Double down

Twice the blogs for half the cost!

Sorry I have been slack in the updates since Friday morning.  Visiting Hopkinton (New Hampshire) has kinda been the business end of this trip and we have been doing all things family.

We arrived safely to Boston and the ‘5 minute drive’ from the station to the rental car place took us close to an hour, with crazy after school, Friday afternoon traffic. In fact, Boston drivers are just crazy. In the taxi I almost got T  boned and we almost had a head on collision, neither of which would have been our drivers fault. Nowhere else is like this. I blame all the smart uni students!

Anyway. Got to the rental place to find our booking was broken, albeit  in the system.  No worries, a car was available and the team got us sorted pretty quickly. Into our big clean white Kia SUV we jumped and out into the crazy traffic and onto the interstate.

Off to a bad start when the GPS told us to go down a 1 way road the wrong way, things dramatically improved once we got on the highway where its just 4 lanes of traffic all heading in the same direction.

Poor Andrew was having to work really hard at being on the wrong side of the road, but did a great job. Within an hour and a half we arrived in Hopkinton to our 200 year old farm house where we stayed Friday and Saturday.

Hopkinton is a town of about 5000 people and the place where a bunch of my maternal grandfather’s family grew up. Its also the kind of place where no-one locks their doors, and presidential candidates come for Town Hall meetings where the whole town turns up at the town hall and asks questions.

Outside of Hopkinton, in the next town over we caught up with my mum and dad, and 3 cousins all of whom traveled from down south, in Philly and Delaware to join us. We chilled at their hotel, had some dinner and drinks and chatted into the night.

Saturday was another family day. We started by saying our final goodbye to my grandmother, interning her ashes in the Goodspeed family plot. It was sad but a nice little service, preformed by a priest, with incense and everything; done “right and proper”.  Poor Andrew, as the youngest male, he was chosen to dump the buckets of dirt in the grave, which was both dirty and hard work in the heat.  He took it like a man and didn’t complain once.

After some graveside mourning we visited the Hopkinton historical society and saw some amazing old photos of my mums dad’s family which was kinda special.

By this time it’s lunchtime so we grabbed a bite, including mum and Andrew enjoying bison burgers (I went for a paleo salad, after all the crap we have been eating and it was yum).Poor dad and his Kosher diet have not fared well in the USA, where theuy insist on adding cheese to everything. He tells me hes lost count of the number of Tuna melts he has eaten.

The best part of lunch was the wine, or should I say the wine bottle. My grandma once picked a wine for us at dinner and it came in a blue bottle. It quickly became known in the family as ‘Grandma’s ruin’ after she got a bit tiddly, that first night. The bottle of wine we picked on the menu arrived in a blue bottle too. I’m pretty sure it was Grandma’s way of letting us know we had done a good job.

So, after an intense morning and a relaxing lunch Andrew and I had a break from the family and went on a shopping excursion to buy and extra suitcase. We also ended up getting some jeans, dresses, shoes and a jacket. Whoops!

Back to the family for a drink before heading to the farmhouse for a relatively early night…

Now we are heading back to Boston after having mothers day breakfast with the family. More adventures ahead. I’m starting to look forward to coming home, but first our last stop.

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