2018 Summer Vacation to Boston

2018 Summer Vacation to Boston

Todd Swank's Diary Entry for July 25, 2018

After three nights in New York City, it was time to go to Penn Station and hop on the Amtrak train to Boston.

None of us had ever traveled by train before and we discovered it's a pretty comfortable way to go.  Bigger seats than on an airplane and free wifi make it all the more pleasant.  Although the delays seem to be a pretty common occurrence and our 4 hour ride ended up taking about 6 hours.  Although that's only a minor inconvenience when you're having so much fun being with family!

It was a pretty neat way to see the countryside as we traveled through Connecticut and Rhode Island on the way to Massachusetts.

We even rode by the ocean quite a bit.  It looked a lot like the same ocean we saw in New York City and eventually Boston, but there's something about seeing it from a train that somehow makes it feel like you're seeing a different ocean.

Eventually we arrived in Boston which has a very unique feel to it.

There's so much history around here.  It seems like everywhere you look there's a different statue with someone famous you learned about in history class.  Although they seem much taller in person.

  

We just loved walking on the Freedom Trail and seeing all the old buildings and trying to remember what happened back in the days of our founding fathers.  I couldn't remember much about what I learned but I do remember some pretty crazy stuff happened back then including something to do with a tea party and some nice red coats.  I like parties.

This cemetery supposedly holds the bodies of a bunch of famous people like John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Paul Revere.  It's kind of sad that all those people died.

This was the site of the Boston Massacre.  We got out of there pretty quickly just in case some stuff started going down again.

 I spent a lot of time walking around Cheers, stopping at tables, and asking people "What's my name?"  Nobody knew it.  All those times I sang that stupid song "Sometimes you want to go.  Where everybody knows your name.  And they're always glad you came..."  Talk about false advertising.

We're not big baseball fans, but we thought we better swing by Fenway Park since that's what people seem to do when they're in Boston.  These guys all seemed pretty cool.

Dave's dad was one of the project managers who helped restore the Citgo sign back in the sixties.  It's huge and a historical landmark in the city of Boston so we took a bunch of pictures with it.

There was a hotel near ours called the Fairmont where they have a couple of Ambassador dogs.  The hotel actually owns the dogs and they are pretty much allowed to roam freely through the lobby and surrounding areas.  We found this incredibly cool and stopped back a couple of times to visit the dogs.  We like hotel dogs.

Just like in New York City, we traveled around Boston via the subway.  On this particular day, it hadn't arrived yet so naturally it was group picture time.  We do that a lot of times when we're waiting for stuff.

We went to Boston Harbor one day.  I didn't see any barrels of tea floating around so they must have cleaned those up or something.

We did see a cool boat called Codzilla and thought, we gotta ride that.  So we did.

There were signs that warned us we were going to get wet and they gave us plastic cover-ups to help us stay dry, so I guess I should have been prepared for how wet we were about to get.  I wasn't.  I had salt water filling every one of my orifices by the time we got off that boat and it wasn't very pleasant.

When we pulled out of the harbor and looked back at the City of Boston, it looked like we were having a beautiful day.

20 minutes later, the captain came on the intercom to warn us that we were going to have a pretty rough ride back to shore.  She wasn't fooling.  We were soaked from the ride and then  became even more so when the rain started pouring down on our heads as we navigated some crazy waters to get back to the dock.  We got really, really wet, but honestly it was a ton of fun!

Fire and Ice was a nice restaurant where you have a huge selection of food you get buffet style and then you bring it to be cooked on this monster grill.  It was pretty yummy.

We also liked Loretta's which was just outside of Fenway Park.  The sign said it was on Jack Daniels Road, but I couldn't find that on Google Maps so they must have just changed it recently.