At Last... The Post About My Trip This Summer
As some of you may know, I spent about a week in Massachusetts and New Hampshire with my friend David this summer. We stayed in the Lizzie Borden house in Fall River, MA, did some sightseeing around Mass, and then went up and stayed with my friend Ashley in New Hampshire for a few days. And, I finally uploaded pictures to share with you. Most of them are actually of David (as you will see, he likes to pose for pictures)...
I'll start with Lizzie's house... We got there late at night Wednesday night after getting a little lost. (Falls River is a bit difficult to navigate.) I don't know how many of you know the story of Lizzie Borden, but she is famous for having been accused of killing her father and stepmother with an ex at the turn of the century. She was acquitted, but most people believe that she must have been the one to commit the murders. The Lizzie Borden house is in fact the house that Lizzie grew up in and the house in which the murders were committed. If you interested in knowing more of the Lizzie Borden story, here's a Wiki Link and here's the Lizzie Borden B&B Site.
By the time we got to Lizzie's we'd missed the tour for the night, so we just settled in. In the morning we were served the breakfast that Lizzie's family had the morning of the murders and then were on our own for the day. We stayed in Lizzie's room and took a few pictures in there.
We spent the rest of the day exploring Fall River. We went to the Historical Society, which was actually an old house of a wealthy family. It was pretty incredible, but we couldn't take pictures inside. They had a Lizzie Borden room, a room about the Fall River Line (a big boat line that went from Fall River to NY), a room of turn of the century wedding dresses, and a room on funerary art in addition to rooms full of important figures and events in Fall River history.
After the historical society we went to the Maritime Museum. Most the museum consisted of information on the Fall River Line, but they also had an exhibit on the Titanic that David really like and an exhibit on the SS Andrea Doria that I really enjoyed. There were also a lot of model ships and such.
We then went to the cemetery in which Lizzie was buried hoping to find her family plot and gravesite. Unfortunately we couldn't find it, but we walked around for awhile and I saw this gravestone that I thought was really interesting.
After walking around we returned to Lizzie's and just sort of hung out until there was a tour that night. During the tour we learned a lot more about the house and about the case. The guide basically took us through the entire day of the murder and the days that followed. We learned a bit more about Lizzie's life and her family. One of the more disturbing things we learned was that the autopsies of Mr and Mrs Borden were preformed in the dining room (where we ate breakfast) because the crime was so gruesome that they didn't want to move the bodies too far from the crime scenes. I actually have a picture of the autopsy photo of Mrs Borden. They had to shave her head and you can see all the ax wounds in the back of her head.
That night there were also a group of Lizzie experts staying at the B&B. Several of them had actually written books about Lizzie and the case. We stayed up fairly late chatting with them and another family that was staying at the house and then went to bed.
The next morning after breakfast we took a few more pictures of David in the room next too Lizzie's which belonged to her sister Emma. Emma was older, but her room was the smaller. Actually, Lizzie had the smaller room when she was younger, but when she was in her early twenties she went on a tour of Europe and returned with a great number of souvenirs, so she convinced Emma to switch rooms with her so that she could have the larger room to display the things she brought back. By the time of the murders Lizzie had been living in the big room that David and I stayed in for some time.
After the pictures we did one more tour around Fall River. We wanted to try to find Lizzie's burial plot again and we wanted to go see the house that Lizzie had built and moved into after the trial. We had success on both accounts, eventually. But, not before getting a little lost and finding a cool old school somewhere outside of Fall River. It looks like the school hasn't been used as such since maybe sometime in the early 90s.
The Borden family was fairly well off, so they had a big family plot. A.J. Borden was Lizzie's Father. Next to the big family plot marker there are little graves for each person (Lizzie, Emma, a sister that died in at a young age, Lizzie's mother, Lizzie's father, and Lizzie's stepmother).
And here is the house that Lizzie had built and then moved into with her sister after the trial. She named the house Mapplecroft. It was opened as a B&B at one point and it still has a lot of Lizzie's belongings in it, but it is now a private residence and isn't open to the public.
We then started heading towards New Hampshire, but took a quick stop in New Bedford, MA where we visited the Rotch-Jones-Duff House & Garden Museum. The house was owned by the three families consecutively and is now a museum. I didn't get a picture of the front, but I got a picture of the back as well as some pictures of David in the gardens.
After the museum we slowly made our way up to New Hampshire and got a bit lost but ended up near Ashley's a little after supper. We decided to get dinner in Wolfborro and then went to Ashley's house in Tufftonboro. When we got to Ashley's we built a bonfire and sat outside with Ashley and a few of her friends and just chatted and relaxed then eventually went to bed.
The next day we slept in and then got up and drove around Lake Winnipesaukee a bit. We visited the Annalee Doll Museum and had lunch at Hart's Turkey Farm and eventually made out way to Weirs Beach where there was a huge Arcade Museum with a bunch of old arcade games. Dave loved that because he's a little bit older and remembers playing all those games in arcades when he was younger. He played a lot and we played a game of pong together. I won. ( : Then we walked around Weirs Beach a little bit and took a few more pictures of David, but really only the one came out and you can't really see much of the beach.
When we got back to Ashley's her family had gotten together a little dinner party with some old family friends and some people that they had employed when they owned a coffee shop in Portsmouth, NH. (Ashley's family has a microroastery and they roast and distribute their own coffee and for awhile had a coffee shop open. If you're ever in around New Hampshire and see Black Bear Coffee around try it, it's amazing. Even David was impressed, and he drinks A LOT of coffee.) Anyway, we enjoyed the dinner party and chatted around a fire for awhile and Ashley showed us a tattoo that she's in the process of getting. I took a picture, it's a pretty fantastic tattoo.
Once everyone left, Ashley, Dave and I went settled out on the trampoline with a bunch of blankets and watched for shooting stars because there was a meteor shower going on. We all saw some really great ones and it was fun to just catch up with Ashley. (She had been my one of my roommates my freshman year at Marlboro, so I don't really get to see her often.) Eventually we went to bed.
The next morning Dave and I slept in again and then went to the Castle in the Clouds which is an old house/castle/mansion that an eccentric guy had built in the early 1900s. It's in the Ossippee Mountains and looks over Lake Winnipesaukee. It's a crazy house that had all sorts of modern technology. There was electricity and bathrooms all over the place. They had huge refrigerators and freezers and a central vacuuming system as well as all sorts of interesting rooms and great gardens. I took a few pictures of the house itself and a few pictures of Dave in the house and in the gardens and then took a picture of the view. Sorry, I didn't compress the picture of the view because it just didn't look as good. ( :
When we got back we had dinner with Ashley and then went into Wolforo for ice cream and to rent a movie. We went back to Ashley's, watched the movie (Freedomland, I didn't love it) and then finally went to bed. We got up fairly early the next morning and made our way to Vermont and took Route 9 through Vermont to New York (the same path I took when coming home from and going to Malrboro). Dave dropped me off at work at 6:02p. I was scheduled to work at 6. (;
Anyway, that was my vacation, it was a lot of fun. Hope you enjoy the pictures and check out the links. Sorry there aren't any pictures of me, but I was the one taking the pictures. ( : Oh, and sorry if I spelled place names wrong... I tried to get them right, but I was lazy and didn't look everything up.