Not So SAHM

Lobstah isn’t cheapah in Maine

So sorry if I annoy you with my continued use of the word “lobstah”. That’s how I pronounce it in my head now. Lobstah, chowdah, pahk the cah at Hahvahd Yahd. I kid you not. I am quickly slipping into a New England, and most likely Bostonian, accent. So come along with me and read this post with your best Bahston accent.

We said our goodbyes to Bahston. I think I’m going to miss that area; it really is the cradle of our nation. And people were nice too. While we were there we tried to be as Bostonian as we could. We had Sam Adams Boston Lager. We ate New England Clam Chowdah. We ate Boston Cream Pie. We tried to find Boston Baked Beans, but that delicacy wasn’t on the menus. So either the beans have gone out of style or they weren’t that good. We’ll never know.

Today we headed up to Maine. Quick! What’s the first thing you think of when you think of Maine? Lobstah right? That’s what I thought of because I’d never been to Maine and could only associate it with what I’ve heard about. For instance, I had no idea they call themselves Vacationland because who vacations in Maine…except the Bushes. And my friend Gretchen. Well, my friend Pepper lives there and one of my previous Sunday School teacher’s whole family is from there…but you get the idea. Right?

So, we’re going up to Maine because we’ve never been there before and it’s only an hour north of Boston. How could we not? Well, we actually passed up our chance five years ago when we were on our Fruity Pebble Tour (our fall foliage tour through New England. Look at the side of a mountain in full glory of changing leaves and tell me it doesn’t look like a bowl of Fruity Pebbles). We were in New Hampshire, ten minutes from the Maine border. It was our last day of the trip though and neither of us were wanting to take any amount of time away from the road to home. Not so this time. Seeing that we were going to be in the state where the lobstah was invented there’s no way we could leave without tasting some of this sea gold.

I don’t eat lobstah very much in real life. It’s too expensive and we all know I’m cheap frugal. If something on the menu has “market price” next to it you can guarantee that the market doesn’t include me. What’s the old saying? “If you have to ask then you can’t afford it?” I don’t even get shrimp very often and shrimp is like the poor man’s crustacean. I thought for sure that since we were going to be in the state that prides itself in all things lobstah that it would be cheaper. I got a lesson in economics today.

Lobstah is not cheapah in Maine. In fact, I’m pretty sure that they charged more for it because we were getting the privilege of eating it in Maine. The whole experience. Maybe it was the fact we were Kennebunkport and everyone who visits there obviously doesn’t have to ask what the market price of their main staple is.

The restaurant we ate at looked like one of those small marina restaurants that prides itself more in the taste of the food rather than the taste of the decor. Actually, I need to eat my words there. I found nothing wrong with the decor. The Bushes frequent Bartley’s when they are at their second home (or is it their third?) and there are pictures of them all over with various niceties written to Mrs. B (who makes a killer blueberry pie).

(that’s Bush 41 jumping on his 85th birthday)

We were in the mood for a light snack because it was in between lunch and dinner times. A friend recommended I try a lobstah roll so I searched the menu for that. $17.95. $17.95! 17 dollars and 95 cents. Swallowing all that might be Scottish in my ancestry (the Scots are known to be “mean”, or cheap) I decided to go ahead and try it. Other lobstah dishes were market price and we know that means it’s too much for me. Du ordered the clam chowdah and we ordered the girls french fries.

I had no idea what a lobstah roll was. In my mind was a sort of rouladen where the meat is rolled with other things (kinda like a jelly roll). What came was a lightly toasted piece of thick buttered toast with about a cup of lobster meat mixed with seasonings. I tell you it was delicious. But worth eighteen dollars? Not to me. Maybe it was the whole Kennebunkport experience we were being charged for. After all, if you could actually buy lobstah for cheapah in Maine then it would quit being a delicacy. And maybe people would quit paying market price for a bottom feeder.

Something interesting I just found out by searching on wikipedia: lobstah wasn’t a delicacy until recently. It used to be poor man’s food and even indentured servants were sick of having to eat it more than two or three times a week. People would bury lobstah shells instead of throwing them away so as not to be caught having to eat lobstah. Oh, the horror. Oh what a little positive propaganda and spin will do to turn something into a hot commodity.

Tonight we’re spending the night in Vermont. Do you think we’ll be able to get some pure Vermont maple syrup for cheaper than I can get it back at my local DC grocery store? I’m not holding my breath any longer.

