Boston - 17th - 19th July

Averil & Neil's house

We arrived in Boston around 8pm after leaving Amsterdam via Zurich. Zurich airport is another one that is so large it has its own railway to take you from domestic to international departures. Our kind hosts in Boston, Averil & Neil, drove 40 minutes to the airport then waited another hour or so while we slowly filtered through immigration. This is their very nice house in Foxboro. Neil has been in this house for over 20 years.

Lake path

The house is surrounded on three sides by an artificial lake and Neil actually owns part of the lake that surround his property. We didn't stay here the first night as a lightning strike has fried most of the house electrics, including the air conditioning. It was so humid that we stayed the first night in a nearby hotel with A/C. The next night was much cooler and dryer so we stayed here instead.

Wurlitzer Juke Box

Neil is the complete techno-nerd, his whole house is wired for computer control and there is a phone in every room, including the toilets! He also has an incredible collection of memorabilia, including this Wurlitzer Juke Box, a library full of leather-bound, signed first editions of popular books and heaps of old past computer equipment. Neil developed the BIOS for the first IBM-compatible PCs so is responsible for the computer you are reading this on.

His home theater is incredible - a 100" screen with huge projector, awesome surround sound, three tiers of reclining chairs and can be totally sealed from the outside air and noise. The air system is totally separate from the rest of the house and the air inside is exchanged every two minutes. We watched the first episode of the new season of Game of Thrones here and it was like being at the movies, except probably better.

Altair 8800

Neil also has this beauty pictured left, an original and in perfect working order, the MITS Altair 8800 computer. What makes this so special? This is the very first home personal computer ever sold. This, my dear readers, started the whole PC revolution. This the machine that Bill Gates and Paul Allen from a budding startup company called Micro-Soft, wrote the first BASIC interpreter for without having the seen the machine firsthand!

5MB hard drive

Here's another piece of history - a 5MB hard drive. Not 5GB, not 5TB, but 5 megabytes - and it is as large as the Altair 8800 pictured above. Huge by early standards, your mobile phone has 12,000 times more storage than this device has.

Our gracious hosts

Eating out is big in America and Neil & Averil took us out for meals several times in our short stay. Here we are having dinner in the local tavern, just near the Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots, for gridiron fans. The food was delicious.

Short stack

We ate out for breakfast too at the local downtown cafe. Meals are BIG in America, this is a short stack of pancakes, which makes me very glad that I did not order the full stack. I have already eaten a third and you can see how big it still is. Mind you it was delicious.

After this breakfast we began our drive down to Connecticut to visit Rick and Nancy, Joshua's parents-in-law.