It’s funny that in almost 7 years here in Boston neither Price or I had really walked the Freedom Trail. Well, I had done portions on class outings but never a real outing to walk it. I mean, I walk by/on it every workday to get to my office from the T stop, but never count that. So we decided that we would make a point of doing it, along with other touristy things, this summer. It was also sooo annoying to be in class when a teacher would be shocked that I had never been to various local museums, gardens, cemetaries, and other landmarks. How am I supposed to see a new exhibit when you just assigned me 6 hours of homework for the week? Now we have a summer completely free of classes and school prep we are making the most of it here.
This past Saturday we stayed in Boston and took our turn at the Freedom Trail. I thought out recent trip to DC was hot and humid to sightseeing- well this was so much worse. We knew a storm was going to pass through in the afternoon, which made it soooo oppressive. So we did the trail pretty quickly, having seen some of the places already and trying to beat out the storm.
I was happy to reach the North End around (late) lunch time. We stopped in some place to split a calzone and salad. Of course lunch was not timed properly/long enough for the rain to start while we were there. No, it had to start about 3 minutes after we left. So we ran down the street with my teeny tiny umbrella into a local bar to wait out the rain. It came down in buckets, resulting in some pretty severe flash flooding in Somerville, a neighboring town. Visibility was reduced to 100 feet or so. Luckily* the rain passed within an hour and we were out again to finish the rest of the trail.
We walked over some bridge to head into Charlestown to see the USS Constitution and Bunker Hill Monument over there. In the end we decided to skip the monument since it is just a mini Washington Monument and we just saw that. One obelisk is like another. We got the last tour of ‘Old Ironsides’ which was nice since there was little wait time. So glad I was not a sailor on there since I learned that they got 1 gallon a water a day to do with water they wanted- which generally was drinking. Man on stinky, cramped boat.
*I’m having some pretty big issues with rain this year. First the flood in March and now this intense storm trampled my newly planted tomatoes and my flower squash. There goes half my veggies this summer. 🙁