The phenomenon of waking up just before your alarm clock rings never ceases to amaze me, particularly when it's at the godforsaken hour of 4:55 am. Early start to a long day. At 5:15 am I walked into Joe's room and informed him that it was time to get up and go to the airport. Here is how it went:
From there, Joe scooted right along. I gave him 15 minutes to get ready and he was out the door in 5. I was even impressed that in that time he had the frame of mind to remind me to tape the swimming events at the Olympics since we wouldn't be seeing them. "How do know that we're not going to the Olympics?" He responded, "Dad, no, come on, where are we going." I told him, "All in due time." After getting on the plane, Joe then asked me if our trip was being blogged which I think is his generation's equivalent of "Am I on Candid Camera?" So I let him read the blog and then asked him if he had any questions. Nothing but a big smile.
We landed in Boston 20 minutes late at almost 4 PM which ended up fracturing my most ambitious plans for our afternoon, but not half as much as the weather did. It wasn't just wet, it was pouring. I told Joe that we shall overcome, and he was game. Fortunately we came prepared. Joe was armed with an umbrella (in hindsight we should've brought two, and I refused to buy my own out of principle), and I donned some golf tournament disposable slicker which had a hood but no sleeves. This meant that my head was wet but my arms were soaking wet. As I predicted, the rain did keep just about everyone off the street except us. I decided that the last place I wanted to be in the rain was a boat i.e. the USS Constitution, so we headed from our hotel room overlooking Fanueil Hall (see my forthcoming TripAdvisor Review) and went into the North End in the remaining 90 minutes when things would be open.
Going anywhere after London, Paris and Rome is tough by comparison, but Boston by any account is a great place for kids of any age (Joe and I went past a row of sidewalk water turrets that we said Will would've loved, especially in the rain). Joe and I checked out Paul Revere's House and then the Old North Church ("One if by land, two if by sea"). The North End is very cool - it looks like London but smells like Rome with all of the Italian restaurants. By the time we made it to the Copp Hill Burying Ground, the thunderstorm had lifted just in time for Joe to say, "Dad, this is kind of creepy." Exactly the reaction that I had when I was roughly his age and I visited my first cemetary in Boston with my parents.
That 20 minute flight delay kept us from making it over to Old Ironsides, so we headed to the T and went all the way over to Copley Square. After testing quite a few subway systems in the last couple of years, the Boston subway is horrendously slow. While you never wait more than a few minutes for a train in Boston, and they take you where you want to go, but they are the slowest most unreliable subway cars I've ever been on. We just sat there for minutes on end in between every stop.
All of this caused me to just miss by a few minutes getting into Trinity Church, a personal architectural favorite of mine. We instead checked out the reading room of the Boston Public Library and then took the T back to Fanueil Hall where we had dinner at Quincy Market. It's funny, after living near Santa Monica for several years where we are inundated with millions of tourists every year, going to Quincy Market seemed an awful lot like going to the Third Street Promenade (drum circles, street performers, eclectic food outlets, all the same retailers, etc.). All of the historical accounts work hard to remind me that Quincy Market is the mother of all lifestyle centers, but in the end I think I prefer Third Street if only because I can get Joe a hot chocolate at 8:45 PM and not have everything be closed. So we wandered around, even saw that Starbucks was closed, and then headed back over to the North End where Joe had a great hot chocolate and a creme brulee (they were out of gelato).
After getting up so early, going to bed tonight won't be tough which is good. We have an action packed day on Friday - finishing up Boston, checking out Portsmouth, NH and then head up to Stowe, where I'm still not sure where I'll be staying, but something should work out or we'll add open-sky camping to the list.
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