Observations from day 2
It’s October! We’re very excited! Everybody got a good night’s sleep. And there are turkeys! This morning there was full-on, Thanksgiving turkeys just walking around the parking lot checking out the cars (our included) like it was their job. If you ask me, I think that portends that it’s going to be a good week.
9:35 AM. We got to the Beverly station and found that the train’s going to be late. Like over an hour late. Hey, you know, life goes on. Everything will be fine.
There’s quite the character collection at the train station this morning. One lonely young man singing loudly and poorly with his headphones on. That was fun.
We met and chatted with a couple from New York that had visited Salem yesterday and was going back today. What started with a comment about the information display board (“I told you it looked like a touchscreen!”) became an hour-long chat. It was so nice to just shoot the shit with them for a while and talk about traveling and figuring out the tricks and traps of the area.
We finally got into town started wandering around.
We could not have asked for a better start to our week. There were a number of buskers we wanted to see this year, and we were willing to change our schedule in order to accommodate them. Instead, as we walked down Essex, we saw them all!
Ashley posed with Salem Jack, met and got huge compliments from the Addams Family of Salem (and they took her photo for their Instagram), too!
A bit further down Essex, Ashley was once again pronounced guilty by the Witchfinder of Salem.
Then, outside the Halloween Museum, we were surprised to see Borah! Instead of a simple photo, we opted for a video, and she gladly obliged. We all admitted that if we had to leave Salem and return home, we’d be happy that we got that video!
We also saw Art the Clown, who let Ashley hold a big rubber flayed corpse for a photo! (We saw some complaints on Facebook about that rubber corpse, but we thought it was amazing!)
We strolled down one of the streets long enough to get out of the main drag and found a private park, open to the public and sat and relaxed for a bit.
We met a nice local lady out walking her dog, Hendrix. We chatted for few minutes. She asked where we were from, she complimented us and complained in the nicest way about the crowds this time of year. She can’t even bring her car out of her driveway most days and has to go different directions just to get out to go to store. But she loves the town and appreciates nice visitors like us!
