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On Monday we stopped in the town of Canmore, Alberta, looking for a library so I could get a few hours of internet-dependent work done. This is their library, and THAT is their view!

We saw several of these along the road in Banff National Park: wildlife bridges over the freeway so animals can cross the road unscathed. Well done, Canada.

Here are Natalie and Emily all decked out for Canada Day on Tuesday:

I’m not going to lie: the idea of a bear encounter while hiking terrifies me. While I’d prefer bear grenades, this spray stuff looks promising (it even came with a holster.) I am now actively looking for a bear to spray.

We unfortunately weren’t the only ones who showed up in Banff to do a hike:

There were just too many people on this particular trail. We aborted our “hike” after about five minutes of fighting the crowds.

We found an alternate, far-less-traveled path that lead to these so-called “ink pots” — springs of cold water that form blue and green pools in the mud:

It was a beautiful view, and it felt great to soak our tired feet in the ice-cold water flowing down from the mountains (it was a long hike).

We camped that night at a nice wooded campground in Banff National Park:

On Wednesday we stopped at Lake Louise, which is very beautiful, but also has a Disneyland feel with all of the crowds and parking congestion. We did a short walk and then we were ready to leave.

We continued traveling on Wednesday from Banff toward Jasper on the Icefields Parkway, stopping at a couple scenic lookouts along the way. The money shot that day was Amy’s iPhone panorama taken of Peyto Lake (click the photo for a larger view):

Here is another stop, this one at Mistaya Canyon. (I’m trying my hand here at an animated GIF.)

Another quiet, wooded campground on Wednesday night along the Icefields Parkway.

We are regularly seeing wildlife from the road as we drive. On Thursday, this elk was practically posing for us:

Hot springs are the reason this area is now a national park. There are numerous hot springs in the Canadian Rockies and our Jasper National Park campground was just down the road from Miette Hot Springs. Amy and Natalie couldn’t resist trying it out:

These typical-looking pools are filled with the water from the hot springs, the hottest in the area. In fact, it leaves the mountain at 129 degrees and cools to 104 degrees by the time it gets to the pool. It felt great on tired, hiking muscles! Note: this sunset view was after 10 pm. We have very long days.

On Friday we stopped at a truck wash to give the RV and Jeep a desperately needed wash. (In hindsight, this was a complete waste of time because it was filthy again within 24 hours.)

By Friday afternoon we had reached the start — “Mile 0” — of the Alaska Highway in Dawson Creek, British Columbia:

We almost camped that night at a Walmart in Fort St. Johns, BC, but the Safeway across the street provided a luxurious amenity: free Wifi usable from our RV in the parking lot!

We saw lot of wildlife as we traveled on Saturday. The most exciting one was this black bear strolling down the road (viewed from the safety of the RV, of course).

Saturday night we got to experience what the Canadian parks system calls “informal camping.” They’re just clearings in the woods a kilometer or so off the main road. It was charming, in a Deliverance sort of way.

We had big plans for some off-roading in the Jeep on Sunday morning. But our woeful inexperience with driving through rivers and such — and the pleading from our daughters — made us reconsider and turn back. We vowed to get educated on what the Jeep (and we) can handle and try it again when we pass through here on the way home. We’ll be back, Churchill Mine Road. We’ll be back…

Even our Sunday morning hike was a bust. We tried to take a short hike, but the mosquitos were unbearable. We turned back and decided to just get on the road.

We traveled some serious distance through a mostly uninhabited stretch of British Columbia. This required careful planning of fuel stops, so this threw a bit of a wrench in that plan:

We fortunately came upon another hole-in-the-wall gas station later that morning, but at $1.97/liter, it hurt. (That’s about $7.46/gallon!!)

We saw lots more wildlife as we drove all day Sunday. Here, a group of mountain goats:

…and later a herd of bison:

…and lots more bears. This will probably be the last bear photo, as they’re a dime a dozen out here. (Unless it’s one I get to spray.)

