Halloween

It's only a few more days until Halloween - and there's no escaping it wherever you go over here. It's almost like a national sport. ALL stores have Halloween decorations and/or items to sell. I dread Christmas!!!
Anyway... seeing as Halloween was approaching, our VP of IT decided that we should have one last "IT get together" since we have now officially been morphed into IBM and such outings will most certainly never happen again. He decided on visiting the capital of Halloween - Salem, MA. It's only about half an hour away from work and we all piled into our cars yesterday morning and drove to the Visitor's Center in Salem. On the itinerary we had a guided trolley tour through Salem, lunch at the Beer Works restaurant and then tickets to the Salem Witch Museum.
The trolley ride was ok, Salem is quite a beautiful little town by the sea but the tourists are only there for the witch history. 1692, the Salem witch trials. A lot of bla bla going on during the trolley ride, interesting and not so interesting tidbits about the times when a few teenage girls were so bored that they talked themselves into such hysteria that left the doctor stumped and only able to announce that this was the work of witches. It was a nice little tour had it not been for our tour guide, a young guy in his early 20s who looked like he was blind. I'm only saying that because he NEVER looked anyone in the eye. He looked just slightly past you but never made eye contact. It was weird - I almost felt like watching just him to see if he really WAS blind LOL
Lunch at the Beer Works was nice and everyone took advantage of the huge diversity of beers that they had on offer - here's a picture of Blueberry Beer. The little black things in the glass are actual blueberries and they act like a real lava lamp. They go up and down every now and then. Fascinating!!!



After lunch we went to the Salem Witch Museum where we sat in a dark room and had to endure a dreadfully boring and lame presentation of the history of witches and the witch trials from 1692. Here's a picture of the museum from the outside and a picture of a witch from the gift shop.





All in all it was a good day, lovely weather, sunny though a bit cold. We were lucky, it wouldn't have been near as nice if we'd gone today - it's almost torrential rain out there at the moment.

I shall end with a pic of the box of books I bought at Nashua Library's book sale last weekend... I still haven't had time to read any of them but I can't wait! So many books, so little time!!!