Downtown Boston – Wednesday, July 27
A few years ago, when we took the family to Washington, DC, we toured the city on a trolley that took us all around the city very easily. We hopped on and hopped off as we wanted, and when we finished with one landmark, another trolley was there to pick us up in no time. That would be a perfect way to get around downtown Boston, right? Yeah, that’s what we thought, so we purchased trolley tickets. The plan was this: pack up, take everything to the Braintree T Station (we were headed to the Cape later that night), take the T to downtown, ride the trolley to the sights we wanted to see. We would spend all day downtown, take the T back to Braintree, drive down to the Cape and see some Cape Cod summer college baseball.
The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.
First problem: traffic. Always traffic. We had heard horror stories about Boston traffic, and we had done well to avoid it, but even skirting around the city to drive to Braintree, we sat in delay after delay.
Problem #2: the Braintree T station parking garage was full. We drove around the area only to find signs that said “NO T PARKING.” Finally, we pulled back to the garage, and I jumped out to ask the attendant where another public parking place might be.
“You want to park?” He asked in his Indian accent.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Come around to the entrance. I will let you in,” he said.
“Even though the garage is full?” I asked.
“You can park here,” he said as he pointed at a space.
True to his word, he let us in the locked gate with the FULL sign. As we pulled close to him, he told us to keep moving up. After a couple of levels, we found a parking space. We thought we were home free.
Problem #3: we rode into South Station where they trolley tour people said they had a stop. We arrived at South Station, but we saw nothing resembling a trolley stop. I walked into the station and asked police officers who worked there, and they told us to go to the regular bus stop. So, we did, and we saw city buses stop there, and we saw other trolley tours pass by, but not our company. The Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum were right around the corner, and I knew the trolley company picked up there, so we headed a block over. People gathered in huge throngs as they tried to see the reenactment of the historic throwing tea overboard. We still couldn’t find a trolley stop point. So, I asked a museum worker.
“Sure,” he said. (I am serious when I said everyone we talked to in Massachusetts was more than nice to us.) “Stop number 16 meets right under those big arches at that building, and that is a really good place to start because they will go to stop number 1 right after that.” We thanked him and moved over to the trolley stopping point with about a dozen other patrons.
Problem #4: I wanted to get to stop #5, #7, and #15. That meant I would have to ride through all the other stops to get to the few places I really wanted to see.
Problem #5: The trolley took longer than the 15 minutes they promised for each new trolley to arrive. We waited about 20 minutes for the next trolley, and when it arrived, a patron getting off the trolley wanted to talk to the driver before she exited, which elicited more than one, “Let’s go!” from the crowd waiting to board (including Jordan). When we boarded, he told us he could only take 17 people, and the rest would have to wait for the next trolley. No way, no how. We made sure we were four of the 17 open seats.
Problem #6: When we reached station #1,we had to wait for someone to validate everyone’s tickets. Meanwhile, we have wasted nearly an hour of sight-seeing time just getting started on the trolley.
I was growing more and more frustrated; Marc, in his usual care-taking way, wanted to solve the problem, but he didn’t know how to get us where we needed to go any faster than the trolley people would take us. Joel worried that I would have a meltdown, and Jordan kept saying things like, “You are going to have to calm down, Momma.” All I could think about was how my one day in downtown Boston was dwindling away while I played trolley games.
Problem #7: When we moved on from station #1, we discovered that the trolley had to go with Boston traffic, which meant moving through traffic at a rate much slower than walking.
Problem #8: I figure out that many of the stops circle back and hit the same spots that are listed later on the tour. Riding along and waiting on each stop in order was going to be a monumental waste of time. I look at the map, and I see that stop #5 would take us to Cheers on Beacon Hill, which was walking distance from a number of the other spots I wanted to hit. So, now, problems solved. When we got to stop #5, we exited the trolley and decided to spend the rest of the day walking through Boston, and we would end the day with the Boston Harbor cruise that came along with our trolley ticket purchase.
The boys enjoyed the food and atmosphere at Cheers even though they had never watched the show. Marc and I told them about how popular the show was and how seemingly everyone watched it every Thursday night. We explained the “Norm!” references, and when Joel saw a baseball jersey with the name “Malone” on the back, we had to explain to him how the character Sam Malone was supposedly a major league pitcher before he bought the bar. They had a replica set upstairs, but we were seated down in the lowest part of the bar, which made the lunch all the more authentic. And of course, we had to bring home 2 Cheers mugs for the house.
