Going Home - And Hitting My Bucket List

View from the Commonwealth Hotel

 So for those of you who follow me you may know that I'm originally from New Hampshire. There's definitely a lot of Maryland gal in me, I've lived here now for 36 years, but my family is from the Great North Woods. I was born in Dover. And I still have a lot of family left up here. Whenever I cross that line past Franconia Notch I feel this incredible peace come over me. I'm home.

My beautiful cousin Sarah was marrying her love Steph this weekend and we were going to have one hell of a party up in Pittsburg. My son couldn't come with me on this venture and though my sisters were coming too I knew I needed some peace and quiet in between the partying. I'm a morning person. They are not. Lol, I also like road trips and side quests so I invited one of my besties to come with me. I knew she wouldn't mind 5 a.m. start times and taking the car and stopping by places for quick hikes.

Statue of Paul Revere

One of the things I knew I wanted to do was catch a game at Fenway. I love the Red Sox. I'm a third generation fan, but I've never, ever been to a game at Fenway. Whenever I go home, I feel guilty for stopping in Boston because I have so much family to see in New Hampshire and Vermont. Lucky for me, my niece goes to school in Boston so I had every excuse to hang out for a few days. So I texted her and asked if she'd be interested in a game. To make it even better, they were playing the Baltimore Orioles. So here I am in Boston, at a game in Fenway lol and I brought I bunch of O's fans with me. It was an amazing game. You could see Fenway from our hotel. It went into the 10th inning and we had great seats. 

Since my friend and I are also nerds and foodies, we had to get some Italian in the North End. We also found an amazing LGBTQ owned BBQ joint that had the most amazing biscuits and homemade jam. We also did a portion of the Freedom Trail. (I'm going to have to go back and finish it.)

Sweetcheeks BBQ

We left for New Hampshire the following day and stopped in Franconia Notch for a little hiking. I dearly wanted to do more, but I'm still working on building up my stamina after getting Long Haul Covid. I can do a 2.5 mile hike, but that was also on lesser climbs so we limited this first one to a mile. In between visiting family and figuring out where in the Great North Woods I'd build my house when I retire up here we also visited Lake Francis, had some ice cream in Moose Alley, went to Beaver Brook Falls and hiked along the stream a bit until a saw a pretty good sized fisher cat and said nope, we're going in the opposite direction. If anyone has read All Bets Are Off they'd know that fisher cats can be real assholes.

Red Sox vs Orioles

The wedding was beautiful. My uncle owns a good part of a mountain in Pittsburg and so we had it in my cousin's back yard. Absolutely gorgeous land. They'd been smoking brisket, chicken, pork and pork belly all week. We ate like kings, danced our feet off, and made the mountain ring with music. If there's one thing my family does well, it's a wedding. 

So I hope you enjoyed the pictures and the break from talking about writing and books. I'll be back next week with more. (There will be more pictures later when I talk hikes LOL.)