But the fun started before we reached Boston. You see, this was no ordinary vacation. While we were on the Amtrak train up through scenic New England, the conductor dropped off a package. In it was a puzzle box, and in the puzzle box once I'd solved it was a cryptic note:
"The quest for your birthday present begins here and now!Attached to the note was a polybius square. And yes, the italics were present on the note. (It was printed out from a computer, so no handwriting to clue me in to the writer's identity.) Sarah and I quickly determined it was referring to the Freedom Trail, which starts at Boston Common and ends at Bunker Hill, and so decided to walk it on our first day in Boston.
It may begin common, but go through valleys to hills.
Come morning, follow the trail of clues and wow!
Free the mystery from obscurity for an abundance of thrills.
And since these puzzles do get greater,
Here's something you might need later..."
This set off a scavenger hunt/mystery that wove itself throughout our entire trip. We did not know who this mysterious person - who we dubbed "the Watcher" - was, we did not know what they wanted, but they remained two or three steps ahead of us, leaving cryptic clues throughout Boston for me to find and solve, with no idea what would be at the end of the mystery.
Read on to discover what we did in Boston, and just how the Watcher's mystery unfolded! A minor warning - this entry is going to be A) long as hell, and B) VERY full of photos because I took SO many.
Day 0.5
We arrived in Boston around dinner time, and went to check into our hotel, the Omni Parker House, aka the nicest hotel I've ever set foot in. This hotel is the longest continuously-running hotel in the nation - it's been in service since 1855, though the current building dates to about 1927. Its kitchen has apparently invented both Boston Cream Pies (of which we ate so many over the course of the week) and Parker House Rolls, and it has hosted many historic guests, including like so many Kennedys. It's also apparently super haunted, but we didn't see any ghosts during our time here.
They also were kind enough to upgrade us to a suite for free! I was incredibly perplexed. Our room, our base of operations for the week, was nicer than any hotel room I'd ever seen. My family was always more of a Holiday Inn type family when we went on vacations.
It was soon time for dinner, and so we walked over to the Union Oyster House, which was a restaurant I had wanted to try, but I didn't think I'd get the chance, as the restaurant's menu is almost entirely seafood and I am a vegetarian. Luckily for me, their one vegetarian dish was a mushroom ravioli dish, and I happen to love mushrooms.
The Union Oyster House is the oldest restaurant in Boston, and the oldest restaurant in continuous service in the U.S. - it's been operating as a restaurant since 1826. (Yes, there are historic taverns like NYC's Fraunces Tavern and Philly's City Tavern, but they have not been restaurants through their entire long histories. I know Fraunces has had periods where it's been a hotel and an office building before it went back to serving food.) The building it sits in has been around since about the 1740s. During the Revolution, there was a printing office in the upper floor (where we ate) that published the Patriot newspaper "The Massachusetts Spy." And of course, this is another haunt of the Kennedys - there's even a "Kennedy Booth" on the upper floor.
We did not sit in the Kennedy Booth, but that's okay because I'm not crazy about the Kennedys. I find them mildly interesting when I come across them in books, but don't seek out stories about them. And I was happy as a clam to eat my rich, creamy mushroom ravioli. I was actually already pretty full when dessert came out. Sarah had told the waitress it was my birthday, and she brought me out a slice of (of course) Boston Cream Pie. And the whole room sang Happy Birthday to me, which was embarrassing but fun! I cannot believe everyone in the room actually did it - in California, your waiter is lucky if they can get even one table to sing with them - but they did! They really did!
After dinner we were very full, but Sarah had one more trick up her sleeve. You see, the Museum of Science has something called Astronomy After Hours the first Friday of every month, and even though we were stuffed and travel-tired, of course we had to go. I am so glad we did! They have one of those really big observatory telescopes that they let you look through, and on that night it happened to be pointed at Jupiter.
Looking through that telescope at Jupiter and getting to see its stripes and four of its moons (the only one I remember the name of is Ganymede, sorry!) really blew my mind, all. It was a big planet, bigger than hundreds of our Earth, many millions of miles away, and we could just look at it! We could just see it, right there! Space makes me so crazy.
We also got to see two stars - Antares, a red giant, and Vega, which is bluish white. They both looked like little dots even through the telescopes, because stars are so impossibly far away. I did impress one of the museum workers, though, because I knew that blue/white stars like Vega are hotter in temperature than red ones like Antares.
Clue count: 1
Boston Cream Pie count: 1
Day 1
We spent most of our first day walking the Freedom Trail, which was an absolute blast. I don't think I can do a play-by-play of every single stop we made - it's a two mile trail with like three cemeteries and... four churches? But I can give a play-by-play of some highlights.
I was absolutely delighted by all the older graves in the cemeteries, as I adore Death's Head gravestones. (If you don't know what that is, mortician Caitlin Doughty has a great breakdown of gravestone imagery here. If you don't know who Caitlin Doughty is, please educate yourself asap because I love her.) We saw multiple graves of historical figures too, including Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, Increase and Cotton Mather, and Benjamin Franklin's parents. (That's right, Ben was a Boston boy before he ran off to Philadelphia.)
In one of the churches, King's Chapel (which was actually right across the street from our hotel), one of the pews had a "secret door". And in that pew the Watcher, it seemed, had left a red envelope with my name on it. I sat there and opened it, but at first the message looked pretty nonsensical:
"12 54 8 35 32, 21 24 33 14 52 23 15 42 15 13 34 33 22 42 15 43 43 32 15 15 44 43 43 44 11 44 15.Hm. Curiouser and curiouser.
