Boston - Day 1 (8/31/2015)

Well my phone didn't heal itself, so for the time being we will just be using Joe's phone (480-385-8180).  We headed out fairly early this morning.  Since we had scoped out the ferry route yesterday, we drove right there and got on board without incident.  We made the 8:20 ferry.  It was a nice ferry, with tables at some of the seats.  Very quiet.  No one talked (except us).

We could see the Boston skyline grow larger as we got closer.

Arrived in Boston Harbor, walked down and caught the hop-on/hop-off bus (Old Town Trolley Tours), and began our tour.

Our driver/narrator was very Bostonish, and Joe couldn't understand her too well, so we got off at Stop 4 to tour the Bruins/Celtics stadium (TD Garden).  Our initial plan was to ride the entire route (2 hours), then go again and get off at the places we wanted to explore further, but we changed our minds.  The Garden isn't the old Boston Garden where Larry Bird played, unfortunately, and the Celtics are definitely secondary here at this stadium -- they don't have any financial interest in it, it's owned by the owner of the Bruins, and the Celtics offices and practice areas are held somewhere else, so they only play their home games here.  We had to wait until 10:00 for the Pro Shop to open (everything in it was out of our price range), then we had to wait until 11:00 for the tour of the stadium.  But it was an interesting tour.  The floor was being worked on so we didn't get to see the parquet floor (it was stacked up in back), but we learned a lot of interesting facts about the building and both teams, and got to see some great pictures.

There was a nice statute of Bobby Orr with his goal that won the 1970 Stanley Cup. 

The stadium is pretty interesting.  The bottom floors is a train station, with several different lines coming right inside.  There was a McDonalds, a Starbucks, a little magazine/convenience store, and seats to wait for your train.  The 3rd floor is actually the hockey/basketball floor, and the top floor was the 9th.  In that "lobby area" on the first floor were lots of big posters, and a couple of interesting plaques -- one of the famous Red Auerbach, and another one of a four-leaf clover which we "touched for luck."

Walking into the stadium was pretty awesome.  Even though Bird didn't play here, the Celtics are Larry Bird to us, so this was pretty hallowed ground.  We certainly thought of John here -- he would have enjoyed all of the pictures for sure.

They had 4 life-size statues, wooden!, that were amazing.  On the one of Larry Bird, you could even see the dimples in the basketball.  It was all made of wood, even his shoelaces.

Our tour guide (who was very good) told a story about the first zamboni.  The horse wore special shoes to keep his feet from freezing on the ice.

Several pictures of Larry Bird and a "case" of things devoted to him, but I was disappointed that there wasn't a group picture of either the Olympic "Dream Team" or one of the championship team pictures when Bird's team won the NBA championship.  I thought there might have been something like that in the pro shop, but there wasn't.  The pro shop was more about hockey than basketball.

Another item that John would be interested in -- a pair of Shaqueal O'Neil's shoes -- size 23 (John would know).  You can see by my size 9 that they were LARGE!

They had one section of the old parquet floor on display.  We were told that they actually incorporated some pieces of the old one into the new floor (removing the dead spots).

And of course, there were the retired numbers.

We finally finished here, that took about 2 1/2 hours including our wait-time, and got back on the bus, passing the Boston Common.  Joe was getting hungry so we got off at a P.F. Chiang's and had a nice lunch, then continued on our bus tour.  One of the next stops was the bar that inspired the original "Cheers" so we should have waited and had lunch there.  Maybe tomorrow.

You can do duck boat tours here and we passed several of them this morning.  Here they were all lined up, and Joe told the driver that they "had all their ducks in a row."  I think he stole the driver's line on that one.

Our next get-off was Fenway Park.  The Red Sox are playing the Yankees tonight, oldest rivalry in baseball so we didn't even try to get tickets, but we had a nice tour of this stadium too.  They too had some statues outside.

We congregated again at the Pro Shop, where they had a nice baseball-glove-seat.

Everything in here was very expensive too, and when we got over to the stadium, we could see that they liked their beer.

Our guide explained the story behind "Boston Strong" which became their mantra after the Boston Marathon bombing.  Very nice story.

It's been a long time since we have been baseball fans, but it was pretty awesome to be here at Fenway Park.  But this field seems SOOO small compared to our Diamondbacks stadium.  Fenway Park is the smallest, as well as the oldest, stadium in baseball.

