Fuck you, Boston

This is a tale of the worst vacation ever.
We should have seen it coming. After all, we've had horrible weather in every other city we've visited this year, including riding out a tropical depression along the Gulf Coast that flooded the island we were staying on and buried our car in sand and surf. See?

Washington, D.C.? Cold and rainy. Chicago? Rainy and cold. The beach? Flooding, wind, rain, evacuation. You get the picture.

So why would Boston be different? We just had no clue what Beantown had in store for us.
First, our flight was delayed leaving Atlanta, which meant we arrived in Boston at 2 a.m. We had a bike tour scheduled for the next day, but we decided to postpone it because of the nasty weather. We spent the day walking around, avoiding downpours by running into stores. That night, we went to the Braves-Red Sox game at Fenway, where the Bravos absolutely ruled. (Woot!) The rain held off during the game, but this was my view during the game from my "partially obstructed" seat.

The next day dawned gloriously sunny. We nabbed a ridiculously expensive rental car and headed for Plymouth to attend a wedding. We didn't have time to see much of the town before the ceremony, but we did see a rather disappointing rock that played some importance in our country's founding. Big lot of hooey, it is.

The wedding was gorgeous, and we met some really awesome people at the reception while dancing the night away. Plus, they had an ice cream sundae bar. Mmmm!

Back to the tragedy.

We woke up the next morning to biting wind and a nasty misting rain. So much for touring Plymouth. Back in the car to Boston, where the roads are so confusing that it took us an hour to find our hotel right across from Harvard. You've heard of Harvard, right? Google Maps seems to be confused as to where it is. Or, at least, the GPS in our iPhones seemed to be confused about where we were in relationship to Harvard. Arg. More rain, more walking, more wet feet and cold. Cambridge is cool, but I'd rather see it when my extremities are dry.

The next morning was just as disgusting. We decide to take that bike tour anyway, as it was our last day in Boston and we didn't want to eat the tickets. About five minutes into the tour, I fell off the bike, skinning up my hand and knee on Beacon Hill. Awesome.

I got back up, hopped on my bike and continue with the 10-mile tour (after some first aid). Ouchy ouch ouch. By the end of the ride, we were cold and very, very wet. My hand, wrist and knee ached. We walked around the North End neighborhood for a while and grabbed some tasty pasta for lunch, where Hot Pants promptly dumped a full glass of Diet Coke all over himself.

Determined to make the best of it, we headed back out into the rain to see about the Institute of Contemporary Art's Shepard Fairey exhibit. I noticed my ankle and foot starting to hurt, but I chalked it up to my hugging the sidewalk earlier. After a mile and a half trudging through the rain, we discovered the ICA was closed. It's Monday. Fuck.

We grabbed a cab and headed for Cheers, where I gleefully bought a pair of dry socks to relieve my feet of their misery. At this point, I was kind of limping from the ankle pain. The more I walked, the worse it got and before long, I could barely walk. Fuck.

Finally, we decided to just head for the airport, where was now hopping on my one good foot and cussing under my breath. We checked to see what gate we were leaving from, only to discover that our flight was delayed for FOUR HOURS. This was where I announced really loudly that I hate Boston. No longer able to walk at all, I sent HP off to find a wheelchair. Turns out you can get checked in and through airport security really quickly if one person in your party is in a wheelchair. That's great, unless you're at Logan airport, where the AirTran terminal has absolutely nothing but a small newsstand and you're stuck there for, I don't know, FOUR HOURS.

I had to elevate my ankle, so I ended up lying on the floor with my foot up in the chair, showing the entire world my Cheers socks. We finally arrived home at midnight, never more glad to see our cat-hair infested home. I'm sure Boston is great, but I'm not really interested in going back any time soon.

Peachy Keen

I live in the Peach State, even though Georgia actually is third in the nation for peach production, behind California and South Carolina. Whatever. We're the ones with peaches on our license plates. Imagine how excited I was when I moved in with Hot Pants and discovered the very lovely tree in our front yard was, in fact, a peach tree! I had visions of making homemade peach pie and canning peaches for the winter and doing all sorts of homespun peach things with the peaches because they are peachy.

Fast forward a few months to when the tree started to actually produce peaches. Did you know peach trees produce too many peaches, so you have to constantly thin your crop or you'll end up with tiny, nubby peaches instead of gorgeous juicy ones like you see at the grocery store? Yeah, um, it's really fun spending time each afternoon picking tiny little peach buds off a tree in your front yard. Woot.

We did the best we could, but by the middle of the summer, the tree's branches were sagging under the weight of its fruit. Add in a two-year-old drought, and what you have on your hands is a bunch of broken branches. Not just one or two branches, but, like, entire hunks of the tree just ripped right off. The tree just gave the hell up. And the peaches looked like sad little golf balls.

That's when we decided to trot off across the country on a nine-day vacation, leaving our miserable little peach tree to fend for itself. About three days in, we got a call from our next-door neighbor, Julie. A lady and her five children had pulled up in front of the house and started loading trash bags full of our peaches. Despite threats from Julie that the police would be involved if they didn't leave, the woman continued harvesting our fruit. I was livid. If that woman had come by when we were home, knocked on the door and asked for some peaches, I would have gladly given her as many as she could carry. It's a terrible economy, and folks have got to help each other out. But to just take them? That's bullshit. Sure enough, when we got home, what few peaches were left were rotten.

This year comes along, and the drought is over and the tree looks healthy and I'm all "We're gonna have peaches!" I carefully thinned our crop, thinking of all the wonderful things I could make with the fruit. Long about mid-May, we noticed gnawed on little ball-like things all over our back deck. Yep. Squirrels. Motherfuckers ate every last one of our peaches and left the evidence on the back deck, just in case we didn't feel the sting of the theft enough. There is not a single goddamn peach on that tree and the season isn't even half over! Fucking rodents.

So far, it's:

Thieves and rodents - 2

CB - 0