By Sunday afternoon, we had reached the Yukon Territory:

We stopped at Watson Lake, YT, to fill the tanks at a slightly better price and found a very curious attraction at the visitors’ center: The Sign Post Forrest, a collection of an estimated 80,000+ road signs and license plates that years of travelers have nailed to the trees and posts:

We retrieved our old California license plate from the RV and left our mark:

I had to pull over Sunday evening and take another representative shot of what driving through British Columbia and Yukon is like. It’s this, mile after mile, day after day:

We stopped for the night on Sunday at a Yukon “government campground” having traveled 1391 miles this week. (Note the daylight; this is 10:30 pm!)

First order of business in the morning: wash that windshield!

Then, it’s on to Whitehorse, Yukon’s only city and the last real town before we reach Alaska.

On Monday we made it to an old favorite from our previous travels: the Sunrise Campground in Bozeman Montana.

As luck would have it, our friends Herb and Jeanie — whom we met here three years ago — happened to arrive that same day. It was great to catch up with them and made our visit to this campground even better.

On Tuesday, we made use of a free RV site at the city park in Cascade, MT. It rained like crazy shortly after we got there.

…but within a couple hours, it cleared completely.

…and we enjoyed a lovely sunset. (This is a weather pattern we’ve experience for several days now.)

We made it to Glacier National Park on Wednesday and immediately took to the roof to take in the view:

While driving around in the Jeep that afternoon, we saw our first bear (didn’t get to pet him though).

That evening we enjoyed a wonderful hike, serenaded by some Swainson’s Thrushes happily singing away:

Thursday was pretty rainy, so I decided to stay in and make a work day out of it.

The girls took a side trip to the Canadian counterpart to Glacier: Waterton Lakes National Park.

The Prince of Wales Historic Lodge sits majestically on a hilltop in this park. The views from here were reportedly stunning, but this day’s low, rainy clouds impeded their view.

Despite the weather, they enjoyed their stop at the quaint town of Waterton. A highlight of the day occurred as they were leaving the park and spotted more bears:

Friday was beautiful:

We did a morning hike to St Mary and Virginia Falls:

Virginia Falls was in a full roar with the spring melt:

The spray overpowered all who tried to stand in the fall’s presence.

On the way back to the RV, a break in the trees and a break in the clouds revealed some pretty cool scenery (click the photo for a larger view):

By Friday afternoon, we had left the country:

We camped that night is a provincial park outside of Fort Macleod where the camping was super cheap:

This is just a catch-all photo to represent all of the wide open spaces we’ve enjoyed over the last week. The sun shines brighter, the sky seems taller and the grassy hills just seem to roll on forever. It temporarily assuages my anxiety about global overpopulation:

Sometimes the name of a place is all one needs to want to stop (I’m sure the original Blackfoot term had a more poetic ring to it):

This was a very well-done museum at a “buffalo jump” site used by the native peoples for some 6,000 years. I had heard of the hunting technique of chasing a buffalo heard over a cliff, but I was unaware of the intense strategy and teamwork needed to pull it off successfully, and how that determined whether there would be enough food to last the winter.

This is one of two cliffs in the area that were used for the buffalo jumps. (It was a much higher drop-off thousands of years ago.)

I don’t know what this “litres” nonsense is, but they are noticeably more expensive than gallons.

On Saturday night we camped in a casino parking lot in Calgary, Alberta. It was nice leaching off of their wifi, since good internet has been darn near impossible to find in Canada so far.

On Sunday morning we visited Calgary’s Winsport Olympic Park, which was the site of the 1988 Winter Olympics:

There were a handful of activities to do there, but we opted for the “luge” ride:

It started with a ski lift to the top of the hill, followed by us riding our little plastic luges down a 1.8 kilometer winding track.

Here are Nat and Amy doing a final brake check at the top of the hill. It was a lot of fun. We did it twice.

