Not this past weekend but the one before, with camera in hand we drove up to Salem to visit the Peabody Essex Museum, walk around a bit and have those fabulous mussels cooked in Belhaven Beer again. The mussles didn't measure up this time but the museum more than made up for it. It's much too big to see in one short trip so we just concentrated on the architecture of the new wing, designed by Moshe Safdie and open only a month or two, and the reconstruction of a 200-year old Chinese family dwelling called the Yin Yu Tang House. After the museum closed we added in a walk around the historic district of Salem with a stop at the best dahlia garden ever. And that's saying a lot when it beats my other all-time favorite dahlia spot in the Jardin des Plantes.