Had a lot of trouble sleeping this morning. ::sigh:: We had breakfast and then it was time to call the storage company. (ALICE! WE FOUND IT!) We now have a cube close to the entrance. And I called the moving company and gave them the name. Finally we went to the post office, but all that was there for this address was junk mail (more address labels! and they spelt Mom's name wrong!). So we took the day off. I was hoping the death certificates would come so we could go to the bank and get the things out of the safe deposit box. Stupid mail.)

When I was a little girl and we would drive to my uncle and aunt's house in Peabody, Massachusetts, one time my uncle took us to a big ice cream place where you were given the ice cream part of your sundae and then could have your choice of toppings from a big buffet table. Well, while going through a travel book, I found what sounded like the place, Hebert's Candy Mansion in Shrewsbury, off route 20. Well, we headed up there today. There are two other Hebert's in the state, so maybe that's where Uncle Petey brought us (I remember the place being white, but I was young at the time and I could be misremembering, too), but this definitely was the correct ice cream bar. Oh, it's changed: I recall clearly the ice cream being in glass sundae cups, not paper ones, but the ice cream is still fine! I had a "mud pie" ice cream, which was coffee-flavored with crushed up chocolate cookies and a fudge swirl, topped with bittersweet sauce, chocolate jimmies, walnuts, and the whipped cream, of course. Yum.

Then we drove further on route 20 to go to Spare Time Hobbies in Marlboro, a little hole-in-the-wall place just stuffed with plastic models and roleplaying material that we'd hunted down on our way to the Vermont Country Store last November, and from there cut north up to Concord and visited Orchard House, one of the homes of Louisa May Alcott—the home in which she wrote Little Women. I've always wanted to go. It's a nice tour; there are many tidbits about the Alcott family, most of which I knew because I've read a lot of Alcott bios, but there was one I didn't which was a corker:

Alcott's youngest sister, like Amy March in Little Women, was very artistic and her drawings were all over Orchard House, including her bedroom walls. May Alcott eventually studied in Europe and had her art exhibited in Paris, and also taught art classes. One of her students was an enthusiastic boy who was so crazy about sculpting that he carved images out of vegetables. May gave him his first sculpting supplies and in return, this boy sculpted a bust of Bronson Alcott for the family. His first big project was sculpting the statue of the Minuteman at the Concord Bridge where "the shot heard round the world" was fired in 1775. He eventually sculpted the statue of Abraham Lincoln that sits in the Lincoln Memorial. Yes, May Alcott's precocious student was Daniel Chester French! Wow.

We actually drove down to the Bridge, but the area was closed: winter had taken its toll on the structure and they are rebuilding it. (It's not the original bridge; that hasn't been there since the late 1700s. In fact, roads were rerouted and there were no bridges there for 84 years. The bridge was rebuilt for the centennial of the event in 1875.) We walked across the field to The Old Manse, which was the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson and then Nathaniel Hawthorne, but the building was hot and James' numbers were down, so we went in search of food instead, after stopping at the wonderful Visitor's Center first.

Just walking across the parking lot to the bridge, then to the Manse, then to the visitor's center gave me the headache from hell, so I was glad when we got to Waltham for supper at Friendly's. We then had to battle our way home through rush hour traffic, but I'm used to driving in that. (We tried to go around it, but always got held up anyway, so we stuck to Route 128 and then to I-95 South.)

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 7:59:00 PM

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