24 35 42 34 31 24 43 15, 44 23 15 33 15 53 44 35 45 55 55 31 15 52 24 31 31 12 15 22 42 15 11 44!
24 44 24 33 51 34 31 51 15 43 11 13 24 35 23 15 42 44 23 11 44 43 44 11 42 44 43 52 24 44 23 11 51,
54 34 45 42 12 24 42 44 23 14 11 54 32 34 33 44 23 52 24 31 31 12 15 44 23 15 25 15 54."
We got lunch at Faneuil Hall (no one seems to agree on how to pronounce that) and sat down to decode it. As a food hall, Faneuil is old as balls, and has a plethora of offerings. Me, I decided Greek food sounded best, and ordered myself spanakopita and 2 dolmades. Had I known the spanakopita would be so large - like three times bigger than expected - I may have passed on the dolmades, but everything was fantastic. Sarah chose a New England classic - clam chowder in a bread bowl. Using the polybius square, I was able to decode the chapel clue to this:
"By 8 PM, find where Congress meets State.As to what this would lead to, I'll get to that, but I knew it would involve a Vigenere cipher - which is a pretty difficult cipher that was used a lot on "Gravity Falls" - with the key word of "July", my birthday month. But we had quite a long ways to go before 8 PM!
I promise, the next puzzle will be great!
It involves a cipher which starts with a V,
Your birthday month will be the key."
Oh! And we saw a play at the Old South Meeting House called "Cato and Dolly", which Sarah and I both really enjoyed. Two actors played all the roles in the play, which centered around the characters of John Hancock's wife Dolly and his slave-turned-freeman Cato over a period of about 50 years. It was a good play, and really humanized the characters and made history feel so alive. At the same time, it did not gloss over the horrors of slavery the way so many Revolutionary sites and plays do, which I super appreciated.
Another site that surprised me was the Paul Revere House. I wasn't expecting to enjoy it as much as I did, and around the corner in the Little Italy neighbourhood was an adorable 1920s-era Italian cafe called Caffe Vittoria. From the homey decor on the wall to the old big band classics playing to the Italian coffees and desserts on display to the old-ass espresso machine, everything in there reminded me of my grandma in the best way. (My grandma on my father's side is Italian.) It was nice to take a short break from the warm day in there. I had a cannoli, which is one of my fave desserts, and I can honestly say it was one of the freshest and best-tasting cannolis I've ever had. Well, not counting my grandma's of course.
 |
| The U.S.S. Constitution, second to last stop on the Freedom Trail. Observe how blue the sky is. |
After that, we went back to the hotel for a bit. The Freedom Trail had taken much longer than expected. I'm really glad we set aside the whole day for it - and if you ever go to Boston, I'd recommend doing it that way - because we could spend as much time as we wanted in the sites we found most interesting, and didn't feel rushed at all. We changed out of our sweaty and damp clothes and were surprised by a knock on the door - the hotel staff randomly brought us a mini bottle of Prosecco, chocolate covered strawberries, and a mini Boston Cream Pie! How decadent! The hotel was like a fairy tale, I swear to the gods!
After we were well rested and changed, we went to a restaurant over in Cambridge where Sarah had made reservations called ArtBar. As its name would imply, it was very modern and artsy in there. Of course, after the hotel's surprise we weren't really hungry enough for entrees, so we got appetisers as our entrees. I had a cheese and jam plate, along with an alcohol-free Sangria. Sarah got poutine, which looked very good and made me wish I weren't a vegetarian so I could try it. But my food was pretty damn delicious, too.
We returned to Boston to see where the Watcher was leading us. Congress and State, as it turns out, are streets. Their intersection is the site of the Boston Massacre, a stop on the Freedom Trail. At this point, I had my suspicions as to who the Watcher was (At first I'd suspected Sarah, but as she was just as baffled as I was, at this point in our trip I thought it was a mutual friend of ours.) but these suspicions would soon be shaken. We stood at the massacre site wondering what we were supposed to be looking for when I got a mysterious text from a phone number with a Colorado area code, which read, "in front of the Bank of America."
The Bank of America was catty-corner to where we were standing, so we made our way over and ended up being on a walking ghost tour of Boston! It was on this tour that we found out our hotel was haunted, but I didn't take a lot of notes, because it got pretty dark, so I cannot relay many ghost stories to you. A man on the tour, though, had another envelope for me from our mysterious benefactor. He gave it to me only after singing "Happy Birthday" to me in front of the whole group.
"Bixccbtlp ztqqs... L ujnpp mir?I know it looks like nonsense - vigenere is difficult to decipher in that every letter changes meaning based on where it is in the sentence, so it's not as simple as "Q=F!" But we did crack it:
Nnlsyym, msc C nyw'n agw u acmcrpny.
Dcjf efn xpyu! Ce'q wie y bfze,
Ci ggbce rqy npnuesayd kxme duianh."
"Something fishy... A water dog?Pin a pedigree... pinapedigree... PINNIPED!
Perhaps, but I can't pin a pedigree.
Seal the deal! It's not a slog
To visit the creatures most floppy."
Clue count: 3
Boston Cream Pie count: 2
Day 2
We started our day with breakfast burritos (and... a Boston Cream Pie!) from Faneuil Hall before walking over (it was a very short and scenic walk) to the New England Aquarium. I was prepared, with my "Seal of Approval" socks with seals on them. I had wanted to go to this aquarium because it's one of the few that houses Northern Fur Seals, a seal type I had never seen in real life before, only in pictures. (Look, I get really excited about seals, okay?)
