My day in Portland started with a nice cup of coffee and a brisk walk into town from the house of my friends, Tom and Shuli, armed with a cartoon map and only a vague sense of purpose. Having never been here before, I wanted to get a sense of what the city was about, what it’s key features were, what it’s people were like. Although I didn’t see many other buildings like it, the City Hall was certainly impressive…
I left Boston on Tuesday morning to head north along the coast toward Portland, Maine. I set the GPS to “no highways” so I could have a longer scenic drive and enjoy the day. I’m also finding that the FJ isn’t an ideal vehicle for close high speed driving — I kicked out the back end once accelerating into Boston traffic, and locked up the brakes twice at 80 mph (~130 kph) in close quarters. I’m not exactly sure what the issue…
It may seem a bit odd, but while wandering around in the quaint town of Concord this afternoon, I ended up spending a lot of time in an old cemetery there, as far as I could tell called simply the South Burying Place. Perhaps I was feeling pensive, but I wanted to give some time and thought to these people who lived long ago and who, for the most part, are forgotten now. I imagine that the events of their lives,…
Walden Pond is located near Concord, MA, and is the site where Henry David Thoreau lived for two years in a simple cabin in the woods and wrote some of his most memorable works. Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a treatise on simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Resistance to Civil Government, also known as Civil Disobedience, an argument for disobedience to an unjust state. Although I understand that it’s quite busy on weekends, there…
I started out for Boston early in the afternoon on Friday. After driving on the interstate for a couple of hours, I decided that, although those roads are great when you just want to get somewhere fast, I really wanted to see more of the countryside and towns around me. I got off at Albany and took a route east across northern Massachusetts, through the lovely Berkshire Hills. There was a little rain along the way, but the roads wound…