During the summer of 2008, my family took a roadtrip to Beantown, stopping along the way at artsy places like Mount Gretna, Pennsylvania and lowlife way stations like the Ghosthunters show storefront in beautiful (well, actually kind of ugly) downtown Warwick, Rhode Island.
This week I finally had a reason to fly into Beantown, a.k.a. Boston, Massachusetts. Beantown turned out to be a way station to my real destination, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, which sits on the southern side of Cape Cod. There I spent three days in a lovely conference room and spent my evenings wandering around Woods Hole and nearby Falmouth. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute sits in what is probably the most bucolic campus in the country, with dozens of lovely building surrounded by maple and oak trees, joined by lovely walkways and with the Atlantic Ocean just a fifteen minute walk away.
As I told my daughter, I enjoy my short distance business trips the best. The shortest ones generally occur in my own time zone, and I can get there with a direct flight, generally lasting an hour or so. Getting there does not swallow most of my day. As it turned out, it took longer to drive between Boston’s Logan airport and Falmouth (where we stayed) than it did to fly between Washington Dulles and Boston. There were no weather or aircraft delays, just routine traffic delays trying to drive out of Boston during rush hour.
Cape Cod is further away from Boston than I thought. I imagined you could glimpse it from Boston Harbor but I doubt that is true, at least not at surface level. It is further east and further south than I imagined. Falmouth, where we stayed, turned out to be a lovely and typical New England town with plenty of stores, galleries and restaurants designed mostly for tourist season. In October, while the tourist traffic was somewhat off, the locals were friendly, looked well moneyed and were overwhelmingly white.
The citizens of this part of Massachusetts are an unfailingly polite group, or so it appeared to this visitor. A walk down the Shining Sea Bike Path into Woods Hole led to many pleasant greetings from fellow residents. Woods Hole is small and exclusive enough to make it nigh impossible to park without a permit. It is also a harbor town. Aside from serving oceanographic interests, it acts as a conduit for tourists to and residents of Martha’s Vineyard. For $7.50 you can board a ferry that will deposit you on the island. Make sure you also purchase a return trip and not miss the 9:30 PM ferry, or you may be in for a long and cold night. Particularly during the summer season, without a reservation you cannot count on a room at Martha’s Vineyard.
I looked hard to find things to dislike about this part of Cape Cod. Most towns in New England come complete with a picturesque town square or commons, which offer a lovely dose of tamed nature in what would otherwise be a busy part of town. In Falmouth, my group found plenty of old churches, meeting halls and restaurants. Dinner at The Quarterdeck in Falmouth revealed a tavern populated not by tourists but by locals, all of whom seemed to be on intimate terms with each other. There was not a hint of crime or litter in Falmouth. Nor could I complain that the town felt fake. Steeped in hundreds of years of history, it cannot help but be authentic. Nor, after walking its long main street, I could I find a chain restaurant, a real plus. If you do not enjoy seafood, you would probably be happier elsewhere, but if you do enjoy seafood you are blessed with abundant and fresh seafood at local restaurants, which you can watch being hauled in at harbors like Woods Hole.
If forced to find items to complain about, one could make the case that the local roundabouts found on the Cape as well as much of New England, while quaint, are annoying and create backups at certain parts of the day. I also checked the local real estate prices. The riff raff are apparently easy to keep away because they cannot afford to live in this area. It helps to inherit a relative’s property or to have a six figure income. Otherwise you probably cannot afford to live in this area, despite its conspicuous absence of supersized houses.
This second trip to New England in less than two years made me realize again that New England is loudly calling for me to settle there. Fortunately, it is also calling my wife, which means we will be looking at retiring, if not in some charming Cape Cod town like Falmouth, then somewhere in New England, providing we can afford it. While there are definitely some not so nice areas of New England (such as Revere, where Logan Airport sits) much of it is charming and inviting to those who like a northern climate.
I imagine New England gets much less charming in the winter, particularly during its abundant snow season. I suspect much of its charm would wear off after shoveling snow several times a week. Most people retire from places like Boston, not to these places. I may find that the milder climate of Northern Virginia where we now live is much better overall.
Still, now that I have an exposure to New England, I want to live here. It will be hard to convince myself to spend my retired years somewhere else.
October 9th, 2009 at 04:45pm
Posted by
Mark |
Travel |
one comment
To have a good vacation you do not necessarily have to fly thousands of miles. That is our premise this year. There are not many areas left on the East Coast that we have wanted to visit. Since my brief trip to Maine a few years ago, New England became an area I wanted to see further. It is also reasonably close as it is only a long day’s drive away. It is mostly an undiscovered region for me. In addition, it has the virtue of being in my time zone. Jet lag gets old after a while.
