The Distracted Wanderer

Two weeks ago this coming Friday, I had occasion to make the trip up to Montserrat to drop off a few things that Amanda needed that were too big to be mailed and decided that whilst I was up that way, it might be a good time to finally stay at a place in Salem that I've been wanting to stay at for a couple of years now. Back in October of 2008, Amanda, her friend Darci, my friend Amy and myself spent a day in Salem and while there had lunch at The Tavern on the Green at the Hawthorne Hotel .  After lunch was over I popped in to the lobby of the Hawthorne for a couple of pictures and got one that you can see here that seemed to have some sort of an orb up near the ceiling.  In Salem, that's not at all surprising and at the Hawthorne it's even less surprising as the hotel is reported to be haunted. Given all that, is it any wonder I wanted to stay there? Salem is a very short drive from Montserrat so after dropping off Amanda's things and taking she and one of her hou

The thought occurred to me this morning that I never got around to doing a post on my stop in Lexington after I had visited parts of Concord a couple weekends ago. Truth be told, I still have posts to do of Baltimore, too, and that was how long ago? The end of July? Oy!  Honestly, I need to start staying the heck home and editing the pictures I have rather than going out and constantly taking more - which is, of course, easier said than done it seems. Anyhow, because I'm still trying to catch up with things here at home off of the computer, I'm just going to make this a short pictorial post rather than one of my lengthy "wanna-be-a-history-teacher" posts.  Plus I didn't really spend anywhere near as much time in Lexington as I could have and will no doubt go back again sometime so I can bore you with the history later - unless I get carried away here which is always a distinct possibility! The beautiful church above, yet another quintessential white clapboar

On the Sunday after I dropped Amanda off at Montserrat and met up with Barb and other members of her Tewksbury High School Class of 1972, I finally got to go do something I had been wanting to do for a long time - visit the area of Concord/Lexington and explore a little bit of the history of the area.  As I mentioned in my post the other day, I was able to take pictures of the homes of a few of the famous authors in the area as well as their final resting places but my main reason for going was to search out the Old North Bridge and the sight of "the shot heard 'round the world". In order to do that I first stopped at the North Bridge Visitors Center which is located in a brick mansion that was built in 1911 by descendents of Major John Buttrick, the colonial officer who first ordered his militia to fire upon British soldiers on April 17th, 1775 and thereby commit treason against the British Empire. I'm not sure if this is an original chandelier or not but I tho