History and hiking with the Mrs... Now with Irish Breakfast

 With a 5 year absence from Massachusetts, and I think 8 years since we last lived there, our recent visit to the Boston area gave me a chance to show Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife a little bit of local history that I was remiss in showing her years ago when it was local to us. I had my reasons for skipping over things. First off, my wife only developed a sense of patriotism after leaving Massachusetts and it's nihilistic sense of self-hatred when it comes to history, and second, by the end  I was discouraged myself by the anti-American propaganda that has infected leftist enclaves. 

 BUT, on reflection, I thought it a good idea to take a 30-minute detour from one of our family visits, and show my wife a few places.  That particular day we were to spend the morning in the woods on a pond in the forest, where her cousin had settled down in a little house with a retired Marine Corps vet. 

        I instructed Inappropriately Hot Foreign wife to dress warm, and to wear comfortable footwear for a fair bit of walking on uneven ground and maybe taking a spin in a canoe on a cool, windy day.  

Brazilian hiking heels

"you should wear jeans, shoes that are good for the woods, and a warm top" 

Advice Given: 2

Advice Taken: 0

Not a historic site, but no adventure starts with getting a salad.

        Seeing where we were, I thought it important that my wife see Plymouth Rock, the spot that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year,  that commemorates where the Pilgrims first landed. I spent a lot of the drive talking up this deeply impressive monument, promising that she would be deeply impressed. 

yes, it's a rock. Wow. Lol. 

OK, so everyone who grows up on the Irish Riviera, the seacoast between Boston and Cape Cod, has to take a school trip to see Plymouth Rock, a site of deep historical significance  rock.  With a date stamped on it. In a hole. That is for some reason always filled with dead sea life. It's a bit like "The Great Egress" of PT Barnum fame. It's a monument to tourism-based dollars. 

"Wait... is a rock, hohnee. Dat's eet?  Chu took me 30 minoots to see a rock in a hole dat smells like a mens room?"

    If I had to suffer through it multiple times as a child, I was going to disappoint her, too. Disillusionment is best savored in company. 

   Luckily for me, she has a good sense of humor and she was more impressed with the MAYFLOWER.  She made an interesting point on the 1620 arrival date carved into the rock, though. It was 2 years after the Portuguese had already built the "New" marketplace in her city in Brazil. 

       Our visit to Massachusetts coincided with peak foliage season. I'll admit it's a beautiful 2 week period, even in Massachusetts. It's easy to forget that something like 80% of the state is still shaded by tree canopy. There's lots of trees even in urban areas.  In the 8 years we lived in MA together, I never once took my wife apple picking, which is something of a fall tradition. Luckily, my oldest brother set it up as a family activity while we were visiting him. Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife luckily packed her hiking high heels, which is a thing, but not a practical one. 

     After complaining about very cold and damp feet as a result of leaving the Irish Riviera and travelling inland where the Swamp Yankees are (the approaches to Cape Cod away from the seashore), I was happy that my wife's apple picking hiking high heels at least had closed toes. 

    ...and I should have remembered that my wife is Brazilian and has been wearing heels probably since she learned to walk. She wore boots with giant heels and this was mostly not a problem for her on a farm, despite my predictions of "you're gonna end up with your ass in a mud puddle."  

     She did of course wipe out, but just the once and got the whole family laughing. Latinas are not quiet people. Her yell was pretty echoey and I'm pretty sure knocked a few apples out of the closest tree.  Then she got up and scooted up a tree in 4 inch heels,  quick as a blink to join my nieces and nephews in getting the good apples that were up high.  

You can take the girl out of the Amazon but...

    By late afternoon, my brother lit a fire on his deck and we had time to drink some local microbrews that were actually pretty damn good. After that, we drove the hour into Boston proper to visit another cousin of hers.  This required a wardrobe change, and while it's true that Brazilian women are not shy or self-conscious, American men who marry Brazilian women are moreso. So that was how I ended up distractedly driving down the highway, briefly, with a naked wife, who, to be fair, is good at it. 

I get along really well with her cousin's husband, and so while the ladies were chatting away, he and I settled into the arduous task of drinking a lot of Irish whisky and laughing about the ridiculous but fun parts of being married to the foreign women we chose.  My wife got to drive us back to the hotel that night. As long as we kept up stories that made the other laugh, we kept having a drink, and so my liver got a serious workout. Luckily I drank a ton of water before bed, and in the middle of the night too and avoided a hangover. The next morning my voice was hoarse. I talked more that night than I had in years. 

     The next morning, feeling the lack of energy presumably caused by my bruised liver, we went out for an Irish Breakfast. And not just an Irish Breakfast, but THE Irish breakfast, if you live in Massachusetts. 

   O B.'s Cafe in Quincy MA   is where you go for Irish Breakfast. Because I am me, I know the owner, Stevie.  Point in fact, we went to high school together and my sister was best friends with his aunt, and since she was one of 16 kids (Hello, we're Irish Catholics, nice to meet you), naturally the family consisted of about a hundred people in a relatively small section of town. 

     I hadn't been in OB's in 5 years, and even so, got a great welcome.  I have a particular fondness for Stevie, as I brought my parents in for breakfast every week or two all through their declining years, and he was there as a part of a lot of great memories (and Irish Breakfasts), and for their parting as well. Even at the end, for both my parents, Steve was always ultra warm and welcoming, would come out for a chat with them, and went out of his way to make sure they enjoyed the meal. And so I have a very strong association with his food and his restaurant and good memories. 

       So, OB's Irish breakfast is scrambled eggs, toast from homemade bread, bangers (with brown sauce on the side), a grilled slice of tomato, Irish bacon, some sort of wizardly home fries that are a secret recipe that I have never seen bested, and both white and black puddings and also beans, if desired. I usually don't get the beans, myself, as I don't want to subject my loved ones to the results all damn day long. 

White and black puddings are a type of sausage. Black pudding is blood pudding, by the way, as in made with blood, yes, and it's peppery, complex and insanely delicious.  Really, the blood pudding is the crown of the meal, as it's something I can't get in my area in Florida, which bans the sale of offal-based foods.   My wife pretty much threatens divorce and pulls out a wooden stake and a crucifix every time I suggest she try a piece, but she admits that her father, an immigrant to Brazil from Italy, used to make his own. 

     Other than seeing family, Irish Breakfast was the best part of my visit to Boston. Not gonna lie.