Saturday, January 12, 2013

Maine, Boston, Perspective & Hindsight

Last summer, we spent a couple weeks in Maine and Boston. We like to travel to cold climes in the summer and, although we knew it wouldn't be exactly cold in New England, we figured being right on the ocean would make it pleasant. Wrong. It was disgustingly hot and humid all but a few days, which made everything we wanted to do less fun than it should have been.

The trip wasn't a complete disappointment. We enjoyed extraordinarily delicious lobster - my favorite food and one I planned to, and did, eat daily - along with a few other local delicacies (including Ipswich clams in Ipswich and tender, rosy roast beef sandwiches in Boston), some excellent boating, lots of nice people with highly entertaining accents, and the stirring historical thrill of the Freedom Trail (made no less stirring, but a lot less comfortable by the triple-digit heat and humidity index the day we walked it). Still, the trip was not what we'd hoped and it left us wishing we'd gone somewhere else.

That sense of disappointment clung to the photos I took.  When I looked at them soon after taking them, they, too, struck me as pallid. Culling through them today, however, I realized that there were some lovely moments amidst the disgruntlement and general stickiness.

A lobster pound where I lunched on an enormous lobster so bright, so fresh, so altogether delectable that rays of sunshine seemed to brighten the piles of gloomy gray clouds surrounding the open air patio on which we ate:


One of the northeastern edges of the United States, at Acadia National Park (these aren't bad photos; the water and air really were this foggy:



Different northeastern edges and a bluer Atlantic on a much nicer day:





An American eagle in her aerie (she's just above and slightly to the right of the center of the photo; click on it to see her more clearly):


A ground-bound bird ready for its close-up:


One of many evocative headstones in the venerable Granary burying ground adjacent to the Park Street Church on the Freedom Trail in Boston:


Sign of the times, also on the Freedom Trail: the Old Corner Bookstore is now a Chipotle Grill:


Boston from the water (the only tolerable place to be when the temperature is nearly 90 and the relative humidity is even higher):




No comments: