Pinholica: Philly in South Boston and Back Home

After lunch with Little Guinness, it was Philly's turn to expose some film.

The day the Marathon took place, all the action was in the Back Bay and points west, so we thought a stroll around Castle Island in South Boston would be a nice way to enjoy the pleasant weather. What had been an island which held a British "Castle" fort, is now connected by a causeway on the south and a gigantic seaport on the north, right at the mouth of the Charles.

To the southeast the view is of the harbor islands.

Pleasure Bay is completely enclosed by the causeway and seaport. If you've ever flown into Logan with a starboard window, you're probably familiar with it. Every three minutes or so a plane goes over at about three hundred feet. That grey streak in the sky is an airliner on final approach.

The Castle, where the British seige of Boston was headquartered, was destroyed in 1776, but the site was used for some kind of military purpose as late as World War II. The current Fort Independence was built between 1833 and 1851 with a late medieval star-shaped design intended to repel cannon balls.

The only gate in the walls has a vaguely Mesopotamian look.

The interior is only accessible by guided tour. When we got there, the last tour of the season had just concluded.

As a kid who grew up in the Midwest, I'm always impressed by the tides. You can literally see the water flowing downhill from the harbor into Pleasure Bay.

I'm going to miss the full-length mirror in the spare bedroom, slightly curved just leaning up against the wall. I could get used to looking like a super-model.

I think Greyson has had about enough of us.

At the gigantic B terminal at Logan with the distinctive control tower in the background.

After years of reading warnings about booking the last flight of the night, I was paranoid about getting stuck at O'Hare. We boarded and pulled away on time, but half-way down the taxiway, they announced that "something was wrong with one of the airplane's computers and they had to do the load-balancing calculations by hand." Just what you want to hear in a flying aluminum tube you're sealed into. Once again we got to enjoy a complete tour of the taxiways to get our turn back on the runway. They put the pedal to the metal and we got to Chicago almost on time, but there was a Triple 7 blocking the way to our gate and we had to sit there and wait for it to move. We landed at the end of the C concourse and had to run to the tunnel, halfway down the B concourse and over to the F concourse, luckily near the terminal. Our flight had called final boarding. We spent almost as much time getting to the runway as we did flying to Appleton but we did make it home that night.

Then there's always that sweet necessity to just go out and take pinhole pictures so you can get the roll processed.

There were only a few Mums left at the garden center before our trip and we bought what we thought were two matched pairs.

This '56 Studebaker President was sitting in the lot of a repair shop. I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, not too far from the Studebaker plant, where my father was employed for a couple years. When my Dad worked in Wisconsin for a year before we moved, he bought a used '57 President. The first car I remember was a bullet-nosed '51 Champion.