NEW ENGLAND

I just spent five days in New England with my best friend. We drove a lot and walked a lot and ate a lot and saw a lot.

We drove north from Boston to Bar Harbor, Maine, then south again through Portland all the way to the tip of Cape Cod and back up to Boston. We walked every day until our legs hurt. We ate seafood until we couldn't stand it (and now I am craving clams).

We planned a few cool things, like the Brownstone college club we lodged in a block from Boston's magnificent Public Garden, and just stumbled upon many others, like the zany "Women's Week" in Provincetown, Cape Cod (above).

We made a few mistakes, like getting sucked into the tourist hell of Salem and Plymouth, but we also lucked out in getting the last room at the best inn on Cape Cod and in discovering that the National Seashore was a million times more beautiful than our guidebook had suggested.

I haven't really digested the trip yet. I've been too stuck on negative feelings about going back to work! But here are a few pictures from our adventure. And I'd really love to hear about other people's experiences in New England. We only really saw Maine and Massachusetts. Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island will have to wait for another autumn.

This is a decaying pier on the shore of Provincetown, Mass., where the Pilgrims first landed.



This is Marconi Beach on the National Seashore in Cape Cod, a federally protected area that is off limits to development.



The next three photos are also from the National Seashore. Cape Cod took my breath away. We walked for more than an hour on this stretch of beach, watching surfers and dogs and shifting dunes.







This is the Boston Public Library, the first public collection in the U.S. It was amazing: carved wood and marble and murals by John Singer Sargent. In this courtyard, Erin saw some dude reading a book and eating dog food by the handful. Boston has a very literate homeless population.



Here is an afternoon snack we had at the Harvest restaurant near Harvard Square in Cambridge. Our guidebook said it was a favorite of Harvard professors, and, sure enough, we were seated next to two codgers with elbow patches who were saying decidedly high-brow things about the genocide in Darfur and Paris in the 1940s.



This is Acadia National Park. Now I know what Anne Sexton meant when she wrote in "The Lost Ingredient" about "some slight need for Maine's coast." We played on the granite outcroppings like little kids.









This is the view from our hotel room in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, just south of Portland, a very lively, old city made of brick and stone. We got up at the crack of dawn to take a walk on the beach ... and got lost on the way back to the hotel.