Beantown

Two days ago Ashley and I found out Emily, a friend from Washington was in Boston for a few days, and yesterday we went down to visit her. The original plan was to go to Walden Pond and live simply, or maybe build some foundations under castles in the sky, but that fell through (and thus I was deprived of the excuse for stupid Thoreau jokes). Instead, we tooled around Boston, had lunch at a delicious Indian buffet, met a bunch of cool people, and took a ferry out to Spectacle Island in the harbor.

Boston is a very cool city. It was actually hard for me to come back to New Hampshire after spending an afternoon in Boston. Imagine spending the day in Seattle and then returning to, I don't know, Cle Elum. I kind of feel deprived of the big city comforts that I'm used to from Seattle—street entertainers, amazing food everywhere, shopping, posters for art and music and opera and indie films, sigh... Of course, I don't have to pay twenty-seven freaking dollars (!!!) to park in New Hampshire, so that's score one for my state.

Boston is kind of like Dover in one way, though. They just haven't figured out how traffic works. As Armando, our host for the day, said, “They can found the greatest country on earth, but they can't invent the grid system.” Also, much of the interstate traffic runs underground through these massive tunnels. Ashley was kind of freaked out by driving on an eight-lane, underground freeway, but hey, it's better than demolishing all those two-hundred year-old buildings up above and putting the interstate up there.

And oh man, the buildings. The architecture is amazing, and it seems like half the buildings have these amazing stories behind them. We left a subway station and found we'd just exited the Old State House, a building constructed in the early 1700s. We were standing beneath the balcony where Colonel Thomas Crafts, one of the Sons of Liberty, read the newly-penned Declaration of Independence to the city of Boston. It happened twelve feet above our heads. Freaking WOW!

The Old State House. There's the balcony. Also, there's a unicorn on the roof.

More old buildings. And some new ones.

We took a boat from the harbor (I wanted to throw a teabag into the water) to Spectacle Island, which was a landfill for a hundred years and is now a state park. It turns out when you hollow out the ground beneath a city and fill it with subway tunnels and the two interstate highways, you get a lot of dirt and nowhere to put it. So the city of Boston dumped all of it on the landfill on Spectacle Island (enlarging the island a great deal in the process), planted some trees, and called it a park. We hung out on a lovely beach and played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Spectacle Island, ex-landfill.

I'M ON A BOAT. (Grimacing)

A tour boat in the harbor.

The Boston skyline and ominous cloud from Spectacle Island's beach.

Tell me if you think of any excuses to return to Boston. We're strongly considering going down for Guster's Lost and Gone Forever ten-year anniversary show at the Orpheum, but we're a little iffy about the money situation. Historic walking tour? Lunch at Durgin Park? Red Sox game?

Ashley is America.