunts. It's a charming coast New England town, full of history and [deep
connections to Ireland][ssiht] on account of its many Irish and Irish-descended
residents.

{{< photo "2022/10/scituate-light" >}}

## Boston

The first part of the friends' trip was a few days in Boston. We stated in
Somerville and explored downtown Boston via the MBTA. We spent a full day
exploring the city on foot. Tess played tour guide for the other nine of us -- a
part (I think) she relishes and (I believe) does exceptionally well. We also
checked out the Isabella Stewart Garnder museum, a bizarre and fascinating
house-turned-museum, and the site of the highest-value unsolved heist in the
world.

{{< photo "2022/10/gardner-museum" >}}

Our second day in Boston, we took the ferry to Salem, MA. Salem is totally
overrun with tourists during October each year because of its history as the
site of the famous [Salem Witch Trials][salem-witch-trials]. We took the ferry
from Boston, visited the museum there and wandered around town for an afternoon.
It's a cute little town that really capitalizes on that witchy history. I
imagine the fulltime residents have a variety of feelings about how intense the
tourism gets this time of year.

In Boston, we rented two cars and drove the ten of us north, through Portsmouth,
New Hampshire, and Freeport, Maine -- stopping at the L.L. Bean flagship store on
the way -- to a rental house on Casco Bay.

## Maine

[pnw]: {{< ref "blog/2021/10/pnw-reunion-trip" >}}
[ssiht]: https://ssirishtrail.org
[salem-witch-trials]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials
