Day 146 - Salem & Boston Part 1, MA

We left Portsmouth and hit the Interstate towards Salem.

I studied The Crucible at school, a 1950's play written by Arthur Miller which is based on the witch trials that took place in Salem. I was hoping that visiting Salem, I would learn more about the witch trials and just how realistic this play was. Neither of us were sure of what expect in Salem, a town obsessed with pulling in the tourists and killing a theme like Roswell, a little village filled with witches or a normal medium-sized American town.

It turned out to be a mixture of all three. Whilst there were a lot of references to the witch trials, Salem was also just a normal town and although it was a decent sized town, it still had a small town feel to it, especially once you get out of the main tourist drag. It is only a month now until Halloween and whilst there were some decorations up, there were no more than other towns we had visited so far, despite this being on of the biggest festivals in the town with thousands of people visiting from all over America to party.

We only had a day in Salem so we decided to take the Trolley Bus tour. This is a great way of seeing all the major sites without having to drive or walk, learn about the history and helped us to decide where we'd like to spend the little time we had exploring. We were surprised that the trolley tour didn't focus on the witch trials, they were mentioned and key sites like the memorial, Witch Museum and the Dungeon but the main focus of the tour was on the original settlers, the significance of the seaport, the huge mansions and the influential people who lived in them. We really enjoyed the trolley tour and within the two hours the tour took, we felt like we had seen all the key sights and learn't a huge amount of history on this town.

With the trolley done, there were three things we agreed we wanted to explore more. The first was the food truck festival in the park. It was well after lunchtime by now and we needed some energy to keep us going. Food trucks in the US are not like food trucks in the UK, we're used to eating 'Death Burgers', greasy fish and chips and overpriced cheap pies but food trucks in the US are often high quality specialist food, the food is better than you get in some restaurants and it reasonably priced for what you get. There were about 50 different trucks to choose from but we both went for a chicken and lamb wrap which was really yummy.

Refueled, we then headed to the witch trials memorial. Here there is a stone seat for each of the 20 residents of Salem who were accused of being a witch and killed by either hanging or being pressed to death!

Our final stop before heading off was the statue of Samantha, my namesake from the TV show Bewitched.

If you plan to visit Boston, Salem is an easy drive away or a ferry ride away and it is a really fun, interesting and different day trip away from the big city.

We hit the road and headed into Boston. We are staying in Boston for three nights as this is a fire break for us so its a good time to get some washing done, catch up on admin and write a few blog entries but before we do any of that, we decided to check out the night life. We headed to the downtown area and whilst the majority of the bars and restaurants seemed very upscale, we managed to google a couple that were more dive bar like just off the main street. We went to Stoddards Fine Food & Ale, Jim Curley and our favourite an Irish Bar called Beantown Pub which was supposedly the friendliest bar in Boston. What really surprised us in this bar was when James Blunt came on the jukebox and the bouncer started singing at the top of his voice and encouraging everyone else in the bar to sing. Of course Lee quickly became friends with him as he helped him belt out a few more songs!

More on Boston in the next blog!