Statues

One of our relatives, Cyrus Dallin, was a famous sculptor. Many people are probably familiar with his sculpture of the Angel Moroni on top of the Salt Lake Temple, but my (SD) trip to New England afforded the opportunity to see two other of his famous sculptures, the Chief Massasoit which stands on the hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, and the Paul Revere statue in front of the North End Church Tower in Boston.

A brief history can be found here.


The statue is nearby the remains/monument for the pilgrims who died in the first year at Plymouth. It was Chief Massasoits people who helped the settlers survive. As thanks, they eventually drove his people out of the area and annihilated his tribe. For this reason, there is a Native American gathering at the Massasoit statue every Thanksgiving day to solemnly remind our nation that there are some who are not thankful for the arrival of the Pilgrims.


This statue of Roger Williams in Providence was not done by Cyrus Dallin, but it seemed fitting to add to a post of statues.

Whale Watching

When I (SD) was young, I wanted to be a marine biologist. Now that I'm old, I still want to be a marine biologist. So I jumped at the chance to go with my brother whale watching on Capt. John’s whale boat out of Plymouth, MA.

After some lovely views of the Bay, we head out to sea and sighted our first whale shortly. Since that whale was spending of the time diving, we quickly moved on.

Our next whale encounter allowed us to see a behavior which our biologist guide said was only seen in about 10% of trips, “lobtailing”. The whale was continuously picking up its tail fin well out of the water and then slapping it down hard against the water. Current thinking is that this signals that the whale is upset about something and represents a temper tantrum.

While watching this very interesting behavior, we were joined by an ocean sunfish, one of the more bizarre looking of the large fish species. In essence, the sunfish swims on its side, and therefore appears as a massive flat disk swimming at the top of the water. He swam a straight course, more or less oblivious to either us or the huge whale nearby. During this time, our whale surfaced directly next to the boat and below our position on the upper deck. Had we been on the lower deck we might have been able to reach out and touch it!

We finally moved off, when we got a call from another whale boat that they were watching a group of four whales. We chased them down and found ourselves in the midst not of four whales but 15-20 whales! These whales were bubble feeding, an amazing behavior where they blow a circular stream of bubbles that trap small fish and krill in a bubble curtain and then swim up through the curtain with their mouth open to swallow all the trapped fish. So we got excellent views not only of the whales’ backs and tails, but also of their faces and mouths as well. The whales surrounded us, so there was always something exciting to watch. Most fun was watching a mother and calf feeding together, occasionally joined by other whales. This was simply an amazing afternoon and the best $40 I ever spend.