Delightfully, the way the aquarium is set up is with the harbour seal tank right by the entryway, so you can watch those lovable chonks and their antics while waiting in line for tickets. I was absolutely enraptured by them. I love harbour seals. I also loved the fur seals and the sea lions - one of their younger sea lions, Ron, shares a birthday of July 2 with me!
There were other animals too. We saw them feeding the seals and sea lions, but also watched feeding times for penguins and the large coral reef tank with its giant sea turtle! The aquarium is pretty well known for its collection of rare lobsters, too, and we did see the one that is split right down the middle, colour-wise.
Oh, and an aquarium worker gave me another mysterious envelope from the Watcher. And what did this clue say?
"All it does is go and go,The description seemed cryptic, but on our walk that morning we had passed signs for the Greenway Carousel, which was right nearby. It seemed to fit the description of something that goes and goes, and yet remains in place. And we were able to leave the aquarium for lunch anyway (we would later re-enter it with a hand stamp) so we decided to head on over.
But never goes anywhere.
Still, we go to see it, so
At least the way is green there!
You'll be done riding in a flash,
But you're sure to have at bash!"
We also determined the next clue would be in Atbash cipher, which is thankfully a bit simpler than Vigenere.
The carousel was super cute - instead of horses, it has a variety of animals native to the Boston area. I did not ride the seal! This is because the seal did not move up and down, and that's an integral part of the carousel experience for me. Sarah rode the seal. I rode a sea turtle. It was delightful. And a carousel worker handed us another clue - it seemed the Watcher was one step ahead of us. Of course, this clue being in code, it again looked like nonsense:
"Mvcg blf droo yv tlrmt jfrgv srts.This (the Watcher being ahead of us) was confirmed when the Watcher continued to text me, sending a simple "Nice job catching the Atbash. I'll have to be more subtle next time." after we'd ridden the carousel. But the mysterious thing was that it wasn't the phone number from the previous night. This phone number had an area code from Georgia, of all places! Now I was really confused, unable to think of anyone I knew in Georgia. I wondered if the phone numbers meant anything at all, or if the Watcher was just using one of those apps that sends texts through a fake phone number. The only thing I could determine was that it was not Sarah, since her phone was in her bag when I received this.
Dsviv rm Ylhglm xzm blf dzop lm gsv hpb?"
We went to lunch at a beachy little waterside place just outside of the aquarium called The Reef. Sarah had a lobster role, I had a really light and yummy Tuscan kale-quinoa salad... and more sangria lmao. Here, we decoded our clue. This is what it said:
"Next you will be going quite high.We were stumped, so we asked the waitress, and she said something to the effect of, "oh, you'll probably want to go to the Boston Skywalk next!" So we knew we'd be heading there. But first, Sarah wanted to go back into the aquarium. At first, this confused me. We'd seen pretty much everything there, though I certainly wouldn't object to more seals.
Where in Boston can you walk on the sky?"
It turned out Sarah had booked us a Behind the Scenes Marine Mammal experience for us at the aquarium! This took us to where the trainers kept the seal food and prepared it, and we got to put together "ice treats" for the seals and pick out "enrichment toys" for them to play with. But the best part, the climax of this tour if you will, was that we then stepped into the harbour seal tank.
 |
| By the way, a seal painted this. I wish I could have brought it home. The talent!!! |
But when I placed a heart-shaped ice treat - an ice mold stuffed with seafood morsels - into the water, a 34-year-old one eyed harbour seal named Amelia swam right up to us to take it. She was adorable! Amelia melted my heart as she ate the heart I'd given her! You guys! I FED A SEAL!!!
 |
| Isn't Amelia just TOO adorable??? |
Then I received another text from the "Georgia" number - "in the grey trunk". Confused, I opened a grey prop trunk to find a wrapped gift. I unwrapped it to find a note which read:
"The next clue will have you engrossed.This note was attached to one of those twisty cipher lock boxes wrapped in styrofoam that I later found out are apparently called Jefferson Disks? As to the contents of the note, "my wife" is a nickname for Sarah herself. We are not married, of course, but we live together and share finances and stuff, so we often refer to each other as such. And what does she say to me the most? Why, "I love you," of course!
What does your wife say to you the most?"
The Jefferson disk was 6 letters long, so I sat in a spot overlooking all of Boston, which was very scenic for codebreaking, and entered "ILOVEU". It opened to reveal... ANOTHER CLUE!
"PerUse your way Back to 1837,
when a Lovely, scenIC stretch of heaven,Again, the capitalisation is copied verbatim from the note. The capital letters were PUBLICARDEN, which when said out loud sounds like "Public Garden", which seemed to be correct - the Public Garden was established in 1837! We decided we would start the next day there. As to what was under the styrofoam, the bottom of the box had yet another note. But unfortunately, I misplaced it, for which I am dearly sorry. This is what I can tell you:
wAs Rescued, and then set asiDe,
for the creation of oxygEn out of carboN dioxide.
to solve the next clue, you'll need to roam.
what's underneath the styrofoam?"
- There was a cipher wheel, indicating another cipher in our future
- The number for decoding said cipher would be the "Day of my birth", 2.
- The letter for decoding said cipher would be the "first letter of my name" - my legal name, not the Nym nickname I use here - which is A
We returned to our hotel and got room service for dinner. Incredibly, we decided against another Boston Cream Pie for dessert, sharing a slice of chocolate cake instead. (We had gotten a Boston Cream donut at Dunkin earlier in the afternoon, though. Does that count? I'm counting it as half a tally.)