On the walk back to Boston Harbor, we enjoyed the afternoon at Boston Common, watched kids playing in Frog Pond, and looked on as students from Harvard and Boston College conducted sociological experiments on kids playing in the park. The entire grounds were filled with people walking and playing and reading and just hanging out in the Common. In fact, all of downtown Boston seemed ridiculously busy – people everywhere working, sight-seeing, shopping, and enjoying the city. I don’t know that I have ever been in a city that busy, including Chicago. It has been over 20 years since I have been in NYC, so it may compete with Boston, but Boston on Wednesday was hopping, and I loved it.
Leaving the Common, we saw, right around the corner to the left, the Granary Burying Ground, which houses the grave sites of Paul Revere and Sam Adams. Then, on to King’s Chapel, an original Anglican church established in 1686 that boasts a bell cast by Paul Revere himself. Jordan and Joel loved the family boxes instead of the pews we now use in church, and I was enthralled by finally seeing in person and up close the church whose photos I have shown to students for years. We stopped and looked at the pulpit poised high above the congregation and paused a moment at the beautiful altar up front. Then, we explored King’s Chapel’s grave yard to find John Winthrop’s grave (the first governor of Massachusetts and the man who claimed their settlement to be “a city upon a hill”). Had there not been a marker describing him at his grave, I would have never found it because after nearly 300 years, the words are indecipherable on the tombstone itself.
Next stop – donut break at one of the corner Dunkin Donuts stores (which are everywhere in Boston) and then on to Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. We were running close on time for our harbor cruise, so we didn’t go inside the two places, but we enjoyed the dancers outside the two halls and took in the celebratory atmosphere of downtown Boston – again, just teeming with people enjoying the city.
Our Boston Harbor cruise took off at 4:30, and we sat atop a small vessel and soaked in the sun as we rode around the harbor and learned about the history of the harbor as well as about the current companies and landmarks we encountered as we sailed. Seeing the city from the water offered a new perspective, and all I could think about was how the settlers must have felt sailing up to a busy Boston Harbor. I guess I have read too many romance novels, but sailing around the harbor helped me to imagine a life long ago when sea travel would have been common and arriving at Boston Harbor meant the end of a long and hazardous journey. So many others had stood exactly where I was standing, breathing in the same sea air and hearing the gulls overhead. In this places, I feel a connection to the past, a moment of humanity that transcends time itself.
After our Boston Harbor cruise, we had to hit the red line again if we wanted to make it to Cape Cod for a 7 pm ballgame. Coming from the harbor, though, meant that we would have to start on the blue line, switch to the orange after one stop, and then switch to the red after one more stop. Yet, we had learned the hard way that navigating the subway always beats navigating Boston traffic. Riding back to Braintree, we had a delay because the car in front of us experienced some kind of mechanical malfunction. After about a 10 minute halt, they had the other car moving, so we moved along, as well.
We hit the highway again, this time moving south toward Cape Cod so we could see Alex Destino on his Wareham Gatemen team in Wareham, Massachusetts. Jordan and Joel and Marc had seen the movie Summer Catch, and ever since then, they have wanted to see a Cape Cod summer baseball game since this league supposedly invites only the best college players from around the world. Tonight, the Gatemen were playing the Hyannis Port Harbor Hawks, and I had to hear the announcer say “Haaabah Haacks” at least three times before I understood what he was saying. They played at Wareham High School, and I was surprised to see that the football field and the baseball field occupied the exact same space. The left field foul line sat directly in front of one of the goal posts, and the other goal post sat right behind the center field fence, which must be temporary for the baseball season and will be removed for football. The Cape Cod league doesn’t charge an admission fee, but they do suggest a donation, and the donation jar sat at the as soon as we walked in. The young man selling t-shirts and other memorabilia saw our South Carolina shirts and began talking to us as soon as we walked up.
