Nashua Airport / Boire Field

On the east side of Manchester-Boston Regional Airport, in a curvy white Streamline Moderne building that does not match anything else around it, is the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire. The building itself is the exhibit's center of gravity. It is the 1937 terminal of Grenier Field — built by the Works Progress Administration at a total cost of $549,758, replacing a 1931 brick shack, and serving as the airport's main passenger terminal through the years when Glenn Miller's USO C-47 flew through here, when Grenier Field ferried 9,000 B-17s and B-24s to Europe, and into the early Cold War. The building was retired in 1961 when the new Ammon Terminal opened. It served as the general aviation building for another thirty-four years. In 1995, with the major expansion underway, it was slated for demolition. The New Hampshire Aviation Historical Society, the City of Manchester, the FAA, and the Town of Londonderry agreed to save it instead. The society raised $1.1 million. In 2004, the building was lifted onto a transport rig and moved across two active runways in the middle of the night — runway 6-24 was closed for one hour for the first crossing, then runway 17-35 closed for an hour for the second. By dawn the building was sitting at its new address at 27 Navigator Road on the east side of the field. It opened as a museum in 2005. The Slusser Aviation Learning Center, a hangar-shaped wing built behind the original structure in 2011 with a million-dollar gift from Eugene and Ann Slusser, doubled the museum's size. Inside: New Hampshire's aviation history from the air mail era — including 2nd Lt. Jean Donat Grenier himself — through Grenier Field's North Atlantic ferry mission, Pease Air Force Base, and the modern Manchester airport. The museum's parking lot is the closest the public can get to active Runway 17-35. It is free, open to 8 p.m. daily, and arguably the best airliner-watching spot in northern New England.

A 61-acre kettle pond in Concord, Massachusetts — formed about 12,000 years ago when a buried block of glacial ice melted, leaving a deep depression that filled with groundwater. Henry David Thoreau built a 10-by-15-foot cabin on the pond's north shore on July 4, 1845, and lived there for two years, two months, and two days while writing the manuscript that became "Walden, or Life in the Woods" (1854) — the founding text of American environmentalism and the inspiration for everything from John Muir to the modern Sierra Club. The original cabin is gone, but a stone-cairn memorial marks its exact site, and a full-scale replica sits at the entrance to Walden Pond State Reservation. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who owned the land Thoreau built on, lived a mile away in Concord and is buried with Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery's "Authors' Ridge." The pond water is famously clear — Thoreau measured its depth (102 feet) and clarity with care; the data still informs modern limnology. The North Bridge in Concord, where the "shot heard 'round the world" opened the American Revolution on April 19, 1775, is 1.5 miles north.

A small public memorial in downtown Salem, Massachusetts, dedicated August 5, 1992 by Elie Wiesel — 300 years after the 1692 witch trials. Twenty granite benches cantilever from a stone wall surrounding a small plot adjacent to the Old Burying Point, one for each of the 20 people executed (19 hanged at Proctor's Ledge, 1 — Giles Corey — pressed to death under stones for refusing to enter a plea). The Salem witch hysteria began in February 1692 when several young girls in the Reverend Samuel Parris's house began having fits attributed to witchcraft; over the next ten months, more than 200 people were accused and 30 found guilty. The trials ended when Governor William Phips dissolved the special court after his own wife was accused. Salem today balances genuine memorial (the Witch Trials Memorial, the Salem Witch Museum's educational mission, the Proctor's Ledge Memorial added in 2017) with Halloween commercialization that runs October through November. The Peabody Essex Museum nearby holds the largest Asian art collection of any U.S. museum — built on Salem's 18th-19th century trading wealth.

Boston Light on Little Brewster Island has guided ships into Boston Harbor since 1716 — the oldest continuously operating lighthouse station in the United States. The current 89-foot stone tower was rebuilt in 1783 after the British blew up the original on their retreat from Boston Harbor in 1776. The harbor itself is dotted with 34 islands, most preserved as a national recreation area: drumlin islands left by retreating glaciers, Civil War-era forts on Castle and Georges, and the lonely whitewashed cone of Long Island Head Light visible from the airline approach into KBOS. The harbor cleanup from 1986-2000 turned what was once one of the dirtiest harbors in America into swimmable water.