Parades and history

So after another exciting expedition on the Bolt Bus I arrived in Boston and found the hostel without drama – always a good thing.  Checked in and with guide book in hand I headed off downtown to see what there was to see.  The Public Garden and Boston Common, apparently, according to the photos on my camera at least.

The Garden in particular was lovely (I spent a bit of time in there over the next few days, including an unscheduled two hour nap on the grass after an especially long day of walking…), with plenty of water, statues, flowers and (surprisingly) not people.  I mean, it was busy, but far from packed.

The  statues and sculptures were pretty cool, including one of a family of ducks which is apparently based on a children’s story from a few decades ago.  Kinda strange thing to immortalise in bronze, but there you go.  Then again, there’s sculptures of frogs beside (strangely enough) Frog Pond in the common, so I guess that’s just the way things are in Boston.  Who am I to judge?

Other than various water-based animals, there’s a few relevant locals that make an appearance as well – a certain Mr Washington on a horse, for example.  All good stuff.  Other than that, I can’t remember what I did the rest of that day, so it can’t have been particularly exciting…

Next day dawned hot and sunny – obviously the ideal day to check out the Freedom Trail.  This is probably Boston’s best-known tourist attraction – a 2.5 mile walking tour through the most historic areas of the city, marked out by a line of red bricks or paint in/on the sidewalk.  So that was the plan, anyway – like all good plans though, it was subject to change.  In this case, due to the frickin’ enormous  tickertape parade that was taking over the entire downtown area, to celebrate the aforementioned NBA victory by the Boston Celtics.  Seriously, this parade was huge and went for miles, and despite being a weekday, seemed to have most of the local populace in attendance.  So obviously I had to be a part of it (well, I was kinda  lacking in options, it was way too big to avoid) – and it was great fun!  Didn’t recognise any of the players or give much of a toss about the sport itself, but the parade was just spectacular.  The locals sure do take their sport seriously … makes a Crusaders or All Blacks victory parade seem pretty tame.

So that all took up most of the morning, and then I got around to the Freedom Trail.  There’s 16 ‘attractions’ along the route – some more deserving of the title than others – and it winds through several old neighbourhoods.  I’d never really associated the US with ‘history’  in the same way as cities in Europe, but Boston certainly has a great mix of historic buildings and areas to go with the modern steel and glass approach.  I’m not going to go into explicit detail about the trail – feel free to google it if you’re really interested – but the highlights for me were Paul Revere’s house, Quincy marketplace and the USS Constitution, all three of which were definitely interesting to  wander round.  So all in all, the trail probably took three or four hours start to finish, with time spent having lunch by the water and taking a few random detours to check out other bits and pieces nearby, and was well worth doing.

Obviously after several hours walking in the sun, some liquid refreshment was in order.  It seemed like most of Boston hadn’t bothered going back to work after the parade, so it wasn’t hard to find a bar that was going off.  So I found a likely looking spot to settle in with a beer, and quickly made friends with some locals at the next table.  One thing led to another and I ended up spending the rest of the afternoon and night with some or all of them, getting cheerfully drunk and generally having a wonderful time…

Gotta love Boston!