Boston - Page 10

Who is Online

Details: Written by: Richard_McKie; Parent Category: Travel; Category: North America; Published: 28 October 2023; Hits: 13002

Article Index

Page 10 of 17

Getting to Boston from Ft Lauderdale turned out to be a challenge. Four changes of flights and a change of airline and airport, due to cancellations; but mainly a lot of airport waiting. Then, collecting the rental car in Boston took over an hour.

In Boston, the tunnel to our hotel was closed. Yet, both TomTom and the in-car GPS kept taking us back to it. Anyway, after a long and trying day we got there, still in time for dinner at a colourful Mexican restaurant across the road.

Refreshed the following morning, we drove up to Salem before coming back into town.

You can see a lot more of Boston, from our last trip there in 2007,
by clicking on the pictures above

No comments

Travel

Bulgaria 2024

In May 2024 Wendy and I travelled to Berlin then to Greece for several weeks. We finished our European trip with a week in Bulgaria, followed by a week in the UK, before flying back to Sydney.

On a previous trip to Turkey and the Balkans we had bypassed Bulgaria, not knowing what to expect. My awareness was mainly informed by the spy novels that I've read in which Bulgaria figures. These reflect real life 'Cold War' espionage when the country had one foot in the Soviet Union and the other, half in the West.

Fiction, Recollections & News

The First Man on the Moon

At 12.56 pm on 21 July 1969 Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) Neil Armstrong became the first man to step down onto the Moon. I was at work that day but it was lunchtime. Workplaces did not generally run to television sets and I initially saw it in 'real time' in a shop window in the city.

Later that evening I would watch a full replay at my parents' home. They had a 'big' 26" TV - black and white of course. I had a new job in Sydney having just abandoned Canberra to get married later that year. My future in-laws, being of a more academic bent, did not have TV that was still regarded by many as mindless.

Given the early failures, and a few deaths, the decision to televise the event in 'real time' to the international public was taking a risk. But the whole space program was controversial in the US and sceptics needed to be persuaded.

Opinions and Philosophy

The reputation of nuclear power

One night of at the end of March in 1979 we went to a party in Queens. Brenda, my first wife, is an artist and was painting and studying in New York. Our friends included many of the younger artists working in New York at the time. That day it had just been announced that there was a possible meltdown at a nuclear reactor at a place called a Three Mile Island , near Harrisburg Pennsylvania.

I was amazed that some people at the party were excitedly imagining that the scenario in the just released film ‘The China Syndrome’ was about to be realised; and thousands of people would be killed.

Terms of Use

Terms of Use Copyright