Started the day with a most excellent yoga class at 0715 - yes really, I know I'm on holiday and I know I don't have to go back to work until February, but the body clock is a powerful thing and am making the most of free facilities!
We headed off to picturesque Gloucester further north up the coast for our pm whale watch, which we'd booked on a Groupon for $55 for two of us instead of $48 each - worth bearing this in mind if you find yourselves across the pond, but the only problem is that you have to have a friend with a Canadian or US permanent address to book on Groupon.com as opposed to the UK site, so I reckon may be worth researching and then calling Groupon UK to find out if it can be booked somehow if you're stuck.
Anyhoo, it took about 45 minutes and when we got there we discovered that although it was a beautiful sunny day, the sea was too rough and the trip had been cancelled. I have to admit, to my embarrassment, to getting a little teary - I had so been looking forward to ticking this one off the bucket list after disappointments on previous New England visits in 1996 and 1998. We rebooked for the following day and headed straight back to Boston so that we could spend the whole afternoon and evening in the city as we'd planned to do the following day.
We followed the Freedom Trail, which is marked by a red brick line in the middle of the pavement should you have a shit map like we did. We didn't take a close look at all the points on the trail, but it's a good way to get around part of the city and get your bearings. Word of warning that Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market are over-commercialised tourist traps - if you're hungry, the latter may offer respite but if you're not, walking through this mega food court can make you feel slightly nauseous at the quantity of comestibles on offer. We did see some great hip hop street dancers performing though. Today's ice cream - espresso from Giardinello's, and very good it was too.
Worth taking time out to see on Congress Street is the Holocaust memorial - I saw it when I visited in the 90s and it's still as moving. It's a series of glass towers, each of them marking one of the Nazi concentration camps, and each one etched with the millions of registration numbers given to the victims and which were tattoed on their arms. It may sound morbid but it's an amazingly respectful, dignified and thought-provoking monument to human suffering and a stark reminder that it must never, ever happen again.
http://www.boston-discovery-guide.com/boston-holocaust-memorial.html
A last-minute decision at the end of the trail was to negotiate the very grubby subway system and go visit the Museum of Fine Arts on Huntingdon Avenue as it was open til late. It's quite marvellous - a fab Herb Ritts photography exhibition, lots of interesting contemporary art for me, and lots of Monet for Toni, as well as a well-above average gift shops within an amazing space - we only wish we'd thought about it earlier.
Treated ourselves to a cab back into the city, dinner at an Italian on the North Side (as you're pretty stuck if you want to eat anything else in the area!), and then we caught the free shuttle bus back to Charlestown - one of the other benefits of staying there. It's walkable too, but we were a bit too footsore and full of pasta...
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