Northeast Tea Festival, Boston, MA - 2025

The main purpose for our excursion north was to attend the first-ever Northeast Tea Festival held Saturday, August 23, 2025, at the Arts at the Armory in Somerville, a suburb of Boston, MA.

This one day tea extravaganza promised to be "the perfect place to indulge your love for all things tea". The event was hosted and coordinated by Nepal Tea Collective, along with sponsorships from Simpson & Vail Teas, MEM Tea, Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, Chicago Teahouse and Cambridge Naturals.

 Admission to the festival included a tote bag and a tea tasting cup. The opportunity to sample teas from around the world was available around every corner. Vendors came from far and wide, eager to talk about their unique teas or specialty blends. The tea flowed throughout the day along with enthusiastic crowds comprised of the novice tea drinkers eager to learn standing side by side with experienced tea aficionados on a quest to discover their next ultimate tea experience.

If you've attended the Pennsylvania Tea Festival, you might recognize Mike and Deb Raab of Tea-for-All, in Trenton as they brought their tea  and tea wares here to vend also.

As noted in this picture, there is a balcony that provided a refuge from the masses on the floor. It also afforded a nice overview of the vending area and a quiet respite to simply watch the activities from above.

In addition to the sales floor, there were different programs to attend, of which we selected two. Susanna and Angelica had fun with the hands-on autumn tea blending session guided by Cyndi Harron of Simpson & Vail. Later, we attended a program presented by Bruce Richardson of  Elmwood Inn on the Five Teas that Launched a Revolution. 

The Northeast Tea Festival reached a wide range of tea enthusiasts, and appears to have already outgrown its space. There are talks about finding a new location for next year. Follow their Facebook page, to keep up with their updates.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA

This past August we enjoyed a morning visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, an art museum in Boston centered around this glorious courtyard that changes with the seasons. The museum was opened in 1903, established for the education and enjoyment of the public forever. The art featured in the museum includes European, Asian, and American studies represented in painting, tapestries, sculptures, and decorative arts.

Between the floral bounty and the Spanish atmosphere, the courtyard was a major focal point as the welcoming center of the museum. We were able to wander from different rooms to experience the amazing collection. Isabella Stewart Gardner had an eye for collecting.

The museum is most famous for the unresolved robbery of thirteen paintings that occurred in 1990 by men dressed as police officers investigating a disturbance. In less than an hour and a half, they slashed painting from their frames, and escaped without issue. The empty picture frames continue to hang in the museum in hopes that they will be returned,