Visiting John Adams' house seemed like a good idea....

but sadly, was more trouble than it was worth! When we were driving to the Cape last Saturday, we passed an exit for Braintree/Quincy, MA and started talking about how that was where John Adams was from and wouldn't that be cool to see where he lived? So, after we got settled, I got online and found out that there was in fact a museum and tours available. Great! Should be an interesting 1/2 day trip.

Wrong.

John Adams apparently made a bit of a, shall we say, misstep in one provision of his will. Apparently he left about 220 acres of his land to the town of Quincy. As is so often the case, being given something for nothing rarely turns out for the best. Because of this generous gift, the birthplaces of John and John Quincy Adams are surrounded by slum-like areas filled with mostly hair salons, ethnic eateries, and shabby houses. The "Old House" that they moved into later fared a bit better, but honestly the town of Quincy is nothing to exit the highway for.

This was a bit of a frustrating trip as you can probably tell. When we got to the visitors center at 11, we were told that the next tour didn't leave until 12:45 and would last for two hours. Not going to happen with a two year old. So, we decided on a path that seemed more reasonable. We wrote down the addresses and figured we'd just drive there, take a look at the homes even though we couldn't go inside, and call it good. Except that it took us no less than 45 minutes just to find the birthplace homes! Fortunately, it only took 10 minutes to find the Old House, but we have no idea how they could stretch a tour of these places to two hours.

However, we did get some neat pictures and some interesting tidbits of information which I am more than willing to share with ya'll. That way, if you're ever on your way to Cape Cod and have the same thought about how interesting this day trip would be, you can rest assured that you got all the best of the experience from this blog and can spend your time in more pleasant pursuits!

Ok, first of all, the birthplaces of John and John Quincy Adams are only about 75 feet from one another and are the oldest birthplaces of US presidents that still exist.

John Adams' birthplace is the house in back and John Quincy Adams' in the front.

It turns out that the winter kitchen in John Adams' house was actually the largest heated room in the county and is where they would have meetings about local politics in the winter. It's no bigger than our living/dining area (which is not big), but they apparently fit 23 chairs in there. Hard to imagine, but I guess having people pressed together during a Massachusetts winter might not have been such a bad thing:-)

The tour guide, who was kind enough to take us on a short, personal tour, explained to us that the fireplace chimney ran up through the center of the house. This was done so that the bricks would warm up and radiate heat to the rest of the house. Guess central heat isn't such a new concept after all! He also pointed out some divets in the fireplace bricks. It seems that they would heat the bricks in there to bake the bread and had songs they would sing to time it while baking. Can you imagine?

Here's another random tidbit that I read about John Quincy while we were in the visitors center. Apparently, after he finished his term as president, he served in Congress. It seems that three prominent abolitionists advocating for the Amistad slaves approached him with their case and he spoke on their behalf for 7 hours before the Supreme Court and was instrumental in obtaining their freedom. Cool, don't you think?

But, I digress. After taking a look around the birthplace homes, we headed across town to have a quick look at the "Old House" which Adams purchased the year before he became Vice President and stayed in the family for four generations before being donated.

Below is the adjacent Stone Library built to fulfill a request in John Quincy's will for a separate fire-proof structure for books and papers. It contains more than 14,000 volumes that belong to the Adams' Now that's a library!

We did two things after finishing our "tour". First, we vowed never to leave the Cape again while here on vacation and second, spent more time down at our lake that afternoon. Those two things seemed to get us right back on track:-)

The schnitz once again enjoyed himself thoroughly splashing, throwing rocks in the water, and digging in the sand. I enjoyed just taking in my surroundings. The light as the sun prepares to go down just makes everything so beautiful. The really cool part though, was when a group of 14-18 ducks came swimming around the curve almost right up to us and proceeded to hang out for a while. One of them came so close to the shnitz that he could have almost reached out to touch him. So cute, the shnitz kept bending down and saying, "hi duck"! They were very neat. It was a great ending to the day and so that is what I will leave you with.