We set back out to top off our night with a "Ghosts and Gravestones" trolley tour, which was as cheesy and spoopy as it sounds.We loved it. Our tour guide, the ghost of a patriot (all the tour guides are meant to be ghosts from Boston's history - I know they're just actors, but play along!) told us about all sorts of dark parts of Boston's history, from the Boston Strangler to the Great Molasses Flood and everything in between. (I really do respect that he made it known that while the Molasses Flood sounds silly, it was hugely tragic and people died.) And yes, he also talked about ghost stories in our hotel. (We later did a little ghost hunt of our own on the second floor, where a haunted mirror hangs. It was atmospheric but we saw no spirits.)
Clue count: 8
 |
| Our ghostly tour guide |
The best part was when he locked us in the Granary Burial Ground, and another "ghost", this one of a man who had been hung in Boston for cannibalism, jumped out from behind a tombstone, took us through some dark stories of those buried here, then threatened to eat me, which was delightful. Don't worry, our tour guide rescued me.
 |
| The cannibal himself. |
Boston Cream Pie count: 3.5
Day 3
After a quick breakfast at a local independent coffee shop, we wondered through the Boston Public Garden, which was quite lovely. The George Washington statue is suitably awe-inspiring, the Hamilton statue... far less so. (He was in a toga over his regular clothes, and the toga wasn't even fully wrapped, it was open and trailing behind him. It was a weird design.) Surprisingly, I also saw a statue of Kosciuszko, who you'll remember from my Philadelphia trip is another of my dudes. And next to him was a tree with a hollow, in which I spotted a yellow envelope. The Watcher had wasted no time:
"Nzc zmtn pcomuco lzct ism dcncpuytc...Luckily, we had our cipher wheel with us, and matching the A to the 2, I was able to figure out what it actually said was:
Up. osucfsdi gtd Ozcpugt?"
"The hunt resumes when you determine...Obviously this was a reference to Mr. Peabody and Sherman, the old cartoon, and I know there are Peabody museums all over New England. The closest one to us was over in Cambridge, on the Harvard campus - The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. So this was our next stop. And it held a very fun surprise.
Mr. somebody and Sherman?"
Yes, I loved the exhibits about Native Americans, Mesoamericans, an archaeological excavation done on the Harvard campus, and the history of anthropology as a field. But the most fun surprise was when I turned a corner in the museum and ran into an old friend of mine who goes to Harvard! Let's just call her "M", idk if she wants me giving her name out lmao.
It was a blast catching up with her. We have been friends since we were 14, but I haven't seen her in person for like 5-ish years or so. It was a lot easier to see each other when we both lived in San Jose. I'm not gonna tell you everything we talked about, but she did hand me my next clue (for a moment she was a suspect. Could M be the Watcher?) which read:
"'Isles and Tablewares, Rummagers tu!'This indicated that our next clue would be a Caesar cipher, but at first we had no idea what else it could mean. Then I noticed the first sentence was in quotation marks, and the word 'scrambled', which meant it was an anagram. With M's help, we unscrambled it, and sure enough, it gave us another location: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. This, it seemed, was our next destination.
Scrambled or solved, that is up to you.
Cleopatra's late lover knocks at the door,
And he will use number four!"
We bid M a fond farewell and headed over to this beautiful museum. It's actually the old mansion of an art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, who left her collection in her will to the city of Boston as a museum on one condition: they could never change the placement of where she had placed the art she collected. This made a sort of topsy turvy wonderland of a place - ancient Chinese art shares space with Napoleonic French art with Victorian English paintings with medieval sculptures, all surrounding the most beautiful courtyard you've ever seen.
The museum is famous for the 1990 Gardner Museum Heist, which Buzzfeed Unsolved covered in one of their videos. Because of Isabella's will, the empty frames leftover from the heist are still hanging on the wall, so you can see little signs of this unsolved crime all over the museum, which makes for a fun scavenger hunt.
A museum worker there handed me my next clue, which we sat in the courtyard to decode:
"Xli ribx tpegi qec wxyqt csy, nywx e wqmhki.Which translated to:
Mxw qsyxl mw sr Gsrkviww Wxviix Fvmhki.
Xlsykl fi mx hywo sv fi mx hear, mx
Riziv lew gvswwih sv wxssh ytsr mx."
"The next clue may stump you, just a smidge.This was also something pretty cryptic. We decided to just head over to Congress Street Bridge to see what was there. And what was there was the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum. This made sense. The entrance to the museum was on the bridge, but of course the ships themselves had never been on the bridge - because they're ships! They travel by water, not roads!
Its mouth is on Congress Street Bridge.
Though be it dusk or be it dawn, it
Never has crossed or stood upon it."
This museum was fantastic, you guys. It was really interactive and well put together, the exhibits were well designed and it allowed you to quite literally step into history. Really. You were assigned a historic person who was actually present at the Boston Tea Party, and an actor portraying Sam Adams started a tour with a rousing speech about "no taxation without representation!" and all that. (Some of the people he called upon - including a teen boy behind us - got REALLY into their roles.) It was so much fun. I got to throw tea into the harbour, naturally.
I don't think either of us were prepared for how enjoyable this experience truly was.
We also ate lunch here. (Actually we did this before the tour.) They have a tea parlour called Abigail's Tearoom, where we ate sandwiches, as well as a historic tea recipe and scones. They even had 18th century games available to play. We played a rather ridiculous board game called "Goose". It was quite fun.
