Its a boy!
Sorry for the slow updates lately - work, and life in general, have been insanely busy. Anyway taking a break from the trip updates again (one day I'll finish that story!), 2 days ago we went to the medical centre here in Boston to get our 2nd ultrasound scan and the breaking news is: its a boy! And so far everything is looking really great - mother and baby are in tip-top health. The funny thing was - the doctor said he is in the top 19 percent of babies for this age of development in terms of height! I guess thats Grandad and Great Grandads genes, certainly it doesn't come from Natalies side of the family :) Perhaps we have a budding Miami Heat player on our hands... way to go little one!
Back at the arcade!
Yep - the next morning we got up nice and early, headed out for breakfast, screamed at the moving company again (we're starting to get ignored by the manager now - I think he knows they've screwed this up pretty much as good as possible) and then off to the arcade. This time - Natalie and Karina come along. Mixed feelings here - they arent exactly known for their attention spans, especially where gaming is concerned :( Anyway theres a kiddies sections of rides etc downstairs - should be good for a little while at least. We start there, play a little air hockey, then I slowly slink off upstairs to the peace of the Robotron machine. Its not long before I'm getting hassled... a few credits later and I need to take them back to the lodge, and I return for an hours peacful blasting. Guilt makes me limit it to an hour and I go back to pick them up for a day out, but "I'll be back!"
So, we don't really know where to go - its still not full season so a lot of the atractions are closed. We have a drive around, find lots of closed arcades and other typical "seaside fair" and end up playing on the beach for a while. Although its a lake, its easy to forget this and think you're at the coastline... despite the cold wind we had a fun time playing on the sand and the playground with Karina, until she decides to get into
the mud and water and start getting herself into a real mess. As usual, pulling her away from such incredible pleasures results in a screaming session, but thats par for the course! Its a shame it was so windy because its a nice place, and on a better day, with everything open, it could be a nice relaxing area to spend a little time. Anyway - the rest of the day was spent eating, chasing more chipmunks, bathing, and finally - more arcade action!!!! Tomorrow is our last day at Weirs Beach and we need to move on further down into Maine (or even to Boston - if our stuff arrives as promised - though I have a bad feling about that). I'm sure I can fit in one last arcade session...........
Weirs Beach continued
Back to the story. So, we're all set at the lodge and its been a tiring day. We bought some beers, snacks, and decided to settle for the night after the drive and the adventures we had (I'm skipping most of the painful bits for the most part - but today we spent several hours arranging stuff - mostly to do with fighting with the moving company who still didnt move our stuff from Montreal and have broken their promised delivery date several times now - at the moment we have no idea when it may arive. We also ended up sending emergency faxes all over the place just to get some electricity for when we arrive, tho it remains to be seen if it will happen. Doing this in New Hampshire, which is utterly devoid of contact with the outside world, is excruciatingly difficult I would add!)
Back to matters in hand. Remember a little while ago I said I had a bigger plan, which is why we didnt stop at Woodstock? Well, theres a little something located in Weirs Beach which is rather special. At least, its rather special to old geeky guys such as myself! Since the early 70s theres been a family amusement arcade here, and its still operated to this day. The big draw now, however, is that its home to the biggest classic video game museum in the States, perhaps the world. Its called Funspot, and its about half a mile from our lodge! I'd planned on paying a quick visit the next day, but once Karina was in bed the temptation got the better of me.
So off I go at 8PM for some retro gaming goodness, and boy was I in for a treat! Theres hundreds of games there, perfectly maintained... from the early 70's black and white machines to pseudo classic stuff from the late 80s, and a whole bunch of games I never played back in the day or at least not in their original form. When I walk into the upstairs room at Funspot its like a step back to 1980! The sound of 200 games in attract mode coupled with an 80s jukebox - very cool stuff indeed. But dilemas: what to play first? Funspit works on tokens rather than coins, so I stick $20 in and get too many tokens to count - I think it was around 100 or 150! So the best strategy seemed to be start at one end and work around all the games. Anyway before I knew it the lights were out and it was a
lmost midnight and I was being evicted, not having made it more than a third of the way round and having managed to go through a good bunch of the tokens too (some practice is in order on some of these machines, I'm rusty!) The funny part was - all night there was only a maximum of about 5 people in the retro section and most of the time it was me and one other guy. The following week was to see the world championships
at Funspot, an annual event held by Twin Galaxies, so I am guessing the other guy was there for the competition, or purely on a retro-vacation a bit like myself :) I have a feeling I'll be back at the arcade tomorow...
Down through New Hampshire
OK so lets get back to our trip to Boston! So, after the travel sick incident is left at the border, we drive down through Vermont for a while and then across and down New Hampshire. Our intention was to drive towards the lakes district in the White Mountains and stay there for a few nights. When we planned the trip we had no idea how gorgeous the scenery would be through the mountains - only that the lake area seemed really beautiful. Its a shame the weather was so bad because I'm sure we'd have taken some great views of the winding road curving betwen some massive mountains literally butted up against the road side. This is a place we'll certainly go back to visit as its a popular camping and skiing area. Anyway, the few pictures we do have here should give you a taste for the area.
So we drove down through the mountains, over to Woodstock (we'd thought about staying here - its such a legendary place after all - but "we" had bigger plans - read on!) and into the lake region for a well deserved break from travelling. It was a little trippy to see the towns of Bethlehem, Moscow, Berlin, Milan, Northumberland and Lancaster all within probably half an hours drive of one another! Our route took us down highway 93 (strangely enough this is the road thats right next to our new house now!) and then we cut across to our first stop - a huge lake called Lake Winnipesaukee (near the town of Gilford!) and to our lodge right by the lake in the town of Weirs Beach. Thats a funny place - on the one hand it looks like its in some sort of time warp back to what I can imagine was the US equivanent of the Great British Seaside Resort, with its miniature golfs and drive in movie theatres, but on the other hand I kinda like that, and by all accounts its a really busy tourist area in summer season.