PS. It wasn’t just the lobstah that was overpriced. Ashlyn’s chocolate milk, all 7 ounces of it, was $4.50. $4.50! Do they not have cows in Maine? Can they not import that milk at a price cheaper than the going rate of per ounce gold? I was more than a little incensed.

And PPS. There is more to Maine than lobstahs. It has a beautiful coastline of which we were only to able to take in a small bit. We visited Olgunquit before Kennebunkport and took a walk on the Marginal Walk. Breathtaking. This picture doesn’t do justice.

Traveling through history

History is fascinating, and I think it takes getting through high school and possibly college history courses for most of us until we actually begin appreciating it. Am I alone?

It took me moving to Germany and having the ability to see places in person. And they may have been just local castles or centuries-old churches, but placing them in America’s timeline (“whoa, this church was built before America was even discovered!”) made things make a little more sense.

Now, being able to see history’s sites in person is the best history lesson I could ever get. Why can’t every student be able to do this? To see Jamestown and learn about how time can change the borders of a river and therefore “hide” part of the original fort. To learn that colonists dumped their chamber pots right outside their front doors (everything just stank back then). To visit Mount Vernon and understand that George Washington was probably a micromanager (my own observation) when it came to farming. To tour James Monroe’s house and learn that the language they spoke at home was French. To visit Monticello and learn that there was quite a bit of interracial “relations” happening back then (and not only with Jefferson). To visit Boston and learn that grave sites were used to the fullest (multiple people buried in one spot) and that Samuel Adams was one of America’s original spin doctors and not the originator of Sam Adams beer. To visit Lexington and learn that Paul Revere was across the street from Lexington Green when the battle took place that morning. To go to Concord and learn that several of America’s beloved authors all lived in that area and went to church together.

Reading books, especially when you’re “forced” to for school, gets you just about nowhere. Unless you have an overactive imagination it’s almost impossible to see the historical accounts for what they truly were: everyday life for someone that happened to become pieces of history for us. Being able to visit the actual places, listen to guides who have read all the books and done all the studying, and being able to visually imagine things makes history come to life.

I guess watching History Channel programs are the next best thing. Only so much information can be imparted in an hour though. And it has to be severely edited. You don’t normally get little historical nuances, or human interest stories from background figures that really makes a story so much more complex.

I’m praying that Reagan gets a little more out of these history vacations than what she would get out of just reading a book or watching a school video. We’ll do those as well, but I’m hoping that since she has actually visited the places that we’re reading about she will take a more active interest in digging deeper and remembering and loving history. I just want to grab her sometimes and implore her to “get it”. To know how incredibly fortunate she is to be able to see these sites first hand.

And I do think we are so blessed to be able to travel to all these historical sites. I do thank God for that ability, and for the small things like cheap hotel rooms and discounted entries. By the end of this school year we will have finished studying the Civil War. As a family, however, we will continue throughout the summer to visit as many of the historical Civil War sites in our part of the country that we can. I will continue to remember or learn things for the first time about our great nation, and hopefully Reagan will gain a love of history that it took me decades to find.

Mini history lesson: This is Lexington Green. The Battle of Lexington took place on here in the morning hours of 19 April, 1775. There were no trees back then because King George III required that all large timber (I believe it was 24″ wide or more) became the crown’s property and had to be shipped to England. Also, the soil is very rocky around there and many trees were felled in order to find fertile soil. So, from the pastor’s house where Sam Adams and John Hancock were hidden away (because the royal governor had wanted them arrested), about 50 acres away, you could see directly to the Green. There is a tavern directly across the street in which John Hancock had left a trunk containing all of his important papers. He was the president of the Provincial Congress and had papers of colonial dealings that could jeopardize the lives of many men with the English crown. Once Paul Revere convinced Hancock and Adams to leave the area and find safety in another town he went back to the tavern to get the trunk and keep it safe. Revere was in this tavern when the battle on Lexington Green happened. In his account he claims he heard the first shot to be fired as that of a pistol. Our guide said that this meant it would be a British officer then who fired first (no one knows who fired the first shot). However, the leaders of the revolutionary cause were great at spinning the details and whether Revere was telling the truth is questionable. After the Regulars left the green and headed towards Concord some family members from the pastor’s house, and others from town, quickly took the bodies of the men from the green, fashioned coffins (our guide made it seem that some were already prepared because the colonists knew war would be coming sooner or later), and buried their relatives, neighbors and friends before the British troops came back through on their retreat back to Boston.

