Boston in September

I’m back from a week-plus vacation to Boston to visit my parents. Debbi of course also came to visit her sisters, so we didn’t see a lot of each other, since our families live about 40 miles apart. Our strange family vacations. 🙂

We took the JetBlue red-eye the night of Thursday the 16th. Several people asked me if we had any trouble landing, because I guess there was a big rainstorm that night, but when we landed (around 5:15 am) I looked outside and just noticed it had been raining. The trip otherwise was perfectly smooth. Debbi’s sister picked us up and we drove down to spend part of Friday with them. I didn’t sleep on the plane, so I sacked out on the couch even before all of Deb’s niephews (2 girls and 1 boy) had headed off to school. Then I had lunch with Debbi and her sisters, and they drove me up to my Mom’s house.

I saw them once more, on Sunday, when one of the girls had a soccer game near my Mom’s house, so I drove over to say hi and hang out. And then I drove Debbi up on Monday to spend the night with us and have dinner, since my Dad picked up some lobsters from Legal Sea Foods for the three of them. (I don’t eat seafood, so I picked up some ribs from Whole Foods. But the verdict on the lobsters was that they were excellent.)

I visited with two friends – my friend Bruce, whom I know from my old APAhacking days, and my friend Charley, whom I know from high school. Charley asked how long it’s been since we’d seen each other, and I said, “Well, last time I saw you you still had long hair…” He said that meant it had probably been a decade or more, which sounds about right. We’d basically lost touch until I came across his web site. We had lunch in Harvard Square and caught up on various things. Bruce and I, as usual, had dinner in Boston’s North End followed by coffee and dessert at Cafe Vittoria, which is an excellent place to hang out and chat, even if we did have to watch the Red Sox get thumped by the Orioles on the big screen. (At least we got to mock them along the way.)

I spent much of the week hanging out at my Mom’s house, with occasional runs to Dunkin Donuts. She volunteers at the new Waban Library Center, in the building where the Waban branch of the Newton Free Library used to be. It’s a beautiful building, built between the two World Wars, and I went up and took some photos, and reminisced about going there as a kid. (Their Facebook page has photos from 1930 as well as from the modern era.)

I went in to visit Dad and have dinner with him twice, and he also joined me for my usual trip out to That’s Entertainment in Worcester, where I picked up some comic books and Magic cards.

The weather was up-and-down: Rainy and cold when we arrived, then cool, and then hot-and-humid! And then alternating cool with hot-and-humid for the last few days. I used almost all the clothes I brought, including my jacket and sweatshirt. I guess we left just before the rains returned. Though the area already looks like it’s perpetually raining leaves, since fall arrived during our visit.

Our flight home was uneventful, other than an hour’s delay taking off (half of which we made up in the air) – far better than last year’s debacle of a return trip!

All-in-all it was a very lazy vacation, and it flew by awfully quickly. Fortunately Debbi and I are also taking Monday off to catch up on things and recover from the plane flight home (it’s over an hour longer to fly west than east between Boston and San Jose). And the kitties are delighted to see us, of course, after 9 days of 3 different pet sitters! (Though I guess Blackjack did his best to charm everyone.)