Boston Trip: Tuesday's Jaunt to New Hampshire

Tuesday morning John drove us all to Boston's Logan Airport so Frank and I could pick up our rental car and so Joe and Margaret could catch their flight back home. We were afraid if John drove all the way in to where the shuttle busses go at the satellite rental pickup facility he might not be able to get out again without puncturing his tires on those spikes that they have at the parking lot gates. He dropped us just short of the gate in a very awkward place with little room to turn the van around. We all got out and exchanged goodbye hugs. Since we were holding up traffic, all the cars and shuttle bus drivers were honking for us to hurry up and get out of the way. It was a very rushed and abrupt end to a fantastic visit but I guess you could say we left to fanfare.

We parted amidst a cacophony of blaring horns
courtesy of those beloved Boston drivers. 

We programmed our Magellan GPS, Maggie, to the Center Harbor Inn on the northern shore of Lake Winnepesaukee, NH, just across the way from Keepsake Quilting. We arrived about an hour before the 3:00 checkin time but our room was ready. We had been assigned a corner room on the water front.

This is the Center Harbor Inn as viewed when you enter their parking lot.
See those three tiny white rectangles on the far corner of the building way down near the lakefront?
They are balconies. The room we were assigned was on the second story and had the middle balcony.

This picture was taken from our balcony.  The hotel is not new by any means and not luxurious but it was neat, tidy, friendly, and the location could not have been better. The lake was right there and we were a two minute walk down the road from Keepsake Quilting.

This is the idyllic scene from our balcony at the Center Harbor Inn.

Our friends Dick and Linda pulled into the parking lot within an hour of us settling in. Dick was the student advisor from Frank's dorm during his college days at Saint Joseph's College, a small Jesuit run school in Philadelphia, PA with a great basketball team, the Hawks. When Dick and Linda emerged from their car I cringed as Frank, who'd been watching for them from our balcony, boomed out his standard historic greeting for his college buddy "Balls, Richard! Balls!" so it resounded across the parking lot. We exchanged quick hugs and agreed, since neither of us had eaten lunch, that we should nourish our bodies before depleting our pocketbooks. We ate at a cute spirited diner just down the road.

The food had home cooked appeal with a bit of a modern twist added.

Linda is an avid knitter and quilter. Dick is into model trains, the large scale LGB type. After lunch we went straight to the business at hand. Dick and Frank set out to find a nearby model train store while Linda and I went to the iconic Keepsake Quilting shop and had fun perusing the quilt store together. The guys caught up with us there, realizing we needed a head start so as not to exhaust their capacity to appear interested. I will not bore my WanderOrPonder readers with the details, but I have a shop review and display of the fabrics I bought shown in the August 21, 2013 post at my other blog, DianeLoves2Quilt. The shop also had completed quilts for sale by other quilters. There was quite a range of sizes, styles, colors... and prices!!! 

Linda and me under the logo sign of Keepsake Quilting. 

Linda's first love is knitting and we admired many of the yarns and buttons in the patternworks knit shop, located just next door. Linda scored a discount for sharing her current project. She is knitting a Froggerina. Yep, that is a ballerina frog.  Yep, it is green and pink. What fun! Her granddaughter is really into ballet and she also bought some ballerina fabric for her at Keepsake Quilting. After the knit shop we browsed in an adjacent book store. Reading tastes are another thing that Linda and I apparently have in common.

Linda's knitted Frogerina scored her a discount at the patternworks knit shop.

That evening we luckily happened upon this restaurant in a shopping center within walking distance to the one that housed the quilt, knitting, and bookstores. The food was excellent. Linda and I both chose the chef's specialty roast chicken. We both agreed we had never – yes, I did say NEVER – had chicken so moist and flavorful. If you are up that way I highly recommend Lavinia for the food, furnishings, and ambience in a very moderate price range.