“You from South Carolina?” He asked. When we said, “yes,” he continued. “When did you come up? How long are you here? We are glad you came to see a game before you leave.” Again, the people of Massachusetts were always so friendly and open to conversation. We perused the souvenir stand and then went to sit in the stands on the Wareham side. Our South Carolina attire drew lots of curious stares from others in the stands, but no one said anything. I enjoyed listening to the conversations around me as I enjoyed the Massachusetts accent; I loved getting a glimpse at the lives of the people who lived up there.
A couple of innings in, our stomachs started to growl. Time to check out the concession stand. My first surprise occurred when I saw that they sold clam chowder and meatball subs at the concession stand. Both of those seem quite complex foods to serve at a high school baseball field, but no one else seemed bothered by it. Then, I saw an item on the menu called “stuffed quahog.”
“What in the world is a stuffed quahog?” I asked Marc.
“I have no idea,” he said.
Well, that means I have to ask them. From what I can tell from her explanation, a stuffed quahog must be something like deviled crab we have down here. She said it was clams cooked into some kind of stuffing. They had them pre-made and wrapped in paper, so she showed me what the package looked like and said that they heat them up in the microwave. I didn’t want to try a microwave-heated snack, so I went with a drumstick ice cream cone instead. The boys ordered hot dogs, and they used the same white-bread-like buns my Fenway Frank had. I wonder where they get those buns? Also, they gave us the buns, and then we took the buns over to the live grill, where they paced the hot wiener right off the grill into their buns. Our concession experience was an enlightening and tasty success.
Eventually, we picked up Cape Cod baseball t-shirts and watched the rest of the game (and near the end of the game, the concession stand workers offered meatballs and sauce in styrofoam cups for $1 each) and then headed back to our hotel, right up the coast in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Yes, that Plymouth. The famous rock where the Pilgrims landed was a few miles away from where we rested our heads that night.
The best part of Massachusetts is the fact that everywhere we went included a story in our American history. We passed a sign in Cape Cod that would have directed us to a cranberry bog, and I would have loved to have seen that, too. In fact, the more I learned, the more I wanted to see. There were more great history spots than we could possibly see within a week. By the end of Wednesday night, I was already mourning our upcoming departure, but I still had one last and very important stop before we headed home on Thursday.
A few years ago, when we took the family to Washington, DC, we toured the city on a trolley that took us all around the city very easily. We hopped on and hopped off as we wanted, and when we finished with one landmark, another trolley was there to pick us up in no time. That would be a perfect way to get around downtown Boston, right? Yeah, that’s what we thought, so we purchased trolley tickets. The plan was this: pack up, take everything to the Braintree T Station (we were headed to the Cape later that night), take the T to downtown, ride the trolley to the sights we wanted to see. We would spend all day downtown, take the T back to Braintree, drive down to the Cape and see some Cape Cod summer college baseball.
The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.
First problem: traffic. Always traffic. We had heard horror stories about Boston traffic, and we had done well to avoid it, but even skirting around the city to drive to Braintree, we sat in delay after delay.
Problem #2: the Braintree T station parking garage was full. We drove around the area only to find signs that said “NO T PARKING.” Finally, we pulled back to the garage, and I jumped out to ask the attendant where another public parking place might be.
“You want to park?” He asked in his Indian accent.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Come around to the entrance. I will let you in,” he said.
“Even though the garage is full?” I asked.
“You can park here,” he said as he pointed at a space.
True to his word, he let us in the locked gate with the FULL sign. As we pulled close to him, he told us to keep moving up. After a couple of levels, we found a parking space. We thought we were home free.
Problem #3: we rode into South Station where they trolley tour people said they had a stop. We arrived at South Station, but we saw nothing resembling a trolley stop. I walked into the station and asked police officers who worked there, and they told us to go to the regular bus stop. So, we did, and we saw city buses stop there, and we saw other trolley tours pass by, but not our company. The Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum were right around the corner, and I knew the trolley company picked up there, so we headed a block over. People gathered in huge throngs as they tried to see the reenactment of the historic throwing tea overboard. We still couldn’t find a trolley stop point. So, I asked a museum worker.
“Sure,” he said. (I am serious when I said everyone we talked to in Massachusetts was more than nice to us.) “Stop number 16 meets right under those big arches at that building, and that is a really good place to start because they will go to stop number 1 right after that.” We thanked him and moved over to the trolley stopping point with about a dozen other patrons.
