Sights & Scenes: North & East of Boston

Time for a visit to the towns to the north and east of Boston, starting close to the city in Cambridge and Somerville.

Cambridge & Somerville

Porter Square - The T stop at Porter Square, which is far underground, has these cool panels depicting early locomotives hanging over the long escalators and stairs.

Cambridgeport - One of the main icons of Boston is the Citgo sign in Back Bay facing out over the Charles River. It competes with this less-famous neon Shell sign, which extends far above an actual shell gas station in Cambridge.

Northeastern Suburbs

The waterfronts of Winthrop and Revere looking east out to the Broad Sound!

Watertown, MA - We didn't see a grocery store in Watertown, but it's the place that Star Market originated decades ago. It's also home to the must-visit Deluxe Town Diner, an incredibly well-preserved diner that also serves up really good food.

Lynn

No more pictures from this area, unfortunately.

Greater Salem

Marblehead, MA is where we begin our look at the greater Salem area, and I most recently visited Marblehead on an unseasonably cold day in late March -- so cold, in fact, that it started to snow. Guess that's Massachusetts for ya.

The waterfront area is a quaint historic district where most of the houses have signs showing the year they were built, the original owner's name, and the original owner's occupation. Some go as far back as the 1600s, though most are 1700s.

And now for a much warmer visit in the summer of 2019 on a bright, sunny day...

Salem, MA - No visit to Salem is complete without a walking tour group seeing all the essential Salem witch sights. Unless you're me, of course, and the tour group simply gets in your way as you're trying to get out to the Salem train station for a train to Boston. And I was trying to catch a connection back out to Worcester -- which, at the off-peak time I was there, only came once every two hours. But train or no train, the walking tours are a big part of downtown Salem! The town is otherwise quaint and pleasant.

Beverly, MA - Okay, it's Massachusetts. There's a lot of quaint, picturesque coastal towns. Here's another one.

It's a pretty big town, too, with a population of a little under 43,000. The downtown is just across the bridge from Salem.

This stately building is the public library, and below, the Woodbery house I referenced while we visited Woodbery Food Market.

Phew! That's a lot of Massachusetts towns to visit, and we're almost done. Tomorrow is the final day of the Sights & Scenes posts, and we'll be seeing the remaining parts of northeastern Massachusetts. Come back to check it out!