1. Thanks for sharing the schmoop with me, lovelies. I didn't know allergies were so damned contagious.

2. Deb, I'm sorry I, and therefore others, mistakenly blamed you for my laryngitis. I had seen you post that you'd lost your voice after the Nilly-Q, and so I assumed you were probably the source. Consider yourself duly exonerated. Considering the fact I was on four planes and five airports (yes, the math works out, really) in the space of four days, it's no wonder I picked something up. It's getting better slowly, thank goodness.

3. Next time Nilly comes out, I hope we get a chance to take her to Mystic Seaport and Sturbridge Village! I think she would love them both.

I had all my money on her falling madly in love with Boston, above all the other cities. She has a deep love of antiquity in her cities, and of all the ones she visited, Boston wears its history most visibly.

As Emily notes, she only got to spend a day in Boston itself, and half of that was looking at Hobbity stuff in the MoS. We did walk some of the Freedom Trail, and visited Bunker Hill, but we didn't have a whole lot of time.

NY, in my view, has much more history mixed into the places that people ordinarily go in the course of a day.

YMMV. I lived there for seven years, walked to school every day, worked at the Cloisters, and never got over the sense that NYC's big talent was hiding its past amongst the every-burgeoning skyline. Not a lot of room for the city to go except up, of course, Manhattan being an island; but my first job was at the Cloisters, I went to Erasmus three days a week (walking through one of the oldest and prettiest sections of Brooklyn), and honestly, the city just seemed more and more determined to be as 20th century as possible. Which I rather liked, since it gave me the Chrysler Building, but still. And hell, I live in a city that's also surrounded on three sides by water, so I get the upward. But I always felt I had to hunt for the 17th century New Amsterdam under all the steel and girders.

The statue in the middle of the quad at Erasmus was (thinking) 18th century or older (affectionately referred to by the students as Old Syph, since it was green), and the few students that actually noticed the date were gobsmacked that it was soooooo ollllllld.

Oh, Kristin, I've never done Mystic, but I bet she would really dig Sturbridge!

Lilty, I live twenty minutes from the Seaport and am a member. Come down and visit and I will take you for freeeee!

Damn, she didn't get to see more of Boston? That's a pity. I couldn't live in it - the winters would kill me - but I love the place massively, the look of it, the geography, the hills, the history, its pride in its age.

Sturbridge and Mystic are both wonderful. Manoman, I need to get back and visit Boston some more.

Damn, she didn't get to see more of Boston?

We were only allotted one day.

I guess it is a mileage varying issue. Everywhere I've worked in the city has been downtown, and there was tons of history there -- I can think of tons of stuff just in the few blocks around City Hall, which is also where some of the most modern stuff was. Plus, stuff like the parts of the old fort in Central Park, and Wall Street, and so many places where you can see little bits of the whole history of the city -- not just "this stuff is old, and this stuff is new," but "this stuff has been here for awhile, and this part got added a little while after it was built, and then that thing over there changed, and then people needed this thing so they built it, and over there you can see where that other thing was knocked down, but they left part of it and built this other thing into it," and so on. I love it.

We were only allotted one day.

And what did you do with that one day?

Took her to see the hoo-hah's of cave trolls.

I had to drag her out.