Tn'A: Boston

(Apologies, I am going to forget some of the details on this segment, I got sick after Boston and didn’t get to write it until well after Thanksgiving!)

The drive back to the states went by pretty quick. Customs only had a few questions, so again we were lucky in crossing the border quickly. We were pretty tired from the previous night’s activities, so just stuck to driving. We stayed overnight in Burlington, VT, doing the couchsurfing thing. This time our host pretty much kept to himself and his family, so it was kinda two ships crossing in the night kinda thing. We did take a walk around downtown Burlington in a pedestrian mall, which was very nice.

In the moring, it was off to Boston. We got kinda turned around getting gas in one place, but successfully navigated the toll roads in. We had some time to kill before we got to Boston so we stopped in a park, had lunch and took some pictures of flowers (SHOCKING!!)

The Bridge to Boston

Parking turned out to be a huge headache in Boston, so we tried to leave the car as much as possible and just take transit and walk. We stayed with Tony’s old college friend Fred, and his longtime boyfriend George. They have a sumptuous two bedroom flat just off of downtown and Halstead (closest thing to a gay district in Boston. George is a Greek national, and is an amazing cook! He had some spanikoptia ready for us when we arrived, which was wonderful. And Fred made us some fresh chanterelle soup (gotta get those recipes!) We also went out to a fabulous Indian restaurant, and ordered two big sampler platters with all sorts of delicious morsels. It was surprising how quickly we got full. We spent one evening playing a hard fought, drawn out game of Risk, but I think everyone was still on speaking terms at the end of the night!

We met up with another friend, Michael Dosmann Curator of Living Collections at the Arnold Arboretum. He gave us a personal tour of the collections, and we bantered about collections management, the status of various projects, and work kinda stuff. He took us to his favorite tavern for drinks- (Adam got some hot chocolate with Bailey’s Irish Cream) and then a fabulous dinner at the Daily Grill (?? Memory fails me on the name). Adam even got the flirty waiter to bring out a strawberry from the kitchen before settling on ordering the strawberry shortcake for dessert (it was pretty good).

Michael lent us his staff museum card for Harvard University, so we took a trip one of the days to see the Harvard Museum of Natural History. The museum was a fabulous “old school” kind of museum, with lots of specimens on display, and now as much “interpretation”. They had extensive mineralogical gems, stones and meteorites, completely mind-boggling animal collection, and a fair number of bones. But what really captured our imagination was the collection of “Glass Flowers”. At the turn of the 20th century, botany instructors had little material to teach students about plant morphology other than brown, pressed, 2-dimentional specimens, which were wholly unsatisfactory. So professors at Harvard commissioned several hundred (over the years) glass replicas of various species from a German glass-blowing family. The attention to small details in the models is astonishing, and on first glance they indeed look like fresh cut wildflowers! Minute tendrils, thin petals, and even wispy hairs are perfectly reproduced and for the most part lifelike. Some of the older specimens are color faded or broken, but most are remarkably preserved. We were impressed by the number of California species they had chosen to recreate. But it makes sense when you consider the time period (1880s – 1920s) was the great age of discovery and description of the California flora, and Harvard’s Asa Gray was a powerhouse of botany in North America during that time.

After several hours in the museum, and on our way out, we discovered a doorway that lead to the Peabody Museum of Anthropology in the same building. Score! Two museums for the price of one! (well, actually free since we got in on Michael’s pass). We ogled the Mayan and other exhibits there for a few hours before being completely brain-fried and heading back.