Back from Beantown

Boston is a GREAT town! I was there for a 6 day work trip for the American Society of Microbiologists tradeshow. It was a long and exhausting week. We flew in Saturday. All day trip with a long layover in Charlotte (yuk) with the same story back on Thursday. We were on the go non-stop between setting up the booth, working the booth, group dinners, more booth duty and tear-down. But, I was able to get an afternoon and take a quick bus tour of the city. As whirlwind as it was, I was able to capture a few cool pics of some key places. Thank goodness I have an awesome camera that can capture a decent photo moving at 20mph!


First, a pic of our booth.....pretty snazzy...


A view of Boston Harbour from dinner on Monday night

Not sure what church this is, but it's old and gorgeous. One of a few historical churches in the area.

The old State House. The first reading of the Declaration of Independence to Bostonians happened here from the balcony.
Cheers! (or at least the exterior shot from the show) The inside isn't really the Cheers bar.
And you can't leave Boston without seeing Fenway. Gotta bring Gabe back for a game here.
I couldn't resist taking this pic of the famed Boston Fire Dept.
What a great town. Reminded me a lot of Europe. We did a couple of other cool things like eating dinner at the oldest restaurant in the US - Ye old Union Oyster House (est. 1826), experiencing The North End and Little Italy (by far the best cannoli I have ever had) and partaking in some local fare such as baked scrod (scrawd) and clam chowder (chowda). But as great of a time as we had, I was very happy to get back home. Six days on a business trip isn't my cup of tea, and Gabe liked it even less. I hope to get back to Boston in the near future with Gabe. The history buff in me just didn't get enough and I know Gabe would love to see a game at Fenway (if we can get tickets before 2015)



On a whole other note.... we performed another animal rescue today. Maybe we need to start a show on Animal Planet! Animal Rescue Midwest Style....

A co-worker of mine discovered a very large snapping turtle stuck in his window well. He wasn't sure what to do with it, so I helped him out by taking it off his hands. I figured it might like our pond. Of course, that was before we found out it was a snapping turtle! But, we took him anyway. I don't expect him to stick around long. Turtles tend to wander a lot. And hopefully the animals are smart enough to stay out of his way!

It was a fun ride home with him. About half way home, he started to get pretty restless and starting trying to climb out of the bin. EEEEK!! Its hard to drive when you have a snapping turtle trying to run around in your car! So I had to pull over and put him in the trunk. HA! What a life! :) Anyway, got a nice pic of him and a video is his release back into the wild.

He measured about a foot in length and about 6-8 inches across. Not nearly as cute as a regular turtle He had a lot of spikes.

And freedom!...