Last Brunch Before Boston Logan
The weather had smiled on us so wonderfully for most of our New England trip, it was perhaps ironically fitting that the weather turned just as we were leaving.
We said goodbye to our lovely apartment on Munjoy Hill. I drove us from Portland to Ipswich in the driving rain.
The weather was due to cheer up middle of the day, but we found ourselves in Ipswich before noon. I had spotted two places for refreshments in the middle of the town: Heart & Soul Cafe & the Choate Bridge Pub.
We started in the first of them, which we could tell straight away would be to our taste. A groovy throw back to the 1960s & 1970s.
Tasty BLTs with avo and great coffee, which is not all that easy to find in USA cafes.
The staff were all very friendly and we got to meet the owners, Bud & Jenny, who were exactly the sort of jolly, genial people you might expect from the pictures.
They were especially taken with my shirt, which they thought might have been designed for their cafe. Funnily enough, it is the one I wore to Kim & Janie’s 60’s themed party, so Bud & Jenny were darned right!
I wondered whether the picture with Ed Sheeran (see headline photo) was an AI-generated joke, as it seemed incongruous for their 60s/70s theme, but it turned out that Ed Sheeran had popped in to the cafe a few months ahead of us.
For reasons known only to him, Ed Sheeran, a son of Ipswich (Suffolk, England), chose to film a pop video in the other Ipswich (Essex County, Massachusetts). And why not?
Perhaps this gave Janie the bug to film a video of her own, which I’ll insert a bit later.
The rain had pretty much died down by the time we had finished our brunch, so we said goodbye to Bud, Jenny and their team and wandered around for a while, taking in some of the old buildings in the town…
…before returning to the centre of town to start an Updike hike. The hike needed to start in the Choate Bridge Pub, as I was aware that Updike had written many of his novels from an office above that pub. Why he chose to write there rather than in his big house, a few minutes walk away from the pub, is a matter for some academic conjecture I am sure.
The nice barmaid told us that upstairs is now apartments (I’d kinda figured), so we thought best to wander down to pay homage to Updike’s house after photographing the Choate Bridge Pub Updike plaque.
On leaving the pub, we got chatting for quite a while with a nice lady, recently bereaved, who had lived in St John’s Wood at one time. Then we sought the Updike plaque.
I thought the couple sitting in the window were trying to avoid being photographed, which would have been fair enough, but it turned out they were clowning around, hoping to photo bomb our picture, which was really pretty funny.
OK, you must all be chomping at the bit to see a five minute hike movie – now’s the time for a showing of Daisy’s movie:
Janie drove us into Boston Logan airport, which was a relatively traffic and hassle free drive, but dropping the car and then getting to the check in at departures was a bit of a circus, as I suspect it always is at Boston Logan.
Once we got through formalities, though, the Delta hospitality (which Virgin shares) was excellent, so we chose to chow down before the flight and eat light on it.
If you want to see all the pictures from this day – we’re talking well north of 100 – then click this Flickr link or the photo link below:
