so i left the house at 9am, got the supplies (no chicken leg quarters, only whole legs), and made it to the cafe by 9:30am. my original plan was to then go home for a run and then come back around noontime to help out a bit before leaving for wellesley around 1:30pm. my mother told me not to bother, that my sister would come and help out at the cafe.
i set out for my run around 10:30am. all along the river were tents set up in preparation for the head of the charles regatta starting tomorrow and lasting throughout the weekend. unfortunately it looks like a bit of rain in store for tomorrow and a lot of rain in store for saturday. i got back home an hour later.
i looked over the directions to get to wellesley college. throughout the morning eliza and i had been coordinating via text, and we decided to meet at the main parking plaza at 2pm to check out the greenhouse. back when i did a lot of naturing, i used to ride by wellesley all the time, it was the gateway to the woods of sherborn, dover, and medfield. it was basically a straight shot down route 16 west, and i was hoping all the familiar landmarks would come back to me once i got going.
i microwaved a spicy jamaica patty for lunch. i ended up leaving around 1:15pm, after google maps told me it was going to take 50 minutes to ride there. all i brought was my phone to take photos, and my saddlebags where i had an extra jacket in case i needed it. temperature was the mid-to-upper 60's, but large patches of clouds started to form, blocking out the sun, which made for a slightly chilly ride.
the ride to wellesley was quite nostalgic as i passed by familiar sights. i haven't been down that way in ages, i want to say more than a decade at least. it'd also been a while since i've riden the motorcycle for longer than a few miles (13 miles to get to wellesley). i'm not sure if i was fully enjoying the ride as i was concentrating on navigating and not getting lost (like being in the wrong lane), but at times i had a smile on my face, knowing this may be one of the last warmish rides of the season before it gets too cold to ride comfortably.
google maps wasn't lying when it said it'd take at least 50 minutes to get there. i arrived at the parking plaza right around 2pm. there was a small outdoor parking space but there was a 1-hour limit, so i headed into the multi-level garage. the ceilings were super low and i involuntarily lowered my head to prevent myself from getting accidentally scalped. instead of going up, i found myself going further down, until it seemed like i was on the bottom floor, before i found a parking spot. i made a note of where i parked and ascended a stairwell structure up to the surface. i started seeing students - all female - and it seemed like i was on the male on campus, which felt a little weird (not a surprise, since wellesley after all is an all-women's college).
no sooner was i out before eliza texted me that she had arrived at a parking lot, but that there was an 1-hour parking limit. i figured maybe she'd parked next to the greenhouse itself. she asked me to send her a link of my location at the parking garage so she could follow it. that's when i heard her voice calling me, and saw her in her rental car. we were actually at the same parking area without realizing it. i told her to park inside the garage, and waited outside for her to come out. minutes later, i heard her calling my name behind me, as she'd appeared from a totally different direction. i didn't question it too hard, apparently the parking garage was much larger than we realize, spanning a vast underground cavern.
from there we went off in search of the greenhouse, walking through the wellesley arboretum area. there was a lake covered with lilypads, a swampy marsh, and a bog. it was like a collection of new england biomes all next to each other. i showed her some exploding jewelweed seedpods. we walked all the way to one side of the campus but didn't see any greenhouse. so we backtracked. eliza spent a few minutes talking with theo who'd called. we spotted a garter snake and two dead short-tailed shrews.
eventually we did find some structures that looked promising. some college women were working in the gardens, and a few astronomy observatory domes on top of a hill, decorated with halloween faces. i asked an old man who told us the greenhouse was just over the crest of the hill. we saw a futuristic stainless steel shingled building, with a large red maple outside shining brilliantly red in the afternoon sun.
inside the greenhouse were were greeted by a pair of young college women. they were more than eager to talk with us, whether it's because they were just super friendly, or maybe they don't get a lot of visitors. on a table were various plant samples to try, including locally grown sesame seeds and jujubes.
they'd renovated the greenhouse space since my first and last visit back in august 2010 with bruce. the new space features a specially built pavilion with retractable glass roofs just for a tall camellia plant that was donated by the founder in 1870's, so it's around 150 years old. it blooms during the winter, so it's worth coming back to see the flowers.
after that we headed into the main greenhouse. first there was a space with desert plants, before transitioning to tropical plants. the place is like heaven for plant lovers. both eliza and i were snapping photos with our phones while chatting, like two alien tourists. but to be fair, many of the plants we saw there we'd never seen before. another really good thing about the place was how much it engaged all your senses. besides the free tastings when we first came in, there was also plenty of signs asking you to touch or smell the different vegetations, like they really want you to engage with the plants, not just to view them from afar.
eliza and i basically had the whole place to ourselves, with the exception of 3 girls who were hanging out in the camellia pavilion before walking quickly through the rest of the greenhouse.
there was a succulent with a few flowers that smelled like rotten meat. an impressive variety of stone plants. caudiforms, which looked like large alien stones but are actually bulbous roots of a type of plant. weird tropical flowers like the dancing lady ginger and chenille plant flowers. a slew of carnivorous plants like hanging pitcher plants and cobra lilies. tropical foliages with dazzling patterns and shapes. a paludarium filled with fish, with orchids rooted above it. a wall of air plants. we even saw a lizard crawling up the wall.
we left the greenhouse by 4pm. there was another set of greenhouses nearby, but those seem to be off limits to the public, filled with ongoing plant experiments.
it took eliza and i half an hour to walk back to the parking plaza. eliza's currently living in the guest house of her father's retirement community, but will move to her friend shauna's place in somerville tomorrow, before leaving for chicago on monday. we made tentative plans for her to possibly drop off some journals and photos from her ongoing storage cleanup so she could store them in my basement for the time being.
i left wellesley college by 4:30pm. there was more clouds than sun and i dug out my extra jacket for warmth. it took my 1 hour and 20 minutes to get back home because of traffic. it wasn't too bad in wellesley and newton, but there was a bottle neck in watertown center that must've taken me 15 minutes to go through. once i was passed watertown center, it was smooth sailing back to cambridge. i got back home by 5:45pm.
li returned home before 7pm. he had lunch at the cafe today - charsiu bento - and my parents gave him a free boba tea. for dinner he had a panini sandwich at another nearby cafe. as for me, i heated up some leftover rice porridge from monday night.