Also, before the battle of Lexington Green, and before Revere went to Buckman Tavern to secure Hancock’s trunk, he and Dawes attempted to ride to Concord to warn the town that the Regulars were on their way. They were riding at about 1:00 am. On their way they met Dr. Prescott who lived in Concord and was heading back that way from Lexington. Why was he on the road in the middle of the night? He was engaged to a woman who lived in Lexington and he had been courting her. Interesting, right! Of course, Prescott was the only one able to evade the British patrol that had been set up on the road in between the two cities, because he knew the lay of the land.

You may have already known about these stories, but I had not heard them, or didn’t remember them. It’s the details like these that make history so fascinating and being able to learn about them “in person” make it so much more real. Give me more!

Pilgrims and lobster and Kennedy

I thought I’d have time to post every night about our activities of the day. But this is no relaxing vacation and we do not usually get in until wee hours of the night. Wee enough to prevent me from posting regularly because I have added the pressure onto myself to post pictures. And then I have to get my phone out, and hook it up, and figure out iPhoto, and get the regular camera out, and refigure out iPhoto, and then figure out how I can get the photos from my computer to the post on the internet. I really should have it figured out by now, but as of yet, it weighs on me every night and therefore I put off posting like it’s a burden.

BAH! You will get no pictures tonight. You may not even get a coherent sentence.

Here’s what we’ve done the last couple of days:

we toured the Samuel Adams brewery in Boston. We tasted three different kinds of malted barley. Tastes like cereal for a reason. Then we were provided with 7oz glasses and three different Sam Adams brews to taste.
we took another walking tour of Boston. Same tour guide, different part of town. This time we went up into the northern part of Boston to see Old North Church and talk a lot about Paul Revere. And Increase and Cotton Mather (think Salem Witch Trials). This is also the Italian section of Boston so our senses were bombarded with wonderful smells and promises of authentic, Italian family style food. I mentioned last time that our tour guide was awesome. He was this time as well. Great entertainment and great stories. What I forgot to mention is that he’s almost rabid when it comes to people outside of the tour group taking his picture. He gets down right mean! He started off his tours by letting us know that everything he says is copyrighted material and therefore could we please only take still photos and if we must video then please make it less than 20 seconds per segment. All righty. And that’s being nice. When people on the street would hear him talk they would naturally be drawn to him. His voice carries, he’s dressed funnily, and he’s giving the history of the surrounding areas. The unsuspecting passers-by would gather around to hear. If he caught someone listening in he would let them know they were welcome to stay, but that this is a paid tour, and they would need to either settle up with him now or at the end of the tour. Every single person he said that to walked away and then he would make fun of them for not wanting to pay as they were walking away. And God forbid them trying to take a picture. He would hold his hat towards the camera so the tourist couldn’t get a picture of him. Most people didn’t persist, but some did and he got louder and louder asking them to please stop taking pictures. I was kind of wanting someone to challenge him to see how far he would actually go to get them to not take pictures. It was funny and scary at the same time. Because I was on his side.
we watched GA Tech whoop up on VA Tech at a dear friend’s house. She and her family are living in this area so we got together Saturday evening some good food and football. Our girls loved her, of course, and have been asking to go over to Miss Diamme’s house ever since. Well, Reagan pronounces her name correctly, but the way Ashlyn says it is pretty cute.
we drove down to Plymouth and toured the Plimoth Plantation. We were one of several idiotic families that braved an odd nor’easter and the freezing, driving wind and rain that it brought. We were rewarded richly though as we were the only family to visit each Wampanoag house and got one on one attention to ask as many questions we wanted of the native people. Same at the English settlement. We even got to sit a spell with William Bradford himself and take part in a Pilgrim-style worship service (where some Arian youth tried to debate the paid actor who was pretending to be a priest). If you are ever up this way it is well worth the trip to Plymouth to experience the Plimoth Plantation.
Reagan and I braved the nor’easter once more to climb atop Old Burial Hill to find William Bradford’s grave and the site of the first fort of 1621.
It is well worth the trip to eat at Wood’s Seafood too. Those lobster couldn’t have been any fresher. I guess we could have eaten them live, but they weren’t long from the ocean when we enjoyed them.
we toured the Kennedy Presidential Library. My favorite part, and I suspect Reagan would say the same as well, was the information on Jacqueline Kennedy. She lived in McLean for a time (that’s in NoVa, near where we live). Actually my favorite part was eating lunch overlooking Boston Harbor and watching the planes approach Logan Airport.
we then toured the exhibit at the Massachusetts Archives. AMAZING. Do I say that word too much? This does qualify though. We saw the original Massachusetts Bay charters of 1629 and 1691. Do the math! We saw the original Massachusetts Constitution, the oldest continually used constitution in the world (the US Constitution was ratified shortly after this one). We saw the copy of the Declaration of Independence that came from Philadelphia and was read on the balcony of the Old State House on 18 July 1776. There was a great interactive, kid-friendly exhibit leading up to these documents. I love seeing the first-hand documents.
we dropped the girls off at Dianne’s house and went on a date night. We almost didn’t know what to do. I had won tickets to prescreen the new movie Motherhood though and so we went to Cambridge to watch that (more about that after the movie is released). We then got to discuss it at Starbucks in Harvard Yard.
Did I mention in a previous post that we also walked around Harvard? And Harvard Square? It was nice being around a college but not having to worry about studying. I did stress a little for all the students milling about when they should have been studying in their dorm rooms. I got over it. I need to watch Good Will Hunting again though now that I might recognize some of the scenery. Or was that all staged?

