Happy Fourth of July! It seems pretty perfect to be posting about our Boston adventure on Independence Day, how patriotic!
We got into Boston late in the afternoon on a Friday. We’d taken the Megabus from New York and got stuck in traffic, and it took forever. So we were a bit weary by the time we got into the transit station. So out-of-it in fact, that Rob accidentally put his credit card into the slot where your metro ticket is supposed to come out of at the ticketing machine! Luckily, just as I started to tear open my bag in search of tweezers to pry the sucker out, the machine spit the card back out, whew.
My big plans for the weekend were to do the Freedom Trail, a path that goes all over Boston and by all historical points of interest. Boston is full of history and I love that kind of stuff, so I was all about it. I wanted to follow the Freedom Trail from the North End through downtown, ending at Boston Commons, all the while stopping at each of the cool spots to learn some good fun facts.
Things did not go quite as planned. The morning started out fine enough, we grabbed breakfast at a little cafe Loyal Nine in Cambridge by our Airbnb, then started walking towards the Freedom Trail across the river in Boston. The first spot we got to was a little cemetery, which we wandered around in for a few minutes, not super exciting, but still kind of cool. As we went further on the crowds of tourist became more and more prevalent. The next spot was the church where Paul Revere lit the signal lanterns to warn everyone that the British were coming. Cool history stuff. By the time we got to Paul Revere’s house it was so crowded I didn’t even want to go in, so we just walked on past. I pulled out the GoPro to try to take some pictures and video of our historical adventure only to find that the battery was dead, and as I stuffed it back in my bag it started to rain.
I wasn’t going to let some sprinkles get us down though, we soldiered on, with hopes that the rain would let up, it didn’t. We made it to Bell In Hand, the oldest tavern in the US just as it started to pour, so we figured a mid day beer was in order. This was also everyone else in the areas idea as well, Boston Pride was also happening right in front of city hall just a block away so it was packed, but we managed to secure some space at the bar to sip our beers and figure out our next move.
Our next move, we decided was to abandon the Freedom Trail to go do errands. Womp womp. Sad and lame I know, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. In an effort to still see some of the city we figured we could walk everywhere. Well, I guess we decided that after taking the metro to the post office once the rain had pretty much stopped. Did did walk by a really awesome beautiful church, that I’m sure we would not have seen otherwise. We also found these tortoise and the hair a sculptures. I love public art like this, it might seem random, but why not have a tortoise sculpture that you can sit on in the middle of a city?
We even ended up over by Fenway park at the end of the day. And even though there were no games going on it was still cool to walk around the oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball.
So even when your touristy plan of sightseeing goes to crap, or gets rained out, you can still end up having a pretty good adventure as long as you are open to it.