 You can see the Green Monster (Wall) on the far side.

They still have a lot of the original (small, uncomfortable) seats which they are very proud of.  Inside their museum area are a lot of artifacts from the Babe Ruth days, as well as some of their other biggies.

There was an interesting story about this one "red" chair in the middle of the bleachers, where someone got hit by a home run ball way back in the day.

And we got to see a little bit of the Sox and Yankees warming up as we worked our way over to the
Green Monster, where we got to sit on the wall.

They also have the only manual scoreboard still used in baseball.

We finally left here, and got back on the bus to finish the route, which took us through MIT.  We saw a few of their buildings, and a memorial to a cop killed by the Boston Marathon bomber.

We got back to the ferry and had a leisurely 30-minute ride back to Bingham.  We sat on the second deck this time.  This is a really nice ferry, a catamaran, very smooth ride.  People did talk a little more at this time of the day.

 Another passing ferry, very similar to ours.

Senior pricing was a nice surprise here.  Our ferry tickets were half-price ($8.50 round trip), and we got half-off on the tour of the Celtics stadium.  Parking, at full rate, was only $4 for all day, another pleasant surprise.  No discount at Fenway Park though -- the 3:00 tour was a flat $20 for everyone on game day, so we didn't even get the $1 off for seniors on that one. 

We bought two-day trolley tickets, so tomorrow we will be back at it, in Boston.

On to Boston (8/30/2015)

I guess last night was my turn not to sleep well.  I finally gave it up about 6:00 a.m. and was going to work on the blog first thing, but as I was locating the camera I noticed the sunrise, so I threw on some clothes and back to the beach I went.  It was actually lighter than these pictures appear.

 

I thought I would be the first person on the beach, but there were several already out, gathering all the "good" stuff.  One group had found several sand dollars and a starfish!

My "haul" included 2 more pieces of seaglass and 2 shovels.  You just never know what you're going to find!

 

I figure those shovels might come in handy when we get back to Florida!

We had a quick breakfast, de-camped and got underway at 9:10, leaving our beautiful beach campground behind.  This state park beach was a real treasure.   I read somewhere that this is the only state park in New Hampshire that is right on the beach, so we lucked out on this since we just dumbed onto it.

We didn't think we had much of a drive to make this morning, but I made it a little more complicated by directing us to the wrong state park.  I had checked on two of them, one had electric at the sites and the other didn't.  Somehow I got that screwed up in my head and routed us to the one without.  We fueled just before we got to that turnoff, and I turned on Lucille and saw that we were 31 miles away.  Since the one we were headed for was only about a mile away, I checked my campground book where I had made by notes and guessed that I had picked out the wrong one.  Had we turned on Lucille earlier, we would have caught it but we figured she would send us on the freeway and we were trying to stick to secondary roads so we hadn't been using her.  Anyhow, we righted ourselves and got to the correct campground by 11:50, so we didn't lose much time, just took some different roads.

We crossed a bridge somewhere on our drive and the warning siren went off just as we crossed it, about gave us a heart attack.  Joe could see in the rear view mirror that the stoplight on the bridge had come on, so we quickly figured out what it was.  The drawbridge was going up!   But that was something new for us.

We saw gas prices from $2.65 down to $2.19.  Fortunately, we waited and bought it for the $2.19 price.

We went into the tunnel under the Boston Harbor, then crossed the bridge over the Charles River.  That bridge is a "cable-stayed" bridge, quite impressive.  "The tunnel is 8,448 feet (2,575 m) long, of which approximately 3,960 feet (1,210 m) are underwater."

TUNNEL UNDER BOSTON HARBOR

 We managed to find our campground, which is sort of in the boonies, in the Boston suburb of Hingham.  It is very woodsy, not crowded at all.

We are tucked in to a campsite again, amongst the trees, I'll have to get a photo tomorrow.

We rested for a while (I took a nap), then we went out to find the ferry, which our campground "host" recommended as our best way to get back into Boston.  Although the address they gave us wasn't exactly right, we managed to find the ticket office and the guy in there was very helpful with information, so we hope to be set for tomorrow.  Then we found a Walmart to pick up a few things (ran out of coffee!!), and stopped at "Margurita's" Mexican restaurant for dinner.  By the time we got back to the campground it was dark.

