Goodbye Boston!

 Goodbye Boston!*

Goodbye Hancock Tower. Goodbye Prudential Centre.  We will miss hanging out with our Isis friends in your enormous Food Court, but my credit card will at last get a break from your extensive shopping opportunities.

Goodbye Copley Square.  I have to admit your Farmers' Market was pretty average, but you were a nice place to hang out in the summertime.

Goodbye Public Garden.  Zoë and I loved to walk around your lake and enjoy the beautiful flowers, but we found the Bostonians' obssession with the ducklings slightly strange. 

Goodbye Longfellow Bridge.  Our whimsical tour guide told us you were so named because the poet Longfellow would walk across you every day to visit his girlfriend in Cambridge.  I suspect that was a load of old bollocks.  I won't miss your narrow and disappearing pavements on our way to swim class, but we will miss your views across the Esplanade and river. 

Goodbye State House and Boston Common.  You were the first place we visited when we arrived.  We have seen you go from bare trees and brown grass, to green and lush with foliage. It's a shame that on hot days you are full of sunbathing bums and drunks. 

Goodbye baby friends!  You were Zoë's first ever friends and we hope we will stay in touch and you will stay friends for many years.  Goodbye Isis and our mommie's group and Teresa our teacher.  Thank you for all that you taught us in a time when Zoë went on her breakneck journey from newborn to chattering crawler. 

Goodbye to our lovely friends.  Without you I would have gone totally bonkers!  Thank you for your wonderful welcome, for being my friends and for making me really sad we have to go home. 

There are loads of other random things I will miss, like going to chiropractor, wandering down Charles Street, hanging out on the Esplanade, going to the swings, eating at Legal Sea Foods, strolling down Commonwealth Avenue, having a swimming pool, the wonderful hot weather (but not the wet, lousy weather), Willie the doorman, watching back-to-back-to-back episodes of terrible US TV dramas like Law & Order and Grey's Anatomy, the Cambridgeside Galleria, Macy's, Carter's clothes for babies, and people finding our accents endlessly charming.  Most of all I will miss spending so much time with my amazing little girl, who came on this adventure with us and was the star of the whole show.  Zoë, I hope you will read this one day and learn all about the cool stuff we got up to and how much fun we had. 

We have had a WICKED AWESOME six months; thank you Boston and goodbye......!

* With apologies to Goodnight Moon

Eating our way around Maine, one lobster at a time

Now we are back in London, which is bit grey and overcast, it would be very easy to forget our wonderful holiday at the end of our Stateside stay.  After we left the Samoset, we headed south to Falmouth to visit Eamon's ex-colleague Edward and his lovely family.  Edward and his wife Emily have got it sorted - they moved away from Boston and their busy lives and now live with their growing family (little Henry is only 9 weeks and Theo is 3!) in a wonderful big house 5 minutes walk from the seaside.  Jealous?  I should coco!

We hung out with Edward and Emily and paid a visit to Portland but after 3 days said goodbye and headed further south still, to Kennebunkport.  To be honest we had wanted to go to the Vermont lakes, or maybe the New Hampshire mountains, but Zoë's inability to cope with a car journey longer than half an hour would have made such a long trip impossible. 

In the event, Kennebunkport was pretty cool and Eamon even managed to get his hair cut by the same barber that cuts George Bush (Senior)'s hair!  And, just for a change, I ate some lobsters.  Well, you gotta make hay whilst the sun shines and at $5 a pound it would've been rude not too.  I am going to miss my regular lobster feasts almost as much as my Law & Order: SVU marathons on USA.  Happy times.   

I ate a lobster and it was THIIIS BIG!

Tequila!

OK, so we are now at the airport (I am blogging this whilst waiting in the queue to check in, how technologic am I!), and not only are we suffering because BA are such a bunch of inept morons (they haven't even opened the check in desks yet), but we are suffering terribly with evil Mexican hangovers. 

Last night we had a farewell thrash at La Verdad, apparently the place to go for Boston's best (and most lethal) margaritas.  Turns out those kindly Isis moms aren't so sweet and wholesome after all, thay are full on party girls. How the hell did I not discover this before?

Needless to say we are feeling pretty sketchy today and not really in the mood for a transatlantic flight with 200 adolescent American high schoolers, but before we know it we'll be back at Heath Villas, tired but happy to be home.

I'll be doing a couple more posts to finish off the last week of our American adventure, but this will be my last on American soil.  Sniff..... 

Tiny Bandit

Just look at her go!!!!  Now all we need to do is grow eyes in the back of our heads.....

OH THE LUXURY!

On some grey day a few months ago, when I was probably feeling gloomy and Eamon had been working non-stop for days, I decided that we needed to book our end-of-stay holiday, and that it was going to be a REAL NICE ONE. So after much Googling we booked ourselves 5 nights at the prestigious (trans. expensive) Samoset Resort in Rockland, Maine.

The view from our deck.  WICKED AWESOME!

Maine styles itself as "Vacationland" on its car number plates (Massachusetts' motto is the anodyne "Spirit of America"; New Hampshire's motto is far more scary: "Live Free or DIE!"). Maine is a certainly a popular holiday destination, probably because of its stunning coastal scenery. It reminds me a lot of Cornwall - beautiful rugged coastline, friendly people, seafood (LOBSTERS), grey drizzly days alternating with clear, breezy sunny days, golf courses, pensioners.... I could go on.

