As the well-known phrase goes q “all good things come to an end”, and so must our road trip. Our flight doesn’t take off until 10pm tonight and we are determined to cram in as much as we can between now and then.
Having munched another weird hotel “make-do” breakfast served with paper plates, we checked out and left our luggage in the hotel’s left luggage room. A short taxi ride into the city centre and we headed for the Prudential Building to check out their viewing platform. The building is a 54 floor skyscraper with the top four floors dedicated to viewing platforms, a bar and restaurant both with 360 views of the city. From here you can see all the sights of the surrounding area including the Red Sox stadium and across the river in Cambridge, the world-famous Harvard campus.
The Harvard Campus is beside the cranes
The Red-Sox Stadium
For lunch we didn’t want to miss out on the fantastic bagel deli a few hundred meters along the road, and as they’re closed by 2pm, we exited the viewing platform and took the express elevator to street level.
I was sad to discover Finagle a Bagel was closed by the time we arrived yesterday, but it was worth the wait. As you enter their deli you’re greeted by a huge selection of home-cooked bagels. They have an amazing choice of flavours including blueberry, onion, jalapeno or cheese.
Note the conveyor belt that has a rotating blade to slice the bagels as they glide along to the filling station, to be rammed full of your choice of meat, cheese or fish.
The “club bagel with chipotle mayo” was amazing, as was the beef salad bagel Char had and the ham salad bagel Liz had. Once we’d armed Char with her weapons of war, a cappuccino, we headed for the pickup point for Boston’s Duck Tours at the rear of The Prudential building. We didn’t have to wait long for them to begin loading us onto the duck that would be our home for the duration of the tour.
Our Duck Tours Vehicle
A few minutes into our tour I noticed how our guide’s facial expressions and animated hand gestures reminded me of my cousin Sarah (Darcie’s mum). You might not see it from the photos, but it was striking. From the lightness of her skin and her freckles I’m also wondering if the pink hair was an antidote to being a shade of red/ginger.
She was a great tour guide, you could tell she loved her job as she pointed out all the sights we were passing. And from the way she described the performing arts school and the fact that many of the plays that end up on Broadway in New York, cut their teeth here in Boston I wonder if she is an actor, or performer/dancer of some type. According to her, the plays are roadtested here and if they pass muster with this tough crowd, they’re good to go. If not, they might move onwards to another city but their chances of hitting Broadway are over.
A few of the sights we saw included….
Trinity Church which was sadly surrounded by renovation works, so we couldn’t snap it from the front.
The Science Museum
Note the gas lamp (streetlights) that are lit in the middle of the day. They’re paid for by the residents of this area in Boston because they won’t let the city council convert them to LED low energy lights. Bizarre right?
Gordon Ramsey’s restaurant
One last item on my list was to sample an American dessert parlour. So we consulted Google and headed down the road a few steps to find my next treat. I guess I need to point out at this point that this blog is a set of highlights and lots of time passes between each item. So if you’re wondering if we spent all our time eating and drinking you’d be wrong. We did eat and drink all the items I’ve documented but they weren’t back-to-back.
Anyhow, here’s a photo of the dessert I had. It was a strawberry sorbet with vanilla icecream, caramel sauce and cream. And it didn’t last long because it was totally delicious.
The serving girl was French and struggled to understand anything we said, I guess she was tuned to the local accent, and our British one confused her.
The ladies had a one-scoop classic ‘skinny’ cone. For reason’s best known to Char she suddenly became quite giggley…
I’m sat typing the last edition of the blog in the BA Silver Lounge which is an unexpected treat. I’m guessing they suggested the lounge when we checked our bags in because we were so early. This wasn’t deliberate but it’s how it worked out due to the things on our timetable falling into place way quicker than anticipated. e.g. we allowed an hour to get to the airport because the hotel shuttle only runs every 30minutes and we needed to mitigate the scenario where we arrived back at the hotel a few minutes after it had left. But it arrived from the airport to drop people at the hotel literally three or four minutes after our taxi from Boston city center pulled up.
So here we are sitting in the lounge, Char’s sipping a complimentary cappuccino and Liz is knocking back a complimentary Coke Zero. And I, dear reader got to play a Steinway Grand Piano downstairs just after the security checks. For those who don’t see the significance, a Stienway is in car terms a Rolls Royce, Bently or Dahimler of the Piano world. It was awesome and when I’d left Liz and Char perching in the cheap-seats downstair while I went to look for the lounge, I couldn’t resist another tinkle of the ivories on the way back.
So that’s it gang, I hope you enjoyed the blog. And for the record, we missed you Tim, and thought of you often during our time here when we saw something amazing and wished we could have shared it with you, or saw something like the snow-plough that we thought you might have liked. And it goes without saying you’d have liked driving the Nissan Armada. Hopefully, you’ll be with us next time we visit the USA. Who knows, we might still ride Route 66 together. It’s on Liz’s and my bucket list.