Day 65 Salem

We were up and on the road early today so we could fit everything into our day. We left the state of Maine and crossed into New Hampshire. From New Hampshire we crossed into Massachusetts and arrived at the town of Salem.

The town is most well known for its Witch Trials over a 9 month period in 1692. Nineteen people were hung and one was pressed to death. The latter would not confirm or deny being a witch as this would mean his family would not be able to inherit his belongings. So he was placed between 2 boards and over a three day period they kept adding rocks to try and get a confession. They never received a confession but he was ultimately crushed to death. (The silly b*****'s only comment was add more rocks). The town has since created a memorial to these 20 people near the old cemetery.

We followed the red line around the town to many of the historic sights. The trail goes past the home of one of the witch trial judges (Jonathon Corwin), the old port, House of Seven Gables (made famous in a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne) and a statue honouring Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched. One of the witch trial judges was Nathaniel Hawthorne's ancestor and Nathaniel added a W to his surname to distance himself from this particular ancestor.

The town, like a lot of others, was in the process of gearing up for Halloween. This added to the atmosphere but it would be interesting to see the difference at another time of the year.

We decided to take a scenic route back to Boston. While there was pretty coastal scenery it left us a little stressed with the traffic in Boston as we had a deadline to return the car that evening by 6pm (office closing time). It did not help that the GPS sent us off in backward directions. That was when we turned on Google Maps and followed its directions. The tricky thing with either units is when the freeways are multilayered and you are not sure if you have taken the correct exit/lane until it is often too late.

Anyway we made it to the hostel, unloaded our bags and drove the one mile to the car rental office. That mile took us 45 minutes!! We could have easily walked this distance in 1/3 of the time. Breathing a sigh of relief, we left the car and walked back to the hostel to reorganise our bags in anticipation of our train trip in the morning.