The 6-wheel bike we saw the other day is a "conference bike" or "CoBi."   "The ConferenceBike is a 7-seat human powered vehicle created by artist Eric Staller and manufactured in Santa Cruz, California, USA by conferencebike.com and in Germany by Velo.Saliko. One person steers and all may pedal.  The bike has a circular jointed drive-shaft and rack & pinion steering. In most countries it has the same legal status as a bicycle. There are now 300 ConferenceBikes in 18 countries."

What was really interesting is that they are using these bikes as "icebreakers" at, among other things, universities, and Vincennes University was named as one of the few!  Small world.



"They have been used for fund-raising events and by biking advocacy groups worldwide. CoBies are being used to transport employees on the Google campus in California; and as ice-breakers at Vincennes, Stony Brook and Alfred Universities. Every group you can think of can use a ‘CoBi’ as a TOOL and a SYMBOL for bringing people together."

On another subject, I think I killed my phone today.  I apparently dropped it when we left for the ferry, and when I went looking for it, in the dark, when we got home, it was under the car.  Now I can't get it to come on, although it rang when Joe was calling me to help me find it, so we think we might have run over it with the car.  So we'll see what tomorrow brings with that.  All in all, I haven't had a great day today, so I'm thinking I might as well just go to bed.  Maybe my phone will heal itself overnight, and we just ordered tickets for a 2-day trolley tour in Boston, so hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.




  

Hampton Beach (8/29/2015)

We made it through the night with no electricity (no air conditioning), but it is quite cool here on the beach, 64 when I woke up this morning.  Joe said he didn't sleep too well, kept waking up without his sleep machine, so he should have brought in the extension cord and plugged it in to the invertor.  If we stay here another night, he will need to do that.

He got up pretty early though, and we walked down to the beach about 7:45.  There were just a few other people down the beach a ways.  The water was chilly, but it was lovely.  Joe thought this bucket was very beachy.

We walked the beach for an hour, gathering rocks and "stuff.  Joe found a big piece of brown seaglass, and I found a little piece, and another piece that might be a pebble.

I also picked up a couple of other "stuff" -- unidentifiable.

The sand was soft and silky, but one area had interesting ripples.

By the time we left the beach, Joe had decided we really needed to spend another day here.  He wanted a beach day!  As we walked back through the almost-empty parking lot, we saw where all the birds rested -- Andrew would have a heyday here.

That was our first hour.  The next hour we spent looking for Joe's soda.  This is a very beachy town, no parking places, lots of little shops.  Fountain sodas are a rarity here.  We finally found a McDonalds, with no parking, so he circled the block while I ran in and got us some breakfast sandwiches and sodas.  In the midst of our travels, though, we did get to see the bridge come up.

We got back to the RV, stopped by and paid for another night, did a little housekeeping, read for a bit, got on the computer.   I fixed us lunch, and made some of our Jiffy Mix brownies during our 11-1 generator time, then we headed to the beach again, this time prepared to get wet.  We've seen a variety of beach "buggies" here and thought our versatile little laundry cart might work, so Joe loaded it up and off we went.

 When he hit the heavy sand, he turned it around and pulled it.  I looked over someone else's buggy, and all we need is bigger wheels on ours.

We spent another hour or so here.  The beach was a lot more crowded than it had been at 7:45 this morning.

But there's always room for more.  We worked our way out in the water to about thigh-high (over a period of time), but one wave wiped me out and I pretty well got everything below the neck wet.  After we got used to the water though, it was very refreshing.  And the cold water didn't seem to bother the little kids at all.

LIFE IS GOOD

We watched a boat pulling parasailers the whole time we were on the beach, and Joe finally convinced me that we should do this, but when we got back to the RV and I called, they were booked up until tomorrow at 4:00 p.m., and we will be in Boston by then.  Since it cost $89 each, it was probably just as well.

We decided we should take advantage of our "down" day (which was pretty busy) and get the laundry caught back up.  We had seen at least two laundramats in our drive this morning, so that was the next item on the agenda.  When we finished that, we spent another hour or so trying to find something to eat -- someplace with a parking lot, a sit-down restaurant, that had something other than seafood.  We ended up with a pizza over in Salisbury, Massachusetts (just down the road another few miles).  Finally, we finished our day, got the clean laundry put away, Joe re-caulked the bathtub, hooked up his extension cord to his sleep machine, and we went to bed.  A nice day in New Hampshire.