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| title | date | draft | categories | locations | tags | |||||||||
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| New England | 2022-10-28T16:01:10-04:00 | true |
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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