Lavinia's menu not only had the food list but also the background of the historic building and the origin of the restaurant's name. The building had been part of the underground railroad to rescue slaves and assist them in their escape.  Lavinia was a woman who figured prominently in the venture's success. Dick asked me to read this story aloud to our foursome while we waited for our meals to arrive from the kitchen. It was a full page's worth but I read it aloud while they listened to the whole thing.

Lavinia's lighting gives it a real homey glow at night. I took this photo before the rain really poured down as we were leaving. It had just been drizzling before and the light reflecting off the paved surfaces was so pretty.

Apparently Dick, Frank, and Linda were not the only ones who had listened. After we had eaten and paid and were leaving, a couple at a table we passed stopped me, and the woman said how much they had enjoyed my reading. I was somewhat embarrassed. I did not realize my voice had carried that far but they were sincere and complimented my "smooth reading voice". I thanked them and shared that we were on vacation and just happened on this restaurant because it was near Keepsake Quilting. The woman was a quilter, too! In fact she is one of the unsung heroes of the quilting community.

Carol Doak is a name well known among quilters who use a technique called paper piecing and she has published many patterns and books of patterns. The woman I met at Lavinia's, was a tester for those patterns. She makes a pilot project trying out the pattern for accuracy and correctness and picks what selection of colors best set off the pattern. Her work is photographed and appears in those books. Her name is Beth Meek. Very few recognize her name but I can sure appreciate all her talent and input that goes unnoticed. I repeat. Beth is among the unsung heroes of the quilting realm. Her substantive contributions to those books goes largely unrecognized. So if you see a pattern or book by Carol Doak, take a closer look and see if you can find a credit to Beth Meek, one of the women behind the well known paper piecer. I know I plan to. This serendipitous conversation really tickled me on this part of my trip.

This is an example of paper piecing. Fabric pieces are sewn onto a piece of paper
in an order prescribed by the numbers. Later the paper is removed.

It was pouring rain that night when we left the restaurant. Our hotel was close by, but Dick and Linda still had to drive a ways back to theirs. Linda still wanted to see the fabrics I had bought at the Lowell Quilt Festival so they came back to our room for a bit.  I showed her my treasures. You too can see them at my DianeLoves2quilt blog in the post for August 19, 2013.

Next morning, after checking out of our hotel, Frank and I met Dick and Linda for breakfast at the Tilt'n Diner. It had a 50's diner theme, somewhat like that out of the Back to the Future movie. There was jukebox music piped out into the parking lot.  Frank and I did a demo of our Triple Step Swing and Hustle from our Arthur Murray dance lessons out there on the blacktop. We parted for Dick and Linda to return  home and for Frank and me to continue our trip down to Rockport where it would be just the two of us for the last days of our time in the Boston area.

Dick, Linda, and I are sharing a last group hug before Frank and I head off to continue our trip.
The pouring rain from the night before had dissipated. We had lovely blue skies with fluffy white clouds.

Boston Trip: Monday at Lowell National Historic Park

There was no rest for the weary after our busy Sunday evening. We started Monday with a trip to Lowell National Historical Park.  We went to the visitor center and watched a short film on the history and development of Lowell during the time of the industrial revolution. There were some small exhibits upon exiting the auditorium and we paused for a group photo.

John, Sue, Frank, Margaret and Joe humoring me for a picture under the gear exhibit.
I really thought all those gears were neat. It must be the mechanical engineer in me.

The National Street Car museum was closed on the Monday we were in Lowell, but there was a full size front end of a street car in the Visitor Center.  

Frank drove flawlessly!

And just outside the National Street Car museum this impressive steam engine was displayed. 

Frank really enjoyed this engine.

We walked over to the Mill Girls and Immigrants Exhibit that was housed in a reconstructed corporation boarding house. Young girls came from farms and lived in boarding houses set up for them.  All their meals were provided but they lived in cramped quarters and worked ~14 hour days 6 days a week. There apparently was no rest for the weary Mill Girls, either. You can see a summary of it in this Mill Girls article.  Here is a picture  of where they would eat their meals. They were fed a lot of calories, but then again, they worked a lot of hours.

