Postcards From Across the Pond

To give my son a break, and the cats a chance to calm down, we went to Concord, MA for a few days, and it was marvellous. For most of my life I lived within day-trip distance yet never thought to visit, and I now know what an oversight that was. It is a charming, well preserved colonial town with bags of history, most within walking distance of the town centre.

We stayed at the Concord Colonial Inn, a place we chose at random, but we couldn’t have selected a better location. Our room was amazing. It had a full-sized kitchen, a bathroom with dual sinks and a jacuzzi tub, and a walk-in closet with more floor space than my office. The main room had a sitting area with a sofa, three chairs, and a massive, oval, glass-topped coffee table framed in black metal in front of the fireplace.

There was a stand-up mirror, a desk, bedside tables, lamps, and a bed so huge my wife is sleeping in the next time zone. The price was equally spacious, but if you broke it down per night, and considering what we were getting, it really wasn’t all that expensive. Though, I have to admit, the Premier Inn was better value for money.

And getting there, thanks to recent improvements in technology, was stress free. Up until a few years ago, we didn’t bring our phones with us for fear of racking up roaming charges, but with our new EE contracts, we pay a nominal fee for unlimited data, allowing us to use the map function as a SatNav without needing to take out a loan.

Consequently, we arrived in plenty of time to do a reccy of the town and enjoy a sumptuous dinner in the hotel’s restaurant (where I was able to tick off clam chowder, corn bread, and Boston Cream Pie, which I didn’t even know was on the list) before climbing into the expansive bed and searching for my wife, who I eventually found near the border of Rhode Island, so I could kiss her goodnight.

A few hours later, I discovered that a massive, oval, glass-topped coffee table framed in black metal is all but invisible in a dark room. I found that out when I tripped over it on my way back from the loo. It was so startling I said, “Oh my, I’ve tripped over the coffee table,” or something like that. Ask the people in the next room, they can probably tell you.

My wife, naturally, came to see what was wrong, and ran into the dark wooden frame of the massive bed.

A room populated with sturdy, dark furniture may look cosy and colonial during the day, but at night it’s a fucking minefield.

We made the trip to Concord solely because we had read Little Women in our book club a few months earlier and I thought Lousia May Alcott’s home was in North Adams, which is near the New York border. We only found out it was at the other end of Massachusetts after we bought timed tickets for the Lousia May Allcot house. Our slot was for 2:15 PM, which left a large enough gap in our day to allow for a visit to Walden Pond.

It was a nice walk, and Walden Pond was lovely. There was a beach to stroll on, woodland walks, and a replica of the house Henry David Thoreau stayed in.

On our way back to the Louisa May Alcott house, we stumbled upon the Concord Museum. It was $16 to get in, but well worth it. Lots of history about the area and one of the actual lanterns that Paul Revere spied hanging in the church tower (one if by land, two if by sea, and all that). They are thrilled to have the one, but they don’t know where the other is.

After that, it was time to head to the Louisa May Alcott Orchard House. Next door to it was The Wayside Home of Authors, where Louisa had lived for a while, and where Emerson and/or Hawthorn and/or Thoreau had lived, and which had been used in the Underground Railroad.

The building was not open, but we took photos.

The Orchard House tour was excellent. We had an introductory video that was very informative, and a guide who had many, many anecdotes about the Allcotts.

After that, we walked back to town and had tea and cake in a Nero’s Cafe. We have a Nero’s in Horsham, but we wanted to see how different it was in Concord (more café-ish than Nero-ish).

The following day, we went to visit The Bridge where the Minutemen faced off with the Redcoats and The Shot Heard ‘Round the World happened. That, too, was within walking distance.

Before heading out, we went to the tourist information building. The lady there gave us a handy map and pointed out that we could also go to Walden Pond and the Alcott House, and we told her we’d already been. Then she said there was a museum, and we said we’d done that, as well. I guess we managed to do most of Concord in one day.

So, we went to the bridge, took photos of the statue, wandered the grounds of the (closed) Visitor Centre, and visited the Robbins House, which features the history of black Americans in colonial New England. That left us enough of the day to visit the Patriot’s Graveyard (or something like that). We had to take a path through the woods and then use our phone maps to find Louisa May Alcott’s grave. It wasn’t hard to locate once we got close because it had a forest of pencils stuck in the ground around it.

That was also the case for Henry David Thoreau. As for Ralph Waldo Emmerson, all we found was a marker pointing to his grave. We searched and searched but couldn’t find it. No forest of pencils for him; he should have produced more popular writings. We stumbled over Hawthorne on the way out. Or at least it was a marker that said, “Hawthorne.” There was a single pen in front of it, and that was good enough for us.

After that we wandered around the town and had another sumptuous dinner at the hotel’s restaurant. As with almost every meal we had in Concord, it included corn bread, and I was pleased to see that they have finally given up the notion that corn bread is anything other than cake, because the corn bread I got with dinner that night had sugar on it.

Having taken in much of what Concord had to offer (I’m sure there was more, but it was a short visit) we left the following day. We didn’t want to stay away too long; the cats would surely miss us.