We stopped Sunday night at a provincial park near Canmore, Alberta. Like many of our other campsites, this one has no plugin for power — and we don’t need it. With traveling nearly every day, our batteries get fully recharged and we therefore have all the electricity we need.

We will head west toward Banff in the morning, then the big push north to Alaska!

After THAT winter, we decided we don’t like being in cold places. So, we’re heading to Alaska. (While we are making deeper roots in Indianapolis, we will continue traveling every summer break.)

The RV rode out the vicious winter in a nice barn in Northwest Ohio and suffered only a dead battery and a bad case of dry-rotted tires. The exciting upgrade to our rig is a Jeep Wrangler. After our Jeep experience out west in 2012, we vowed to never return without one.

We jumped right back with one of our old favorites: the National Park sites. Our first stop was at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site in Springfield, IL on Sunday afternoon. This was Abraham Lincoln’s house prior to becoming president, and even contained some furniture that the Lincoln family used.

Our first camping spot was at a lovely Walmart in Hannibal, Missouri:

The next day we made a visit to the Pony Express Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri. The museum itself was fine, and the history of the Pony Express is pretty interesting: it was a start-up — the brainchild of three private entrepreneurs — that ran for only a year and half before being rendered obsolete by the telegraph.

On Tuesday we visited the Brown v. Board of Education National History Site, located in one of the formerly-segregated schools in Topeka, Kansas. It was a well-restored school but lacked specific information about the pivotal case.

Later that afternoon, we did some off-roading in the Jeep:

…and the Jeep was duly christened. It was a lot of fun.

Our campsite on Tuesday night was at a local park in St. Marys, Kansas. Here we took in a big ol’ slice of Americana: watching the St. Marys 10-12 year old girls softball team defeat their dastardly archrivals from Silver Lake.

That park was a pretty cheap stay ($10/night), and I needed to catch up on some work, so we ended up camping there until Thursday morning.

Thursday night was another camping community in a Walmart parking lot (Colby, KS.)

On Friday, through bug-coated windshield, we saw the Rockies off in the distance and finally felt far away from Indiana:

We made it to Boulder on Friday. I stayed home and worked that afternoon, but the girls took a tour of the nearby Celestial Seasonings Tea factory.

While traveling through Wyoming on Saturday, we made a quick stop in the town of Guernsey to see the wagon ruts of the Oregon trail still visible in the sandstone:

Some Wyoming towns offer their parks as free RV campsites, one of which we made use of Saturday night in Douglas, Wyoming. They don’t provide hookups, but there is a dump station. And free is hard to beat.

We intended to do another free Wyoming camping park Sunday night in Sheridan, WY. But I got a little creeped out by the random idling cars that would come and go for no discernible purpose.

We relocated to the local Walmart and settled in among another comfortable compound of campers (how’s that for alliteration?).

We got back on the road bright and early Monday morning and headed to Montana…

A collection of favorite photos.

A humorous anecdote or two.

An inspirational take on a random encounter.

A list of “lessons learned.”

Those are the things I imagined putting into a bookend for this blog — an eloquent final entry to encapsulate the wonderful experience of living on the road with my family.

But the words just wouldn’t come. Nurturing this blog gave me lots of experience capturing life’s events one week at a time, but summarizing two-plus years of traveling proved to be futile.

What I can do, given the season, is a little Christmas analogy:

I remember the excitement of planning our adventure was like that of a child’s anticipation of Christmas. Being on the trip was like Christmas morning, each new location another gift to unwrap. But being off the road is a bit like December 26th: we had a blast, made wonderful memories, but are quite bummed — at least I am — that it’s over.

I saw snowfall last night for the first time in a while, so I’m bracing for a long winter.

All the more time to plan our next adventure…

(to be continued…)

Talk about a week of mixed emotions.

We had a very enjoyable time at Amy’s parents’ house in Ohio last week. But by Sunday afternoon, despite our hesitation, it was time to make the last leg of this trip. It was time to finish this.