Before heading to New England, we first elected to spend Saturday night in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. We spent much of the afternoon and evening in Mount Gretna, a near by and decidedly liberal (and well moneyed) township in the woods where respect for the natural environment is a high priority. Tourism accounts for a fair amount of its business. The Mount Gretna Playhouse hosts a number of shows during the summer. There were two last Saturday alone. We attended a performance of The Capitol Steps, which my wife and I saw for the first time in January. The Mount Gretna Playhouse is a covered amphitheater that is far larger than I expected for being in such an out of the way community. This time our 18-year-old daughter Rosie came along. A few of their numbers were familiar, but most were new or reworked. They seemed edgier than they were back in January and even funnier.
As for Lebanon, it is a sad declining city on the outskirts of Pennsylvania’s Dutch country. Like many cities in the Northeast and in Appalachia in general, it has seen much better days and it appears those days will never come back. Our stay at the Quality Inn in Lebanon was anything but. The hotel was musty. The free wireless was spotty. The free breakfast was non-existent. Our windowpane was cracked and there was dirt and mold around its seam. There was only one elevator serving its five floors and it was slow and antiquated. My daughter complained endlessly about her uncomfortable rollaway bed while my wife refused to take a shower in the hotel because she did not feel it was clean enough. It is at best a two star hotel. I hope that other Quality Inns have higher standards. Unbelievably, this was one of the less expensive hotels in the area, yet we still paid more than $120 a night for a room with a king size bed. We were glad to check out of the room.
Sunday we drove from Lebanon, Pennsylvania to Boston, touching five states in one day including two I had never been in before: Connecticut and Rhode Island. We elected to avoid New York City and navigated around it instead, taking I-81 to Scranton, then I-84 across the southern part of New York State into Connecticut. I saw some lovely and mountainous country I had not seen in more than forty years along the Hudson River. Connecticut charmed both my wife and I. We were especially intrigued with the cities of Waterbury and Meriden. We both ached to explore more of Connecticut, but we had to get to our hotel in Boston.
We stopped for dinner at an Applebees in Cranston, Rhode Island. For being the nation’s smallest state, Rhode Island seems to be doing quite well and Cranston was doing better than most, with expensive multistoried housing going up. Rhode Island surprised me because it was prettier, hillier and more prosperous than I expected. Cranston is also located next to Warwick. My wife and daughter are fond of the show Ghost Hunters on the SciFi channel. Two plumbers who are the hosts of the show now apparently make most of their money selling their alleged expertise in the area of the paranormal detection. Anyhow, we found their storefront for TAPS, The Atlantic Paranormal Society, which was an otherwise indistinguishable storefront along Warwick’s main drag. I snapped a few picture of my wife and daughter in front of the storefront. Apparently, the ghost hunters were busy elsewhere that Sunday afternoon, but we could see through the door that they left a heap of fast food wrappers in their wastebasket.
The sun was setting and thunderstorms ahead provided an illuminating show as we headed north on I-95 toward Boston. Our GPS had been acting cranky and would lose its satellite connections after about an hour or so. Consequently, we used it only sporadically when it seemed fresh. It took us to our hotel well enough, but with the crazy roundabouts that populate Boston it took several attempts before we successfully got on the right road to the Doubletree Inn Bayside where we are spending two nights.
Today we spent the day trying to get a brief taste of Beantown. I had been through Boston at age five or so but had no recollection of it, so I was seeing it for what felt like the first time. Our hotel near the convention center was far nicer and cleaner than the Lebanon Quality Inn, but a bit pricier. I picked this hotel because it was just a couple blocks walk to the T, Boston’s name for its subway system. The T is an aging transit system and it shows, but at least it is reliable. There are just six stations between our hotel and downtown Boston.
Unfortunately, we did not have much time for sightseeing. Today was inordinately cool for August as well as overcast and periodically rainy, with high at best making it into the low 70s. We spent most of the day inside the Museum of Science, which is on an island on the Charles River. This was just as well considering the weather outside. An IMAX show, a planetarium show, lunch in the cafeteria and a couple hours of wandering the exhibit halls later, we had seen enough.
From there it was a brief subway journey to the Boston Commons, where we dodged more rain. We did not have time to do much more than look around, but our time there did cement our decision to come back to Boston sometime and see the city properly. We then took the T to Harvard Square across the Charles River in Cambridge, where we met a friend. What little I saw of Cambridge impressed me. Of course, it helps to have two of the nation’s most prestigious schools there, including Harvard University, which is right across from the station. It seemed that Click and Clack were right because we found a number of bums hanging out at Harvard Square. We found no sign of Car-Talk Plaza, nor of the law firm of Dewey, Cheetem and Howe.
Thanks to our friend, we did dine at Bartley’s Gourmet Burgers, which the Wall Street Journal proclaims as one of the best burger joints in the country. I certainly enjoyed my “This Old House” burger, which was both juicy and very hot. Their hamburgers have unique names, most with political affiliations. (The John Kerry burger, for instance, says he voted this the best burger before he voted against it.)
We should end up at Boothbay Harbor in Maine tomorrow night, followed by a day in New Hampshire, a day in Vermont, and two days in the Hamptons.
August 11th, 2008 at 09:10pm
Posted by
Mark |
Travel |
no comments