Problem #4: I wanted to get to stop #5, #7, and #15. That meant I would have to ride through all the other stops to get to the few places I really wanted to see.
Problem #5: The trolley took longer than the 15 minutes they promised for each new trolley to arrive. We waited about 20 minutes for the next trolley, and when it arrived, a patron getting off the trolley wanted to talk to the driver before she exited, which elicited more than one, “Let’s go!” from the crowd waiting to board (including Jordan). When we boarded, he told us he could only take 17 people, and the rest would have to wait for the next trolley. No way, no how. We made sure we were four of the 17 open seats.
Problem #6: When we reached station #1,we had to wait for someone to validate everyone’s tickets. Meanwhile, we have wasted nearly an hour of sight-seeing time just getting started on the trolley.
I was growing more and more frustrated; Marc, in his usual care-taking way, wanted to solve the problem, but he didn’t know how to get us where we needed to go any faster than the trolley people would take us. Joel worried that I would have a meltdown, and Jordan kept saying things like, “You are going to have to calm down, Momma.” All I could think about was how my one day in downtown Boston was dwindling away while I played trolley games.
Problem #7: When we moved on from station #1, we discovered that the trolley had to go with Boston traffic, which meant moving through traffic at a rate much slower than walking.
Problem #8: I figure out that many of the stops circle back and hit the same spots that are listed later on the tour. Riding along and waiting on each stop in order was going to be a monumental waste of time. I look at the map, and I see that stop #5 would take us to Cheers on Beacon Hill, which was walking distance from a number of the other spots I wanted to hit. So, now, problems solved. When we got to stop #5, we exited the trolley and decided to spend the rest of the day walking through Boston, and we would end the day with the Boston Harbor cruise that came along with our trolley ticket purchase.
The boys enjoyed the food and atmosphere at Cheers even though they had never watched the show. Marc and I told them about how popular the show was and how seemingly everyone watched it every Thursday night. We explained the “Norm!” references, and when Joel saw a baseball jersey with the name “Malone” on the back, we had to explain to him how the character Sam Malone was supposedly a major league pitcher before he bought the bar. They had a replica set upstairs, but we were seated down in the lowest part of the bar, which made the lunch all the more authentic. And of course, we had to bring home 2 Cheers mugs for the house.
On the walk back to Boston Harbor, we enjoyed the afternoon at Boston Common, watched kids playing in Frog Pond, and looked on as students from Harvard and Boston College conducted sociological experiments on kids playing in the park. The entire grounds were filled with people walking and playing and reading and just hanging out in the Common. In fact, all of downtown Boston seemed ridiculously busy – people everywhere working, sight-seeing, shopping, and enjoying the city. I don’t know that I have ever been in a city that busy, including Chicago. It has been over 20 years since I have been in NYC, so it may compete with Boston, but Boston on Wednesday was hopping, and I loved it.
Leaving the Common, we saw, right around the corner to the left, the Granary Burying Ground, which houses the grave sites of Paul Revere and Sam Adams. Then, on to King’s Chapel, an original Anglican church established in 1686 that boasts a bell cast by Paul Revere himself. Jordan and Joel loved the family boxes instead of the pews we now use in church, and I was enthralled by finally seeing in person and up close the church whose photos I have shown to students for years. We stopped and looked at the pulpit poised high above the congregation and paused a moment at the beautiful altar up front. Then, we explored King’s Chapel’s grave yard to find John Winthrop’s grave (the first governor of Massachusetts and the man who claimed their settlement to be “a city upon a hill”). Had there not been a marker describing him at his grave, I would have never found it because after nearly 300 years, the words are indecipherable on the tombstone itself.
Next stop – donut break at one of the corner Dunkin Donuts stores (which are everywhere in Boston) and then on to Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. We were running close on time for our harbor cruise, so we didn’t go inside the two places, but we enjoyed the dancers outside the two halls and took in the celebratory atmosphere of downtown Boston – again, just teeming with people enjoying the city.