Three hours later, we were back in Indy:

I tried to soak up as much as I could and savor every remaining mile. It was great to see my mom, however, and we were eager to see the apartment that she is letting us use.

Some quick details on that: My mom owns a multi-tenant rental house in downtown Indy (right across the street from her house), and she is letting us live in one of her units. The plan is to stay here for the next 6 to 12 months and hopefully achieve some clairvoyance on where in the world we want to settle down. We’re very grateful for this little “halfway house” as we transition back into normal life, whatever that means.

Here are the girls celebrating their new room. It’s funny: this apartment is only 650 square feet, but to us it seems HUGE! As Carrie put it, we’ll be living “New York City style” for a while.

The excitement of our new place was a welcomed distraction from the heartache of moving out of the RV. That took way longer than I thought it would (almost a couple hours).

After being relieved of its cargo, the ol’ Southy was ready for storage. I noted how it drove differently without all of our stuff in it. It even sounded different inside.

Maybe it was because I’ve seen this thing against backdrops of mountains, deserts, beaches and forests, but it seemed wrong for it to now just be facing a brick wall in a storage lot. I didn’t like that something so central to our family can in an instant become so dormant. I’m sure this all sounds a bit corny, but it was hard to leave it.

The mixed emotions continued on Monday. We rented a U-Haul and drove over to our house to get a few things from the garage for the apartment. Our house and yard look terrible; we have some serious work to do to get it ready to sell.

Going through our stuff was fun, however…it was like opening up a time capsule. We had purged a bunch of our crap before starting our trip two years ago, but it appears we didn’t purge enough. We dropped off a few boxes at Goodwill at the end of the day, and there will be many more where those came from.

It was a long, full day of moving, but I think everyone was glad to sleep on their own mattresses and with their own bedding. It made it feel a little bit more like home.

I feel the need to do a post of “greatest hits”…just something to summarize the last two years before I bring this blog to a close, if only for my own therapy.

Stay tuned…

We finished our lovely week in New Jersey, and then on Friday we broke camp for the last time. We made it to State College (home of Penn State) in Pennsylvania where we boondocked in a Lowe’s parking lot. Nothing like going out in style:

The next morning, Amy did her usual runners’ group meet-up and farmers’ market stop, and then we hit the road for a full afternoon of traveling. Here’s Amy driving the last leg, with Carrie in the co-pilot seat:

…Natalie chillin’ in the back:

…and Em watching the midwest scenery go by:

We were at Amy’s parents’ house by late afternoon; it was great to be with family again.

We’ll be staying here — sleeping in real beds, under a real roof — for the rest of the week before making the final three-hour trip back to Indy this weekend.

To continue from our cliffhanger previous post, the creek stopped rising, and the fridge situation turned out to be good-news/bad-news. The good news is that our fridge is operating as designed; the bad news is that its a sucky design. It just doesn’t do well when the temps get above 90 (I’m sure it would prefer, oh I dunno, a 32 to 40 degree climate.)

We have since bought a little fridge fan to circulate the cool air inside, and that has thus far kept us out of the “Danger Zone” (insert Kenny Login’s Top Gun theme song).

On Tuesday we took a side trip to Woodstock:

Don’t be too impressed. While a “Woodstock Museum” sounded promising, it turned out to just be a guy who showed us some Woodstock paraphernalia and then talked about what it meant to be a hippie:

Nice guy, but I was wanting to see the actual site of the 1969 Woodstock music festival. Turns out the city of Woodstock is only where the event was planned. The event itself took place nearly two hours away in Bethel NY. Oh well.

We took in some more presidential history last week. On Wednesday the girls visited the house of president Martin Van Buren in Kinderhook, NY:

Then on Thursday I tagged along for a tour of president Franklin Roosevelt’s house in Hyde Park, NY:

Friday was our big trek into New York City. We started with a train ride…

…that took us to Grand Central station:

We then took a ferry to Liberty Island to see the Statue of Liberty.

