Boston

Ah, wonderful red-bricked Boston! It is full of tourists wearing red sox paraphernalia but at the same time is a town possessed of rich US revolution history. We had a short taste of this harbour city in summer and we liked it. We had a number of comments before we left that the Boston accent was very strong and hard to understand. Our experience was that is sounded ‘normal’ and was so much easier than the Southern twang.

It is commonly quoted that travel is about the journey and not just the destination. Those of you who have traveled US Airways will know that it is all about the destination! Late planes and lost bags seem to be their forte. We had a number of ‘adventures’ with this airline including:

• missing the first flight to Charlotte as arriving 25 minutes before take off is apparently too late to check bags in


• unable to use web check-in when flying with a lap-sit child


• spending an hour on the tarmac in Philadelphia waiting for take-off which doubled the flying time to Wilmington


• spending half an hour on the tarmac in New York staring at the Brooklyn bridge and various
  skyscrapers (a positive note!)


• losing our bags on the journey home and delivering them 24 hours later


• overbooking the PHL to ILM flight and asking for volunteers to surrender seats in return for free flights anywhere in the US (not us this time!!! We still have our free flights to use)


• on two of the four flights Lucy got her own seat due to a few empty seats being available
  and the flight attendants kindly shuffling people around to enable this to
  happen


• all flights took off later than anticipated
  

Lucy was reasonably behaved on all flights with almost no crying but she did not sleep! Always a very energetic girl she seemed to get more active throughout each journey. It was hard traveling with a 13 month almost-walker by myself! We read the 5 books we had at hand at least 50 times each! With Andrew around on the way back it was much easier even though she did launch herself back and forth between us frequently. Any nanny volunteers for next time?

On another note Americans seem to very possessive of their allocated seats. I observed a number of minor altercations on our flights when one person thought someone else was sitting in their seat. Loud, rude talking was the order of the day until one party realized they had mis-read their boarding pass. On the first flight the flight attendant asked the person behind me to switch seats with me as there wasn’t a baby life jacket under my seat. The woman launched into a tirade and refused saying that in the event of an emergency she would pass the life jacket over to me. The flight attendant and I both looked at her and said don’t worry about moving. What is the problem people? One old guy who thought he had 3F next to me (where a girl was seated) started shouting at the flight attendant “problem, problem, we have a problem” and holding up all the passengers. The flight attendant asked him to step into the galley to let everyone through and then she could sort out the seat issue. Turns out he had “13F”.

Enough plane stories, let’s get onto Boston highlights.

Louisberg Square (pronounced Lewis-berg) is surrounded by houses with famous residents including John Kerry. It is a pretty little square but what with the terrible parking situation and the tourists I can’t imagine it would be my first choice for a home. After checking the square out, about a 1 minute walk from our apartment, we headed over to Acorn Street which is dubbed the ‘most photographed street in Boston’. It is a cobblestoned street where mosses grow lined by red brick houses. It is very pretty but very impractical.

We stayed in an apartment in Beacon Hill right next to Charles Street. Awesome location close to the public gardens as well as many fine restaurants. We ate take out from Figs and Paramount. Both were excellent especially Figs where the pan seared scallops with tomato couscous was out of this world. Paramount bears the slogan “never trust a round pizza”! We had breakfast at the French Café Vanille and tried their Boston cream pie. It is not a pie and does not have cream but it was divine all the same. Lucy was restricted to croissants whilst we tried out the sweeter things on offer.

At the ‘Make way for ducklings’ sculpture in the Public Gardens Lucy met Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Oack, Pack and Quack face to face. She also saw many live ducks on the pond as well as turtles (are these new? As readers will know that the island was chosen by Mrs Mallard as there were no foxes or turtles) We walked across the famous little bridge which is not a replica of the Brooklyn Bridge and saw the George Washington statue. Heaps of people in the park especially families and dog walkers. Lucy appreciated the dogs more than the ducks! We took a ride on the famous Swan Boats around the lagoon looking at the ducks, the island and the nesting swans on the bank. Lucy had a great time but it was worrying that there were no safety rails and it is a miracle she didn’t throw herself into the water for a closer look. It was very pleasant sitting in the sun wiling away the time.

We took the Freedom trail around to the most famous sites including Boston Common, the State House, the Old Granary burying ground (Paul Revere, Samuel Adams and John Hancock) and then after great Italian lunch in the North End at Artu we went on to Paul Revere house. We also did some shopping at Faneuil Hall which was once a marketplace for fresh food it has now exploded into a consumerist maze of shops. Although hard to pinpoint some purely Boston things to buy we did note the Yankee candle company, anything with lighthouses on it, lobster stuff (such as hats, oven mitts, chocolates etc) and Cheers merchandise. Of course Red Sox gear was EVERYWHERE. They weren’t playing this weekend but I’m sure it would be hard to get a ticket if they were.

My favourite part of our trip was our visit to the Museum of Fine Art’s Edward Hopper exhibit. Having seen ‘Nighthawks’ in Chicago some years ago I was super keen to see this exhibit. As it said on the short doco in the exhibit “everyone likes Hopper” and I’m sure all of you have seen some of his paintings though you might not have known it was Hopper. He is an iconic painter with an interesting perspective on the world using light to great advantage in his paintings. An even better part of this story is that we got in for free (usually a very steep $23 each!) We got to the museum early at 9:30am as it opened at 10 and already a small crowd had built up. Whilst waiting away from the majority of the crowd we saw a modern sculpture (‘a lump of metal’) near the front entrance and Andrew asked me what it was called. I went over and passed by an elderly gentleman who asked me if I had tickets to the exhibit. I thought he might have been a scalper given the long line of people waiting to buy tickets and thought he would offer me to sell me some tickets now. I said I didn’t have tickets and to my surprise he said he was a life member of the museum and had 6 free tickets to the exhibit but couldn’t use two of them – would I like them? Of course! We then had a long chat about Australia and airlines before heading into the exhibit with our sleeping bambino! It was a magic 45 minutes. Before our frantic scrabble to the airport we also made a quick detour to the main entrance of the museum to see the famous John Singer Sargent rotunda murals painted on the ceilings and the ‘appeal to the great the spirit’ sculpture on the front lawn – both worthy of the detour.

And so yes we would visit Boston again. However if traveling alone with Lucy again I would definitely make it a week rather than just a weekend visit as she missed a lot of sleep in a short period of time and was rather cranky on arrival.