This room held four tables seating eight Mill Girls each.
Girls slept in small rooms, two to a bed.

We rode a real trolley car on our return trip to the visitor center and headed home late afternoon. Then it was time for our meal with a lot of calories.  John barbecued different kinds of sausages – kielbasi, italian, turkey –  and we feasted on them and corn on the cob and fresh grown string beans and tomatoes. We relaxed a bit more, chatting over a nip of wine or sip of beer before reluctantly calling it a night, retiring to our bedrooms, listening to the chirping of the frogs, awakening the next morning to the twittering of the birds.

Tuesday morning dawned. Joe and Margaret would be leaving to fly back to the Washington, D.C. area and Frank and I would be heading up to Lake Winnipesaukee, NH. It was good to have had these days with dear college friends and we all agreed to pursue a joint trip or cruise somewhere "same time, next year". John and Sue were excellent host and hostess, chauffeurs, chefs, gardeners, naturalists, tour guides, conversationalists, historians, gamers, and puzzlers. Frank and I had a great visit and look forward to getting together again soon.

1st Ponder Post

I diverge from the chronicles of my Boston trip to insert a ponder, not wander, post.

Today is my daughter-in-law Carrie's birthday and so I wish her HAPPY BIRTHDAY. I sent her a birthday e-card via  the Jacquie Lawson site. (The site, by the way, has awesome animated cards lovely music.) I ordered her gift online from an electronic registry and had it shipped directly. But what struck in thinking about her this morning, is that although she is clearly technologically savvy - she answers my texts within about 10 seconds of me pushing send -  she is a lovely blend of the old-fashioned. I certainly do not mean old-fashioned in an-out-of-date, or in a dire-need-of-an-update sense but in a very good, personable, holding-on-to-the-best, touching way.

I am glad my son married "the girl next door".

Here I am generating a travel blog. I was away for nine days of travel and I sent no one a post card. Nobody. Nobody at all. Carrie is not like that. Wherever she and my son Dan go, even for just a short weekend away, I get a postcard.  I have saved all these. I used to just tuck them randomly in a picture frame, but I just bought a binder and have collected them in it, leaving the binder out like a coffee table book. These postcards tell me she was thinking of me, amidst her merriment or business, she thought of me enough to jot off a few lines. How old-fashioned and just plain nice is that?

I have heard among the social medium that the first "tweet" was actually a post card. A social media site says, "Postcards could be considered the first form of social media, like Twitter, short and sweet." 

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts states in its postcard exhibit, "In the decades around 1900, postcards were Twitter, e-mail, Flickr, and Facebook, all wrapped into one."

Carrie cares enough to send handwritten card stock glossy postcards, handwritten thank you notes, handwritten birthday cards, handwritten get well cards, handwritten happy retirement cards. I can go back and touch these and re-live the feeling of being appreciated. I do not need to search through some intangible bits and bytes buried on some computer chip to get that feeling.  Maybe I even sent those bits and bytes off to cyber heaven during some mass delete session.

I wish more people stayed old-fashioned in the sense that Carrie does. I am going to use Carrie as an example and try be more old-fashioned. Yes I am trying to move into the modern age with Facebook, blogging, drop box, but I vow to also devote more effort to the old-fashioned way of doing things. I should have more time now, right? After all... I am retired.

Boston Trip: Sunday Leisure Activities and Kimball Farm

Joe and Margaret were such good sports. They got off an airplane on Saturday and immediately launched into a full day's worth of site seeing, reminiscing and fancy dining without so much as a moment's rest. Good thing there is such a thing as Sunday - the day of rest. Well, at least sort of, for part of the day.

We arose Sunday morning and went to Mass at John and Sue's parish.  Afterward we stopped off and picked up... tah, dah... drum roll... Dunkin' Donuts! A blast from the past!

Don't these look good?

