Lemme tell you first folks, driving Boston, MA is a friggin’ nightmare. It’s definitely designed for the foot-borne traveller. I pride myself on being a hell of a driver and whatnot, but it just doesn’t help that much. Next to Boston, driving through New York was a dream (though I didn’t drive directly through the city). That having been said though, the Compleat Strategist was a nice place with an excellent selection of books (and yes, Felix, that is the way it’s spelled). I got to talking with some nice folks and got a couple of books off my hands as usual. I stayed a couple nights in Danvers, MA, just a bit west of good old Salem. Yes folks, that Salem – the witch trials place.
I spent most of my morning today in Salem hanging out around town and checking out the area. It’s a beautiful town with some excellent architecture. Not to mention it’s the one place where you can openly be a heathen and everyone’s perfectly alright with that. I suppose they figure after hanging a few folks 300 or so years ago they owe us or something. Funny thing is, all of that business dealt with their own good Christian brothers and sisters. I sincerely doubt a sinlge pagan was among those. Generally, folks, that’s because most of us pagans would have packed up and left town long before, assuming any of us would have it in our heads to live with the Puritans in the first places. I for one think that perhaps the reason for all the mass hysteria there was based on the simple fact that the puritan lifestyle wasn’t even remotely entertaining. I mean, if you take a look at the lifestyle regulations at the time, rustling up some craziness was bound to happen sooner or later. I spent a good time at an awesome shop called the Broom closet there talking with some modern day witches (of the Wicca persuasion), who were completely un-pretentious (often such nonsense is a staple of modern witches) and totally cool. If you happen to stop through Salem, check out the Broom Closet…nice pagans and a fabulous selection of genuinely useful stuff for those of you who practice the Craft (I personally swing a different way for religion, but this was an awesome shop for Wicca). Other than that they carried some typical tourist stuff, but you gotta make a buck.
Salem and Danvers were good for selling books as well. As a matter of fact, I’m almost sold out of what I brought along for the tour so it’s been a good run, which is excellent because costs for the Northeast were way over what I expected. The drive into Maine was awesome – I took the coastline road off Rt 1 and stopped in Ogunquit at the beach and took some very nice pictures. Unfortunately, I also dropped my cell phone into the Atlantic amidst all of this. Salt water and electronics is bad news folks. For a fun fact, though, Ogunquit is the town in Maine where Harold and Fran are from in Stephen King’s The Stand. If you haven’t read that one, you should.
That’s all for now though – I’m at Crossroad Games here in Maine tomorrow and, after that, I believe I’m headed back to the heat of Texas for a while before heading up through the Rockies on my next tour. I know I’ve been talking features for this site and more updates of this and that, but a lot of that will have to wait until I get home. Until next time…
– Ashe
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