Rawr, and so forth

So hubby and I had a very nice time on our min-vacation. Aside from the waking up obscenely early to make flights part, anyway.

We arrived at Boston just in time for lunch, and had a nice meal at a place called Buggaboo steak House. I had some really good grilled chicken covered in BBQ sauce and cheese. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it!

We took it easy Thursday, though we did see Transformers 2. I was pretty sick of sitting, so the long movie was not as exciting to me as it might have otherwise been. And I got a little bored with what seemed to be excessive fight scenes. "Omg look Optimus Prime is like 2 miles away from us let's go!" Yeah it looked like a half mile on the movie screen.

Afterward we went to an art opening for a friend of the brother-in-law's...it was, oddly enough, at an upscale beauty salon. They were doing free chair massages. I took advantage of that. Then we took advantage of Dunkin' Donuts afterward--it was right next door. (And one of 98 in Boston.)

Friday was probably my favorite day...whale watching! We drove out to Gloucester for our departure with 7 Seas Whale Watch. It was really sort of eerie as we made our way to Stellwagen Bank (which is where the whales go to eat). We had fog rolling in from time to time, which made the trip rather...ghostly.

All in all, we saw 7 humpbacks (Pinpoint, Lavalliere, and Cajun were the names of 3 of them), 3 fin whales, and a couple minke whales. It was really very neat and I plan to do that again next time I'm in that neck of the woods...here are some photos to enjoy! (Video will be forthcoming once I've wrangled that mess together) An amazing shot of a humpback's tail!

Cajun comes up for some lunch. She had her own way of catching her food, which was different from Pinpoint's!Cajun again, getting lunch. The seabirds went absolutely nuts while the whales were hunting, and sometimes looked in danger of being snapped up accidentally!

We went to the town of Rockport afterward, which was not very far from Gloucester. They had many neat shops for us to peruse, and we also had dinner there.

Saturday was, of course, the Fourth of July. And Boston was pretty much nuts because of it. We went and had lunch at Cheers. They had really, really good burgers--definitely recommend them for a good meal!

We also went to the New England Aquarium, which is very nice. Their penguin display was extremely cute!

After the Aquarium we headed back to the condo...because luckily it was within walking distance of all the evening festivities! The Charlies River was just a stone's throw away (well, maybe a little more) so we walked there. It was nice weather--I wore a light jacket. How often will I ever say that about the Fourth of July?

And the fireworks were stunning. We could hear the music thanks to some walkmen radios that the guys ingeniously thought to bring along.

The next day, we had brunch at The Top of the Hub, which is the top of the Prudential building. We had a really, really nice view. I also had a chance to attempt to taste new and weird foods like duck quiche and creme brulee. (Duck quiche was okay, creme brulee I am not a fan of.)

Here's a view from the Top of the Hub. This is showing where we were along the Charles River the night before...we were to the right of the boat house.

We also managed to get a view of Fenway Park...and if you squint, you can tell there are people in the stands!

Later on Sunday, we took a duck tour. The duck vehicles are authentic WW2-era vehicles, some that participated in D-Day!

Our duck tour took us around Boston by land...and then by water.

After our duck tour, we had dinner (with our niece--she's so adorable!) and then headed to the Improv Asylum for their "Lost in Boston" show which was a mix of skits and improv. They were actually very funny, well mostly funny--with improv it's hard to be funny 100% of the time, but they were good at what they did.

All in all, we had a great trip...look for those whale watching videos soon!