In Good Company

Subtitle: You don’t just marry the man; you marry the whole family (ancestors included)

At some point after we started dating, Johnny casually mentioned that he was a direct descendant of a woman who once escaped captivity by scalping several Indians.  Oh, well then.  It only took us a minute of googling to find the woman he was referring to: Hannah Duston, who was captured by a group of Abenaki Indians and made a bloody escape.  If nothing else, this story served as a nice bit of brunch-time trivia.

Go ahead, question our meal-time conversation standards.

Some time before we moved to Massachusetts, we realized that we’d be living pretty close to where Hannah was abducted.  Not only that, but her hometown had a statue of her, as well as some preserved landmarks, and somewhat ironically, a hospital named after her.  We decided that we’d have to make a trip up there, and it finally happened a couple weekends ago.

Life of the party.

 

The town is a little more than two hours away, but the scenery was nice and the company was good.  When we got to town, it was easy to find the statue, in a park right off the main road.  We took the obligatory photos and then crossed the street to the public library to ask for directions to other monuments.

Johnny, me, and great-great-great-etc-grandma

The librarian was very nice, but quickly ruined all of our plans.  The library’s special collection?  Only open Tuesday/Thursday (budget cuts).  The house built by Hannah’s husband?  Hasn’t been open to the public for years (budget cuts).  The marker of where her canoe landed after her escape?  A haven for drug dealers.  The city’s tourism website?  Not updated for years.  She didn’t specifically mention that other one, but it was pretty obvious.

She gave us a couple books to look at, which was interesting but not exactly what we had hoped for.  We flipped through them (while I also took pictures of the squirrel statue in the library’s fountain).

Just waiting for the Bronze Squirrel Food budget to be cut.

We decided to drive out to the Duston home anyway, since we had come all that way.  As the librarian had told us, the house was solidly locked up.  We took a few more pictures there, and then decided it was time to head home.  By that point, we were all starving and hoped that perhaps we could salvage the trip by eating at a quaint local diner.  Not so.  The options were all some variation on Sketchy’s Pizza or Bud’s Grinders, and before we knew it, we were back to the freeway.  In the end, we wound up at Wendy’s (boring but a known quantity).

Well, so much for a family reunion.

All in all, Johnny and I have decided that we shouldn’t venture more than about 30 minutes from home.  First our legendary Yosemite trip, and now this.  As we keep saying, at least the company is good!

These are quickly becoming our standard roadtrip faces.