Are you still reading? Wipe the drool please. In the next couple of days we’ll visit:

Lexington
Concord
Bunker Hill
USS Constitution
and drive by a house that many authors lived in or are associated with. Did you know that so many famous American authors are from around here? Alcott, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Emerson. Maybe it will inspire me to get back out those classics that I was trying to read at one point.

Sorry to bore. I wanted to get this down for posterity. Oh, and we’re going to try to get up to Maine as well.

Death in Boston

I was going to be all cool and make my title the Latin for “death in Boston”. After Googling it though, “nex in Boston” just doesn’t have a cool Latin ring and would leave you scratching your heads. So, Death in Boston it is. And we saw a lot of it today. For a city that’s been around as long as Boston there’s bound to be some death.

We visited the Granary Burial Ground yesterday on our guided walking tour and today by ourselves. We actually redid the whole tour today by ourselves in order to go into the buildings that we weren’t able to access yesterday. The Granary Burying Ground sits right next to a church and is very close to Boston Common. Please click on the link to the burying ground; there’s fascinating information about the history of that area. What it doesn’t tell you though, that we read on one of the plaques today, is that the area had natural springs underneath it so when it rained heavily bodies would surface. That’s not creepy, that’s just gross. I’m not sure how they prevented that from happening and why it doesn’t happen anymore.

People buried here include three signers of the Declaration of Independence (Samuel Adams, John Hancock and Robert Treat Paine), Paul Revere, the Boston Massacre victims, Benjamin Franklin’s parents, some French Huguenots, and James Otis.

John Hancock

Paul Revere

Boston Massacre victims

What’s cool about really old head stones is that they have great art on them. Here is a quote from the Freedom Trail Website about the Granary Burying Ground.

GRAVEN IMAGES Puritan churches did not believe in religious icons or imagery, so the people of Boston used tombstones as an outlet for artistic expression of their beliefs about the afterlife. One of the most popular motifs was the Soul Effigy, a skull or death’s headwith a wing on each side that was a representation of the soul flying to heaven after death. Elaborate scroll work, poetic epitaphs and depictions of the Grim Reaper and Father Time also adorn many headstones.

The next burying ground we visited was adjacent to the King’s Chapel. Mary Chilton, one of the women on the Mayflower, is buried here. She ended up marrying a man and moving to Boston from Plymouth.

We then went to The Old State House.

The Boston Massacre took place outside here in 1770. Read this account by the Freedom Trail Foundation. Five men died in what was to be called a “massacre” by Samuel Adams. Today it’s an intersection in the middle of Boston. These men are buried in part of Samuel Adams’ family plot at the Granary Burying Ground.

Paul Revere’s Drawing

And of course, the death isn’t over here. There’s Lexington and Concord and the Battle at Bunker Hill, which we’ll be doing soon.

P.S. You can click on these pictures to see them bigger.

