Avast, ye New Bedford!

Cotton and I took a trip to New Bedford on Sunday. It was a beautiful day, and we were trying to decide what to do. We were making the bed, and I think the aquatic blue color of the bedroom got to us because my immediate thought was not the Topsfield Fair like we had planned, but instead the New Bedford Whaling Museum. I'd been dying to go, and we were looking for a road trip, so we said, Ahoy!, and went on our way. The museum itself is AWESOME. New Bedford, though, seems like it has seen better days. I think parts are really neat - the wharf area, and also the historical whaling park area, the 20 blocks of national park. The rest is not so hot. I think Doug was telling me that in 2006 New Bedford was the site of the largest drug bust in New England, or something crazy like that. I can't say that I'm totally surprised. I mean, here's another sad and tired New England story: a town is one of the richest towns in the country due to robust industry, in this case whaling, and then that industry disappears and what happens to the city? Complete devastation, basically. How do these cities get revitalized? Providence is a success story; Hartford is not. This is a case for urban planners, I guess. Or Buddy Cianci.

Anyway, our first stop for the day was gas, and I had to take a photo of the price. $2.95, to us, felt cheap. Now we can take road trips again! Yay! So we get gas and then head on down to a part of MA we had never explored before. I didn't know New Bedford was so far away. It's not, really - only an hour - but it's not necessarily close, either. For some reason I was thinking it was closer. And when you're down there you don't feel like your in Massachusetts. You feel like you're in Rhode Island. What's the difference, you might ask. Well, there is one. Subtle, but noticeable. This area is slightly more industrialized, or slightly more... decrepit? That's mean, and not exactly what I mean, but it will do for now.

The museum is filled with really cool whale stuff, as the name would suggest. There's this blue whale skeleton hanging in the lobby, and also this cool killer whale relief.
We noticed that whales are always smiling, or at least that's how they're always depicted. (If a whale's life is always happy then let me come back as a whale, please! But somehow I doubt this estimation of what it's like to be a whale.) We learned neat whale words, like spermaceti and odontocete. We also saw interesting exhibits on the whaling life in New Bedford and breathed in the refreshing salt air from the lookout deck on top of the museum. We didn't see the whole of the museum, which was partly intentional - we want a reason to go back soon - but we did spend some time walking around New Bedford. It seems we were the only ones, though, out and about on the streets downtown. The place was deserted, save the random crazy person or tattooed hipster. There weren't even any cars driving around. I was expecting to see tumbleweeds at any moment. All the restaurants we would pass were closed. Not even a Dunkin' Donuts was open (didn't even see one, actually). We finally found an open eatery - Freestone's - where we had nachos and buffaque chicken tenders, but still, we felt like there could have been so much more to the city had we been walking the streets maybe 50 or so years ago. It's terribly sad how cities live and die, just like people. I don't know if New Bedford is dead, necessarily, but it's holding on for dear life. What is has to offer is history - whaling history - and how long can it survive on that? Doug and I will go back to see the museum again, to finish it, but then what? What after that? We'll probably never go again.