The Cozy Mystery List Blog

One of the day tours my daughter and I took was to Salem. On our way to Salem (from Boston) we went through Revere – the setting for Camille Minichino‘s Periodic Table mystery book series. (As some of you know, Minichino is one of my favorite Cozy Mystery book authors…)

Our bus driver/tour guide was a lifetime resident of the Boston area .. complete with the “yooz guys” dialect, “Wooster” was not the name of P. G. Wodehouse’s main character, but was the “Worcester” exit. I’m not sure if this was laid on so thickly for our benefit or if he truly spoke this way during his off hours. Either way, I loved it!

I have to say that listening to the tour guide was a real treat. He was… full of local color. I especially enjoyed all of his Revere stories (He actually grew up there.) He spoke about the public beach/amusement park/boardwalk of yesteryear… with the same loving nostalgia that Minichino’s main character Gloria Lamerino speaks about it.

Unfortunately, time has taken its toll and the big roller coaster has been demolished. But in its place, they have built buildings with sides that are true to the angles of the dips and rises of yesteryear’s roller coaster. Those buildings are fun to see when you know their history, but at the same time, they’re an oddity to behold when you don’t know about the roller coaster story…

Back to Salem…

Obviously, a large bulk of Salem’s economy is made from selling tourists all of what you would expect to buy in Salem… potions, herbs, candles, crystals, lotions, fortunes, ETC. As we ventured around the town, we noticed a lot of Wiccans, which I should have guessed would find Salem to be a great place to live (and prosper.)  I especially enjoyed hearing informational mini-lectures throughout the town… One Wiccan was especially interesting as she conducted a tour of one of the town’s cemeteries.

While October must be a huge boom for Salem, Halloween must be a real treat!

I’m home! And I feel smarter now than I did before my trip! As I’ve mentioned before – my daughter moved to Cambridge to pursue her law degree.

I had a great time visiting a lot of really neat places. It really would be terrific to live on the east coast and have access to all sorts of historical places! We took a trolley tour and saw the highlights of Boston, and on our harbour tour we saw the USS Constitution. The trip to Salem was a real treat, as was our trip to Lexington and Concord. We saw such beautiful scenery AND after so many years of San Antonio’s lack-luster falls, the autumnal changing of colors was truly phenomenal.

My daughter rented a “Zip Car” twice, so we were also able to do a little shopping – for necessities, not clothes. We took advantage of her student status and went to Harvard’s Museum of Natural History, where we saw the most amazing glass flower collection imaginable. The flowers were made by a father/son duo (Leopold Blaschka and his son, Rudolph) – commissioned  for Harvard’s Botanical Museum in the late 18900s/early 1900s. Really impressive!!!

But of course, as a mom, my favorite event of the trip was seeing my daughter. I have missed her a lot and I have missed our weekly lunch dates when she attended the University of Texas at Austin. Some weeks the seventy five mile trip (one way!) felt long — but now I look back and feel like she was truly in our local “neighborhood” school.