7th July – Boston

It was something of a relief today to wake up and not face the prospect of wrestling 835lb  of unforgiving metal down the highway.

We therefore gently eased ourselves into the day by extending our beauty regimes and watching some daytime TV. One thing I will miss about American TV is the frequent adverts for medication for a variety of alarming conditions, many of which I had never heard about before. They normally feature some grinning oldster who exhorts you to  “get your life back”, just as they have done, as a result of using whatever it is that is being advertised. Presumably as part of a legal requirement, the narrator of the advert then starts to rapidly list all the possible side effects of the medication, which is usually a chillingly long list of gruesome possibilities, finishing with something like “May cause a plague of boils and in some cases a horrible, painful  death – consult your doctor before using.”

Having had our fill of facial scrubs and daytime TV, we then set off to walk to the North End of Boston where some of the significant events of the Revolution took place and we visited various places of interest such as the Old South Meeting House, the site of the Boston Massacre, the Old North Church and a couple of burial grounds. The Old South Meeting House, we learned,  had all its pews chopped up for firewood and was used as a riding school by the British in the Revolutionary War – much, it would seem, to the annoyance of George Washington.

There were a lot of tour parties about, often being conducted by people in 18th Century costume or, curiously, dressed like Smokey the Bear. Eavesdropping on the commentaries we began to feel a little uncomfortable about our nationality at times and we, like our ancestors, eventually beat a retreat in search of more convivial surroundings.

We weren’t invited to any Tea Parties so at about 2pm we breakfasted on lobster rolls, fries and beers in a dingy bar we passed along the way. By that stage we were so hot and tired we’d have eaten in a public toilet if it had air-conditioning.  Thus refreshed we resumed our journey and crossed Boston Common and somehow managed to find ourselves in the “Cheers” bar again but we didn’t stop long there as it was packed out.

We got back to the hotel hot and tired where we cleaned up and rested for a while before setting out for round 2. Being up on the 16th floor we managed to get a spectacular view of a large thunder storm that passed over about 6pm. It didn’t last long though and by the time we went out at 7ish it was baking hot and humid again.

We ended our last full day in Boston, as we had started two weeks ago, at the Cheesecake Factory. However this time we were a bit more careful about the scale of the meal we took on. I had the salmon while Mark feasted on half a cow, he also had a side of spinach and now has so much iron in his system that he will have to avoid magnets for the next 24 hours. Once again we did not eat cheesecake.

We are flying back home about 6.30pm tomorrow and should be back in the UK on Wednesday morning. It won’t be possible to post the blog tomorrow as we’ll be travelling but I’ll aim to post an update on Wednesday and let you know how many times Mark gets strip-searched in the course of the journey.