My own personal Freedom Trail

After today Freedom Trail means something different to me as a mommy to two young ones. More about that later. Today we walked a majority of the Freedom Trail in Boston with the coolest tour guide EVER.

At the end of the tour we tipped him hoping he’d come along with us for the rest of the day…but he didn’t seem to be thinking the same thing we were…so we wandered around the rest of the day by ourselves. We even had our first taste of a Boston original: Boston Cream Pie, which looked like a piece of cake to me. I want to try one that has more cream.

Here is a picture of the girls eating with the enemy at The Green Dragon Tavern. That’s ok, the girls are spies and were gathering good intelligence. They’re so cute people just blab stuff to them.

Here’s a seemingly innocent family picture, but if you look closely you will see Ashlyn performing an ancient oriental fighting maneuver called the behind the back eye poke. Take that you lobsterback! He was caught off guard due to Ashlyn’s lightning quick reflexes. I should know about those; she almost poked my eye out with a pencil using this technique.

Boston reminds me of bigger cities in Europe. Bigger cities in Europe in the winter. Today it was COLD, the skies were grey, it was threatening to rain, and it was COLD. That reminds me of Europe in the winter like nothing else can. Maybe mulled cider at a Christmas Market would be better, but where can you get those over in America? Plus the city looked kind of dirty. I’m attributing that to the gray* in the sky, but that also reminds me of European cities. Northern cities are dirty in the winter because of all the dirty snow that gets left shoved to the sides of the street. The snow melts but the dirt stays and it just dirties everything up. It hasn’t snowed here yet this year, but that’s what it reminded me of.

That’s not to say that I don’t like Boston. I like big cities, and this one is great in that it mixes old with new. Like Washington D.C. and Atlanta. Boston is more compact than those other two cities, like European cities are. There’s nowhere to go except closer together! We really didn’t see much today and I’m looking forward to going back tomorrow to explore more. That is if I don’t run off on my own freedom trail, escaping the incessant talking of little girls. And yelling. And fighting. And question asking. And noise making. And general not listening. No wonder Kevin Leman said in one of his books (and I’m paraphrasing heavily) that it’s bordering on insane to take a family vacation with young children. Who ever thinks they’re going to relax on a family vacation is kind of stupid. Ahem. Hand raised. Maybe if this were one of those go to one secluded place and sit there for five days without pressuring yourselves to explore or be seen in public kind of vacations, maybe then I wouldn’t be ready to forge my own freedom trail. I persevere though, knowing that He who is in me is greater than he who is in the world…and tomorrow? Tomorrow just may be a more relaxing day.

*I used both spellings here because I’m a terrible speller and even googled the differences in the spellings. Take your pick, apparently it doesn’t really matter. I personally prefer “grey” to “gray”. “Gray” looks too loud and as a Southerner I’m tempted to lengthen that diphthong into aaaayyyyyyyy. “Grey” is just shorter to pronounce to me. Whatever.

Please come to Boston…

In keeping with my somewhat insane desire to visit every single historical site within a “reasonable” driving distance and somehow relate it to our homeschooling we are now on the go again. This time: Boston!

On an eight hour drive, when you leave at 7am, feel free to take a little time and have a little fun.

Don’t spend time in toll booth lines though, get an EZPass and drive on through.

Let children exercise during stops.

When driving by big, cool, major cities stop and eat lunch. Times Square and Ben’s Pizza in SoHo. I have a thing for men named Ben who make food. (Ben’s Chili Bowl in DC and now Ben’s Pizza in SoHo)

Maybe window shop and find live mannequins. These were cutting up at a Limited Store in SoHo.

Maybe also spot other models doing a photo shoot on the sidewalk. The guys to the right of the white building were wearing hideous clothes and were being photographed by someone who probably thought they looked cool.

Or a taping of “Nurse Jackie”.

Drive by stores you love. This one is Mood Fabric, our beloved purveyor of threads for Project Runway.

Drive through states that you have never been in before, like Rhode Island. Sorry, RI, I didn’t get any pictures of you!

Stay in a hotel that gives you a big discount because of where your husband works.

And bring your computer so you can figure out what to do while on vacay! We’ve got lots of ideas, just not sure which days we’re going to do them.

More to come soon!

Oh, one more–Pack a borrowed DVD player but don’t tell your kids about it. Only pull it out if absolutely necessary. And we never had to pull it out! (We are not fans of DVD players in cars…did we just lose a lot of friends?)