Long Weekend in Boston and Maine
September 12 – 15, 2013
We have booked more travel than usual this Fall, using Luisa’s
stay with us as an excuse. We decided to take her along with us as often as
possible when we have the chance to travel. With this in mind, we took Alle and
Luisa with us to visit Boston and coastal Maine when we were invited to a
wedding September 14th in Kennebunk, Maine.
The four of us flew to Boston early Thursday morning, after
leaving our sleeping boys for the longest time we will be apart from them since
they were born. They will be in good hands with their nanny, Savanna. We
arrived in time to take a Boston Duck ride from the Prudential building, which
is close to our hotel, the Fairmont at Copley Square. We settled into our two
rooms, separated by four floors for some reason, and set out for the Duck tour.
It was a good, quick tour of the top Boston attractions, as well as the
mandatory dunk into the Charles River to have a quick look at Cambridge from a
distance. Here's our Duck Boat/Bus sliding into the river (as reflected in a near-by mirror).
We took Luisa to Legal Seafood for her birthday dinner that
evening and were the last ones in the place as we ordered almost one of
everything on the menu and then dessert.
On Friday, we did touristy things we have never done while
in Boston before. We walked the Freedom Trail and then took the T (subway train)
over to Cambridge for lunch and the Harvard University tour. The Freedom Trail is
a wonderful walk around all of the best sites of colonial Boston. I have seen
most of them before, but it was more interesting seeing them all together in
one walk and thinking about the time and the actions of the people there as the
US moved towards independence.
Being in Harvard Square is like seeing an old friend, but it
was new to Alle and Luisa. So, the Harvard tour was a good introduction for
them.
It was fun to walk into Cardullo’s (shop of gourmet items), which I
remember from spending summers near-by when I was between the ages of five and
fifteen. I also forced the girls to walk west to see where I used to live and
more interestingly, Longfellow House and its lovely gardens and view to Memorial
Drive and the Charles River.
We went back to the North End for dinner later that night
and had an amazing meal at Ristorante Saraceno, a small family run Italian
restaurant on Hanover Street. We found
out the easiest way to embarrass teenage girls is to be serenaded by street
musicians (whom we had to pay, of course) as we ate our gelato from a near-by
gelato shop afterwards.
Saturday, we left the area after taking more photos of
rowers on the Charles and of Memorial Drive on a beautiful, crisp Fall day.
We
drove north about an hour and half to Ogunquit, Maine. We were staying at the
hotel recommended by the wedding party and I had made the incorrect assumption
that it would be near the wedding and reception. They both turned out to be another
half hour away and so we broke a few traffic laws trying to make the wedding on
time.
After a lovely, and unfortunately, very on-time wedding in a
small church in Kennebuck, we had a chance to congratulate the bride’s father,
who is an old college roommate of Ricardo’s.
We went to the reception, ate wonderful food, tried to
figure out Tom’s statistics of the wedding guests (!), and danced with our
teenagers.
On Sunday, we had another amazingly clear, sunny late summer’s
day on the coast of Maine. We walked the Marginal Way in Ogunquit and at one
end of it, ate truly fabulous lobster rolls at the Lobster Shack in Perkin’s
Cove. There are other restaurants and ordering windows right near the Lobster
Shack, but they are only trying to pretend they are the Lobster Shack. The real
thing has the best food.
We then drove to Manchester, New Hampshire to try the new
flights to Des Moines on Southwest Airlines. All in all, we had an
action packed four days and we hope a wonderful four day introduction to the northern East
Coast of the US for Luisa.
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