To our surprise, a man in 18th century garb came up to our table with another envelope for me. He was pretty fantastic. I wish I'd recorded exactly what he said - it was something like "A courier sent this for you. He paid me quite handsomely to not reveal his name!" Point is, this guy remained in character while giving us the Watcher's next message, which added an extra layer of magic. The message said:
"Much Ado Aout Nothing, Anne of Geen Gbles!These, you will doubtless have noticed, are all books. And the missing letters were deliberate - they spelled out BRATTLE. Which obviously meant our next stop was Brattle Book Shop! This is one of the oldest and largest used bookstores in the nation, and I'm a book lover to the extreme. It was also close enough to walk there.
Tell Tale Hear, Litle Women, and al kinds of fabls!
Between each page, a wonderous treat,
Your next clue lies where they all meet."
Brattle was lovely, overstuffed with all sorts of literary delights, but I wasn't really sure where the Watcher wanted me to look. I did find a copy of the novelisation of my favourite Star Trek movie, "The Voyage Home" (aka the one with the whales), so of course I had to buy it. Do not judge me.
And then I got another mysterious text. This one was from a San Jose phone number, but it wasn't a phone number I knew. Not Sarah's phone number, not the mutual friend we'd suspected at the start of our trip, not M's. I still wasn't sure if the numbers meant anything at all. The text simply said, "I am the dark between the stars, the whispering voices in the silence, the guide in the chaos. I am the Watcher. Find your wonderland."
Well, we combed through the bookshelves until we found a copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Two copies, in fact. It was quite fitting. After all, I too was in a sort of topsy turvy adventure right now, and Boston was my Wonderland. Tucked into the larger copy was a green envelope. Another clue! But this one wasn't a cipher or a riddle. It was a quiz.
I'm not going to re-type every question. A lot of them were related to fandoms I'm in - including one question about "Star Trek: The Voyage Home", which I'd just bought the book for! Clearly whoever the Watcher was, they knew my own watching habits well. The answers were fill in the blank style, with one space underlined in every blank. The underlined sections spelled out an address: 33 West Street.
Well, this was right down the street! And what did it end up being? Why, an archaeology themed Escape Room of course!
I actually took it upon me to text the Watcher back, too. I sent them, "All hail the Watcher." And their response?
"The depths are cold. The depths are silent. The depths keep their secrets."
This was getting stranger and stranger by the second.
We went to the Escape Room at 6 PM, doing it with another group of 3 women, who were all wonderful. This was the tightest escape I've ever made in an escape room. We made it out with only one second to spare. Yes, I'm serious! And after we got the obligatory photo taken, one of those 3 women held me another envelope and told me "there's one more clue for you." Had the Watcher told her to say this?
The clue said:
"If these puzzles have you wanting more,This clue came with a key, and Sarah and I almost screamed our excitement right then and there. Because, you see, there was a lockbox in the form of a false dictionary in the bedside table drawer in our hotel room. It had literally been there since day 1. We'd thought it was the property of the hotel. This whole time it had been part of this mystery? Well, I was dying to see what was in it, but we had to get dinner first. We hungered.
There's something waiting in your drawer."
We ended up going to the Green Dragon, which is another historic tavern type restaurant. It feels very Irish pub-like now, very casual, but it does have a storied history - back in the 1770s, the Sons of Liberty would meet here. British officers also dined here, and once a local youth overheard two of them planning to arrest Sam Adams and deport him back to England for trial. This youth warned Adams, who was able to flee. Nowadays in the present, it serves Irish pub food. I was delighted to find Irish curry fries on the menu. Was it a healthy dinner? No. Was it nostalgic and delicious? ABSOLUTELY.
And for dessert, of course, we had to split a Boston Cream Pie. Its funny, I never thought about it before this trip, but I guess it was kinda like the unofficial dessert of the week? Either way, the Green Dragon makes a fantastic Boston Cream Pie.
We paid our tab and hurried back to the hotel, eager to unlock the false dictionary. Inside, we found candy, biodegradable non-plastic glitter sunscreen, and another note:
"For two, too, can find five threes o'er north,If we counted words like "too" and "for" and "oh" as numbers, these were actually coordinates! 42° 25' 30", 70° 58' 58". We entered these coordinates into Google Maps, only to have it land on Revere Beach! That must have been why the Watcher gave us sunscreen.
But seven, oh... Has five ate five eight west?
The answer is to be Revered.
That is, if you are up to the test."
Clue count: 15
Boston Cream Pie count: 4.5
Day 4 - MY ACTUAL BIRTHDAY
We got to Revere Beach nice and early, and it was a beautiful day for a classic New England beach. And I do mean classic - this has been a public beach since the late 1800s!
Thanks to our sunscreen, we were more glittery than a "Twilight" themed drag show, but since it was biodegradable and plastic free, we felt okay going into the ocean. We spent an hour in the chilly Atlantic waters, which were pretty calm. This is not a beach for surfing. But it is absolutely beautiful.
When we got back to our towels, there was a message in a bottle, like something out of a pirate story! The message was as follows:
"I'm afraid more than 6 clues remain unawoken.We got lunch on the beach, then ice cream at an adorable looking ice cream parlour before returning to our hotel room to shower the sea out of our hair and decode this hint. I have to admit, it stumped me at first. The numbers didn't seem to be any cipher that I knew of. Sarah was the one who figured out that maybe they were referring to letters in the rhyming couplet. Like the 5th letter of the couplet is R, so 5=R. Using this it decoded to another address: 60 Rowes Wharf.
0! The endless pursuit of knowledge, unspoken.
17 37 5 10 32 40 46 60 39 3 50 4
7:30 PM."
However, plugging this address into Google Maps only gave us a blank wharf. No restaurants or museums on it, just the wharf. And our phones were similarly silent. The Watcher was not texting us.
