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Published: June 21st 2017
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Boston Common
Jan 11 2016 17 Boston Common Geo: 42.3585, -71.0596
We ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant. We generally prefer to do this as it is quick and easy before a big day of sightseeing. Boston in January is also extremely cold, so it was nice not to have to walk to find breakfast.
We then set off into the beautiful but very cold and windy day for our self-guided walk of the Freedom Trail. There were large chunks of ice on the grassy areas as we walked along the street and it was certainly much, much colder than we are used to here in Melbourne.
We started our tour just down the road at the Boston Common, where we were all enchanted by the squirrels. We don't have squirrels in Australia, so we find them fascinating. The Common was beautiful, even in the winter. We went to the Tourist Office and picked up maps for our day and then headed to the other side of the Common to the Massachusetts State House. We purchased our tickets and were lucky enough to be just in time to join a free guided tour. The tour was very interesting an enjoyable, as was the State House. So much history in Boston!
Next,
Massachusetts State House
Jan 11 2016 20 Massachusetts State House we walked to the Granary Burial Ground, final resting place of Samuel Adams and Paul Revere among many others. The monument to Benjamin Franklin is also there, but he is actually buried in Philadelphia. This is the marker for his family plot.
Next was the King's Chapel and the King's Chapel Burial Ground, which is the oldest cemetery in Boston, and a look at the Old South Meeting House, which was used to organise the Boston Tea Party.
We were very cold and hungry by this stage, so headed to the next stop on our tour which was the Faneuil Hall Marketplace. We had a wander around Quincy Market and finally ended up eating like total tourists at the Cheers Bar there, where I thoroughly enjoyed Carla's Petite Burger. The younger (and older) boys in the group had Norm Burgers and other foods from the show. Suitably warm and fed, we then headed into Faneuil Hall itself for another guided tour of this fascinating building.
We continued walking past the oldest tavern in Boston, Paul Revere's statue and his house and various other places on the Freedom Trail, before finally walking over a bridge over the Charles River on our way
to the USS Constitution Museum. It was totally freezing crossing the river, I can rarely remember being more cold.
The Constitution was in dry dock, so we could only see it from a distance, but the museum was very interesting.
We returned to our hotel by ferry over Boston Harbour and then a very cold walk through the Boston twilight and across a beautifully lit Boston Common. We stopped for a quick peek at the Christmas Tree in Copley Square before arriving back at the Lenox after an extremely enjoyable, but bitterly cold day.
Dinner that night was New England seafood at the Atlantic Fish Company, just over the road.
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