Carey and Peter do fishing villages in the US: Bass Pro Theme Park.... Shopping and Boston

BassPro Outdoor World fishing and hunting shops take shopping to a new level. This is a 'must see' if we are doing any shopping when we are in the USA and every time we find one, it seems bigger and bigger and more extreme. They DO sell stuff, lots of clothes, much much much fishing equipment (it was an hour and a half visit for Peter, I got to sit in the car and read more of my book that I am determined to finish before we come home...). They also sell lounge suites covered in camoflage, and a number of other extremely tacky things, but also some cool things. The easiest way to describe it to you is with photos...

Go fast as you can fishing boat, $30,000 with 150hp Mercury on the back, to get to the fishing site before anyone else

Peter in front of another moose, trout pond and turtle pond.

The shooting range, where people pay to shoot. and the bear

Huge aquarium, another pond next to it with trout in it, another one with turtles

Moose, with trout swimming around

Outdoor walk and cranberry bo

Peter showing how big the fishing boat is, registered in Gloucester

A fly fisherman casting

The whale

Entrance and fireplace, I assume for the wives to sit and wait at....

This says' Welcome fisherman, hunters and other liars'.

We had our long day shopping as planned. Didn't get everything as planned, and I thought it would be not as long as we have whittled down the shops to look in, but no, after the Basspro visit, and a trip to Target to get another bag.... (camping stuff takes up so much room, and we still had to buy our normal quota of books....), it was a solid 7 hours shopping, exhausting stuff!

It was nice a relaxing to have a lovely leisurely breakfast talking politics with Helen,then she kindly drove us up to Boston, whereby we completed our shopping (with the book purchasing stage of our trip to the US, books are SOOO much cheaper here, and there are a lot that we never get in NZ... but our bags aren't as heavy as usual this time...). Caught up with John and Joan for dinner, lovely meal and company, and back to talking business, John is a business friend. Made us realise that we only had 2 1/2 days holiday and plane trip home before we get back into it. Sigh...

Today was the long planned trip to Harvard. And, we were right, so many less people on a Friday, and so much easier without the bikes!! Did the tour around Hahvahd with the students. We had two of them, Chase (who is studying English and Portugese, guaranteed to get him a job, not!) and Wes (studying Statistics). There were around 75 people on the tour, and the recommended tip was $10 a person. An hour later, it was such a great performance, we definitely felt it was worth that much, hope others did as well.

I had the opportunity to quietly ask Wes how you got into Harvard. Chase had already told us that if your parents earn less than $60,000 and you got into Harvard, there were no fees, and the normal fees were $52,000 a year, but there were discounts if your parents earned $300,000 or less (that is if they were 'poor'- our emphasis). He said that the first two parts depended on your SAT's and your GPA. Now, I've read about these for years in american books and never understood them, so this was a great opportunity to find out.

Your SAT's (Standardised Achievement Test) is sat in your senior year. Your marks are out of 2400. He said he got 2070 (which is around 87%), and he said that that put him in around the bottom 20% of all his Harvard class mates. The GPA is your 'grade point average' in your last year in school. I've seen these written down, but had no idea what they mean. Each of your subjects gets a grade, and A is worth 4, B is worth 3, C is worth 2 and a D is worth 1. They are then averaged so that you get a score out of 4. Your goal to get into Harvard is to get the highest score possible. Any of our US friends reading this, please email me if I've got this wrong???

Then, you have to write an application and have an interview, and they look at all the things you did in High School (I presume sports, clubs, volunteer work). Unfortunately he had to go and do his share of the entertainment then and I didn't get to ask him about how you get into Graduate School. There are 6500 undergraduates and 12,000 graduates.

Also visited today was the Harvard Natural History Museum, primarily to see the Glass Flowers exhibit. The photo's don't do the exhibit justice. There are over 4,000 of these flowers and bits of flowers that were made in Dresden, Germany from 1890 until around 1936, by a father and son, who were commissioned to do this by a wealthy benefactress and her daughter, for Harvard. The point was to have models for students to study the flowers and how they are made up. It is quite unbelievable that these flowers and branches are all actually made of glass, they look so real.

Glass flowers made in Germany for Harvard University research, from 1890 to 1936

The Museum also had a lot of stuffed animals, which was quite hard to look at, it was quite sad. Again, these were collected in the 1800's and up to end of 1920's. There were lions, elephants, tigers, cheetahs, jaguars, giraffes, zebra's, rhinoceros', whales, hippopotamus, wolverines, armadillos, anteaters, gazelles, sharks, a kiwi, bears, monkeys, apes, chimpanzees, antelopes, gorillas, etc etc. A lot of them were so old that they skins were cracking. We understand that this is how they learned about the animals back them, but it was sad to see them in the museum.