Vince Goes to Cape Cod
I visited Kristina's family at Cape Cod. Marie was there too, and my friend
John showed up for part of the time. Friday was the quite long drive
up empty I-88, to Albany, along most of the Mass Pike, and then down
around the crazy rotaries to the Cape.
On Saturday we went to the beach. It was quite a lovely day.
Then, since we are all engineers, we set to work building a sand castle near
the low-tide line. The castle is supposedly the fortress of Maedhros
at Himring.
Despite two levels of walls and moats, eventually the moon conspired to raise
the tide and our fortress was slowly taken away by the sea...
We then walked among the dunes.
One member of our party managed to get
horribly sunburned. I managed just to sunburn my feet.
Sunday we went into Boston.
We drove through the Big Dig, which is a bit anticlimatic
when you realize it's just a long tunnel. All of the marvelous engineering
and horrible expenses are hidden by some dirty tile walls.
We went to the Boston Museum of Science. Quite good.
There were some impressive Van de Graff generator demonstations going on.
The Math exhibit was also interesting, with lots of famous math quotes.
I liked the remnants of the old computer museum scattered about. I got to
see i4004 and i8008 chips, and actual Altair and Alto computers.
The 6 foot tall SCSI card was a bit surreal though.
Finally, we went to the Lord of the Rings exhibit, which was the eventual
goal of this entire weekend. Unfortunately there is paranoia that
I might somehow try
to make a rival multi-million dollar movie based on a few photos
so no picture-taking was allowed. It's
a shame, because how often can you stand next to Marie waving around a sharp
sword and live to tell about it?
The props were very well done, amazingly so in fact. I had been to a
similar Star Wars exhibit years ago and was disappointed how it was all
illusion and the uniforms were just pajamas with plastic parts glued on. But
the costumes and weapons were all exquisitely detailed here.
And then, after the long weekend, took the long 7 hour trip home.
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