THORNBERRIES BOSTON TEA PARTY--Part V

Monday May 14, 2007—A Day of Bostonian Culture

The next morning, I awoke to find Jennifer bobbing face-down in a deep pool of her own sweat. After I yanked her from the brine and helped her purge out the fluid she’d aspirated, we cleaned up and got dressed for the second phase of our trip. The historical tour.


After a difficult meal and hard-to-get iced tea, we stopped by a tourist center to begin...well, our tour. First, however, we listened to an offer by a young woman in 18th century period costume who offered to give us a guided tour of the Freedom Trail. Not wanting to be bogged down by too much structure, we prevaricated by promising her we’d think about it, and then we didn’t. We grabbed a map in the center, used their less than scintillating restroom facilities, then headed forward!

We’ll Huff and Puff and Walk in Circles

We didn’t get far.

No, we were our own worst enemies in this case. By the time we climbed all the way up the steep hill to the Massachusetts State House, their capitol building (see left), both of us were braying like the pack mules we’d made of ourselves. Yes, Jennifer and I had assumed that being as far north as Massachusetts, the weather would probably be on the cooler side. After all, we were at similar latitude in Canada last year and froze off our protruding body parts. So we were wearing our hot jackets and carrying some newly purchased books, our two large iced teas, the camera case, the map, and a large awkward chunk of porcelain I finally identified as a kitchen sink. We were already hot and sweaty and were anticipating several hours’ worth of hard walking. [Sigh]. As frustrating as it was, we felt we’d be better off if we backtracked through Boston Common, headed back to the Milner Hotel and discarded some of our crap prior to going forward. You can see some of what we encountered during our doings by clicking on the clip below:



On our way back past our own footsteps, the graduation “cows” became as thick as a wall of rotten banana peels. There were literally 20-30 people vying with us to cross each intersection, making it a challenge not to get smashed into sodden cornflakes from the oncoming traffic, while simultaneously avoiding being trampled in the overwhelming stampede. But we succeeded in getting to our shoebox room, dispensing with our burdens and then heading back out again. [Pant, pant!]

The Freedom Trail—Magna Turba in Via Clamavit.

The italicized phrase in the title above is Latin for “The large crowd shouted in the street.” Yes, the “cows” weren’t dying down (when the hell were these people supposed to start graduating, already!?). We decided that since we had previously seen a snippet of the Freedom Trail, up to the capitol building, we might be able to bypass the park, and therefore, the “cows.” There were a few sites in the direction of Boston Common that we had not reached prior to backtracking, but none of it really captured either of our interest. Therefore, Jennifer pulled out her map, protractor and astrolabe and used them to plot us a course to meet our goals and still bring us back to the Freedom Trail further down the line. It was a plan. I liked this plan. I liked it mightily.

Of course, then we would discover why the Freedom trail was planned out as it was. As soon as we stepped off of it onto Jennifer’s alternate route, the temperature dropped 30 degrees, darkness fell, the shadows came to life and all the people around us turned pale, fanged and filled with hunger for the souls of the living. Despite our going over only one street from the tourist trail, we found ourselves in a distinctly “seedier” part of the city. There were more vagrants, more hawkers, and we once got accosted by a youth begging us for change for the “T.”

Arnold Bocklin's Head of Medusa at the MFA captures the feel of a few people we saw off the Freedom Trail!

Fortunately, we picked up the Freedom Trail again pretty quickly. Basically, we could tell where it was by looking at the sidewalk for distinct red bricks that had been set into the concrete. They literally formed a reddish “line” through the city. In intersections where the sidewalk broke for roads, the trail was continued on the asphalt using old-fashioned red paint. The Trail took us through many different types of neighborhoods, most of them ethnically distinct. Jennifer later told me that Boston is a city known for just that phenomenon.

The Freedom Trail offered sites to be seen all along this route, but the one Jennifer was waiting to stop and see was the historical home of Paul Revere. Yes, he’d long since made that classic ride we all studied in grade school, leaving behind only his house. The humble little structure, which was old even in his time, is now stuffed between larger, more modern buildings.

Historic home of Paul Revere, stuffed between the more intimidating structures of modernity

We decided we didn’t really need to tour the inside, since just being there was reward enough for us and we’d have that without paying the entrance fee. Two of the most fascinating features I noted were the close placement of the house’s chimney to the next building and the quaint nature of the cobblestone street outside.

Leaving the house, we journeyed further down the Freedom Trail. I won’t give an exhaustive account of its other sites here, since even my lofty Shakespearean writing style and our available pictures won’t entirely do it justice [insert tongue-in-cheek!]. Briefly, we swung by the Old North Church, whose steeple played a prominent role in the American Revolution. Remember the phrase from your grade school textbook, “One if by land, two if by sea”? Well, the vicar of the Old North Church hung two lanterns in the steeple to tell the Patriots that the British were coming up the Charles River to attack Lexington and Concord – the first battle of the Revolutionary War. Jennifer found it cool that the Episcopalian church is still active.

The Old North Church, still hosting ecclesiastical services unto this very day.

We worked our way toward Boston Harbor, the two of us pushing our bloodied feet over a bridge spanning Boston Harbor, where I finally got the picture of the panoramic view for which I had hoped when we first planned this trip (you can see Jennifer in it at the top of this entry). In other scenery, it was nice to see some of the well-shaped female joggers in that area, sweating in their sports bras!

The two of us moved along to spend a few minutes adjacent to the U.S.S. Constitution, nicknamed “Old Ironsides,” with its immaculate black paint job, impressive spidery rigging and constipated multiplicity of cannon.

It almost capped off our tour of this historic trail. We truly finished it when we went up to the Bunker Hill Monument, the site of a major Revolutionary War battle.

The rest of our experience basically involved finding our way back over the more than 2.5 miles to our hotel, where we would rest and use a bicycle tire pump to re-inflate our flagging feet.

We Wanna Go Where Everybody Knows Our Name

The day was drawing to a close and only one more small event awaited: finding a bar called Cheers. Yeah, all of us who remember the ‘80s can recall that show with some degree of nostalgia, if not fondness. Well, Boston is home to the façade that was used for the external shots, though it is not the set where the show was actually shot. Nonetheless, we thought it might be fun to say we were there, and though it meant another walk, it seemed a shame to travel nearly a thousand miles and not drop by since we were only about three blocks from it.

The short version of this story is that we found the place with no problem. The familiar sign was brightly glowing in the darkening New England sky. When we entered the premises, they had a buttload of paraphernalia, most of it T-shirts, cups, quotable calendars; all dedicated to the television series. But it was crowded with "cows," and we were tired. So we didn't attempt to stay and have a drink.

Satisfied at last, we took our memories, our pictures and a bottle of port back to the room, where we enjoyed our last remaining night in Boston.


NEXT: Courting death just to get home.

Click for Part VI