Walking Around Boston

My husband and I spent day two of our New England vacation in Boston. It began with a great breakfast at a place called Cafe 26, and then we set out to walk the Freedom Trail. It's a sequence of more than a dozen historically significant sites spread out over around two-and-a-half miles, all strung together by a thin line of red bricks to lead you from one site to the next. You start out from Boston Common park, then just keep walking.

Some of the sites are truly inspiring sights. The Old South Meeting House presents as an unassuming old church at first, but it's where Boston colonists gathered on December 16, 1773 ahead of the Boston Tea Party... and when you try to imagine five thousand people crammed into the space, the mind reels. Other sites present history only in the mind's eye, such as the marker noting the location of the Boston Massacre.

You pass through several cemeteries where many noted figures are buried; Paul Revere is the most popular, and his original, modest headstone is preserved right alongside a later, more conspicuous monument. In sharp contrast to this preserved history, there's another old building -- the Old Corner Bookstore -- whose original structure is still there, but which today is home to a Chipotle.

We had cool but nice weather until we reached my favorite stop on the trail, the USS Constitution. Also known as "Old Ironsides," the ship is the oldest commissioned naval warship still afloat. You can go aboard and see for yourself what it might have been like to go to war at sea at the end of the 1700s. Befitting the moment, that's when the rain opened up (and drizzled basically nonstop until we left Massachusetts the following day).

I was told I had to have a lobster roll at some point on the trip, and that's exactly what I did at Pauli's. The place proudly trumpeted how Guy Fieri ate there and endorsed it, if that means anything to you; it doesn't really matter much to me, but it was a tasty lunch.

Then we headed over the MIT Museum. It's a strange fusion of modern art museum, children's museum (but for adults), and factory floor (for strange inventions). There we saw a wide range of scientific oddities. In some cases, you could easily imagine that you were glimpsing the future, such as when you looked upon an impossibly tiny new kind of solar energy collector. Other displays presented passion projects of varying degrees of scope that nevertheless suggested future applications -- like a low-viscosity compound that slides easily across surfaces without sticking, or a semen created using only female-contributed DNA.

Still other displays seemed like pure pop art, though many were still fun to experience. I was amused by the "Arachnodrone," a musical instrument that's really just an empty cube of space. You stand inside the area to trigger sounds by breaking "web strands" of light with your movements, like a giant theremin you play from the inside or something. I also enjoyed the wild clockwork machines of Arthur Ganson, elaborate contraptions built only to do some odd, repeated task like keep a severed doll's head looking in the direction of a tiny, orbiting ball.

We capped our day with a beer at Trillium before dinner at Fox and the Knife. Trillium is a well-regarded brewery in beer enthusiast circles; in the way of many such breweries, their focus seems to be on more "pure" beer styles and doing them well. Fox and the Knife was a fancy Italian restaurant; maybe we could have had seafood the whole time we were in New England (and maybe we should have), but we went for something different on this occasion.

The next day marked the beginning of our steady circuit from state to state... which I'll pick up in my next trip blog.