Greetings from the Pool Bar!

The Samoset has a golf course and I would say a high proportion of its guests are very average hobby golfers kicking the arse of 60, but it was a great place to bring Baby Zoë. We had a lovely large suite, so she could sleep peacefully in her Pack n Play whilst we could watch TV next door or sit on the deck. There was an indoor and outdoor pool, and some swings too!

We didn't just laze around every day sunbathing and demanding margaritas from the cabana boy (just most of them).  We also took a trip on the ferry to Vinalhaven, one of the many islands that dot the coast of Maine.  If mainland Maine is like Cornwall, then Vinalhaven is much as I would imagine the Falkland Islands, only with decent weather and full of obnoxious people on holiday from New York.  Check it out.   

We swam, we drank, we walked, we took ferries, I ate an awful lot of lobster, we slept, we sunbathed and generally had a lovely relaxing time.  Rockland Rocks!!!

The Lobster Fights Back

We are now in Maine on vacation (trans. holiday).  I will spare you the tortuous details of our journey here and will fill you in on our activites on a later date, but for now, simply know that we are in the lobster capital of the entire world and I am doing my best to meet eat every lobster I come across whilst we are here. 

The Long (Boozy) Goodbye

Yesterday we moved out of our apartment at 4 Emerson Place and all this week we have been saying various goodbyes to the friends that have made our stay in Boston so special.

On Tuesday Katie rounded up the original Isis mom-crew and we took our babies for a slap-up lunch at the Cheesecake Factory.  First of all I have to point out that the Cheesecake Factory is my most favourite chain restaurant in the US.  Its menu is, like, around 30 pages long.  Seriously!  But for some reason I always have the cobb salad (lunch size, and even then there's enough left over for a decent meal in the evening too).  Secondly, it was totally amazing to see the babies that a few months ago could barely hold their heads up sitting in high chairs and drinking from sippy cups!  Sniff, I have a lump in my throat just thinking about it....

Thank you wicked awesome Isis moms for being my buddies, and a particularly big thank you to Katie for organising the lunch for me and, more importantly, being such a good friend to me whilst I've been in Boston. 

On Thursday it was Eamon's last day at work.  To celebrate we went to the Equity Residential Annual Margarita Party with the neighbourinhos, Chris, Jessica and wee Amelia.  My experience to date with margaritas is limited and my only observation would be that they taste a lot like seawater.  Those served out of margarita fountains (!) at the party were not much different.  The food was pretty good though, it's just a shame that despite being held at the pool we weren't allowed in the pool to cool down after all those jalapeno peppers.  Well, you know how all those doctors can be after a few margaritas, they can go ker-azy!

Two drunk mommies (at this point I am past caring

whether I am sucking my stomach in for photos)

On Friday, our last night in apartment 1014, Bill and Helen came over and we went out for a boozy dinner whilst Eve and Zoë stayed at home under Bridget's watchful eye. 

Helen has beaten me to the punch by blogging about the evening first so I won't add to what she has so eloquently written, suffice to say that the next morning we were not in the tipmost-toppermost form to be sorting out the remainder of our possessions before hitting the road to start our vacation (as you can probably surmise from the photos above, there were a few sore heads the next day). 

Zoë finally says goodbye to that crappy swing, now on sale at the Salvation Army on Mass Ave

When we arrived in Boston at the end of February we had two suitcases each.  Going on holiday yesterday we managed to fill a Chevy HHR, Helen and Bill very kindly took away a people carrier worth of our stuff, we had four boxes shipped back to London and Eamon and Chris took a car load of gear to the charity shop.  That's an awesome volume of THINGS* to have accumulated in just six months. 

So, in conclusion, when we leave Boston we'll be leaving behind a huge bunch of stuff but, more importantly, a great bunch of friends. Sniff sniff, that lump in my throat's come back......

* Or TUT as it's known in our house.

Zoë in Wonderland

On our last full day in Boston we made the inevitable pilgrimage to the end of the Blue Line to take Zoë to Wonderland.   

It was pretty weird hearing a disembodied voice on the T saying: "Next stop, Wonderland!", and I am not too sure quite what we were expecting from a place whose name conjures up all kinds of visions and expectations of extraordinariness.  For a few brief years in the early 20th century Wonderland was an amusement park featuring attractions such as rollercoasters and "a re-enactment of an urban conflagration" (?).  The amusement park is now a delapidated greyhound stadium near to the Suffolk Downs racetrack (both tracks have seen better days), located in the strange and lonely hinterland beyond the airport, along the North Shore. 

This is Wonderland now, a strange combination of Stalinist Black Sea beach resort and Ostend in Belgium.  I once spent a weekend in Ostend in 2000 with my friend Kirsten, and the memory still haunts me to this day.  Ostend was full of tremendously unattractive Flemish people and Wonderland was full of mahogany-coloured pensioners sunbathing on the pavement (why? when there's a beach right there?). 

In all fairness, it's pretty cool when you can hop on a train in the middle of the city and in 20 minutes be at the beach, so I'm sorry we left it until the last minute to visit this blog's namesake.  We could have come to this fabled land of wonder on sunny weekends and worked on our own mahogany tans.  And we couldn't even stay long when we did visit - there was so much still to do before we had to be out of the flat by noon the next day.  But we were glad we finally did go and spend our last day in Boston as a family taking Zoë to Wonderland.