Boston, MA | A Day in Salem

Our third day in Boston was an early one – we wanted to get on the road to Salem by 7:30am so we could try to beat the crowds. (Salem in late October, may not be the best time to visit if you hate crowds, haha.) And, I’d like to take a moment to commend the fact that all five of us were dressed, hair done, makeup on, and ready to go by 7:20! BOOYAH.

Unfortunately, this is what greeted us when we got to our rental. A flat tire!

The rental car place wanted to charge us $70 + admin fees to come out and change the flat, but thankfully, one of our friends has AAA and was able to get us a tire change for free and the guy arrived within 10 minutes! That’s some service.

We were able to get on the road by 8:30 so we weren’t super behind schedule like we imagined we would be. When we arrived in Salem, we found a FREE parking spot right near the cafe we wanted to go to for breakfast. (We were thrilled to find parking so easily, even more so when we discovered other parking lots were charging $40 to park!)

Our first stop of the day was breakfast at the Gulu-Gulu Cafe. I ordered a breakfast sandwich and a peppermint mocha. The sandwich was phenomenal but the coffee drink was just okay. Not enough peppermint for me! We giggled a lot during this meal and developed a lifetime’s worth of inside jokes. It’s always a good time when you can’t breathe because you’re laughing so hard!

After our delightful breakfast, it was time to get out and explore Salem! I requested a bookstore visit to Wicked Good Books, which is a small independent bookstore where I picked up an adorable tote. I would have liked to buy a book but I knew we were visiting two other bookstores while in Boston and needed to adhere to a semblance of a budget.

After the bookstore, we just strolled around town, stopping when something caught our eye – like the Salem Witch Trials Memorial. This was a powerful memorial that went in a U-shape, with large granite stones commemorating the people who were executed during the trials. Each stone had a person’s name, how they were executed, and their execution date. (We were really disturbed by the man who was pressed to death. Can you imagine?!?!) There were flowers left on every stone and a few had notes from family members. I can only imagine how it must feel to come to this site to see a family member memorialized.

After that, we decided to go to the Salem Witch Museum because a few of us were interested in learning more about the history behind the trials. Unfortunately, the line to get in was out the door and once we found out that the line was just to get a time to visit the museum (!), we were like, “Well, there’s always Wikipedia.” Heh. There was too much of Salem to explore to stand in line for that! I would definitely love to come back to Salem (when it’s less crazy!) to visit more of the museums, but it was just a busy time of year.

Then, we found the Pickering Wharf Marina where we enjoyed the view of the water from a set of Adirondack chairs. Blissful! (Also, my feet were killing me by this point so it was a necessary break for me.)

We walked around Salem for a bit longer and then decided to head back to where the street market was being held to buy some fun tchotchkes to take home. We passed by a great little booth filled with cat toys earlier in the day and I wanted to go back to buy one of the tiny witch’s hats because, honestly, how adorable would Eloise look in one? I think she would tolerate it for, like, two seconds, but that’s long enough to snap a picture, right? Ha. Unfortunately, she sold out of the tiny hats so I picked up some catnip toys instead (which they went bonkers for).

At this point, we broke off as a group because three of us decided to partake in a psychic reading! There were a bunch of options at this street fair and we were lucky to find one without a wait. I opted for a tarot card reading and I’ll be completely honest: I went in with all of the skepticism in the world about it. Psychic stuff is something I was told to stay far, far away from as a kid growing up in an evangelical church. I wasn’t sure how much I believed in it but thought it could be a neat experience – as long as I didn’t hear that I was going to die in, like, 30 days or something.

And, y’all. I was blown away by how accurate my reading was! One of the first cards I pulled was about a situation I’m finding myself in at the present moment, and the push/pull I’m experiencing about it. I also pulled a card that said I’ve been leaning on a significant female figure in my life as I make this decision – ding, ding, ding! My mother! There were other cards I pulled that gave me great clarity about my life and what I can expect out of it over the next few months. All in all, it was an extremely positive experience and I’m really glad I pushed myself out of my comfort zone to get a reading done. It’s not something I would have ever thought I’d do, but that’s the beauty of life, isn’t it? It takes us to unexpected places!

I also talked to the tarot reader about being a Sagittarius, as I’ve never identified with that sign. He is a Sag as well and we couldn’t have been two more different individuals! He told me to look into my rising sign and moon sign to get a fuller picture of my signs. My moon sign is Pisces and my rising sign is Aquarius. I don’t really feel like the traits of Aquarius rising are very “me,” but I definitely could identify with the traits of Lunar Pisceans. Like, really, really identify. It was the first time I read something about my “sign” that actually rang true for me. I don’t really know what these moon signs and rising signs truly mean, other than that’s the position of the earth when I was born, and I’m still not fully on board with astrology but it’s fun to play around with and read about!

After our readings, we met back up with our friends. It was a little after 2 p.m. and Salem was getting very busy! There were people everywhere and it was getting harder to walk around due to the crowds. We decided we were ready to leave.

We stopped in the Brookline area to visit a bookstore and have dinner. The bookstore we visited, Brookline Booksmith, is incredible. It’s two stories, with the bottom story devoted to used books and the top story devoted to new books. I could have spent hours there but I wanted to be mindful of my friends’ time. (Most of them don’t buy books, preferring to use the library instead. I used to be the same but then discovered how much I love the aesthetic of books in my home and the utter joy I receive from buying books and perusing bookstores. However, I still use my library frequently, especially for romance novels! My reading life ratio shakes out to 60% library books to 40% owned books now.) I picked up one new book (The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang) and called it a day.

After that, we headed over to The Publick House for dinner where I had a super delicious burger that really hit the spot. (What is it about traveling where you never seem to eat at normal times? We typically ended up skipping lunch and going for an early-ish dinner the whole time we were in Boston.)

Then, it was back to Southie and figuring out how we wanted to spend our last day in Boston! Our flight left at 7:20 p.m., which gave us plenty of time to enjoy more of the city before leaving.