On May 25-28, 2001, my parents and I vacationed in Boston.  We left San Francisco on a red eye Thursday night, May 24, and arrived in Boston about 10:30 in the morning Friday, May 25.  After settling in at our hotel, the Courtyard Marriott in Revere, we took the T to Prudential Center to buy tickets for the tour we wanted to take later that day and have lunch at Legal Seafood, a Boston-centered chain of seafood restaurants.  They had a delicious hot crab dip appetizer, and good clam chowder, although a bit clammy for my taste (I’m not a big seafood fan), and a nice salad.  Dad had a wonderful crab roll, and Mom also had clam chowder.

After that, we still had several hours before our tour, so we stopped at an information booth and picked up all kinds of brochures for tours and restaurants.  Then Dad found a nice shady bench outside Prudential Center near the tour boarding area and read the literature and Mom and I strolled down Newbury street looking at all the shops and picking out a place to have dinner.  We decided on Charley’s, an upscale family restaurant with lobster and seafood for Dad (Dad was determined to have lobster before we left), and appetizers and steaks and stuff for Mom and I.  Dad had also found several places while he was waiting, but we didn’t find any we liked better.

Then we sat and watched the tour vehicles go by, and decided what tours we wanted to take.  Mom and I decided we wanted to ride either the pink or the purple tour vehicle, and we decided on the Ghosts and Graveyards and the Boston by Sea Tour.

Then it was time for our tour.  That first tour of the weekend was a Duck Tour.  The Ducks are WWII amphibious vehicles that have been purchased by a tour company and painted bright colors.  They have tours in DC, Branson Missouri, North Carolina, and several other places, but Boston is the most successful.  The Ducks ranged from dull brown and black to pink and purple and turquoise with names like Beacon Hilda, and each of the drivers has adopted a persona and a catch phrase.  Our driver was Major Groovy, and our Duck was the red Duck, Tub of the Hub.  Major Groovy’s catch phrase was “Feel the love”, and everytime he said that we all quacked at the passersby.  He was particularly fond of doing that when we came upon couples being affectionate.  At one point, Major Groovy stopped to talk to Admiral Foggy and pretended that my parents were visiting from his commune and Dad was a high mucky-muck.  Quite fun.  Admiral Phineas Foggy of the US Naval Cavalry drove the brown Duck, and his catch phrase was “Charge!”.  I’m afraid his crew were much louder quackers than we were, but it was still fun.  The nifty thing about the Duck boats is, since they’re amphibious, the tour is amphibious as well and includes a brief ride on the Charles.  We sailed past the boathouse where, for $1, any child can learn to sail, and if they don’t have a dollar, they’re subsidized, and Major Groovy let anybody who wanted to drive the Duck.  Mommy wanted to, so now she has a sticker that says “I Drove a Duck” preserved for posterity in her National Parks passport.
 

After the tour we went to Charley’s where Dad had his lobster, Mom had a filet mignon, and I had a wonderful beef kabob.  Dad’s lobster was 1.25 lbs and something else.  They presented it to him with the head on the center of the plate, the two claws on one side, and the tail split in two on the other side.  Quite attractive.  Then we had two kinds of wonderful chocolate cake, a ganache and another kind, for dessert.  After that, we were really tired, so we went back to the hotel and went to bed.

Saturday we got up early to go to the Haymarket.  Why Mom wanted to get up to go to something she could have seen the equivalent of back in her home town is a mystery, but Mom loves anything that smacks of a Farmer’s Market (yes, she enjoyed the Food Court at Faneuil Hall, too).  It was actually very interesting.  Much of their fruit was from California, but they had a wonderful selection of vegetables, including huge carrots, and New Zealand Horned Melon, and yellow watermelons, and all kinds of things.  They even had a meat store where you could get literally any meat product or by-product your heart desired.  Mom was fascinated, but it was a bit ripe for Dad and I.

Then, we’d planned to take the National Park Service walking tour of the Freedom Trail, but Dad decided he didn’t want to do that much walking, so we bought tickets for Seemore, the Old Town Trolley, and embarked on our second tour of Boston.  The first stop was Paul Revere’s house in the North End, where Mom scoped us out a place to eat the next night and Dad, the Mason, asked the guides about Paul Revere’s activities as a Mason (apparently, he was Master of the Lodge at the time of the Boston Tea Party, which fell on a meeting night.  The Lodge, according to the minutes, took a very long break in the middle before resuming business.  Any guesses what they did?).  The poor guides had no idea what a Mason was, and kept assuming Dad was talking about the craft type of mason.

