Mary had a little lamb

On Sunday we got up to hear the rain falling. Not that that stopped us. Lee took us on a driving tour of the area. The first place we stopped at was Longfellow's Wayside Inn. Longfellow was a poet and wrote a poem about the Wayside Inn which was originally built in 1702 and is America's oldest operating Inn.

You can walk around the Inn and some of the rooms have been preserved so you can see what it would have been like back in the 1700 and 1800's.

One of the preserved rooms

Throughout the Inn they have discretely configured the traditional lighting so that
it is now powered by electricity, however the strength of the lighting is the
same as what would have been generated by the traditional methods. Pretty cool huh!

Sitting Room - that you can use.

Example of an old bedroom.

In the old days ropes were used in a bed where we now have the mattress.
They used that device on the bed to tighten the ropes when they became slack,
hence where the saying "Sleep Tight" came from.

The Old Bar Room that is still in use today.

When we came out of the Wayside Inn it was still bucketing down with rain. We drove past the Martha-Mary Chapel which you may recognise from several films. The latest film to have filmed there was the Matthew McConaughey film "Ghost of Girlfriends Past".

Martha Mary Chapel - built by Henry Ford in 1940 in
honour of Mr and Mrs Ford's mothers.

And right next door to the Martha Mary Chapel is the Redstone School where "Mary had a Little Lamb" (originally it was "Mary and Her Little Lamb") nursery rhyme came about.

Redstone school house.

We also drove passed Orchid House, home of writer Louise May Alcott and where she wrote "Little Women".

Orchard House

I was just so excited by the amazing history of the area, and they were all so relatively close to each other too. It was so great.

We then drove into a park to view a tiny wooden bridge. Now this bridge is a very important and historical bridge.

It was on this bridge where the Revolutionary war (1775) between the British and the Rebels began. It's still an all wooden bridge and as you walk over it you can hear the water rushing by below. Surrounded by nothing but fields and peaceful silence, the first gun shot must have sounded so loud. Whilst standing on that bridge, soaking in all the history (and the unfortunate rain), I thought to myself, on that fateful day, just before the first gun shot rang out, that the peaceful silence must have been deafening to each man on both sides.

We then stopped for lunch at a lovely old Inn and then headed into Boston.

We didn't have a lot of time around Boston, so it is definitely somewhere I would like to spend more time in. The first place we stopped at was to see the USS Constitution, the worlds oldest warship that's still in commission.

USS Constitution.

 This warship, built in 1797, was also known as "Ironsides" because cannonballs from opposing ships could not penetrate her sides. She is made from "Live Oak" an extremely strong wood (just like our Ironbark).

Now she is mainly used for ceremonial services, but even in the rain she is a striking ship painted in black, white and red.

We then parked the car in the city centre and walked around the town for a while and just like New York the architecture here is amazing. So many different era's and so beautifully maintained.

Inside City Hall

By the end of the day, when Bryan and I stepped onto our LimoLiner heading back to New York we couldn't rub the smiles off our faces from such a wonderful weekend. Thank you again Lee and Katherine!

Oh yes.......I got myself a snowglobe!