How do you like dem apples?

The Iceland adventure began in Boston. More specifically, it began with a trip to Cambridge, home to Harvard University, a place I’d never visited before. The campus reeks of smart (“smaht” as the locals say), and you can’t help but feel like the folks there all spend their hours speaking in Latin about the minutae of monetary policy in the mid-fourteenth century Incan Empire. The campus is also notable for some awesome buildings, a lot of open space, several old churches, and tons of jogging girls, all of which I greatly approved of.

My efforts to leave Cambridge were twice thwarted by some weird scientific singularity that makes Cambridge the center of the universe unless you leave along a specific bearing, but after two hours I finally found a road that didn’t eventually lead back to Harvard Square. The next stop was Gloucester, and if my ten years growing up in New England might have once qualified me as a local, the fact that I now call the town “Gl-ow-ster” instead of “Gl-ah-ster” puts me squarely in the tourist camp. Delicious seafood was eaten for a late lunch, and then a roundabout path was taken to my hometown of Nashua, New Hampshire. This was one of only a handful of trips I’ve taken back since moving away in 1984, and things continue to get smaller. At age nine my world consisted of approximately the three block radius that I was allowed to play in, but that once-massive landscape now seems pretty tiny. It’s worth noting, however, that nine-year-old Ryan knew every tree, stone, plant, and shortcut in that world, while thirty-two year old Ryan is considerably less familiar with the world that he lives in.

I’m not sure what today’s plans are – after not sleeping on the red-eye to Boston I crashed for eleven hours last night, and will enjoy having a bed and shower until the noon checkout before heading off to somewhere with considerably fewer amenities, and probably many more bears, for the next two days.