Frank and I chilled at John and Sue's with and Joe and Margaret – eating and touring their lovely property and vegetable garden area. The afternoon was filled with heated political discussions. So I am told. I took a much needed two hour nap! My sleeping patterns had been erratic. I had not yet adjusted to the three hour time zone difference. (I am secretly glad I missed the political discussions.)

When I took this photo it reminded of a park ranger giving an in-depth nature discussion tour.

We played Qwirkle  (I won, nana-nana-nanah) – and just talked in general. We did the kind of stuff your kids would be bored senseless if you did while they were present.

Match colors of different shapes or shapes of different colors on a crossword or Scrabble type format.
If you get six in a row, yell Qwirkle and get extra points.
This is a fun game and the tiles are tactilely pleasant to hold, too.

Later that night we met up again with Norma and Stan at Kimball Farm, a local entertainment and eatery, ice creamery, and general overall fun entertainment place.

It was Sunday night and the place was a really hoppin'! Kimball Farm is truly a spot for good clean family fun.

We enjoyed an informal outdoor dinner on the picnic tables with those classic red gingham oilcloth checkered table cloths that just scream country farm fun. The food was plentiful and good! The ice cream portions afterward were huge!

I, Sue, Margaret, and Joe pause eating to smile for the camera.

John, Stan, Norma and Frank stop chewing long enough for a photo.

John, Frank, and Joe ployed their skills at the batting cages. John, a former Little League baseball coach, was the highest scorer by far.

Frank is poised to drive that next ball hard and far! 

Frank and I challenged each other at the bumper boats. 

It is getting to be dusk but Frank and I had to go at it! We clobbered each other good, several times!

Both guys and gals posed for cheesecake type photos.

The guys insisted that the AT YOUR OWN RISK SIGN be in the gals photo
as an editorial statement of some sort. 

Frank, John, Stan, and Joe posed in a partial profile organized by height.
You cannot really expect an artsy grouping from four MIT nerds, now can you?

We returned to John and Sue's eager to relax and continue visiting the remainder of the evening. Best intentions aside, eyes drooped. The political discussion of the afternoon were not to be continued. That evening was not to have deep soul searching conversations or convoluted discussions of scientific principles late into the night. We parted to our separate bedrooms to konk out.

Boston Trip: MIT Memories Part 2

We began our walk down memory lane by walking inside the MIT Chapel. The wind caught the heavy wooden door and it banged open. Whoops! We broke right into a wedding in progress. Beating a hasty retreat we decided to break for lunch and ate at a pub type restaurant near Kendall Square called the Cambridge Brewing Company.

This is not us in the picture but you get the general vibe that this  pub style restaurant gives off.

After lunch we make a short detour to the MIT Museum before going back to campus. Alumni get in for free by showing your brass rat or spouting off the number of your course major. Sound off:

     Diane       Course 2.0, Mechanical Engineering,
     Margaret  Course 6.3, Computer Science
     Sue          Course 7.0, Biology
     Frank       Course 8.0, Physics
     Joe           Course 8.0, Physics
     John         Course 16.0, Aero and Astro Engineering

This may not be the exact route we walked but you get the idea.

One of the first exhibits on the main floor of the museum is a tribute to slide rules. Here is the exhibit. Look closely at that picture second down on the left. Recognize anyone?

In my finals we were not allowed to use hand held calculators since not all students had the advantage of owning one.

Yup. The photo captures me intently working away in one of my mechanical dynamics labs. That is pure analog equipment there – none of that new fangled digital stuff!

I am memorialized as a part of MIT history!

After touring the MIT museum we went back to campus to see the chapel, interface, and dorms. Surely that wedding must be over by now! Frank and Joe pulled on the chapel doors and they were locked. Oh, well. I tried and must have had the right touch because one sprung open. I peeked inside gingerly. Another wedding! This time I backed out inconspicuously. We moved on to McCormick Hall.

McCormick Hall was dedicated to offering a female only residence option to MIT coeds.  The first floor even provided "date rooms".

