My Magical Mystery Birthday Trip Through Massachusetts

On 2 July, I turned 29, entering the last year of this crazy decade I've called my twenties. This wasn't as depressing as it could have been, entirely because my amazing and wonderful bff Sarah who arranged a week-long trip to Boston and Salem, two cities in Massachusetts that I've wanted to visit my entire life. (Okay, technically I had been to Boston once already, as a very small child, but I remembered nothing of this trip. Parents, take your kids on vacations after they develop long-term memory.) Sarah did such an amazing job planning - every day brought new wonders!

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!
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..."

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.

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.

It's Hot as Hell! In Phila-del-phia! (My Recent Vacation to Philly)

Sometimes you need an escape. Desperately.

I recently received some very bad news that I'm still not quite ready to go public with on this blog. (I will make it its own separate post once I've fully grieved and processed.) My mother, my therapist, Sarah, my kindred, and my friend Eliza are so far the only ones who know. (I have two other friends I also want to tell before I go public, but I want to tell them in person, and haven't gotten an opportunity to do so yet.)

The point is that I just couldn't be in my day-to-day life in New York for a little bit. So it worked out great that Sarah had planned a vacation to Philadelphia, a city I had long wanted to visit. And with Philly so close to New York (only 2 hours by bus, about the same amount of time it'd take me to get from my apartment to the Bronx) it worked out surprisingly well.

And you guys. You guys.

Philadelphia is wonderful.

THIS STREET DOES NOT EVEN LOOK REAL DOES IT?

Between all the Revolutionary History (I'M ALWAYS A SLUT FOR THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION), delicious food, getting to cross an item off my bucket list that's been there since 2003, and way too many "1776" references (sing it with me now - "someone better oooooopen up a window!") Sarah and I had a much-needed wonderful time. I was able to decompress away from home and have a lot of fun, too.

Now this is going to be one of those "look at all this cool stuff I did!" travel posts. If that's not your jam, I will not be at all offended if you skip this one. (My viewcounts have been low since facebook censored me - yeah that's still not fixed - so I've made my peace with the fact that not everyone will read every post.) But if you wanna see what Sarah and I did, read on!

Oh, Canada!

So I've been more or less fairly silent on the blog, and for that I am sorry, but I've been so busy planning the vacation Sarah and I took for her birthday! I'm pretty proud of myself as I planned this entire vacation all by myself, a major step in adulting if I do say so myself. We went to Niagara Falls, Canada!

We did a pretty good mix of activities, too - from the nature related (taking a boat up to the falls, and taking a nature walk downriver), to touristy (look I know Clifton Hill is cheesy but we were on vacation and we love kitsch), to living like the real Canadians (by which I mean we ate a lot of Tim Horton's)

It was a short trip, yes - but it was a much-needed fun one!

There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays

The weird thing about visiting my parents in California for a week is that sitting here in my big comfy bed with my orange cat Momo laying by the foot of it snoring, the heat running without me having to worry about paying for it... it honestly almost feels as if the past year and three months of living on the East Coast never happened. As if it was all some long, crazy dream.

I've had a lot of fun the last few days, and if I'm being completely honest with myself, there's a part of me that doesn't want to go back. Seven days hasn't quite been long enough for my emotional brain to remember that living with one's parents isn't quite as fun as having them spoil you for a week because they never see you. Despite my logic brain trying their best to remind my emotional brain, emotional brain just drowns out logic and sings:

Oh there's no place like home for the holidays... For no matter how far away you roam... If you want to be happy in a million ways... For the holidays, you can't beat home sweet home...

Look, I know no one does Christmas/Hanukkah/Yule/What have you like New York City. But the truth is, California will always be my home in my heart. You can keep your White Christmas - give me 65-degrees-farenheit all December, please. The Silicon Valley is the Valley of my Heart's Delight, and if I had it my way, I'd have taken a month off to visit rather than just a week. A week just isn't long enough to do everything I want to do, to see everything I've missed and some things I never got the chance to see. I'm already counting down the days until the next time I return to the Bay Area (next June for my high school reunion) and I don't even fly back east until Sunday!

I do miss my three-legged cat back in New Jersey, though. 

At the same time, though, New York is consistently in the back of my mind. San Jose is just as sweet and quaint and cool in its own way, but I've changed. I'm less of an easy-going pushover now. And okay, I'm a little more snobby sometimes - there has been more than one stop this trip where I've been like, "okay, it's cute, but in New York we have this similar thing that's so much bigger!" Honestly, I don't know how my family doesn't think I'm completely insufferable.

I can cook a lot better now, too - look at this fondue spread my mom and I made!

