Day Six or our annual road trip would be our final day in Massachusetts. Though we’d run out of exploration time for Boston, we had two more cities to visit before crossing the state border. After checking out from the our roundhouse hotel that morning, we drove northeast through a maze of highways and disorganized side streets to world-famous Salem, listed in our American history books as a site known for famous trials of considerable controversy. The town’s official tourism literature swears there’s more to Salem than just witches. During our research I got the impression that certain local parties were sick and tired of the whole “witch” debacle and wanted to put it behind them forever. Hard to blame them, all things considered.

To their credit, Salem wasn’t a dull place to wander. Their public parking is affordable, a few local establishments are famous for solid non-witch-based reasons, and public art abounds on every other street corner. A fair number of citizens have done their best to evoke anything but witchcraft and needless executions.

Time travel, for example. Witches don’t do that. Not often, anyway. If they made a habit of time travel, one or more witches surely would have irrevocably tampered with Salem’s history by now and we would all find “witch trials” to be a very confusing word pairing.

Continue here for more not-witch things…