Since I'd been an undergraduate living there, McCormick Hall had expanded to encompass the neighboring building, previously called the Interface, and now called it the Annex. We used to have coffee and donuts after Catholic Mass there every Sunday. Margaret and I made the coffee. At first Joe brought the Dunkin' Donuts. Once Frank learned there were coeds involved he volunteered to help Joe. I remembering saving the chocolate covered donuts for the kids, much to their parents' dismay. That is where Frank and I met, and Joe and Margaret met, and the rest is history. TCC, the Tech Catholic Community, held work parties during which we painted the kitchen area and the seating area where students socialized after Mass.

John and Frank are inspecting and displaying pride in what they had worked on painting so many years ago.

John and I are pretending we are holding donuts. Hmm. I think donuts may have been bigger back then.

We continued our McCormick Hall tour after our diversion to the former Interface and Sunday morning memories. Here is the parlor where a social get together was hosted for the incoming freshman (no parents). Sue and I were the first person each of us met respectively right after our parents left after saying goodbye. We were both feeling a bit nervous, a bit scared, mildly abandoned, kind of excited, cautious, jittery... you name it – you get the picture.

This large parlor was the hub of many meetings and parties.

Sue and I talked to each other, really hit it off, and clung to each other as the first college friend we had made. Even though freshman year I was in the West Tower and she was in the East Tower, we would carry our food down the elevator, across the lobby and up the other elevator to have dinner together.

Sue (right) and me 42 years after we first met. Yikes!

After McCormick, Frank and I tried one last time to see the MIT Chapel. The chapel has a unique architectural design.  It is surrounded by a moat and has clear panels on the periphery of the circular building that look down at the water. When the sun is shining and the breeze is blowing, light bouncing off the ripples on the water is reflected back up onto the interior walls of the chapel, giving it really cool presence-of-God effect. Irreverently, one of our pastimes was calculating just how many packages of Jello would be required to immobilize those ripples into a big solid blob.

A wedding was just being dismissed and there was a receiving line. I respectfully and quietly walked behind the receiving line into the chapel. "What's the matter..." I whispered to a chagrined Frank, "...the bride and the groom will each think we are a guest for the other person's side... kind of like in the Wedding Crashers". I was bound and determined to get a picture of each of us in that chapel.

The sculpture behind the altar further enhances the dancing lights on the walls created by the ripples of the moat.

We attended many a Mass here.
One Christmas, the priest allowed Frank to read "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" as the sermon.

While Frank and I participated in our chapel shenanigans, John went to get the car. We drove past the tennis courts, past some of the other dorms, and around Tang Hall, the graduate dorm where Frank and Joe had lived. We were to meet up for dinner with Sue and John's son and his girlfriend and with our Boston area friends Norma and Stan, also from MIT days. Norma was a year behind Margaret, Sue, and me and Stan was a grad student and still is a co-worker of John's. Norma had made  5:00 pm dinner reservations at Strega's Waterfront known for its celebrity customers, stunning architecture, and authentic Italian cuisine.

We had waterfront window seats at the far end of this photo as you look through this grandiose tiled arch.

We enjoyed good conversation, great food, and had the great pleasure being joined by John and Sues' grown son John and his girlfriend Sasha.

Sasha and John were instrumental in selecting the restaurant.

Here are the eight MIT grads gathered for our photo op on the Boston waterfront. I think we look happy and damn good after all these years!

The grad school guys Joe, Stan, Frank, John
The undergrad gals Margaret, Norma, me, Sue

The red building in the far background is Anthony's Pier 4 restaurant.  That was Frank's and my special place for the occasional fancy dinner when we were at MIT. Our timing this trip was a bit off. Anthony's Pier 4 closed just one week before we arrived due to Boston Waterfront renewal project. Hopefully they will re-open and we will catch them on another trip back east. I remember waitresses there would walk around in colonial garb and hand out buttered corn on the cob and huge popovers that were to die for.

