Little Women Road Trip

Thirty something years ago, my parents and I were on vacation in Massachusetts when we stopped by Louisa May Alcott's home in Concord.  

This weekend, Kari, Chelsea, Roxie and I loaded up in Roxie's Caddy and headed northeast to Concord.   The weather couldn't have been better, nor could our excitement been more palbable. 

Having read most of Louisa May Alcott's books as  young girls and re-reading many of them as an adults, the trip was a sort of literary pilgrimage, keeping with the spirit of our Dorothy L. Sayers Traveling Book Club.  It was also a chance to celebrate Roxie's birthday. 

We toured Orchard House, the Alcott home, and learned sweet and interesting facts about Louisa May and her family from an enthusiastic tour guide.  We saw the desk where she wrote the first half of Little Women.  We spent too much money in the gift shop.   And best of all, we read passages from Little Women on the front stoop of her house. 

We spent some time at Author's Ridge in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, visiting the graves of the Louisa May (1888), Henry David Thoreau (1862), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1864), and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1882).

We drove by Walden Pond, unable to stop because of a water main break.   The lack of water didn't stop us from having our fun though - we browsed a bookstore in Concord, enjoyed an ice cream break, stayed at the Aloft Hotel in Lexington and enjoyed dinner in Burlington.

Since the theme of the weekend was literature, we spent time reading from Little Women, Dorothy L. Sayers, Schiller and Kari and Roxie even recited poetry.   Kari was the offiicial photographer and documented well, the evidence being at her Flickr site.  And being the sassy and smart group of women we are, there was hardly a moment that wasn't filled with laughter and a list of memorable phrases that will no doubt follow us on our next adventure.