Next we rode over into Cambridge (MIT) and got on the T for Harvard.  There we had lunch at Au Bon Pain since that was the only place I knew I could find without difficulty (it’s a bit hard to miss).  I kind of regret that of all the places we could eat in Harvard Square we chose that, but I do strongly associate ABP with Boston, and anyway, it worked out for the best as we probably wouldn’t have gotten to see the Boston Tea Party Ship if we’d had a longer lunch.  And I had my first soup in a bread bowl—yummy corn chowder, and the bread was delicious.

Then we walked through Harvard Yard where everybody was packing up to leave for the summer.  I showed my parents the window of the room in Grays where I lived during the Harvard Secondary School Program in 1990, and Widener Library, and the Science Center which is built to resemble a Polaroid camera.  Then we went to the Natural History Museum to see the glass flowers, which were even more spectacular than I remembered them.  The leaves especially look real, as do the spikier flowers.  Some of the more opaque, petaled flowers you can tell are glass, but they’re still spectacular.  And these models were meant to teach botany students about plant anatomy, so you get stamens and pistils and cross sections which are really cool, although they reminded me a lot of amoeba under a microscope.

After that we browsed through the fossils (they have an amazing collection of beetles of all shapes, sizes and colors, and the type example of a triceratops, which is cool, and this huge sea dinosaur which is just amazing), and the butterflies, which are cool, and the birds.  I learned a lot about the different classes of each, which was nice because I’m thinking of doing web pages for them, like my reptiles page.  We also looked at their minerals exhibit, where they have a huge geode, and their special tourmaline exhibit, which was fascinating to a family of jewelers like us.  Even Mom, who’s a certified gemologist and has this huge tourmaline ring, didn’t know all the different kinds.  Tourmaline is actually a name for several different chemical compounds, which start with one of two elements (I forget which) and combines with one of several other elements.  There are at least 11 different kinds.  Fascinating.

Then we went back to MIT and got back on the trolley and rode out to the Tea Party Ship.  This is a replica of the Beaver, one of the 3 brigs holding tea anchored in Boston Harbor at the time of the Boston Tea Party (the Eleanor was another, and I forget the third).  The tour begins with a mock town meeting, where the “town” (the tourists participating in the tour) decides to disguise themselves as Mohawk Indians and dump the tea into the harbor.  We then all stick feathers in our hair and march out to the Beaver yelling “Dump the tea into the sea!  No tax on tea!”.  Then the guide describes the way it would have appeared the night of the tea party, with warships bearing down on us and the other two brigs parked alongside.  Then he selects 3 children to dump parcels of tea over the side of the ship (it’s environmentally safe and fastened with a rope so you haul it back up again).  After which everybody can roam around and push the tea over the side, which I did.  Much fun.  It was a wonderfully interactive way to get into history, and we all got a free cup of tea afterwards!

After that the plan was to have dinner at the food court of Fanueil Hall, but it was packed so we went to Durgin’s Park, one of the sit down restaurants, instead.  Daddy had a shrimp salad and scallops wrapped in bacon, and I had scampi (which didn’t have enough butter and garlic for my taste, but was good), and Mommy had lamb.  Then Mommy and I tried their famous coffee jello (imagine coffee ice cubes) and apple pan dowdy.  Then we were going to go on the Ghosts and Graveyards tour, but they’d overbooked (the trolley shop had sold some tickets without calling them into the central place), so we gave up our seats in exchange for free tickets for the next night and went home to bed.

Sunday we got up and had breakfast at Finagle a Bagel in Faneuil Hall.  Mommy had a cinnamon raison bagel, Daddy had a plain bagel with garlic herb cream cheese which was very good, and I had an onion bagel.  Then we went down to Long Wharf and boarded a boat for the Boston by Sea tour.  It’s put on by the Boston History Collaborative, founded in 1997, which aims to make Boston’s historical attractions more fun for visitors and local residents.  This tour is a harbor cruise with a multi-media presentation, including songs and skits by two actors.  We had David Coffin, who’s in his third decade performing with Cambridge Revels and has been Master of Ceremonies for 11 years, and Joseph Zamparelli, Jr.  David sang songs, much of them New England adaptations of songs you’ll hear at Ren Faires (Rounding Cape Horn, Down to Old Maui, Boston Girls They Love You for Your Money (which I’ve heard as Capetown Girls), and Joseph played all sorts of wonderful historical characters, including the last survivor of the Boston Tea Party, one of the men who rowed Paul Revere across the Charles for his midnight ride, a famous pirate, a powder monkey on Old Ironsides, and so on.  It was really nifty.  Only problem was, it was foggy, so we didn’t see a lot of the sights.  However, if you live in or visit Boston and have never done it, I strongly recommend you do so!  One of the video presentations even uses the dance tune Faithless Nancy Dawson as background music!

