Dominica May

Tuesday 20th November

We got up bright and early this morning, but weren’t out and on the road until around 10am, as that’s when the car we had booked to hire this morning arrived for us to take.

The weather today was too cold for rain, but not cold enough for snow. We were showered then with sleet for much of the day. Whilst driving, we did see patches of what looked like snow on the ground, though.

Our first stop out on the road was Salem where the famous Salem Witch Trials took place. We went to the Salem Witch Museum, which was a little corny, but gave us (I hope) the facts of what took place during the witch hysteria in Salem through an audio show with various life sized dioramas. There were plenty of other Witchy things, and a pirate museum to see in Salem, too, but after we watched a 27 minute film on the history of Salem and Essex County at the visitor’s centre, it was time to head on our merry way. Why? I had two more states to cross off my list today.

So we headed up route 1A and over to route 1 to head up the coast, through some towns in New Hampshire, crossing the border into Maine, and stopping when we got to York to have a look at the rocky coastline. On our way back through Kittery, before crossing the NH border, we stopped at the most awesome candy shop we’ve ever seen. Something tells me if we moved to Boston, there may be a few trips back up there. We didn’t buy much, though, because we didn’t have room for what was mostly packed in bulk.

It may be a little lame for us to have paid around AU$100 to hire a car and pay for petrol just so we could do these things, and let me get two states closer to achieving my lifetime goal of visiting all 50 US states, but I don’t mind.

If we can manage me driving our next hire car when we get to Denver, I think we will. Jeremy is getting sick of me trying to tell him directions whilst driving, and getting mad at him when he goes the wrong way (or accidentally exits from the interstate when I don’t want him to). Truth be told I’m getting sick of feeling stressed for the same reasons. It unfortunately meant we didn’t get back to our hotel in time to see the pan pipe man perform.

Wednesday 21st November

Finally, a nice sleep in for me! Doyle got me up sometime after 4am and didn’t let me back to bed until nearly 6am, but when he got up again, Jeremy got up to take care of him, and let me sleep in until 8am.

We didn’t do much this morning, because the bus I wanted to catch wasn’t scheduled to leave until 10:50am, so we just hung around our hotel and Doyle watched some Sesame Street.

It was too late for us to catch the bus I wanted by the time we got to the bus terminal, but that was okay because there was meant to be another bus leaving only fifteen minutes later. Only in the confusion, it forgot to take us. I was pissed off when I realised, thinking we should have just taken the one who asked us originally, even if we didn’t get to sit together. But Jeremy came to my rescue, and got our tickets from Greyhound refunded (I wasn’t going to wait until after 5pm for the next one!) and got us slightly cheaper tickets for a more frequent bus on Bonanza. We didn’t have to wait much longer by that time to catch the bus, but we had wasted an hour in the terminal. We also lost one of Doyle’s expensive mittens whilst waiting for the bus we finally caught.

And where did we go? Providence, Rhode Island. Yes, purely because I wanted to cross another state off my list. I’ve now officially been to 30 out of 50 US states. It was more fun than that when we got there, though. We got to see the oldest shopping mall in America, opened in 1860. I took a few pictures of some buildings I found interesting, and we also found a Tim Horton’s. For those of you who weren’t around when I posted my journal from my last RTW trip, Tim Horton’s is a coffee shop chain I frequented quite a bit whilst in Toronto, Canada. It’s named after a Canadian (Ice) Hockey player. I can’t remember if he founded it or not. Anyway, they have the best hot chocolate, and also very nice donuts. We didn’t get any hot chocolate at the Providence one, but we did get a donut each. Yummy! I got me a Canadian Maple. Now, I wonder if we’ll find any Tim Horton’s in Vancouver.

We only stayed in Providence about an hour and a half before heading back to Boston. And it was already dark by the time we got back, even though it only took just over an hour to get there.

More washing was done when we got back to our hotel as I wanted to make sure we had enough clothes to last us through New York until we get to Laramie. When we were up there, Doyle played with some blocks and trains. He’s getting very good at holding onto things to help him into a standing position.

We also got a phone call from my friend Kristian, who folks who attended my wedding will remember as our Canadian stand up comedian on board the Captain Cook. He’s occasionally living in Boston now, so we’ve got vague plans to meet up tomorrow – Thanksgiving. Yeah, Canadians don’t celebrate the American Thanksgiving either.

Doyle started singing “la la la” tonight, too. So now the letters he has in his vocab are a, b, g, l, o, w and y.

Thursday 22nd November

When we arrived in Boston, we were given a letter from our concierge about things to do on Thanksgiving, since most places would be closed. On that letter, we were informed that the USS Constitution would be open, so we decided to leave it until today to visit. We were, however, misinformed, as we discovered upon arriving in the area on the ferry just after 10:30am this morning. So we wandered around and took a few photos before jumping on the next ferry back to Long Wharf.

We went into the other Marriott hotel on the way back to ours to check it out, since we’re allowed to use their services because we don’t have them at our hotel (pool, restaurant, etc) and decided that the Long Wharf hotel isn’t nearly as nice as ours.

So it’s a good thing we had some Canadians to visit us today, or the day might’ve been entirely dead. Boston is almost like a ghost town on Thanksgiving! Kristian and his girlfriend Kristine arrived at our hotel around 2pm. We showed them how awesome our hotel is and just hung out in our living room for a while, chatting, before heading out to try and find somewhere open we could get some food. We ended up in a nice restaurant in the North Market, next to Quincy Market, where Kristian and Kristine had the clam chowder, and Jeremy and I had hot fudge brownie sundaes. Kristian was lovely enough to treat us to the nice afternoon tea. Kristine was lovely, too, so it was great to finally meet her after hearing so much about her when Kristian was in Australia last year. It also amuses me that, despite the fact Kristian and I are from opposite ends of the world, I’ve seen him every year since I met him in 2004. Although the time between meetings has been getting longer.

We walked our friends back to the subway after that, and then headed back to our hotel. Doyle was so exhausted he had a nap. He woke up just in time for us to go downstairs and try the pumpkin pie; only they’d changed the menu and time and we missed it by five minutes. I did all the packing I could while Doyle was asleep so we can hopefully hang around the city for a little while tomorrow morning before we have to head to the airport.

For dinner, Jeremy did his best to make us a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. The food was mostly right, but the atmosphere wasn’t quite the same without the extended family. After dinner, Jeremy headed back down to the counting room to discover we hadn’t missed the free pies after all! So we all went back down for free pie, and socialised with some other guests, who all thought Doyle was very cute. That’s pretty much the kinds of comments we get everyday from so many people we encounter.

When we came back upstairs, Doyle played some peek-a-boo games with me (he’s getting very good at being the one to hide and then show me where he is) using his tent, then even climbed out of his tent and did some more crawling along the floor.

And so ends what is probably the last post for a while. But then I said that in Brazil, too.