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content/blog/2022/10/new-england/index.md

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 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