The marina in Quincy has been a good base for touring.
We spent a day in Concord visiting the Minute Man National Park and learning about the beginning of the Revolution. Concord is an interesting place, founded in 1635, and a center of intellectual thought in the early to mid 1800s. Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa Mae Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne all lived here. We drove by Walden Pond (a tourist trap) and walked through Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where all of the notables are buried (no headless horseman seen, although Washington Irving's hollow may have been elsewhere).
Yesterday we drove to Lowell and toured the national park there. The Park Service has done a great job preserving the history of the American industrial revolution which had it's beginning in the textile mills and machine works here. The feeder canals off the Merrimack River have been preserved and a small part of the Boott Cotton Mill is still operational as a demonstration site. Visiting a boarding house for the mill girls really brought home this slice of American history and gave a new appreciation for the beginnings of labor unions.
We will do provisioning and boat chores today, spend tomorrow visiting with Liz and Pete, then leave early Sunday AM to make the trip back through the Cape Cod canal. We will be in Newport from September 4 to 6 to meet Mike and Barbara Wapner for a cruise down Long Island Sound to New York. I'll start a new folder of pictures in the gallery and a new Favorites in the blog categories for our trip south to the Chesapeake.