 I think, on some level, I will be happy to return to the East Coast. I do want to go to Hamilton Grange next weekend, I am curious about the axe-throwing place they just put in Brooklyn (expect my Viking ass to do a future entry on that), and I am eager to take my GRE and get a head-start on working towards the future that I moved to the east coast for in the first place. I just... don't want to leave California yet.

Honestly, if I had it my way, I'd live half the year in New York and half in California. Perhaps do spring and autumn in NYC and winter and summer in the Bay Area. But unfortunately, I'm not rich, that kind of lifestyle is just way beyond my means.

Anyway, I'm just rambling about how happy I've been the last few days, compared to the last few months (I had been, frankly, quite miserable for the latter half of October and almost the entirety of November and December - Seasonal Affective Disorder, you guys. It's a real hell and a half). But if you want, read on for a day-by-day summary of this little week of heaven. If not, I'll see you all in New York!

Mysteries of Kinderhook

Hey, remember when Sarah and I went to Albany?

When we did that, we were actually staying in a small town just south of Albany called Kinderhook, best known for being the birthplace of President Martin Van Buren and not for much else. It's an adorably quaint historic town, though, and a little over a week ago, we went and stayed there again for Sarah's birthday, taking excursions from there to Albany, Hudson, Adirondack, Lake George, and Saratoga Springs. We did so many exciting things, from escape rooms to ropes courses to a historic spa!

But one of my favourite things that we did happened in Kinderhook itself. Sarah and I helped solve a mystery.

No, really. I'm dead serious.

Kinderhook happens to be full of mysteries, as every quaint small town should be if fiction hasn't lied to me.  Some are more historical in nature, some more paranormal, and some straddle the line. I'll of course be talking about all types in this blog entry but first allow me to brag about the mystery Sarah and I helped solve. Ours was more historical than paranormal, but who isn't down for a history mystery?

It was pretty much one the coolest things that has ever happened to me, but like an idiot I did not have the foresight to take photos of the object in question. However, I did at least get a photo of the outside of the historic house in Kinderhook where our mystery was solved:

Built in 1819 and now known to locals as the "House of History" (What a great title, amirite?), the Vanderpoel House was originally the home of prominent lawyer James Vanderpoel and his family. In the 19th century, it was used as a boarding house. It stands today as an outstanding example of Federal style architecture and is one of four museums in Kinderhook run by the Columbia County Historical Society.

Sarah and I had stopped in on the morning of the sixth and I happened to strike up a conversation with the woman running the place about my own experiences working in historic homes, both the Winchester House and the Federal style Hamilton Grange. And that's when this woman's eyes lit up.

"Maybe you can help me with something," she told me as she led me to the front door.

Visiting the Grave of Sarah Winchester

Yesterday, three former Winchester Mystery House tour guides (myself, Sarah, and Hannah) took a journey that I have been meaning to take since moving to the East Coast. We met in Grand Central Station at noon, boarded a train to New Haven, CT, and went to the Evergreen Cemetery to find the final resting place of the woman who built the House we all loved working in so much - Sarah Winchester.

My Weekend in Albany

A couple weeks ago, Sarah approached me with a proposition - I get a weekend off of working any of my jobs (including my beloved Hamilton Grange) and we could go stay with her aunt and uncle in Kinderhook, a small town near Albany. I shit you not, the way she actually convinced me to go was telling me, "we can go see Schuyler Mansion."

Stars in my eyes, I could only reply, "that's where Alexander Hamilton got married..." How I would love to see that!

We did see it.

And New York City, I love you, but sometimes you bring me down. The city can be stressful, even for someone that loves it. And let's face it, it's expensive. It'd be nice to go somewhere where we don't have to even pay for lodgings and food (I can't remember the last time I had a weekend where I spent zero dollars). It'd be nice to take a break sometimes. (Okay, okay, I'll stop with the songs.)

So we booked the vacation, and on Friday we boarded an Amtrak train to Penn Station to make our way upstate!

I cannot tell you enough how non-stressful it was. How quiet. Not only that, the room I got to stay in was adorable:

Antique wooden furniture? An old 1940s book of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales? A charming patchwork quilt? An affectionate cat? (His name was Shoelace.) Sign me the fuck up.

Sarah and I spent most of the weekend just relaxing at her aunt and uncle's house, watching old episodes of "Bob's Burgers" and playing Clue with her cousin and petting Shoelace a lot. Her uncle is a professional chef so we were well-fed. It was nice to do nothing for once, though on the first day I didn't really know what to make of it. I'm used to NYC being so fast paced, being so "what can I do next?!"

That being said, we did make room for a few excursions into Albany...