I haven’t been too active here lately because, well, Heather and I have been traveling. Last week was our 25th wedding anniversary and we decided to spend the week in Boston exploring history. Our trip did get delayed due to the early Nor’Easter they had. We were supposed to leave on a Saturday, but on Friday got a notice from the airline that all flights into Boston were canceled. It took a couple of days but we finally got a redeye flight out on Monday. We weren’t able to extend our return so we ended up canceling a few our our planned activities. Even with the shortened stay we still enjoyed ourselves.

On our first day we took the hop-on hop-off bus around Boston so we could originate ourselves and see what we’d like to see more of. First stop was at the USS Constitution:

This is “Old Ironside” and dates back to the 1800s. It’s still an active naval vessel and is used for training and public relations as well as a historical landmark.

The next day was our anniversary and we went to an art museum, a coffee shop and found this place for our dinner:

We had a great meal at the Chart House. I don’t think it’s historic or anything, but when we told them it was our anniversary dinner, we got a free glass of champagne so I walked away with a very good opinion of them.

I’m not going to make this “what I did on my summer vacation” but here is a view from our hotel room in Cambridge:

We stayed in a hotel right on the Charles River a few minutes drive to downtown Boston because we rented a car to take a few day trips out in the area round Boston. You don’t want to drive in Boston unless you have to and having a rental car there is challenging.

We did take a bus tour of Lexington and Concord and did a walking tour of Boston’s Freedom Trail. Some of the highlights for us were seeing the Boston Public Library, Institute of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Fine Art. We did manage to get to Harvard Square to visit a bookstore, have coffee and took a little walk through the Harvard campus before heading back to our hotel.

On our last day, Heather indulge me in a road trip down to Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic CT so I could see some more sailing ships and watch a blacksmith working. The highlight of this trip was an exhibit at the museum titled, “Brick Wreaks” that turn out to a whole gallery of ships, shipwrecks and other underwater scenes made from Lego. Here is one of the ships they had on display:

The sign said this took 160 hours to build. This ship is huge — about 3 feet long and a couple of feet tall. It has to be thousands of bricks to make it.

While there we also got a tour of the bay around the seaport on a history paddle steamer which they had converted to diesel electric so they didn’t need to shovel coal anymore.

Well, that’s it for this week. Now it’s back to normal retired life, visiting doctors, doing yard work, listening to sea shanties and planning for our next trip.