At this point, it was only about 2 PM and we had some time to kill, and no idea how to kill it. Sarah had wanted to do one of those Boston Duck Tours, which I wasn't really jazzed about but I agreed to do it because it makes me happy to see her happy. Besides, she was paying for it. It was a bit silly for my tastes, but it was a nice way to see some historic Boston architecture. And okay, I admit it was cool when the vehicle went in and out of the Charles River.
Plus it dropped us off in front of the aquarium so we got to go say hi to the harbour seals again. Don't judge me.
After this, it was back to the hotel room to get ready for our mysterious nighttime adventure. And since it was my birthday, doggone it, we decided to dress up. Sarah did her make-up and put on a little black dress with gold detailing. I put on a button up shirt, vest, and tie, but with a pencil skirt and flats since I like to play with gender expression.
I had no idea what was coming. It was the most epic birthday present ever.
We walked down to Rowe's Wharf past boats docked there, and yet it didn't dawn on me until we were holding tickets that WE WERE GOING ON ONE OF THEM. I love boats and being on the water, but it just seemed so far out of the realm of possibility, and then suddenly we were boarding a motherfucking yacht!
The yacht was called the Northern Lights (fitting, no?), and she was a 1920s-style "commuter yacht", the kind that richies in the 20s used to use to travel from New York City and Long Island up the New England coast. And on that particular night, it was decked out with fairy lights for something called the Parade of Lights, when a bunch of boats decked out in lights sailed down the Charles River, and then at the end there were fireworks.
We befriended a couple of couples, who I think also assumed we were a regular ole lesbian couple, but honestly they were so adorably supportive (one of them thought Sarah was gonna propose to me lmao) that we didn't have the heart to correct them.
After gorging ourselves on fancy cheeses and mini desserts and blueberry lemonade limoncello drinks (made with real Maine blueberries!) we went up to the front of the boat to watch the crowds on either side of the river. One of the couples we'd befriended, the wife and Sarah were cut from the same cloth, I swear! They kept yelling to people on the shore; "IT'S HER BIRTHDAY!" and pointing to me.
The real fun was when people started yelling back: "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!" In some instances people actually sang at me! I could hardly believe that this was happening for the second time in one week! Are people in Massachusetts all just really friendly, or is Sarah just incredibly charismatic? It was funny and embarrassing and flattering and magical all at once.
The climax of the parade was the fireworks, which were practically right over us. And not to get sappy or anything, but while they were going off, on one side of the river we could see the Bunker Hill monument, and on the other side the spire of the Old North Church, and it suddenly struck me that it was pretty damn amazing to be right there, right then. We were right in the middle of where the inciting incidents of the American Revolution happened, and then a couple centuries later celebrating it on those same coordinates. It was beautiful and poignant. And of course this country is not without its severe problems, but in that moment it was beautiful and incredible to be there.
After the fireworks, the yacht turned to go back to shore, and one of our new friends handed me a mini treasure chest, which is the best thing to receive on a boat! There was no key to it, but there was an envelope on the bottom from the Watcher, who had mostly been pretty quiet all day. But this clue was a little different. It wasn't a poem, and for personal reasons I'm going to have to censor part of it, but here it is:
"Sarah will need to bring snacks. That's not a puzzle, I just worryThis was not the Watcher's usual style, so I was stumped at first. Pretty much the only thing I could figure out was the station it referred to was North Station.
About her blood sugar. Okay, puzzle starts now. A Purple train willl
Leave J***** J******'s Boston station around 9:30am. 5th stop.
Everyone search thoroughly! Your next clue could be hiding in any
Museum, shop, or anywhere really. You should def check all of the
Most likely locations... You know what, I bet Sarah can whip up
A quick itinerary that'll be helpful in covering ground."
And then I saw it. The first letters of every line spelled out something very specific. And that's when I realised...
We were going to Salem!
Clue count: 17
Boston Cream Pie count: 4.5
Day 5
We did so much in Salem that it was honestly a little overwhelming - in the best possible way. A quick, cheap breakfast at the Dunkin' in North station was our fuel as we set out towards this little witchy city I've wanted to visit since I was 8 years old. (Yes, this included another Boston Cream Pie donut. Yes, I am counting it as another half tally. My blog, my rules.)
I suppose I will begin at the beginning. We started our day at the Witch Dungeon Museum, which pleasantly surprised me. You see, I'd read online that this museum - which takes you down into a dungeon with wax models of gruesome scenes like the Salem dungeons and the death of Giles Corey - would be a really kitschy experience, but our tour guide Sarah (not to be confused with my own Sarah) did a fantastic job humanizing the events and stressing the need for sympathy towards those involved, that it actually ended up being my favourite of the witch museums we visited. She was fantastic. The tour also had a pretty stellar recreation of part of the trial of Sarah Good. The actresses playing Sarah Good and Ann Putnam were wonderful.
 |
| Sarah 2 |
It was pretty nifty getting to see the spaces where these Puritans actually lived. Folk magic like witch bottles and poppets were on display, as well as plaques informing viewers of the general culture at the time which allowed something like the witch trials to happen. According to this museum, "Allowing a witch to remain in the community was feared to bring the displeasure of God against all of its members."
On our way to our next stop, we stopped into the first of many many witch shops that we visited. I'm only writing this one up because this entry is long enough and because it was fantastic. I'd wanted to go into the Coven's Cottage since reading about it online somewhere because unlike other witch shops - indeed, unlike even the others of Salem - it doesn't assume Wicca is the one true Pagan faith. Its primary focus is actually on Norse and Germanic paganism - it's a Heathen store instead of a Wiccan one that has one or two Norse books, if you're lucky! Plus it's family owned!
