oh my god, our hosts are gamers! i have never seen this before. this is a far cry above the world i'm used to. they have machines about 4x's the size of the ones we use. the graphics is incredible. we came home and found father and son, each sitting in front of their own machine and large monitor, playing an on line version of lord of the rings. They've got head sets with microphones and their playing with 12 other people online. the son is a programmer for a gaming company and he keeps a running discussion going with the other online participants. this may explain how they are so socially inept that they went out for dinner earlier without telling us and left us just sitting on the back deck wondering what was going on. we had to text them to find out if they had in fact gone out and what we should do about locking the door when we went out.
i'm sure this has some relation to the incredible time we had earlier touring the minuteman national park. we got up slowly this morning, rode through the massachusetts countryside, up and down, up and down. then we picked up the nashua river rail trail, stopped and had breakfast in a groton cafe, and continued on to concord. outside concord we entered the minuteman national park ( and, no, jeff, it's not named after you. stop bragging.) what a real delight to see the actual location of the battles (skirmishes is more like it) betwen british and colonialists. (and, please, do not tell me you do not know what happened at concord and lexington) we stood there and looked down on the north bridge from the same location as the colonists mustered, where they would have looked down on the 96 british soldiers there. and we stood on the bridge, both sides, and felt what it must have been to be on both sides. then we road the 'battle road trail' along the route of the british retreat.
it's amazing how little damage was actually done by all of this. the muskets both sides used were incredibly inaccurate. i remember watching 'last of the mohicans' and marvelling as daniel day lewis shot the english officer through the heart from a hundred yards away. well, that just didn't happen. these guys could stand a hundred yards apart and fire all day and they wouldn't have hit anyone. in fact, that's pretty much what they did. at the battle of lexington commons, where the british and colonialists faced off, the total damage to britsh forces was one leg wound and one hand wound. unfortunately, there were 8 colonialists killed. this by trained british soldiers. but there was a lot of noise and smoke. anyway, it was exciting to see the actual battlefield.
from there we went through lexington and on to arlington, where our hosts are. and now we are. 45-50 mile day, but it felt longer. and although the gods continue to smile on me (is it a joke?), maurice came up limping with his second flat tire of the trip. on the battle road trail, no less.
it's amazing how much nicer it is to approach a city through rich neighborhoods, with stone walls and orchards and shaded woods, versus the slums of saginaw. the barns of massachusetts are distinctly different. they're not the classic dutch gambrel, painted red, but simple tent roofs with gable ends, often painted brown. and the town halls are unique, shaped by the fact that they served as meeting halls, not courthouses and administrative centers as we commonly think of them. a more purely democratic government (if you were a free, white male) the populace would meet together to discuss issues in a large room.
tomorrow, the final 10 miles to boston bay.
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