Then we went back to Faneuil Hall and I finally got my meal in the food court.  Daddy had a lobster roll and lobster bisque, I had teriyaki chicken wrapped in bacon, and Mom had corn chowder and an Italian sausage.  Then we got yummy walnut chocolate chip cookies from the Boston Chipyard for dessert.

Then we went to the aquarium, where they have lots of harbor seals in interesting enclosures so they do more than just swim in circles.  They’re big hams, especially the ones by the entrance, and they keep popping out of the water and stretching their necks as if expecting it to be scratched!  They also have two sea otters, who are very cute, as always.  One of them climbed into a big bucket of ice and curled up for a nap!  The other kept popping straight out of the water to look around like a furry Jack-in-the-Box!

Then we went to the Sea Lion Show, which was held in the hold of a boat, which was very cool, and featured one huge (750 lb) California sea lion named Guthrie and two little boys whose parents had paid to have them in the show.  Well, I suppose that’s one way to go about breaking down the barriers between man and nature, and it is, I suppose, a good cause.  The show focused on how the different tricks corresponded to natural behaviors and was very interesting, although Dad still doesn’t understand how being able to balance a ball on the end of his nose could possibly help a sea lion in the wild.

Then we went and wandered around the main exhibit, the huge reef, and watched all the fish being fed.  They had a shark, and several fairly large scorpion fish and some puffers, and a green turtle and a logger head turtle, and a green eel (I don’t think he was a moray—a wolf maybe?) and another eel that was maybe a snake eel and was quite good sized.  Then Mommy and I went a little wild in the gift shop.  They have an amazing array of stuffed animals, almost any type of sea creature you can imagine, including lots of seals.  I added 3 to my collection—a little white one, a really soft, cream-colored bean bag one I named Cream Puff, and a gray finger puppet I named Revere.  They also had sea horses, sea dragons (which are related—I’d love to see a real one—the stuffed version is fascinating), sea otters, turtles, octopi, and all kinds of other things.  They also had some cool key chains, including ones with otters and seals, and nifty magnets, including a lobster Mom got for Dad, and some nifty jewelry.  Definitely a dangerous place for Mom and I.

After that we took a taxi back to the Italian restaurant in the North End Mom had found.  It was called Summa’s, after the owner’s grandmother, and I think the owner’s husband waited on us.  It was a very nice, proprietary little man who took wonderful care of us.  Mom was just tickled with the place.  She said it was the family pictures at the hostess’s station that really did it for her.  Dad had a broiled haddock he thoroughly enjoyed, I had lovely gnocchi in meat sauce, which is apparently the traditional way to serve it, although I prefer Alfredo or a cream sauce (I could probably have gotten that, but I figured I’d try it the “traditional” way), and Mom had a rack of lamb and polenta.  Mom said the best thing about the lamb was no one came along trying to foist off icky old mint sauce on her!  Dad and I happen to completely disagree with Mom about mint sauce (we adore mint jelly), but Mom was happy.

Then we went for our Ghosts and Graveyards tour.  This is run by the same people who run the Old Town trolley, but instead of the perky green and orange Seemore, they have a trolley painted black with lace curtains at the window and belching smoke.  The guides are dressed apppriately—the two we saw Saturday night were in Victorian clothing with shovels, and one of them Sunday night (whom we actually spoke to booking tours down on the dock to make sure we were confirmed) had a marvelously tattered suit with a top hat with the band coming off.  His character name was Gilbert, and he had a skull for a partner named, naturally, Skullivan.  Our guide was dressed quite differently, as his persona was a late 17th Century gravedigger named Mortimer B. Sod, or Mort, and he wore knee breeches and a flowing sleeved peasant shirt like you’d see at a Ren Faire, with a black kerchief round his head and a marvelous black cape.  His story was that he was a gravedigger who’d gone into antiques on the side (filched from the graves he dug), and he was caught and hanged when he unwittingly sold a man the ring from his dead wife’s hand.  As punishment, he was set to walk the earth for eternity as a warning to others.

