Boston

We're in Boston (or at least, in Andover near Boston) so it must be Tuesday.

Today our coach took us into Boston. In the morning we visited the JFK Library and Museum: a bit of a challenge for our coach drivers as there were roadworks, and I heard them saying to each other "what does your GPS say?", but we got there in the end after asking a policeman or two.

As JFK was the President who really made television his tool, there was lots of great archival footage, starting with Kennedy family home movies when he was just a gorgeous boy and then going to Paris when his father was Ambassador to France, and then various election campaigns and his victory speech, right through to the assassination. We only had an hour, and I wish we'd had more time to spend there, but we were running late.

We had a quick lunch at Quincy Market, which has some wonderful food stalls and a few interesting shops, and then picked up our onboard licensed guide for a tour around Boston. She was excellent: Swiss by birth, she emigrated in the sixties to the US.

Boston is very pretty, surrounded by water and with some wonderful parks and historic buildings. We visited Old North church (where the Sons of Liberty shone two lamps in the window to let Paul Revere know which way the British soldiers were coming: "one if by land, two if by sea") and sat in the enclosed pews that still had the names of the people who rented them back in 1794. We drove past Boston Common, where cows were grazed, and saw the land reclaimed from the sea that has been turned into park, and the statue of the duck with her ducklings: Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Oack, Pack and Quack.

And we visited USS Constitution (Old Iron Sides), one of America's first Navy ships after Independence.

It was bloody cold, so we didn't linger. After we dropped our tour guide off we headed back to Andover and had dinner at Crackerjack (another clone, but with even faster service). I discovered that blackberry cobbler is pretty much blackberry jam, served with icecream on top.

I"ve been wrestling with my ASUS eee pc netbook and in desperation followed some advice that I found when I googled the error message. It involved using Linux commands, which makes me very nervous, but seems to have part-fixed the problem. Mainly now I think the problem is that I don't have much memory, but at least I can move photos from my camera SD card to my memory stick.