A Face from Home

We had a fun few hours with Catrina (Steve..our youngest sons wife) Wednesday night and Thursday. She was here for a convention with people from her office at the U of U. We picked her up Wednesday evening and just had dinner out at Not Your Average Joe's. Yes, it's a good restaurant chain here in the Boston area. The one thing Cat will tell you is that I don't do well driving in the Boston city traffic. It was rush hour and the more I drive here, the more I dislike the general population. A bunch of enabled people that when they get behind the wheel they think they're the only ones on the road. We about got taken out, so to speak, a couple of times and people honk and push you off the road. And when there's so many cars and so many people on foot, plus wicked taxi drivers, you know why you want to take the subway----even if people DO throw themselves in front of the train!!!! Yikes!!

We decided not to drive in town with the rush hour (oh, morning rush is from 6 am to 10 am and evening starts at 2 pm til 7 pm)Thursday morning so Cat took the T from the hotel and we picked her up at the station at our end. Much more convenient and took less time too!! We ate at the Main Street Cafe in Concord where they have marvelous panini sandwiches. Then we did the tourist bit.
Went to the Old North Bridge first where the British met the Colonists and the first British soldiers were killed and the Colonists started the first event that pushed the British back to Boston.We decided that Cat would be able to see more if we did some of the things around Boston rather than spend the day in Salem....she'll save that for "another" time. She knows enough history that the places we went were interesting. Besides, she brought some really crummy weather with her and it rained all week. She left this morning and the sun came out this afternoon!!!









This was a Kodak moment. A really old knotty tree with the thickest trunk ever--and some other Kodak nuts took our picture with the Old North Bridge and the monument behind us. We walked thru the battlefield up to the Visitors Center..of course we left our umbrella's in the car. Why did we even bring them??

After the bridge we drove thru the rain and saw Louisa May Alcott's home, also Ralph Waldo Emerson.....oh, I forgot, we went to Walden Pond as our first stop but I guess the pictures are on Catrina's camera....she sat in Thoreau's chair in his little house and dipped her hand into Walden Pond. Too cold for swimming altho we did see some people swimming way out. Anyway, after going to the Minuteman Visitors center and seeing the film on the beginning of the revolution and driving around Lexington Green, we went to the Charlestown Naval Shipyard. This is a picture of Boston from the shipyard.

Catrina was excited to see the USS Constitution but the first ships we saw were these Navy ships that had just pulled into port. There was one that we could have toured but we ran out of time!

We waited in a nice long line to get on the Constitution! They're doing an extensive restoration of the ship that is 211 years old. I guess we'd need a good restoration if we were that old too!!

The ship was first commissioned to protect American ships from pirates off the coast of Africa who would take the ships and hold them for ransom. Does that sound like a familiar story just a couple months ago? Old Ironsides got it's name as the pirates thought it must have been made of iron as they could never sink it with their guns. Actually, it is NOT made from iron.

The sailors on the Constitution wear the uniforms of the 1700's; their pants made of cloth like the sails and shirts made of cotton. They are actually members of the Navy and this is their assignment for 2 years! What a fun assignment.They were all young and energetic and knew their history.

This is one of the guns (they are cannons before being loaded on the ships but once they're on board they are "guns". Each one weights 7000 pounds and takes 9-14 men to work one gun.

You can see the guns are lined up at every port hole on both sides of the ship. There were about 450 sailors on board to man the guns. And they only had one cook on board. That was just a bit of interesting info I remembered!!!










This is where they had the gun powder. Boys 8-16 years old were on board and they were responsible to getting the gun powder and the cannonballs to each gun so they could be shot every 90 seconds.



















When there's no gun in the hole, this is what you can see. Actually, this was a good deck to be on as there is at least some ventilation.

This is the command center on the boat where the officers would be found issuing orders!


All the comforts of home! How would you like to sleep here?? The sailors could only sleep four hours a night as there wasn't room for everyone to sleep at one time. They had to work 20 hour shifts!!! Where was the union????

This is looking thru a barricade into the officers quarters. Much more comfortable as they each had their own little cubicle and a bed!



And here we are in the Constitution Museum. It was a fun altho wet day. Cat had to get back to go to dinner at a fishy place with her group and we had office hours (of course no one came). This just makes us more excited to have two of our grandkids come to see us the end of July

We have a Saturday off...kind of.....tomorrow. But we're going to redo the Self-Employment workshop to include some good material we've gotten from some online seminars we get from Atlanta. Sunday we're going to New Haven to meet with a group of people that the Stake Employment person is getting together for some help. So we'll do an hours worth of mini workshop stuff. Wish every stake would do that. Time marches on!!!!

Thanks Cat for giving us a fun time!!!!!