Looking back on Manhattan from atop the ferry:

After that, we visited the 9/11 memorial:

The 9/11 museum is still under construction, but looking through the windows I could see the original World Trade Tower “trident” beams that will be on display. I’d go back to NYC if only to see this museum when it opens.

On the New York City subway:

We met up with our friend Megan (and later her husband Eric) who gave us a walking tour of Central Park. I didn’t ever completely get away from the sounds of the city, but I was struck at how secluded Central Park felt at times. I couldn’t believe that such a natural setting could exist in the middle of such a large city.

On Saturday, Amy took Emily to do some plane-spotting at JFK International Airport. Some highlights of the day were seeing a Dreamliner, a Dreamlifter, several 747s and four A380s, among many others. She took some good photos, too:

Another of Emily’s photos, this one looking back at the NYC skyline:

Before taking this trip, we lived in a neighborhood called “Irvington” which was named after the author Washington Irving. So we HAD to visit the original Irvington while we were in New York:

…as well as the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, a major character in Irving’s classic The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:

Appropriately, Mr. Irving is interred in the Irving family plot in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. His is the taller, rounder head stone on the left:

Having lived in the Indianapolis Irvington most of our adult lives, Amy and I felt a strange connection to this area. It was cool to be there.

Before we left, we toured Washington Irving’s home. It was a cozy little place.

This week in New Jersey we’ve been spending time with some friends from Greensboro who are vacationing on Long Beach Island, which is about a half hour away from our campground. Our girls were pretty excited to see their girls and have some sleep-overs. It also afforded Amy and me some kid-free time for our 18th wedding anniversary on Monday (thankyouthankyouthankyou, Bob and Jo!)

This campground where we’re staying this week would otherwise blend in to the blur of previous campgrounds if it weren’t for one realization: this is our final campground.

After we leave here in a couple days, we’ll land in Ohio at Amy’s parents’ house for the week. Then it’s back to Indy, and with that, this trip — this amazing 2+ year epic adventure — will come to an end.

I thought I’d feel more ready for that, but I’m not.

It wasn’t the most action-packed week in Mystic CT, but it was a good one. We drove into town on Tuesday hoping to see their cool drawbridge in action, but we missed it. We did, however, walk past the town crown jewel: the Mystic Pizza joint, made sorta-famous in 1988 by the Julia Robert’s movie of the same name. You’ve seen it, right? Me neither.

We didn’t have a sewer connection at our camping spot, and we did NOT do a very good job of conserving and managing our waste tanks. Fortunately, the campground provided a free poo-sucking service that emptied our tanks mid week. That was nice.

Also mid week, the girls did some fresh raspberry pickin’:

…and visited the Submarine Force Museum in Groton, CT. They were able to tour the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear powered submarine, christened in 1954.

The girls enjoyed comparing the tight quarters of a submarine to our RV.

Natalie had a fun day on Thursday. Amy drove her back to Newport, RI (about an hour away) so she could take some surf lessons, something she has wanted to do for a while now. (Her favorite movie is Soul Surfer.)

Nat catching a wave:

That day was also the 4th of July, and Emily made us an all-american dessert featuring the fresh picked raspberries:

We ended up at a Connecticut Tigers minor-league baseball game that night, just to see their post-game fireworks. The game was tied when we got there in the 7th inning, and it was still tied at the bottom of the 9th. But the Tigers scored a run and won their game, and I avoided extra innings. It was win-win.

…and we got to see our fireworks. It turned out to be a pretty fun evening.

The next day we made another trip into Mystic, and this time we DID see the cool drawbridge. Yes, those are humungous hunks of concrete that act as counterweights to lift the drawbridge:

We had a pretty light travel day on Saturday, so we were looking for something else to do (and to stay out of the heat). It was near our route, so we made a stop at the PEZ factory in Orange, CT:

Sextuple-parked in the PEZ parking lot:

Did you know that PEZ was originally a peppermint candy marketed as an alternative to smoking? And that the iconic dispenser originally looked like a cigarette lighter? We learned all kinds of fun facts like that.

