Gloucester – Road Trip

Matt was pretty sure he’d come over from Missouri when I was in the country, but we were largely undecided as to what to do when we hooked up in Boston. We initially toyed with the idea of visiting Niagara Falls, but dumped it as too much traveling time would had been involved just getting there and returning. Not really time well-spent.

So, the idea of a road trip came up. There are three directions we can spring from Boston: North, South, and West (East would see us driving into the ocean). Westwards: places of interest would be far in between. So, Matt suggested driving up North towards Gloucester: here’s a selection of pictures from our trip there on Saturday.:)

The car rental agency was located right next to the Central Square T subway station, and the rental office was manned by these two American guys who looked like they were US Marines with their crew cuts. We toyed with the idea of booking a humvee, but figured we’d probably not be able to park the damn thing into a lot then. So, it was a Hyundai Sonata:

One thing about driving in the States is that you’d easily get lost + in the middle of nowhere with a GPS-enabled navigation computer.

One thing I was keen on trying out during the road trip was to get arrested by the local police for whichever. No such luck though: this police car just ahead of us completely ignored us:

Our Ang Mo dude on the wheel. No way I was going to try driving. Not on roads which drive on the opposite side than we’re used to:

No road trip experience is complete without a visit to Walmart just to see how Americans shop – which Matt remarked is a very sad state of affairs. We ducked into a Walmart store in Peabody for supplies:

Matt observed that this was a pretty small store by Walmart’s standards, though it looked plenty big to me:

Picking up on sugar grub, candies, chocolates, root beer, and water. All the sweet stuff would later melt into liquid form real quick in the summer heat though.

Gloucester and Boston is linked by Interstate highways. I was on Dramamine, so was half-conked out for the outbound trip.

It took us about 60 minutes to get to Gloucester, the seaside town being about 60 km away. The roads in the town was lined with many houses, all very pretty:

The summer sun was all up, which made for great pictures albeit in a moving car.

It’s a very different general feeling about the place, with plenty of spaces between residential unit to unit. Nothing like the high density living of Singapore.

We spent 30 minutes looking for parking lots in the town. Apparently, car towing – or minimally parking warden awarded fines – are a big thing in this part of the world. We finally found a spot that was available for public parking:

But then again, some things just remain the same no matter where you go:

We popped into the town’s Chamber of Commerce to get some visitor information, and to ask about interesting places to check out while in town:

Continued in the next post.:)