Destination #1: Wellesley, MA from List #1.

Preparation.

I babysat a funny little toddler yesterday morning ("Gabby, say 'goof ball'." "Goose hole!") and made an extra $25. Yay! Not bad for 2 hours of non-work. I took it with me to Wellesley. I went with my mom since I'm visiting my parents this weekend and Wellesley is about 20 minutes away. This means I didn't end up leaving until after 5, when her shift ended, but there was still enough to do that I felt like I got an idea of the town.

I decided to drive because I feel like that's part of the experience. I wanted to try to find it without a gps and just by memorizing the directions, which I thought my mom would be really nervous about, but she was actually pretty calm.

My preparation for the trip involved finding directions, looking up potential things to do, making sure I had some way of taking pictures (just my phone for this one), and making a playlist for the ride (I'm going to try to make a different playlist for each place).

Here's my Wellesley playlist:

1) Loser- Beck

2) She's Leaving Home- Easy Star All-Stars

3) Steady Rollin'- Two Gallants

4) Baby Elephant Walk- Bad Manners

5) Sway- The Blue Hawaiians

6)Run-Around- Blues Traveler

7) Roadrunner (Once)- Jonathan Richman

8) Bad Romance- Lady Gaga

9) Tattoo of Your Name- VAST

10) Get It Faster- Jimmy Eat World

11) Sleeping In- Postal Service

12) Home- Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes

13) 15 Stories- Jump, Little Children

14) I'm The Only One- Melissa Etheridge

15) The Fix Is In- Ok Go

16) One Step Beyond- Madness

17) Ventura Highway- America

18) Black Water- The Doobie Brothers

19) Anything At All- Firewater

The Trip.

At 5:00 PM I picked up my mom from work. We stopped by Stop&Shop on the way to drop off a RedBox movie and then jumped on I-95. We got turned around once on the way because we didn't count the off-ramp as a road and apparently google maps did? Anyway, we turned around and got back on track and it was pretty much a straight shot from there.

We headed toward Central Street, since there seemed to be a lot to do there. We went to the Wellesley College campus first, because we wanted to check out the botanical gardens while it was still light out. It took us a little while to figure out how to get to a parking lot close to the gardens, but we found it and we got a nice little tour of the campus on the way. Apparently there was reunion going on because there were all kinds of signs pointing to reunion parking and tents with food. My mom was surprisingly calm the whole time we were driving, even when I had a mini road-rage moment at a point of mild intersection confusion with an impatient middle-aged soccer-mom type (oops). Considering we've clashed before because of my sometimes slightly less cautious driving style, I was pleasantly surprised.

Anyway, we walked through the Gardens, which were beautiful. Mainly trees and bushes, with a few ferns and little flowers. There was a pond at the end and we saw a couple in designer clothes walking a little pomeranian (lol cliche) who seemed very insistent on chasing the family of nervous geese grazing by the sidewalk. It was funny to see a dog just a little bigger than a squirrel try to go after a bird three times its size. We also saw ants harvesting honey dew from aphids, which I found much more exciting than my mom, but it really is awesome!

After that we had planned on going to find a little bookstore I read about online, but we passed the science center on campus and it was such a neat building I had to check it out. Lucky me it was still open because the bathrooms were being used as public restrooms for the reunion. There are pictures of the building below.

After that we went back to town, parked across from a congregational church (with a rainbow stripe on the sign! I was pleased) and started looking for a place to eat. The plan had been to get pizza somewhere, but we passed a fancy little place called "The Milestone" with an outdoor eating area and a wine list. We stopped there to look at the prices. They weren't terrible and we had just over $100 between us, so we stayed. If you're going to hang out in a nice town, you might as well eat at a nice place, right? The wine was good (granted most of my previous experience has been with $4 bargain barrel wines and everything from Banrock Station which is 2 for $10 in this area), the food was good, the people were friendly and the waiter was amusing. The table was a little crooked, but I folded my napkin and wedged it under the short table leg and all was well, again. The only real problem was that the service was very slow toward the end, so the bookstore was closed by the time we paid and left.

For mom, ice cream at the end of the day is like coffee at the beginning of the day, for most people. So, the last thing we did was walk down to a little homemade ice cream shop. It was a cute little place and the ice cream was pretty good (all natural, so different sort of taste, but still good), but the place was hot so we ended up sitting on a bench outside watching random people walk around. I noticed most of the younger guys wore polo or button down shirts with boat shoes and that most of them had slightly fluffy blonde or light brown hair. It was a little surreal... like Twilight Zone meets Stepford Wives. I'm sure not everyone in Wellesley looks like that, but at least four people that passed us while we ate our ice cream fit that description.

So, there's trip number one! Here are some pictures:

Little waterfall at the botanical gardens. It was hard to get a good picture.

Ants farming aphids! Hard to see, but it was really cool. They protect the aphids from predators, like ladybugs, and in return milk them for the honeydew they secrete.

Another attempt at an aphid farm photo.

Pond at the end of the path. Holy lily pads, batman! So pretty.

Looking up at the Science Center from outside. We were on our way out when we passed it and I had to go in. Awesome building. Very cool design. If I went to school there I think that would be my favorite place.

Stuffed koala in the science center.

Funky curly stairs in the science center! Why not?

Stuffed birds. There were lots of these.

Random stone stairs because... again... why not?

Windows looking into offices (and classrooms?) in the science center. So cool. Every turn there was another neat or pretty thing to look at in that building. I could've stayed there for hours.

Gay-friendly congregational church across from where we parked :)

Blurry phone picture of me at The Milestone drinking Cabernet Sauvignon from Sonoma, California (nice little tribute to my old school).

Blurry phone photo of mom drinking a Shirraz at The Milestone.

Pretty alley we passed on the way to the ice cream place. The window is the front of a doggy boutique where they had little doggie pastries and pies, comparable to what you'd see at the front of a coffee shop. Too funny.