I bought a wooden statue of Freyja, which is fitting. The first god statue I ever bought was Thor, and He was the first god I worked with. As Freyja is the second, it made sense that I bought Her statue second, though it wasn't what was running through my head at the time. We chatted a bit with the guy behind the counter... and he handed me a blue envelope from the Watcher! And can you guess what it said?
"No clue here!"...huh.
Our next stop was the Witch History Museum. It's a similar museum to the Witch Dungeon Museum, but as our tour guide here was not as down to earth as Sarah-who-was-not-my-Sarah (though he was very entertaining), this one ended up feeling far kitschier. After this, we needed something a little more sobering in the face of all the witch kitsch, so we went to pay our respects at the Burying Point's Witch Trials Memorial. It's a beautiful memorial to a tragic event. It's easy to forget how tragic it was, but people died horrifically. It is important to remember that.
Time for some mood whiplash, though. Because immediately after our sobering quiet moment of paying our respects, we went to the New England Pirate Museum, which was completely kitschy and completely delightful! I was obsessed with pirates as a little kid, so my inner child was super excited, moreso when we realised how knowledgeable our tour guide was.
The best story he told was that of William Fly who got his start in a mutiny of a slave ship. It was his death which was truly legendary though. When Fly was caught and sentenced to hanging, he brought the executioner a bouquet of flowers. Cotton Mather (yes, the same Cotton Mather responsible for a lot of Witch Trials rhetoric and buried in Boston) came to oversee the execution and Fly spat in his face. And when the noose was placed around his neck, Fly criticised the hangman for doing a poor job and then re-tied the noose himself! What a badass, right?
At this point we were quite hungry, but not quite ready to return to witchery, so we decided to get lunch at a place I've long been curious about, called Flying Saucer Pizza, which is themed around aliens and science fiction. I knew we'd be right at home as soon as we stepped inside and saw a painting on the host stand of Spock's LLAP hand signal, and the words "Live Long and Pizza"
Our table was beneath a model of the Enterprise, and the vegetarian section of the menu was called the Vulcan Menu, which is a level of attention to detail I really appreciate - in "Star Trek", Vulcans are vegetarian. We ordered nonalcoholic drinks (A "Charlie Temple" for me, which was like a pomegranate Shirley Temple, and a "Tiny Rick" for Sarah - yes a ref to "Rick and Morty" - which was a sparkling raspberry lemonade), some appetizers (one of which was called SPACEBALLS), and a "Silurian" pizza on beer crust. It was unique and delicious and very filling.
Oh, and tucked against the drink menu was a pink envelope! And inside?
"Not here either!"It seemed, perhaps, that the Watcher was trolling us.
 |
| Also where can I buy these prints for my apartment? |
Our next stop was the Salem Witch Museum, housed in a huge, gothic castle-like building. It markets itself as the most historical of the witch trials museums, but it was really no more or less historical in regards to the trials themselves. Actually, you guys, I have to confess it was my least favourite of the witch museums.
Oh, the first half of the tour was fun. A little dated in the narration (which had been recorded in the 50s judging by the man's Mid-Atlantic accent - though if it was from the 50s, it was pretty #woke for that time as it specifically called out racism against Tituba) but a fun overview of the Witch hysteria. It was the second half I did not like. This was supposed to be a history of witches - and it was spouting ahistorical NONSENSE! Wicca is not an ancient faith that was persecuted in the (nonexistent) burning times! And yet this museum was presenting all of this as fact, which is completely irresponsible for something calling itself a historical museum. And look, I have nothing against Wiccans. I know a lot of Wiccans who are lovely and wonderful. One of those links about Wicca being modern and the Burning Times being a myth is from a Wiccan blog. And I would not at all have minded a display about modern Wicca, or modern Paganism in general - I just don't like a "historical" museum blatantly lying to its guests. But this, too, is part of the Salem experience, I suppose...
One thing I can praise about this museum, though, was at the end when it compared the hysteria of the witch trials to more modern "witch hunts". Yes, the Red Scare of the 1950s got lip service, but so did homophobia of the 1980s, Japanese internment in WWII, and what's going on today with targeting of "illegal" immigrants. That I could respect. That was really bold of them and I super respect it.
We walked along the Salem shoreline after that, through part of the Maritime National Historic Site (we did not go into any of the buildings), and even walking out to a secluded tiny lighthouse. And I do mean tiny - according to this website I just found it's only about 20 feet tall! It was a nice, calm interlude in a very full day.
Our next stop was yet another museum, but we made a pit stop at Ye Olde Pepper Companie, which was founded in 1806. It's adorable in there, and I just had to - HAD to - get one of the historic candies that are made by hand using recipes dating back to the 1800s. I settled on Blackjacks, which are like hard molasses sticks. They're very good, but I have to break them into chunks to eat them - they're too sweet for me to finish a whole one in one go. I also got maple candies. Being in New England, how could I possibly resist?
 |
| The House of Seven Gables - you'll have to trust me that there really are seven gables |
Guess what, guys? It turns out there is a limit to how many museums I can do in one day! And that number is seven! I can do seven before I get overstimulated and need to take a break! Good to know, I guess?
After a short rest on a bench over at nearby Pickering Wharf to restore our spirits a bit, we hit up a couple more witch shops but didn't buy anything. However, I did find another clue from the Watcher. A yellow envelope in one of the witch shops, tucked between the arms of a black cat figurine, with the following message:
"(The day of your birth x 100) + The month of your birthThe first half of this puzzle was easy. My birthday is 2 July, so (2x100)+7=207. I may not be a total math whiz, but even I could solve that. It was the second half of the clue that confused me. There is no Hamilton Street or James Street in Salem (that we were able to find, anyway).
