A Pilgrim’s Digression

While recounting the details of our New England adventure, I left out one day remarkable for a detour that went terribly…well. I’ll bet you thought I was going to say “terribly wrong,” didn’t you?

Our whole trip seems like a detour in retrospect. I’m not sure we did more than a couple things we planned to do, in the beginning. For example, we did not visit Salem–we are saving that for next time–but we did visit Gillette Castle.

What is Gillette Castle, you ask? Is it the mansion of the Gillette razor magnate, King C. Gillette? Is it the Connecticut home of magician and exposer of hoaxes, Penn Jillette?

No, Gillette Castle is the one time home of actor William Gillette, famous in the first decades of the 20th century for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes.
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I have not written about this yet, because until yesterday it was not a sure thing. Now, it is pretty much a done deal: Lynn and I are taking in a foster child. I know, it is ironic that in only a week, I am having an operation that will permanently prevent us from ever having another child of our own, yet at the same time we are adopting (is that the right word?) a foster child. Yet, this is what is happening.

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After some debate about how we wanted to spend our last days of vacation, we finally decided to stay in Concord and visit some of the sites we missed the first day: the North Bridge, the Old Manse, and the historical centers/museums of both Concord and Lexington.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately since it lent the pictures I took an unusually gloomy atmosphere, it rained heavily all morning. So we decided to take the bus tour that travels from the historical center in Lexington to the North Bridge in Concord and back again. It essentially follows the route that Paul Revere and his fellow ‘alarmists’ took when riding to Concord to warn the militia there that the British regulars were on the march.

The tour was actually quite good and worth the money, the guide giving a rather gripping account of the events on that April night leading up to the battles of the next day that began the Revolution. Lynn’s Mom remarked that she would like to have the guide’s narration on CD so that she could listen to it again at her leisure, but somehow I don’t think it would be the same, listening to it in the car, as listening to it as we stopped along the road and the guide pointed out the sites as she told her story.

The North Bridge and the Old Manse were probably the highlights of the tour, for me at least. We came back to the Old Manse later in the day, after the rain had stopped, for a complete tour of the house and grounds. Following are some pictures I took of the North Bridge earlier in the day, when it was raining, and later in the day after it had stopped. I am going to include thumbnails with a link to the full size image, because I really think you need to see these pictures at full resolution to appreciate the sites we saw.
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My last post was so lengthy, I really did not have space to include any photos. This post is almost entirely a photo post.
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To wrap up my account of our tour of Concord yesterday, we had lunch at an ancient inn called the Colonial, where Concordians once stockpiled the weapons that the British regulars were marching to seize that fateful day in April 1775.

There, I ate perhaps the best yankee pot roast I have ever had in my life. It was truly a memorable meal, the gravy thick and rich, so that I imagined it simmering in a wrought iron skillet that dated back to the origins of the inn in the eighteenth century.

Afterwards, we walked out the Lexington road to the Orchard House, home to the Alcotts. Nearby stood the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson as well, the Wayside, which we did not tour. What one quickly realizes, upon visiting these historic towns, is that nearly every home and every plot of land holds some sort of historic connotation. One could spend days visiting sites throughout the town and environs and never view all the history on display.

Instead, we visited the Alcott house, a good choice I believe. The Concord museum has a replica of Emerson’s study on display; the Orchard house has Louisa May Alcott’s room, and much of her family home, intact and authentic as it was when she and her father and siblings lived there. As the tour guide said, over 80% of the artifacts in the house are original to the house and family.

When you climb the stairs to Louisa’s room, you see her desk, built into the wall, where she wrote Little Women. Upon the lintel above the fireplace is an owl painted by her sister May (the model for Amy in Little Women). In May’s small room, one can still see where she drew upon the walls and window frames with her pencils. So much about the house simply feels real, as if the Alcotts stepped out for a few moments and are bound to return any moment. Nothing is under glass or roped off.

Walking across the uneven floors, hearing the guide describe how the Alcott girls would perform in plays for their parents and guests in the parlor (Louisa always played the male roles), one can easily imagine their presence still habiting this close, familial space.

So much history is disappointingly remote; the history of family life, via a particular family, can be surprisingly real and vibrant, when properly represented.
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Today we awoke in Warwick, Rhode Island, and we are ending the day in Concord, Massachussettes. As Lynn’s mother has said repeatedly, this is where “it” all began, meaning the American revolution in particular and the American nation in general.

