By hook or by crook

Off to Salem
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Today is our last day in Boston. We enjoyed a buffet breakfast and said our final goodbye to Sophia. We packed up the hire car with our luggage and headed out to battle the city traffic. The GPS seemed to lose our position in the city and had us turning this way and that but finally put us on the Mass Turnpike on our way to Salem - the home of the witch trials. The trip out there was a lot quicker than we thought, and with no incidents (like the missing roundabout in our travels yesterday). On arrival in Salem we had no problems finding a street park and headed off towards the Salem Witch Museum.

Salem Witch Museum
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We got there just in time for the midday tour session. This had us entering a hall and sat us down on benches. An automated narrative then played, with different parts of the hall lighting up in turn, showing wax character scenes being talked about. It explained the story of how the witch trials began as a trick played by young girls on the puratin folks of the time. This ultimately led to the hanging deaths of nearly 190 people in Salem. After an amusing time in the souvenier shop we made our way on foot to the House of Seven Gables. The sun had come out today and it was getting quite hot, feeling like 25 degrees. On the way to the house, we spotted an old ship moored in the maritime ship yard, but decided we did not have time to go on the hour tour.

Spooky scenes, and I'm not talking about the US road network!

Salem Heritage Trail - follow the witchy red line
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When we arrived at the Gabled house and read the brief story in the foyer, we decided to give the tour a miss here also, as neither of us had read the famous book set in the house, we decided to give this one a miss. It also loked like they were setting up for a wedding reception in the garden, so part of the house was going to be off limits.

Off we then went on our trek to the Witch Village and wax museum, somehow on the way missing Frankenstein's Laboratory. At the Wax museum there was two rooms of wax mannequins showing important figures in the witches trials and early maritime heritage of Salem. After this it was across the road to Witches Village, where at 3pm a tour host took us on a stroll around the inside of the building, telling us the story of the origins of witchcraft with scenes depicted at stops along the way through. She told us that Salem was the short form of Jerusalem, the city of peace. She also told us the story of straw brooms and how they used to be used as a garden tool to sow seeds into the ground. This was followed by the ritual of the growers performing a ritual on a full moon of standing astride the broom and jumping in the air to indicate how high they would like their crop to grow. The flow on from this was that the banks of the swamp was the most fertile place to plant seeds, and that after doing so, on a full moon, when the gas methane from the swamp would be rising at night, the light from the full moon would turn this gas green coloured. Young children then saw people, astride their brooms, "attempting to fly" jumping up and down, and turned green from the gas, and ran back to town exclaiming witches were at work.

SS Friendship in dock
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The trials were also interesting to hear about. No one was hanged unless they confessed to being a witch. The problem with this was that they were tortured until they admitted it - so it was either death by torture on the rack, or in a pressing machine, or confess and be hanged! So no one who was living in the town ever openly said they were a witch, they were a midwife, a healer or a sharman. Animals could also be declared witches, with one story told how 600 cats were hanged in one day in one town, because a puratin had overheard voices talking negatively about the goverment of the day. When this person raced outside to the alley from the tavern he was in, all he saw was cats - so the cats must be guilty!!

The witches wicken calendar
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Our final stop for the day was the post office in an attempt to post yet another box back to BrisVegas. This however didn't eventuate as the post office closed at 3pm, so we are going to have to take the extra items with us through to Berlin.

We decided to return the hire car at the Airport rather than back at the hotel, which turned out to be fortuitous as the airport was closer than the hotel. This process went vrey smoothly and before we knew it we were on the Hertz shuttle bus to the terminal. We arrived a bit earlier than we had planned, getting to the lounge about 5:15pm for our 8:45 boarding - but I imagine if we had left it any later we might have run the risk of getting stuck in Friday afternoon traffic.

Typical Salem pot plant holder!
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That's it for the North American part of our holiday, its now over to Euroupe.