Then simply add Hamilton's dad.
7:30 PM"
There is a Washington Street, though. And while Hamilton himself seems to have resented any implication of Washington being a father figure to him, historically the man kind of was. Hamilton's political career would never have gotten off the ground if not for Washington's patronage. Anyway, I'm not here to speculate about their interpersonal stuff. Regardless of the history (a phrase you will probably never hear me say again), this seemed to be what the Watcher meant, because 207 Washington Street is the site of another Escape Room.
After a very quick dinner to refresh us (it wasn't anywhere special; we were aiming for quick so we could make the 7:30 reservation on time), we headed over to a 1692 Salem Witch Trials themed Escape Room, which was a perfect way to end a Salem day!
We were in a group with a family of 5 which included 2 young boys, which I was worried about at first except for the fact that the boys were very smart (and their father was an engineer) and ended up solving some of the hints that would have stumped us otherwise. But also, this room included a puzzle where you have to reconstruct a human skull, so my anthropology training came in handy, and one involving the names of trial victims, so my history interest also came in handy. Also another secret passageway (through a "fireplace") which are always a fun detail in escape rooms. Honestly, my life just needs more secret passageways in general.
 |
| The secret passageway from the House of Seven Gables |
THE ENVELOPES.
In the Uber on the way back to Boston (we were too tired to wait 30 minutes for the train, don't judge us - plus, this way we got to drive back over the Zakim Bridge, which we'd been admiring all week but not been on yet), we took out the envelopes that had been found throughout Salem. The false leads with the trolling "no clue here" messages weren't useless after all - its just that the clue was on the envelopes themselves rather than the papers inside! Shining the blacklight upon them revealed this message:
"I'm your biggest fan.This was obviously an A1Z26 cipher - a rather simple cipher where each letter is represented by the number of its order in the alphabet. A is represented by 1, B by 2, C by 3, so on and so forth all the way to Z being represented by 26. So we were able to decode the numbers in the Uber, and what they said was:
9-20 1-12-12 5-14-4-19
1-19 9-20 2-5-7-1-14."
"It all endsClue count: 22
As it began."
THE THRILLING CONCLUSION TO THE MYSTERY OF THE WATCHER...
The mystery was coming to a close on our last night in Massachusetts. We returned to our gorgeous hotel suite, full of trepidation, and sitting upon my bed was a wrapped gift with a gold heart-shaped lock through some of the cardboard, which would have prevented me from getting into the wrapped box. The tiny gold key from the treasure chest unlocked it, and I opened the gift. Inside was another box along with the following handwritten note, in a handwriting that looked... familiar...
"Dear [my name redacted],And inside that smaller, second box?
Sorry for giving you the runaround, but to be honest I'm very shy. I hope you didn't mind too very much...
Happy Birthday!
Love,
Your New Friend."
A seal. A beautiful seal made out of blown glass.
"It's a seal," I said.
"Yes," said Sarah.
"I don't understand," I was completely fucking dumbfounded.
It turns out... it was Sarah who had masterminded the whole mystery, and expertly woven it throughout our entire trip, placing the appropriate hints in the appropriate places throughout our journey. In the context of the mystery itself, the Watcher was the seal, not Sarah, but she had written the clues and assembled everything. She, who had already done so much work in planning out this entire trip for me, had also planned out a mystery. Why?
Simply because she knows I've always wanted to experience something like out of a storybook, something that just doesn't happen in real adult life. The mysterious texts weren't from a number changing app, either - Sarah had recruited various friends of ours, texting them "text [my name redacted] this in 5 minutes" so that when the texts came to me, she wouldn't be anywhere near her phone. It was very smart of her and completely fooled me.
I love and appreciate Sarah so much. I cannot believe all the time and effort she put into this for me. I truly don't feel deserving of it at all. Sarah is so incredible. She is the best wife ever. And this was the best birthday ever.
Day 6
Dawn of the final day. It was time to go back to New York City. We were reluctant to leave, of course, but all good things - including vacations and magical mysteries - must come to an end. So we packed our bags. I made sure the Watcher was wrapped up safely so that they would not break their flippers on the train ride back. We left the hotel staff a generous tip (after all, Sarah could not have pulled off the mystery without them), and headed downstairs to check out and get one last buffet breakfast in the stunningly gorgeous dining room of our hotel.
But Boston had one more trick up its sleeve, one that even mastermind Sarah in all her genius could not have predicted. The hostess in the restaurant area saw us with our bags, asked if we were checking out, and when we said yes, she offered to do one last magical thing for us. I believe she even used the word "magical" - a kindred spirit, I suspect.
She sat us at a table with an excellent view of the restaurant's beauty and told us of its historical significance.
This was the table where John F. Kennedy had proposed to Jacqueline "Jackie" Bouvier. Sarah was given JFK's seat, and I sat in Jackie's. It was a beautiful way to end such a fantastic trip, and a wonderful place to sit and bask in the week's glories as we loaded up on delicious food.
Oh, and I had wanted to get one last Boston Cream Pie after breakfast, but after all the incredible food, I was just too full. Oh well.
Boston Cream Pie count: 5. (That may not seem like a lot, but it's more in one week than I've had in the last, like, 10 years.)
Thank you to Massachusetts, and everyone in it - the staff of the Omni Parker House, the museum workers, my old friend M, our new friends on the Yacht, the friendly restaurant workers, and everyone who sang to me from the banks of the Charles River - for making my birthday week truly spectacular.
Yours at 29 years old now,
Nym
No comments:
Post a Comment