Dunkin'

Welcome, sweet reader, as this week I update you on our second week of holiday over in New England. Last week, you'll remember us being part-way through our time in Vermont, a bastion of self-proclaimed weirdness. We continued our time there before returning to Boston for a couple of days, then flying home.

In Vermont we managed to find something describing itself as "New England's Biggest Corn Maze", which is a challenge we couldn't really pass up. However, after an hour of wandering around in not-quite-circles, seemingly not getting anywhere, it's possible that spirits were a little lower than when we started:

However, we recovered to solve the maze in a better-than average time, entirely by accident of course. The maze itself was intelligently thought out and definitely worth a visit.

The reason we went to Vermont in the first place was to see the famous Fall colours, but sadly we were a week or two too early. A few trees were definitely on the turn, giving us views like this one:

Before long we were heading back to Boston. Massachusetts is of course the home of Dunkin' Donuts, and they are pretty much everywhere throughout the state. Boston itself is also famous for dunking tea in the harbour, and as there's a museum which lets you re-enact just that, we had to partake:

Now apparently, "taxation without representation is tyranny", which of course must mean I'm living under a tyrannical regime; no news there really.

In Boston we also took the opportunity to go and see the Red Sox play at Fenway Park, the oldest ballpark still in use in Major League Baseball. Fenway is massively space-constrained, with the streets outside closed off before the game to provide extra space for those all-important food vendors. It has the most amazing, manually-operated scoreboard which is worth the price of admission in itself. The Red Sox won, which mascot Wally the Green Monster (or possibly his sister Tessie) was suitably happy about:

Anyway, it was great to soak up Boston's history like this, and generally the place has the feeling of a European capital city due to its lack of a grid system and the fact that they called skimmed milk by its proper name over there. I even enjoyed the best fish and chips I've eaten in the US in Boston, so it seems like they haven't entirely shrugged off their English roots. Hussar!