Brunhilde and the Witches

Friday morning was a blissful morning of sleeping in - something the puppies, bless their hearts, do not usually allow.

Let me first quickly recap my new favorite phrase. It is: bless his/her/their/etc. heart(s). I learned the usefulness of this phrase from Mississippi Man. It seems that, in the South at least, "bless her/his/their/etc. heart(s)" is a phrase typically used with deep, scathing sarcasm but actually pronounced in a loving, gentle kind of way. So that if you say to someone, "Oh, bless your heart." You are not really saying something kind and sympathetic, you are in effect saying, "You're such a freaking moron." So to rephrase the first sentence, the puppies - those freaking morons - do not usually allow blissful mornings of sleeping in.

If you're still confused, well, bless your heart.

So after waking up and doing a little bit of homework, Tim and I decided that it was 10 and maybe we should think about finding breakfast, checking in with Mississippi Man and then seeing what the day might hold for us. After brief co-ordinations we arranged to meet in the lobby and go find food around 11:30. A quick perusal of the food list showed an IHOP nearby, so the three of us loaded up in the Pig, set up Brunhilde, and headed off toward the IHOP where we partook of yummy IHOP goodness and had the following conversation regarding a previous conversation that took place between Tim, Mississippi Man and the groom at the bachelor party Thursday night:
Tim: So, MM, do we have to go to the rehearsal tonight?
MM: Don't think so, Groom said he would let us know if we did need to be there.
Tim: Does he have our cell #s?
MM: Yes, he said he did.
Me: Um, did he say when he'd let us know by?
Tim & MM: We'll only hear from him if we do need to be there.
Me: Are we sure it's a good idea to go somewhere?
Tim: He seemed pretty sure we wouldn't need to be there, we're only ushers.

And that was that. So Salem seemed like a fun destination - after all, it's not every day you get to see if someone weighs more than a duck and, if they do, "Burn her!"

(It may be an important thing to note at this time that we did not have a map of Mass. We had Google maps to places we knew we were going (which did not include Salem) and we had Brunhilde, Maven of the two year old GPS maps.)

Back in the Pig, we set up Brunhilde again and tickle out of her the location of the Salem Witch Museum. (She actually had this listed under attractions, so that sounded promising.) Now, we were staying south of Boston proper. This means that we had to go through - you guessed it - a tunnel - on the way to Salem. It was there that we heard the lovely phrase, yet again, "Lost satellite receptionnn." (She seemed to slur those last n's, I think we'd've been a little better off if our GPS lady wasn't intoxicated.) Well we did what we thought we remembered we needed to do, exiting in the tunnel toward the road number we all agreed sounded familiar. When we surfaced, there was a pause and then:

"Off route."

To which we replied, "Aw, crud."

Well, with some winding and wiggling and a general knowledge of at least the vague general direction we needed to head, we travelled over a Very Cool Bridge . Unfortunately we were not supposed to travel over this bridge, but we didn't find that out til we were on our way back to the hotel and able to actually follow Brunhilde's route the whole way. Regardless, it all worked out and we arrived in Salem.

We then proceeded to look for parking. And look. And look.

And then we saw signs for the House of Seven Gables . Now, this is one of my favorite books. Usually I don't really care for Nathaniel Hawthorne (Seriously, how many times can you read the Scarlet Letter and still be enamored?) but that was a neat book and, well, I'm a sucker for historic houses. So, as the guys didn't care, we changed our plan and went there instead. And hey, they had parking right there in front!

The tour was really neat. They have a hidden passage that you actually get to use! It's a teeny, tiny staircase (not for the faint of heart) that takes you up up up to a gable room. Then you wiggle through another little passage into the "main" attic and take the big stairs back down. There was a little girl (maybe 8 or 9) on the tour who will probably be a main stream media journalist some day. She peppered the entire tour (well, mostly the tour of Hawthorne's birthplace) with questions in rapid fire:

"What's that in the corner? Who are the pictures of on the wall? What are the curtains made of? And does that fireplace really work? And is this house haunted?"

The (amusing) typical response to questions about pictures on the wall was, "Well, we don't really know, they were donated to us, but they're representative of the time." The little girl was not overly pleased with that answer. Her mother was mortified. The rest of the tour pretty much looked at eachother (over her head) and gave the wide-eyed grin that said "Ah, precocious youth."

When all was over, it was about 3:45, we all checked our cell phones, no calls from the Groom, so we figured we were good to go as far as just heading toward the rehearsal dinner and not bothering with the rehearsal, so we headed to "In a Pig's Eye" a local pub/bar kind of thing to get a little refreshment before heading back. (We discussed looking up the witches, but the nice man in the lobby of the Seven Gables told us they closed around 4, so we didn't figure we'd have much time to see anything.)

Brunhilde got us back to the hotel with no issues - though it's only about 20 miles it still took close to an hour and a half (good old Friday Boston traffic). Upon returning to our room, I noticed our phone light blinking. So I listened to the voice mail. It was the groom:
"Hey guys, it's about 2:30, and I just talked to my bride and well, yeah, she'd like you to be at the rehearsal. So, it starts at 5:00 and we'll see you there." Laughing hysterically, I called Tim over and pointed at the phone saying "You have a message."

For those, bless their hearts, who are arithmetically challenged, 4:00 + 1.5 hours in traffic = 5:30. And we're still in scruffy tourist clothes, not "going to the rehearsal dinner afterward" clothes. Factor in that it takes 30 minutes from hotel to church and 45ish minutes from hotel to dinner and you see the hilarity. Another quick consultation with Mississippi Man and we decide to take up lumps and just head to the dinner - making sure to bring with us preemptive apologies but fully expecting to meet a flesh-eating Bridezilla. Bless our hearts.

It all turned out ok. Groom gets HUGE points for selecting a (seemingly) even-keeled bride. Mom of the groom said that essentially the boys not being there was one of the more minor things that was going wrong, so not to fret. Bride seemed to agree. Other than that, the rehearsal dinner was good, though the fourth at our table was a Lutheran minister who dominated the conversation trying to explain to us that baptism was all that was necessary for salvation. I'm not Lutheran. I don't know if he spoke for the majority of Lutherans. I did disagree with him, however, and we had a very lively debate (though it's hard to have good conversations with someone who doesn't listen to your comments because he's already decided that you're wrong.) After dinner, the three of us determined that, should we be at the same table at the reception, we would do our dangdest to ensure that the topic did not come up again.

We scooted out around 10:15 to run back to the airport to pick up the 4th Musketeer (who was to become Mississippi Man's roomate for the remainder of the weekend.) Other than his flight arriving early and him calling while we're still like 20 minutes out wondering where we are, it was a smooth trip (thanks, Brunhilde!) there and back to the hotel, where we changed back into scruffy tourist clothes and went down to the lobby to hang out and catch up. Until 1:30 am.

I am too old to stay up til 1:30 a.m. Bless my heart.