I’m planning to visit an Irish friend who is visiting Boston. I’m thinking “road trip”. Maybe some camping. I know nothing about Massachusetts, except that the countryside is probably lovely, in a Stephen King / new England kind of a way.
Also, does anyone know of sessions Thursday, Friday or Saturday in Boston? (Relaxed, open ones that is?)
And is cape Cod all it’s cracked up to be? And will they let me cross the border what with my fiery pacifist views if my passport is in order?
Pacifist-aggressive disorder?
Which border? 
djm
Visit the Mother Church (First Church of Christ, Scientist), and get me a souvenier of some sort. Even a post card will do. I disagree with most Christian Science belief, but I find Mary Baker Eddy fascinating. She is the only woman in recorded history to single-handedly found her own religion. I’ve been wanting to visit Boston for this reason alone for a long time.
http://www.tfccs.com/index.jhtml;jsessionid=YZ0AWVDEX1A3VKGL4L2SFEQ
See the Blue Man Group show.
Couple of things come to mind:
Cape Cod is nice, if you can somehow avoid the crowds. At least, try to go there on a week day rather than a Sat or Sunday. The beaches on the National Seashore are beautiful, but the water is very cold.
Old Ironsides is very cool to walk around on.
If you like art museums and hit a rainy day, the Museum of Fine Arts is superb.
Quincy Market is a popular shopping/touristy area.
There are historical walking tours downtown.
Tons of wonderful seafood.
If you really want to do the Stephen King thing, you can drive up to Maine pretty easily from Boston. Cape Anne and Glouscester just north of Boston is a nice area. Heading East, Newport RI has some astounding summer “cottages” of the ultra-wealthy like the Getty’s which are open for tours. Further East, Mystic Seaport is sort of like Colonial Williamsburg, but nautical.
For a road trip I’d recommend a trip to Salem, about 20 miles NE along the coast from Boston (if I recall aright). It’s a lovely town in its own right, and has the Salem Witch Museum, and the house that the original Judge from the witch trials lived in, which is interesting just to see how people lived in those days. Also a pirate museum which I enjoyed immensely, being a big fan of piratey stuff.
In Boston itself, start at the Old State House, near which the Boston “Massacre” took place, and there’s a town trail from there that takes you to various other sites of interest round the city on a reasonably sized walk. Paul Revere’s House is still preserved and worth a visit. Also, the USS Constitution is docked in Boston, a living piece of US Naval history. The pedestrian shopping area is lovely - and make sure to have some clam chowder.
I really enjoyed my trip to Boston, except for the foul weather we had some of the time ( a Nor’ Easter was having its last fling), and felt we left some stuff to see again another time.
The last time i was in Boston (years ago), a friend of mine took me to Harvard, and we spent the afternoon in a great museum of Asian art there.
If you don’t count Ellen White, Mother Ann Lee, Agnes Ozman, and Aimee Semple McPherson.
Ooh, this is excellent. Nice and dark. Massacres and witch burnings. He has one of those morbid Belfast senses of humour. Sounds perfect.
How about the New England Aquarium?
The Glass Flowers exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History is pretty amazing. If you like that kind of thing.
Salem’s okay, but if you go there during the summer allow at least four hours for the roundtrip drive from Boston; the traffic can be absolutely insane. I was stuck in a traffic jam for an hour and a half in Salem last summer; it was the first time I’d been there in about 10 years and I remember the traffic being just as bad even a decade ago (it once took me 3 hours one way to get to Salem, and that was even using the shortcuts to avoid traffic!). I find Marblehead a lot more interesting than Salem but getting there is a bear too as you have to deal with the Salem traffic.
Cape Cod traffic is also bad in summer. As someone else pointed out above, it’s a good idea to go mid-week rather than the weekend (this strategy won’t help you for Salem, however). My favorite place of all on the Massachusetts seacoast is Plum Island, but I think the national seashore beach there will be closed until late July to allow the piping plovers to nest in peace.
The crowds and traffic west of Boston are easier to manage; I lived in and around Concord for 10 years and it’s a nice area to explore. Lincoln has a lovely network of trails and lots of conservation land; when I lived there I often spent an entire day hiking in the woods without encountering another soul, which is pretty amazing considering that Lincoln is a 15 minute drive from Harvard Square.
So what’s there to do around Boston anyway?
Hang out with my daughter. If you’re not amar.
I see you used quotes aroung “Massacre”. Let me remind you that the “massacre” was the first, and one of the most sucessful, propaganda gambits of the yet unformed United States. Why, those evil Red Coats went around slaughtering innocents constantly. Boston was a veritable fountain of blood.
Oh, I almost forgot. Fiddler, Screw the east coast. They suck with their inflated sense of historic value. Come to Michigan. We’re almost Canadians. We watch Red Green!!!
Do you make Amar wear one of those GPS ankle collars?
Or come to Seattle, WA. It’s just like Vancouver, BC, only not.
They founded different denominations. Mary Baker Eddy sat out to (and succeeded) form her own religion. Mary Baker Eddy didn’t consider herself or her Church a part of a larger Christian tradition, but as the only tradition. Ann, Aimee, and Ellen (especially Ellen) had more help than contemporary histories might have you believe, although I do think Sayo Kitamura would contend as well…
Thanks for the tips, Brad - the more we can avoid crowds the better. I blow my top just trying to find parking around St. Denis on a Friday night. Definitely don’t want to spend my holiday stuck in traffic. Lincoln sounds good! Trails are my favorite thing I grew up at the foot of the Rockies. (I don’t know about my friend - I took him to la Montagne to see the view of Montreal at night and he just about fainted with paranoiia - Apparently the parks in Dublin are full of dodgy characters and the tourists who go in don’t come out.)
And thanks to everyone else, too. Keep 'em coming - I have 40 hours to plan, then I’m on the road.