From Minutemen to Acadia

This past Saturday we went to the Minuteman National Historic Site. Grumpus bikes past it on most of his rides, so he figured that it was about time we explored it. Our adventure started at the visitor center, where we watched a surprisingly good video that retold the events of April 18 & 19, 1775 in a multi-media theater (the narrator appearing as a man-sized video apparition in a doorway). For those of you who aren't from Boston, April 18th was the night of Revere's ride, where he rode past our house in Medford to alert the militias that the Regulars ("British") were coming. One of the things we learned in the video was that Revere wasn't the only rider heading to Concord -- William Dawes took the southern route from Boston and both men ran into a third rider, Dr. Samuel Prescott, neither of whom get much credit.

Boston back then looked way different -- the Charles River was huge, and we felt sad that so much land around the city has been reclaimed since then. Anyways, we learned that Revere got caught, and Mumpus even got a picture at the very spot! (They let him go again after a few hours, silly Regulars.)

The real reason for checking out the area was the reenactment that the Stow Minutemen were putting on. The South has Civil War reenactments, Virginia has Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown, Cleveland has nothing and Massachusetts has the Minutemen. The Stow Minutemen were spending the day cooking, playing fifes, trying to amuse kids with lame games from the 18th century and firing guns. Now as you might imagine, people who dress up on heavy wool outfits for fun 20 times a year are a little weird. The Minutemen were all friendly, but odd, very odd.

We learned that each company had a fife and drum; the fife can be heard above the guns during battle, while the drum can be heard below. The fifes and drums were used to signal retreat, fire, cease fire, time to pray, time to wake-up, etc. The music wasn't great, so we were happy when it ended after 15 minutes. Next came the best part -- the guns! The minutemen fired several rounds, and it was awesome. After the guns we decided that it was enough, so we headed off to a farmers' market in Natick.

It was the lamest farmers' market ever, so we had to scavenge for food. We finally settled on Chinese and learned an important lesson -- never, ever trust a Chinese place that doesn't have Chinese characters on the menu. Ever. Instead of delicious Chinese food, we had a mystery meat egg role and some terribly heavy pork. It was sad. After lunch, we headed to a Wholefoods parking lot to buy a bike rack we found on Criagslist. The best part about Craigslist is that you meet people and exchange cash in a manner strikingly similar to the way high school kids buy drugs. Loot in hand, we continued on to Callahan State Park for a hike.

The hike wasn't all that special, but Grumpus finally saw a snake eat a frog-- something Allie saw last summer and that Grumpus had been jealous of for a long time. The snake was over three feet long and the frog was the size of a kiwi. The frog was struggling hard, but the snake had him good. While we were watching the snake must have sensed us, because it managed to hide under the leaves while the frog was fighting to break free for its life. We wanted to help the frog, because nature can be sad, but we didn't, because it wasn't our place to intervene. And the frog was going to die anyways.

We woke up at dawn the next day and began our journey to Acadia, ME!