All was quiet on the factory floor; no PEZ-making on the weekends:

We made it back into New York yesterday afternoon and we’re now camped in Elizaville, NY for the next few days.

We went to a farmers’ market in nearby Rhinebeck this morning. Amy has been to about a gazillion farmer’s markets over the course of this trip and she said this farmers’ market was one of her favorites (good selection, cool town, good vibes, etc.).

It was another hot day here, so we decided to postpone our Sunday morning hike for later in the day. However, it rained hard this afternoon, and there were some flash flood warnings.

We now have a few concerning issues that we’re closely monitoring. One is the refrigerator, which does not seem to be refrigerating. Our food is spoiling!

Another issue is that the creek is risin’:

…and lastly the power is out in the campground, which means we can’t run our air conditioning on this very hot evening. (Actually, we could run the air conditioning if we fired up the generator, but we’re not that hot. Yet.)

The water level is climbing, but it’s still a good 30 yards away from our RV…we’re watching it closely. That’s the nice thing about having a house on wheels: If things start getting bad, we’re outta here.

It turned out to be a busy work week for me while in Cape Cod. But on Tuesday evening, we went out for a double-feature at the drive-in over in Wellfleet:

Amy had been to a drive-in before, but it was a first for the girls and me:

It was really fun, and the picture quality was surprisingly good, especially for a 1950’s era facility. We didn’t get back to the RV until 1:30am.

At the recommendation of the campground office staff, Amy took the girls to the Chatham fishing pier. The seals there have a Pavlovian response to the returning fishing boats:

The weather continued to be as volatile as ever, toggling between rain and shine throughout the day. We hoped to catch an ocean sunset on Wednesday evening, but it was drizzling and mostly overcast when we got there:

We got lucky, however, and the sun poked through. It was rather surreal, with the muted pink lighting and the ocean water only a few inches deep as far as we could see:

As we waded through the water, we could feel throngs of these little critters hopping up on our ankles (I have no idea what these are):

On Thursday, Amy and the girls took a side trip to the Cape Cod National Seashore. The lighthouses are an important part of the history of this treacherous shoreline. That there were three lighthouses at this particular spot called the “three sisters” is sort of poetic.

Do you recognize this famous Cape Cod lighthouse?…

…if so, you’ve eaten too many of these:

We left Cape Cod on Friday afternoon, and were once again heading in the right direction. Arriving in Cape Cod at the end of a weekend and leaving before the next weekend begins is definitely the way to do it!

We arrived in Newport, Rhode Island on Friday night, and on Saturday morning met up with a client of mine. She and her boyfriend showed us around the Newport Shipyard where they work, so it was like a backstage pass to the world of yachting.

This was an impressive site, watching a ferry getting placed in the water:

A picnic lunch by the Newport Harbor:

My client also hooked us up with some free passes to a 1-hour narrated boat tour of the Newport Harbor and lower Narragansett Bay (thanks Shannon!).

It was a great way to see and experience Newport from the water. Of all of the places we’ve been to lately, Newport has felt the most “New England-y.”

For our Sunday morning walk, we did the “cliff walk” of Newport:

It’s not as perilous as it sounds; it’s actually a paved path that meanders between the ocean-facing cliffs and some of the historic mansions of Newport:

Speaking of mansions, we took the tour of this cozy little place once owned by Cornelius Vanderbilt II:

It was a fascinating and incomprehensible display of wealth, and this was just his summer home! (No photos were allowed inside unfortunately.)

We made it to Mystic, Connecticut this afternoon. Our campground seems nice, but there are no sewer hookups. But hey, they have a bounce house!

Tomorrow is July 1, and thus begins the countdown toward the end of this little RV trip.