Frank and me in front of our special place, Anthony's Pier 4.

Boston Trip: MIT Memories Part 1

Joe and Margaret's flight from Washington, DC was due into Logan airport at 10:02 am Saturday morning. John, Sue, Frank and I all piled into John and Sue's seven passenger van to pick them up, ready for a day of déjà vu on the MIT campus and a dinner at an upscale wharf-side restaurant in Boston. After dropping Frank and me off at the terminal to meet Joe and Margaret, John and Sue parked in the cell phone lot for Logan. I kept them updated on the status of Joe and Margaret's flight, their arrival, and luggage collection with a pretty constant chatter of texts.

I had just gotten a new iPhone a week or so earlier and was practicing how to use it.  I had said that one of the first things I was going to do when I retired was get a smart phone but I did not appreciate just how dumb smart phones can make you feel.  I used the voice activated feature of Siri to create the texts. That is a laugh in itself to see how what you say is interpreted and converted to text by the phone but since I text at a snail's pace it helps a lot.  It would also be a lot faster if I were not so anal as to go back and correct these misinterpreted text words before sending off the message. I need to get with the program and realize that it is culturally acceptable to have misspelled words in text messages.

After a few brief moments of concern when the luggage carousel stopped moving and no bag for Margaret was to be seen, a porter brought out a cart of additonal bags.  Lo and behold her bag was at the very bottom of it. Crisis avoided, we proceeded with curbside pickup and drove on into Cambridge to walk the MIT campus and environs.

We visited our old large lecture hall 26-100 where a lot of the core classes were held. I remember taking an electronics course there, among others. Behind Sue (our biology major) near the left upper corner was still suspended a 12+ foot long double helix DNA model.  I wonder if it was the same one from 40 years ago? Do they dust it regularly?

Margaret, Sue, Joe, me, Frank at the top of 26-100.

John, Margaret, Sue, Joe, and Frank. The guys were grad students. We gals were all undergrads, class of '75.

We also visited the other large lecture Hall 10-250. I listened to many a lecture and took many a test in 10-250.

I could still feel the jitters of taking my gosh awful hard fluid dynamics final here.
I remember taking the final. I remember nothing on it. I remember it was HARD!
I remember I got an A and the professor offered me a job with his company.

Those nine blackboards in 10-250 raised and lowered and by the end of a lecture they would often be filled!

We sung the MIT parody of the song "Give My Regards to Broadway"

          Give my regards to Kresge

          Remember me to Kendall Square

          Tell all the nerds in 10-250

          That I will soon be there...

We walked the long main corridor and looked at the bulletin boards.  The Square Dancing club is still active.  Joe, Margaret, Frank, and I belonged and were active members in our youthful (ahem) days at MIT. 

Pass Thru, Star Thru, and go Left Allemande.      Sides Face... Grand Square!

We exited at the end of the main corridor, looking forward from 77 Massachusetts Avenue toward Kresge Auditorium.

Kresge Auditorium, McCormick Hall girls dorm, and the Chapel are to the left. The student union is to the right.
The school store, the Coop, is relocated to Kendall Square and is no longer in the student union.
We used to square dance in the student union.

Traditionally the night before registration the Lecture Series Committee would show a porn flick.
Usually more cultural correct events were held here. I remember seeing the Man of La Mancha performed.
(I also remember going with Frank to the porn flick Flesh Gordon.  Setting? The planet Porno.)

We crossed Mass Ave and looked back.

 This is the image of MIT from 77 Massachusetts Avenue that is emblazoned in my memory. The iconic Great Dome which is is cast into the MIT class ring along with a beaver is farther back on the building, not visible in this photo.
The ring is affectionately called a Brass Rat. Why?
Because the beaver is the engineer of the animal world and the MIT engineer is the animal of the engineering world!

Aaaah... so many times I had crossed at that intersection, passed through those columns, and looked up...

Entry to MIT from "77 Mass Ave"