The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

This is the $114M addition to the museum.  It was designed by Renzo Piano, one of the hot architects of the moment.  The challenge was to attach a modern building to an antique building.









This woman was a great collector and decided to create a museum to display the things she collected.  In her will she directed that no painting could be moved from where she had placed it.  Now it's over 100 years later and there are great masterpieces hung in the most inconspicuous places.  It's like a treasure hunt to find them.









This is where the new meets the old.












This is the main atrium.  She collected all of the architectual artifacts on trips to Europe.







She also lived here on the 4th floor after her husband died.  It's very close to Fenway Park.  She was a huge baseball fan.



























This is one of the bathrooms in the new wing.  Architects go crazy when designing bathrooms in museums.

Another italian restaurant in the North End.....

If you haven't figured it out by now, our summers are devoted to sightseeing, shopping and eating.  There are 40 restaurants in the North End and we are attempting to work our way through them.  This was a good one.

The Mayflower II

This ship was built in 1956 in England and sailed over to Plymouth.


















Here is another enacter, a young girl.














These are shots of the interior of the ship.
















There was no way to get a good shot of the entire ship.

The Plymouth Colony and Plymouth Rock

On a very cool day we decided to journey to Plymouth.  This is a very big deal like going to Disney Land or Williamsburg  You can make it an all day thing.  It's supposed to be an hour south by car but there's always traffic.












A nice pond by the Visitor Center.





There's a movie that explains the re-creation.  All of these people are enactors.  They might be retired school teachers, or actors or historians.  They know the history and they speak in the dialog of the time.





He is telling the story of making a canoe out of a log.















This woman knew all about corn and insects and everything that went on back then.  She could talk for hours.











Here is Ed in the top of the fort where there were at least 4 cannons.






This is another enactor.








Dancing with the tourists.





Another character.  Everyone was very dirty.  The place was very grimy and dusty and can you imagine wearing all those clothes when it's over 80?  Let alone 90?






































































This is Plymouth Rock.  The reason for the bars is that the tide comes up and would leave flotsom and jetsom around the rock.








This is a pavillion built atop the rock.