Our Boston Harbor cruise took off at 4:30, and we sat atop a small vessel and soaked in the sun as we rode around the harbor and learned about the history of the harbor as well as about the current companies and landmarks we encountered as we sailed. Seeing the city from the water offered a new perspective, and all I could think about was how the settlers must have felt sailing up to a busy Boston Harbor. I guess I have read too many romance novels, but sailing around the harbor helped me to imagine a life long ago when sea travel would have been common and arriving at Boston Harbor meant the end of a long and hazardous journey. So many others had stood exactly where I was standing, breathing in the same sea air and hearing the gulls overhead. In this places, I feel a connection to the past, a moment of humanity that transcends time itself.
After our Boston Harbor cruise, we had to hit the red line again if we wanted to make it to Cape Cod for a 7 pm ballgame. Coming from the harbor, though, meant that we would have to start on the blue line, switch to the orange after one stop, and then switch to the red after one more stop. Yet, we had learned the hard way that navigating the subway always beats navigating Boston traffic. Riding back to Braintree, we had a delay because the car in front of us experienced some kind of mechanical malfunction. After about a 10 minute halt, they had the other car moving, so we moved along, as well.
We hit the highway again, this time moving south toward Cape Cod so we could see Alex Destino on his Wareham Gatemen team in Wareham, Massachusetts. Jordan and Joel and Marc had seen the movie Summer Catch, and ever since then, they have wanted to see a Cape Cod summer baseball game since this league supposedly invites only the best college players from around the world. Tonight, the Gatemen were playing the Hyannis Port Harbor Hawks, and I had to hear the announcer say “Haaabah Haacks” at least three times before I understood what he was saying. They played at Wareham High School, and I was surprised to see that the football field and the baseball field occupied the exact same space. The left field foul line sat directly in front of one of the goal posts, and the other goal post sat right behind the center field fence, which must be temporary for the baseball season and will be removed for football. The Cape Cod league doesn’t charge an admission fee, but they do suggest a donation, and the donation jar sat at the as soon as we walked in. The young man selling t-shirts and other memorabilia saw our South Carolina shirts and began talking to us as soon as we walked up.
“You from South Carolina?” He asked. When we said, “yes,” he continued. “When did you come up? How long are you here? We are glad you came to see a game before you leave.” Again, the people of Massachusetts were always so friendly and open to conversation. We perused the souvenir stand and then went to sit in the stands on the Wareham side. Our South Carolina attire drew lots of curious stares from others in the stands, but no one said anything. I enjoyed listening to the conversations around me as I enjoyed the Massachusetts accent; I loved getting a glimpse at the lives of the people who lived up there.
A couple of innings in, our stomachs started to growl. Time to check out the concession stand. My first surprise occurred when I saw that they sold clam chowder and meatball subs at the concession stand. Both of those seem quite complex foods to serve at a high school baseball field, but no one else seemed bothered by it. Then, I saw an item on the menu called “stuffed quahog.”
“What in the world is a stuffed quahog?” I asked Marc.
“I have no idea,” he said.
Well, that means I have to ask them. From what I can tell from her explanation, a stuffed quahog must be something like deviled crab we have down here. She said it was clams cooked into some kind of stuffing. They had them pre-made and wrapped in paper, so she showed me what the package looked like and said that they heat them up in the microwave. I didn’t want to try a microwave-heated snack, so I went with a drumstick ice cream cone instead. The boys ordered hot dogs, and they used the same white-bread-like buns my Fenway Frank had. I wonder where they get those buns? Also, they gave us the buns, and then we took the buns over to the live grill, where they paced the hot wiener right off the grill into their buns. Our concession experience was an enlightening and tasty success.
Eventually, we picked up Cape Cod baseball t-shirts and watched the rest of the game (and near the end of the game, the concession stand workers offered meatballs and sauce in styrofoam cups for $1 each) and then headed back to our hotel, right up the coast in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Yes, that Plymouth. The famous rock where the Pilgrims landed was a few miles away from where we rested our heads that night.
The best part of Massachusetts is the fact that everywhere we went included a story in our American history. We passed a sign in Cape Cod that would have directed us to a cranberry bog, and I would have loved to have seen that, too. In fact, the more I learned, the more I wanted to see. There were more great history spots than we could possibly see within a week. By the end of Wednesday night, I was already mourning our upcoming departure, but I still had one last and very important stop before we headed home on Thursday.
Kristie Camp 