Living from a Suitcase First Requires a Suitcase

The blog has been silent for the last week, as I've been vacationing in New England. It's an area I'd long wanted to see; I'd only been to Boston on a work trip (and you never get to see much but a hotel and a convention center that way), while my husband had never been at all. Together, we set out to see every state in New England in one trip.

You know those maps that make the social media rounds every now and then, where people mark the states they've been to? There's usually some phrase in there causing you to question exactly what makes a state "count" for a visit (probably put in there deliberately to spark debate to help it go viral). Here's how we defined it: we had to stay overnight in each state. So we planned for a road trip pretty evenly divided everywhere.

It started with us flying into Boston (the easy direct flight option from Denver). Day one, of course, was mostly taken up by the flight itself and the time change, but we we still packed in a surprising number of stops on that first night in town.

First, we grabbed dinner and beers at the Cambridge Brewing Company. This was actually part of another "collect as many states as you can" thing we have going. Several years ago, I bought a neat canvas map showing every craft brewery in the Unites States. Craft breweries come and go (and Covid especially made a number of them "go," unfortunately), but it's still a pretty cool map of places to get a microbrew. And we've been sticking pins in it for years: silver to mark breweries we've had a beer from, and gold to mark breweries we've actually been to. We wanted to add a gold pin in every state of this multi-state trip, and we took care of Massachusetts first thing.

Cambridge Brewing itself wasn't exceptional; decent food and decent beer. But one aspect of it will be challenging me for ages: the strange mural painted on the wall. It depicted a bar full of patrons... mostly celebrities (but not all?), mostly Boston-area personalities (but not all?). We probably spent more time at the brewery than we needed to just because we kept identifying (maybe?) new faces in the crowd. Finally, I took a photo so that I could revisit the mural in the future and see if friends could help fill in the gaps.

 

 

The next stop wasn't for fun: it was to buy luggage. I can imagine what you might be thinking, but yes: our luggage did arrive with us in Boston. But my husband's was incredibly worse for wear. It didn't seem like it had merely been dropped from a great height, but that a sledgehammer had been taken to the zippers. One of the pulls had been smashed off completely, and the runners had been so deformed that they'd clamped down on the zipper teeth and would not open -- at least, not without using extreme force. Which we did... and so it was never going to close again. So we had to make a stop to buy him a new suitcase to transfer everything into to proceed with the trip. Parking being what it is in Boston, this involved me sitting on the side of a busy street with hazard lights flashing, ready to run circles around the block if required, while my husband ran in to pick up his new suitcase. But we took care of the errand and got things back on track.

Having accomplished that, we rewarded ourselves with another beer. This time, we went to the original Samuel Adams (Boston Brewing Company) location in Jamaica Plain. While you can, of course, get a Sam Adams pretty much anywhere in Denver, we selected an unfamiliar style limited to the tap room (or at least the region). But we'd arrived just minutes ahead of last call, and since the whole suitcase affair had left us needing a little more, we decided on one more nearby stop.

GrandTen Distillery makes their own whiskeys and other spirits. In the way of many small Denver breweries or distilleries, it's hidden down an alley... but it's doing a lot with its space. We sat at the bar, where we got the expected "where you from?" question that quickly revealed our bartender too had spent time in Denver. He actually gave us a recommendation of a speakeasy we hadn't heard of, something to try out when we got back home. He also served us some nice drinks as a classic Ric Flair wrestling match played on the TV over the bar and 90s hits played on the speakers. (The place had an eclectic vibe.)

OK, this was a boozy first evening. But we could hardly plan anything that required daylight (or tickets) on a travel day... and we really deserved a reward after deftly handling the suitcase mishap. Plus, this was the one time on the trip where we planned to stay in the same place for two nights; we'd see more of Boston the next day.

And that's what we did. I'll have more tales of New England to come, sprinkled amid the usual sorts of blog posts in the days and weeks ahead.