Leaf Peeping in New England
[Leaf peeping is an informal term in the United States and Canada for the activity in which people travel to view and photograph the fall foliage in areas where leaves change colours in autumn, particularly in northern New England]
When I was teaching it meant holidays could only be taken during the school holidays when it was more expensive and busy. And I couldn’t tag on to the OH’s conferences either. Which is why during one October half term we decided to do a fly drive holiday to the eastern side of the USA and do a spot of leaf peeping.
We began our trip in Boston where we stayed in a city hotel for a couple of nights before returning to the airport to pick up the hire car.
We arrived late on the Friday – just before midnight and were shown to a very second rate room as although we had specified a late arrival it seemed our actual room had been given to someone else. We were moved to a much better room in the morning and after breakfast we headed out to explore the city, beginning with the famous Public Garden where we had hoped to see the Swan Boats, but they were closed for the season, and we completely missed the ‘Make Way for Ducklings’ sculptures. I remember reading the book of the same name by Robert McCloskey to my daughter when she was a child.
From there we wandered around the Beacon Hill area, one of Boston’s oldest neighbourhoods and full of charming, narrow cobblestone streets, federal style row houses and gaslit streetlamps.
And as our visit was shortly before Halloween it was decorated with pumpkins and skeletons and all things ghostly!
It takes time to walk a block in Boston, there is so much architectural detail to see. There are a lot of tree-lined streets and parks. And cars.
After dinner we set off to find the Old State House and wander down to the harbour where we followed the harbour walk as far as the Boston Tea Party museum, which was closed, before heading back to the hotel.
A lot of this will have changed by now (this visit was in 2007) I know that the Northern Avenue bridge was in danger of being demolished along with the rundown Tender’s House next to it. The bridge is unique in that it is a rotating swing bridge built in 1908.
(It was closed in December 2014. Apparently there were plans to reconstruct it as a pedestrian/cycle only bridge, but because of Covid the project came to a halt in 2020. The Tender’s House was partially demolished in 2008. The boarded up and rambling structure served for nearly a century as a home for the keepers of the rotating swing bridge – who had to be available, night and day, to let ships through. As one local said “This is demolition by neglect” )
Boston is an interesting city, though I would not like to drive in the city centre, even driving through the tunnels (a later post) was enough to give me nightmares.
TRAVEL WORDS 