Anyway - finally we arrived after what was to turn out to be the first of 6 weeks of major unplanned detours (for detours I guess I mean "getting hopelessly lost") due completely to google maps inability to direct you to the end of your own street. However - we found our place though a mixture of rough directions from some suspiciously redneck-esque locals and, well... luck! The lodge was massive and completely empty bar ourselves and one other family who we never saw but only heard. It sort of reminded me a little of the hotel Jack is the caretaker of in the Shining - a little cold or sterile feeling, empty long halls with lots of doorways leading off them. Fortunately Natalie hasn't seen that movie - I'm not sure we'd have stayed long otherwise :) But it was a nice place for us - we had a suite with living room, kitchen, huge bedroom, 2 TVs and DVD... pretty much everything. And a huge patio area leading to a shared lawn surrounded by trees (and chipmunks - so we discovered!) and overlooking the lake. Very tranquil and quiet, and of course Karina loved it... chasing chipmunks and bothering beavers because her main goal in life for those 2 days.
To be continued.....
First time in Harvard
Another piece of old news I'm afraid - we're so behind on our updates (damn you Comcast!!!).
A couple of weeks ago we took our first trip into Harvard Square (the area comprised pretty much of the Harvard University, sitting on the banks of the river and surrounded by history, beautiful architecture and lots and lots of groovy coffee shops, bars and restaurants!) for a quick look around but with the main intention of visiting the Chinese Dragon Boat Festival on the river.
While we were in Montreal we thought there were a lot of festivals there, particularly in the summer months, but Boston so far beats it hands down, both in terms of sheer number of activities but also in diversity. There are so many cultures represented and so many vastly varying subject matters that there really is something for everyone as long as you are prepared to make a move and go to see these things. Thats one thing we probably didnt do enough of in Canada - actually motivate ourselves to do stuff, but I guess we really wern't too happy and I think it had quite a bearing on our laziness :)
So - we took a nice leisurly walk through the Harvard Square area, stopped in for coffee, and made it down to the water for the huge Chinese festival along the banks of the river. There were lots of activities for the kids - lantern making, Chinese writing, fortune cookies (of course!) and a tonne of other stuff that we didnt even investigate because it was so crowded.
Definately a good, family day out for a lot of people. Lots of food too - surprisingly anything and everything remotely "eastern" including a myriad of Indian food, for some reason. Not that I ever complain about that you understand :) In the end all we sampled (well, myself and Natalie sampled it and Karina guzzled it) was the home made ice cream which was some of the best we ever tasted, but boy did we regret it that night! Karina was on an im
mense sugar rush until late that evening... if I mention Beavis and Butthead - well either you understand or you don't. She was hyper!!! But it was a blast - great to see her having such a good day out. We gotta take more time to look around Harvard, its a gorgeous part of the city. So much to do, so little time......
The new pad
It seems that its a night for recaps... I was just pulling a few images off the camera and realised I should probably post some of this stuff for the folks back home. OK so - in between all the problems that we'll continue to document on our intermittent posts updating everyone on the whole relocation process, we finally managed to settle somewhere. As you'll read, this is our 2nd place in a couple of weeks, pretty much, but finally we're here and starting to feel pretty settled.
Its a nice neighbourhood, close enough to Boston to feel part of the city but far enough to be residential and family friendly. We have the athletics field of a major university right across the street from our front door, a nice private garden out the back for Karina to play in, only one set of immediate neighbours (a Brazilian family who are really friendly) and... well, lots of trees and birds :) At the same time we're a 15 minute walk from the coolest neighbourhoods in West Boston - Cambridge, Sumerville, MIT and Harvard are all easily accessible to us, so we really do have the best of both worlds. Anyway - this is our new pad... as you can see, Karina is pretty happy to be in her new house...
Happy Birthday America!
OK a quick break from the "trip" recap!
Yesterday was the 4th of July - American Independance Day. Of course everyone knows this is a huge holiday in the States and we decided to take in some of the festivities, not having realised that Boston holds the biggest celebrations in the States, mostly due to the history of the
patriots, the signing of the Declaration of Independance and Massachusetts being the birthplace of Samuel and John Adams. So we found out that the Boston Pops are playing, as is customary, a free open air concert at the Esplanade, the riverside area along the Charles River here in Boston. The celebrations were actually part of Harbour Fest, a week long series of events and happenings culminating in the concert and huge firework display over the river. Due to the rain and thunder storms during the day we didnt venture down until around 7:30 and it was already really packed with people! We managed to get to the concert area quite easily, albeit that we couldnt actually get to the park area in front of the stage. Instead we watched from a distance but had clear sound of the entire show. It was a blast hearing the full orchestra (most famous, perhaps, as having had John Williams as a conductor since 1980 - he of Star Wars theme tune fame, not to mention numerous other movie scores) playing a mixture of movie themes (Rocky, Star Wars etc), show tunes, more traditional American songs such as Yankie Doodle Dandy and even an excerpt from God Save The Queen!
But - by 10 PM the place was insanely busy! Organisers were estimating 500,000 people in attendance. I'm not sure if this is accurate, but it probably wasnt far wrong. Anyway we found a back route that took us back to the bridge over the river and we found a nice spot not too far from the metro station (for a quick escape - if that was possible) where we could see the majority of the fireworks, and what an amazing display it was! All choreographed to a musical score which unfortunately we wern't in a position to hear, but it was a stunning end to what was a great night for us and I'm sure a fantastic week for the city of Boston.
We're already planning next years festivities - you can guarantee it involves coolers of food and beer (actually - scrap the food!) and some raincoats.