For me, “it” is the American literary experience. Concord was the hometown of Emerson and Thoreau, the Alcotts, and Hawthorne. Many other lights of the nineteenth century travelled through the town to visit Emerson, who was considered the premiere American intellect of his day.

We arrived around noon, not planning to see Walden Pond immediately, but on the way into town we saw the sign for the “Walden Pond Reservation,” and so we veered off course. It was a beautiful day to visit Thoreau’s woods, but unfortunately I shot mostly video rather than taking still pictures. I bought a Panasonic mini-DV camera specifically for this trip, and for better or worse, much of my photography has been done with it rather than our digital still camera.
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One of Lynn’s favorite television programs is the show Ghosthunters on the Sci-Fi channel. The show just happens to be set in Warwick, Rhode Island, so when we decided we were going to vacation in New England this year, she said the one thing she wanted to see was the T.A.P.S. home office in Warwick.

After spending Saturday in Hartford, Connecticut, we decided to make Warwick our next stop today. It was only about an hour and a half drive. As we have discovered, New England is a small place, and outside of the Boston metro area, it rarely takes two hours to drive from one point to another.
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Our days begin like this: we get up, get ready to leave, and only then really decide where we will end up at the end of the day. After some consultation of a map, and some debate amongst ourselves, we decided that today we would only go as far as Hartford, Connecticut.

One of the places I wanted to see on this trip is the Mark Twain house. It turned out that Harriet Beacher Stowe also had a home right next door to Twain, but unfortunately, it was closed when we visited or we would have went there, as well.
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This week, I am on vacation, but am hoping to keep up my blogging while on the road. Or rather, I am hoping to pick up my blogging again after a hiatus last week.

We are driving up to Massachussetts for the week. We will probably spend much of the coming week in Boston, but also on the itinerary are Salem, Plymouth, and some of the sites in the surrounding states of Connecticut and Rhode Island. I’d like to see the Mark Twain house in Hartford, Connecticut, as well as any Hawthorne-related sites in Salem. We are also going to try to see the Alcott house, which (I believe) is in Hartford.

This is probably the most impromptu vacation we have ever taken, in terms of advance planning. We have known for a year or so that my wife, my mother-in-law, and I were going to go for a drive through New England, but we have made no reservatons, nor until yesterday did we even sit down with a map and plot our trajectory. We are totally winging it, not really knowing more than a day in advance where we will be staying that night.

Right now, we are in a hotel in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. My sister-in-law Michelle is a Best Western manager in Pittsburgh, so she got a room for us at $39.00 a night. And as soon as we know where we are going to be at the end of the day, we will call her and she will call ahead and book another room for us. It’s all working out pretty well so far.

Me, I am enjoying the freedom. Brendan is staying with Michelle and her husband and three kids in Pittsburgh. They are leaving today for Hershey, Pennsylvania, where they are going to go to the amusement park there, so I think he will have a good vacation, too. We felt bad not taking him with us, but he was so glad to see his cousins yesterday he hardly gave us a thought when we left Pittsburgh.

“Bye Dad; have a nice vacation,” he said, giving me a quick hug and then running off to play with his cousin Noah.

I was going to leave the laptop behind, but as you can see, I could not quite bring myself to do that. Besides blogging, I think it will serve some real useful purpose, as well. At the very least, we can use it for Mapquest, weather reports, and looking up restaurants and sites to see in the towns we visit.

Tonight, I am not yet sure where we will be. I am hoping we’ll be in Massachussetts, but I don’t know, or particularly care if we aren’t there yet. We are just driving. We have a long week stretching ahead, and who knows where we will end up.

“Alright, let me see what you’ve got down below.”

I hesitated, feeling about as uncomfortable as a person can possibly feel, then I stupidly began to unbutton my shirt.

Seeing my discombobulation, the doctor said, “Just drop your pants and pull up your shirt.”

I undid my belt and let my shorts and underwear fall to the floor. As I pulled up my shirt, the doctor, who was sitting on a stool, wheeled closer. He was wearing latex gloves, which he had put on almost immediately upon entering the room. I had known for awhile that this exam was coming, but that knowledge did not make it any easier.

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