Only four weeks left…

I had a pretty busy work schedule early in the week last week, but Amy and the girls were able to meet up with my cousin Kathee and her kids on Monday at her nearby pond in Concord. (I’d get to see her as well as my Aunt Grayce later in the week.)

On Tuesday we learned that my nephew Matthew from Greensboro was laid over at the Boston airport on his way to France. Amy and the girls were already heading there for some plane spotting, so it was great that they could stop in and say hi:

Emily also got to see her first Boeing 787 Dreamliner take off:

On Wednesday afternoon we drove into Salem and learned all about the witch trials of 1692. It was a sad, sad reminder of what happens when fear and superstition mix.

Strolling through Salem:

Amy picked up a few books at this Salem bookstore. It was a cool place, in a crazy mess sort of way:

We visited the Salem graveyard — known as the “Burying Point” — which dates back to 1637. We located the gravestones of a witch trial judge as well as a Mayflower pilgrim.

Total side note: I don’t care enough to research why, but there are Dunkin’ Donuts evvvverywhere out here. Everywhere.

On Thursday, I worked at the Concord library…

…while Amy and the girls visited Sleepy Hollow cemetery nearby. They tracked down the headstones of Thoreau, Hawthown, Alcotts and Emerson.

They also stopped at Walden pond:

These are the woods where Thoreau hung out for two years at Waldon pond. (I love that Thoreau quote.)

Amy and I enjoyed some beautiful scenery on our morning runs at the Lorraine Park Campground in Harold Parker State Forest:

As I mentioned in last week’s post, our challenge for the week was to live without the electric, sewer and water connections that we typically enjoy. Turned out to be a piece of cake, with our only real challenge being that our waste tanks fill up faster than I wish. Our water supply, however, was more than enough, and I still had almost 11.5 volts of juice in the batteries at the end of the week (that’s really good).

Saturday was our big day in Boston, starting with the Boston subway system. (Fun fact: Boston had the first subway system in the country in 1897.)

One of the first things we came upon was the make-shift memorial for the Boston Marathon bombings. It was pretty moving.

Amy left one of her race bibs and a note as part of the memorial:

The bombs blew up just a short distance from where I took this photo:

Inside the Boston Public Library:

Another old graveyard — Granary Burying Ground. We saw the headstones of Paul Revere, John Hancock, Samuel Adams and James Otis (the dude who coined the phrase “taxation without representation”) among others.

The Old South Meeting House. This is where Samuel Adams launched the Boston Tea Party:

This little place — what is now a Chipotle restaurant — used to be a book publisher and was where Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others brought there manuscripts to be published:

This is the Old State House built in 1713 to house the British colonial government of the time. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence was read to the Bostonians for the first time from this building:

The site of the Boston Massacre:

We had covered a lot of ground by mid-afternoon. We were whipped.

…nothing a little Italian ice and gelato can’t fix, though:

We summoned enough energy for one more trek, this time to the Charlestown Navy Yard to tour the USS Constitution:

This old ship, named by George Washington himself, formed part of the original US Navy. While fighting in defining battles of the War of 1812, it received its more recognizable nickname “Old Ironsides.” It’s amazing that it even still exists, let alone still floats (and even still sails!). It was very cool; the highlight of my visit.

Boston is an amazing town, one with a staggering amount of historical significance. It was a very full day, however…we were all ready to head home.

Before getting on the road Sunday morning, Em and Nat helped me finish my air-conditioner repair job. It worked!

We made an impromptu detour on our way to Cape Cod to see Plymouth Rock. I’m glad we stopped just to say we were there, but we didn’t stay long. Those Pilgrims sure picked a busy town to land in.

Here we are heading into Cape Cod. Note that this is the right direction to be going on a Sunday afternoon:

And now we are settled into our latest retirement community of the week:

We have been told by many Bostonians that we must stop at “the Cape.” We’re looking forward to discovering the draw of the this beloved place.