the new england history tour of 2007

we've decided that we want a big part of our time here to involve learning about this area (or reminding ourselves what we already know about this area). there are so many resources in new england for learning about history, including the houses we live in, the bumpy brick sidewalks we stroll over and the crumbling gravestones we pass by. aaron and i are really trying to notice what is around us, and to learn about how it came to be and how it used to be.

so far, we've explored a bit of the south shore of boston, including the coast guard heritage museum in barstable, the herreshoff marine museum in bristol, the new bedford whaling museum and a few boatyards on the cape. we walked a bit of the minuteman bikeway in lexington and had dinner in the old rail station downtown. we've gone to the maritime heritage center in gloucester and of course the essex shipbuilding museum. last weekend we drove out to the northampton area and visited the historic northampton museum and the williamsburg general store. on the way home we stopped at walden pond in concord and walked around it "deliberately."

while aaron focuses more on the history in and of these places, i focus more on the gift shops. in particular, on the notecards in the giftshops. i'm building up a nice collection, though most of them will likely be mailed off to some of you in the near future. at the walden pond gift shop i saw some beautiful prints with thoreau quotes and block prints by artist michael mccurdy. this is my favorite:
he also has a series of animal notecards, which are really fun. here is the fox:

and at the gloucester maritime museum, we found this awesome book:

this british shipwright and artist, james dodds, set some of his boat linocuts to the words of a kipling poem. it's beautiful! and after snooping around on his website, i saw another of his books, "alphabet of boats," which has a cool boat linocut for each letter of the alphabet. here's the ark:

i can't wait for our new england gift shop tour to continue!