Baked Beans

The State House in Boston

When we finally left Maine and the lobsters behind it was Vicki's intent to head straight back to northern New Hampshire to try and catch some leaves in the process of changing, but Chris had badly OD'd on hicksville and wanted to touch base with civilization again, so we detoured south a bit to spend a few days exploring Boston.

One does not drive a motorhome into Boston or any other major city if one can help it, and we thought we had explained this to our GPS, but it had other ideas and took us right through the middle of town on I-93.  It was Sunday and the traffic wasn't that bad as it turned out but the road was in terrible shape.  They need to work on their infrastructure.  We breezed through town and kept going south past Quincy and Braintree where John Adams use to hang out and ended up in the town of Middleboro at the dreaded Kampgrounds of Amerika.  From there the plan was to take the train into Boston and leave the car at the station.  We couldn't take the dogs on the train with us and they weren't that heart set on Boston anyway, so we arranged for them to stay at Kamp K-9 and get baths whilst we were sight seeing.

One if by land, two if by sea.

Monday morning we drove to the Park 'n Ride lot, picked a likely spot marked 178, parked the car and headed for the commuter rail station.  At the station there were lots of little metal boxes and friendly signs explaining that if there was no money in the box for your parking space, your car would not be there to greet you when you got back.  What the signs did not explain was why there were no boxes for parking spaces 1 through 200.  Not a hint.  We finally sent Chris back out into the lot to move the car to a space with a higher number.  Then, with our four dollars jammed into the corresponding box, we climbed aboard a train.

Fifty minutes later we found ourselves in the Boston South train station, where we would have to be again by 4:30 if we were going to retrieve our dogs before they locked the doors of Kamp K-9.  From there we had to navigate the Boston subway system.  That's right, three Californians who never go anywhere without our automotive cocoons aboard the MBTA, the same system where Charlie rides forever 'neath the streets of Boston. No doubt we would have joined him except that Christopher had recently been schooled in a similar set of problems in New York City.  The MBTA is apparently mild by comparison.  He also knew that Google MAPS will tell you exactly which trains to take to get from point A to point B, which I would never have guessed in a million years.

Fishing with Froggy at the Boston Commons

Christopher had three things he specifically wanted to do in Boston.  One was to see a game at Fenway Park.  Unfortunately, the Sox were on the road all week.  Second, he wanted to tour the Sam Adams brewery, which was on our schedule for the next day.  His third goal was to visit the Boston commons.  I have no idea why.  The old British commons were open areas in a town used "in common" where farmers could let their cows graze while they were off trying to find a buyer or butcher for them.  The Boston commons presumably started the same way.  Now however, the commons is a largish public park smack in the middle of downtown.  We wandered around the park for about an hour (at least Chris did, I spent some of that time sitting on a bench watching the squirrels).  It's a nice enough park, I just don't know how it got onto Chris' radar.  Then we went looking for lunch.

Squirrel watching

There was a perfectly good McDonald's right across the street from the commons, but Vicki was having none of that.  So we wandered a few block passing 3 or 4 other eateries that didn't meet her exacting specifications.  Finally, we came upon a nice looking Cafe, just off the lobby of the nice looking Ritz Carlton Hotel.  Here she would eat.  The lunch was nice, but not as nice as I would have hoped at the Ritz Carlton prices.  If you got fries with your sandwich you got your very own 2 oz. sealed-at-the-factory bottle of Heinz Ketchup to go with them.  That, I guess, is class.

Our Duck Boat reflected in the side of a skyscraper

Our project for the afternoon was to take a Duck Boat tour.  The Duck Boats have been touring Boston for fifty odd years.  They were originally WW II surplus amphibious landing craft like the oneTom Hanks clambered out of to go save Pvt. Ryan but today all but one of their 28 boat fleet were custom made for the tour company by General Motors.  It's a fun tour, the drivers all being certifiably insane, and in 90 minutes we drove past all of the city's major landmarks, so we can at least say we saw them.  At the end of the tour they roll your tour bus into the water and take you for a 10 minute cruise in the Charles River.  Nice but you don't see anything new from the

Passing a sister Duck on the Charles River

water.  I assume at some point in the past the amphibious part of the tour was more germane, now they do it just because they can.  By the time we got back to the Duck launching area we weren't sure we could MBTA our way back to South station in time to catch our train, so we took a taxi to the station, caught our train and made it back to Middleboro in time to save the schnoodles.  (And Julian, but who cares really?)

The next day was kind of a washout.  It started out as an instant replay of Monday, catching the train into town, then we took a cab out to the Brewery.  After the

Sam Adams brewery - closed

Green Dragon Tavern

cabbie drove away and we took this nice picture in front of some Sam Adams beer barrels, we read the small sign on the door that said the company had sent their entire staff off on some kind of training mission and there would be no tours until Thursday, by which time we would be well on our way to Gorham.  We consoled ourselves with a couple of free beer samples, then figured out how to take the subway back downtown.  There we ate brunch at the Green Dragon Tavern.  This is one of the oldest eateries in town, where the Sons of Liberty would meet to plot sedition and treason (except not at this particular spot because somewhere along the line they had to moved out of their original building).  They've been serving beer and Irish food for over three centuries and they do a pretty good job of it.  I had eggs and about 5 kinds of sausage all of which were tasty, along with some taters and baked beans, which apparently go with everything in Boston.

Tea Party Museum

After late breakfast, we headed back to the MBTA where things went straight downhill.  Chris, our subway expert, failed us.  Or Google Maps failed us.  All I know is something definitely failed us and it clearly wasn't me.  Whatever the cause, we spent 40 minutes sitting on a subway platform waiting for a train that didn't exist.  I finally got Chris straightened out and we made our way back to South Station.  From there it was a few short blocks to the Boston Tea Party Museum which was Vicki's choice for the afternoon activity.  Unfortunately, after two days of wandering around Boston my arthritic knees were killing me and three Boston blocks seemed like about 1000 miles.  By stopping to sit down about every 100 yards we finally made it only to discover that the "Museum" was actually a kind of dress up re-enactment.  The next show was in a half hour and would last 90 minutes, which would give us under ten minutes to get back to the train station.  Vicki was afraid we would miss our train, so she decided to skip it.  So we turned around and I crawled the 1000 miles back to South Station where we were now early enough to catch an earlier train back to Middleboro where we retrieved our mutts and called it a day.