My sidetour visit with Robert and Ginger (former brother-in-law and wife) was relaxing and easy. They live outside of Boston in Lexington, and Ginger and I did a few local touristy things while Robert worked during the day. I never got to Boston proper, which is OK with me. I'll have plenty of city time in London.
On Monday morning, I spent an hour or so sitting cross-legged on the purple-blue, pileless carpet of Chester Hill Hair Co. while Ginger got her hair done by the same gal she's used for twenty years. (Never give up a good hairstylist once you find one.)
I dinked around on my little computer and keyboard to the roar of a blow dryer fluffing another customer, the Beatles crooning "Let It Be" on the radio, and the hairdresser chattering with her clients in that litany of topics that hairdressers discuss the world over--wild-son escapades, sibling troubles, romantic dramas, health complaints, car mishaps, unfulfilled or upcoming life plans, how to raise children without killing either them or yourself, etc. Hairstylists seem very much like bartenders: service-provider-slash-therapist-slash-sounding-board-slash-occasional-dumping-ground to their clientele.
In the afternoon, Ginger and I walked part of the Battle Road, which has an access point near their house. It's thinly wooded with maples, pines, and other trees on both sides. Unlike in PacNW woods, the woods here have little undergrowth beyond fallen leaves, granite stones, partially overgrown stone walls, pocket marshes, and an occasional spot of just-blooming lily of the valley. A week of hard rain had left lots of puddles on the gravel road to walk around and created a sand-clay-mixed mud that was a pretty shade of creamy brown orange, like the old Crayola Flesh crayon. It rained a little while we walked.
At this point along Battle Road, we were walking the same route that Paul Revere, Richard Dawes, and his cohorts had ridden on April 19, 1775, to alert Concord that the British Regulars (redcoats) were coming. The road still has some of the original mile markers of the time.
It’s called Battle Road because the British marched it from Boston to Concord, but the Minutemen also used it to chase the British all the way back from Concord to Boston, fighting them the whole 17 miles. Both ways of the two-day trip was trudging and bloody and full of ambushes for the British.
The Minuteman Interpretive Center for the trail is very good. We watched a multimedia audio-visual show that depicts the events using lighted maps and sound effects and cabin settings that bring the whole event to life. (And yes, Tom and Mimi, I even got the passport stamp from the park site to add to my National Parks Passport book--yay!)
That night we went to dinner with Anthony and Claudia, Robert's aunt and uncle, at a restaurant in Lexington. I didn't catch the name of it, but we had a wonderful supper full of laughter and reminiscing. I ordered a spicy roast pork that was so tender that it fell off the bone. We went back to the house to enjoy homemade maple crème custard that Ginger had made from a recipe she and Robert had gotten from a chef they'd met on a local daytrip during the sap-running days last autumn. Very yummy.
On Tuesday, Ginger and I headed out to spend the day at Harvard Square, home of Harvard, MIT, and a couple of other colleges. I like university towns. They're full of youthful energy and funky clothing shops and local artisan craft boutiques and unique restaurants. Harvard Square is also full of high prices, like most of the Boston area.
Our first stop was the MIT region, which is steeped in high-tech references and in unabashed high-tech pride. We lunched at the Miracle of Science Bar+Grill, where the menu is a clever knockoff of the periodic table and their business card boasts the phone number 617 868 ATOM. Their specialty is the skewered meats, and the marinated beef version that I had--element B2 on the menu--was proof of the reputation. It came with apricot chutney, mint slaw, and black beans to build your own tapas/burrito/absolute-mess.Fortified with food, we were ready for the MIT Museum down the street. This place is a tribute to the beginnings, the mystique, the technological feats, the famous sons, and the (sometimes debatable) world-enhancing inventiveness that continues to come out of MIT.
The room on robotics would have been more interesting if the parts actually moved, but we got treated to that on a small scale in a room of mechanical artworks that were made of gears and levers and cams and motors and chains. Ginger found the floor switch to activate the ones that moved. One weird little contraption dipped a container into a pool of motor oil that it stood in, lifted the oil via a chain conveyor, and poured the oil over itself in an endless loop of self-lubrication and refilling.
Another mechanism had a wishbone "walking" along a track and pulling a lightweight wire framework that looked like an inverted penny-farthing bicycle, big wheel spinning slowly on the top, and riding along two smaller wheels at the side. When the harnessed wishbone reached the end of the track, a portion of the track slowly swiveled like a train trestle to send the wishbone and its burden the other way.
Another room had lots of holograms. One image seemed so real that when I turned to face it, I automatically stepped back to avoid bumping into the scenery that extended two feet from the frame. One hologram has a telescope that you can lean down to look through--the image extends a good foot from the holographic plate, so you really have to step back and lean down to get your eye in front of it. You get to see a celestial image magnified at the other end.
The other part of the museum that I found interesting was a section dedicated to a fella named Harold Edgerton, the guy who did the famous experiments with strobe photography--balloons being popped by bullets, milk splashing up in droplets, etc. He invented/discovered strobe flash, assisted the defense department in more accurate aerial bombings during the war, and helped Cousteau (also MIT, I think) create the sonar equipment he needed for his underwater explorations.After strolling around Harvard Square shops for a bit and picking up her repaired clock from the shop, Ginger went home and I wandered around Harvard Yard (the school grounds), took tea at Dado Tea shop, and enjoyed dinner and catching up at The Red House restaurant with Ann, my former boss from Aldus and fellow self-employed wordsmith who moved a few years ago to Boston. Her fella joined us at the end of the evening, which rounded out a very full day in the area. I was happy to take the redline train home and see Robert zipping up in his little Miata to collect me at the depot.