Our driver was also in character.  He was Killer, your typical homicidal maniac with stringy grayish hair (a wig, we discovered) and a shoulder holster complete with gun.  Dad was interested in how he got away with that.  I said either Massachusetts had different laws than California, or it was a prop, and/or he had permission to carry it as an actor.  I also suppose it could have been real and he had a license to carry, but I like to think not.  Dad skipped one of the stops because he was tired and stayed on the bus talking to Killer.  Turned out, without the wig and under the name Teddy Ballgame, he’d been our driver briefly the day before on the Old Town Trolley.  He had apparently once been director of the second largest foreign exchange organization on the US, but he’d gotten tired of corporate life and dropped out to become a tour bus driver in Boston.  He was quite good at it, for all the jokes about getting us there in one piece.

The first stop on our tour was Boston Common, where we got to see the pond where they dunked scolds and nags, and the hanging tree where Mort was hung.  Then we went to Granary burying ground and heard about Peter Fanueil, who inherited his uncle’s fortune on the condition that he stay a bachelor and who died at a young age of too much bachelorhood, and learned about Mother Goose, and the library where Nathaniel Hawthorne sat at the same time every day for a week with the ghost of Reverend Harris, who kept up his daily habits despite being dead, and finally about John Hancock, who was dug up and moved at one point, at which point it was discovered that his right hand was missing, the right hand just like the disembodied right hand holding a quill on his monument.  While I find that creepy, I find it almost as creepy to believe in the, IMHO, more likely scenario that someone else dug up the grave and hacked off the hand as a souvenir.  Yuck.

Then we walked down the street and met Killer at the King’s Chapel Burying Ground.  We didn’t get to go in, though, because our timing was too good and Killer was just arriving.  We just got to hear about Elizabeth Paine, who was the model for Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter.

Next we drove past several hotels and learned about the Omni Parker House (the oldest hotel) ghost who committed suicide in room 303 and still comes back, and the ghosts at the Ritz Carlton who walk out the front door in old fashioned clothes and wave and smile at everyone, and the ghosts of the people who died in the nightclub fire because the revolving door jammed.

Then we stopped and walked up Cop’s Hill to the Cop’s Hill burying ground to visit, among others, the monument put up by the Masons to Prince Hall, the man who founded the African American Masonic lodge (unfortunately, Dad didn’t want to walk up the hill, so he stayed and had his talk with Killer about leaving Corporate America).

Next we heard ghost stories from the Boston forts.  Edgar Allen Poe was stationed at one of the forts for a while and got the inspiration for The Cask of Amontillado from the story of a lieutenant who loved to duel, and as revenge, friends of those with whom he’d dueled tricked him into one of the areas of the fort, chained him to a wall, and bricked him up.  This was assumed to be just tall tales until, remodeling the fort at one point, the construction crews actually found the chained remains of a body bricked up inside one of the walls.

Finally, we drove past the apartment where the last of the Boston Strangler’s victims was murdered and heard all about the man who confessed but was never convicted.  The officials thought he was crazy and hadn’t done it, but they were half-forced to believe him when he had so many details in his confession.  Still, the suspicion lingered that he may have heard them from a fellow inmate who may have been the actual Boston Strangler, and the man was convicted on separate counts of breaking and entering have nothing to do with the murders, but not for the murders.  The man himself left a riddling, third-person poem questioning the identity of the Strangler.  Very puzzling.  But, this will hopefully soon be put to rest as the family of the last victim has requested DNA testing.  We shall see.

After that, our tour was over and we headed back to the hotel to bed.

The next morning we rented a Hyundai Accent and drove to Lexington.  We got there just as the Boy Scouts laid a wreath at one of the monuments to those who died at the Battle of Lexington and the Minute Men fired off a volley.  So we quickly parked the car and watched as the Minute Men marched right past us into the graveyard next to where we parked to lay another wreath at the grave of the commander of the American troops and fire another volley.  I got a great picture as the marched past, but my picture of the volley is a bit too far away as I’d forgotten my good camera with the zoom and was using a disposable.  Finally, they marched back to the Battle Green, raised the flag (all the way up, surprisingly), laid a wreath at the monument to the officers who’d died, and fired a final volley.

Then we took pictures of the Minute Man statue and went to the visitor’s center, where there’s a memorial to all the Navy ships named Lexington.  In the visitor’s center, Mom couldn’t resist buying herself a mobcap and Dad a tricorn hat.  Then we went to the Old North Bridge where Dad got his picture taken in his new hat.  Then we drove back to the airport and flew home!
 

Image courtesy of The Animation Factory