Saturday = Boston

A whole day in Boston! And Cambridge, too. We parked the car and took the T into Central Square to visit Pearl, my favorite arts and crafts store while in school. Didn’t find too much, disappointingly. I did get a couple of nice Kolo albums that I’m planning to use for pictures from our trip.

We walked down towards MIT and got some breakfast. I’ve been going through oatmeal withdrawl this week, so I finally found some. We walked along the campus to see if anything had changed recently. (Not much.) It also helped to know where the bathrooms in the student center were. :)

The Head of the Charles regatta (crew) was this weekend, so we walked along the river, all the way back to Harvard Square. In the mile or two that we walked, I don’t that we actually saw a race. Maybe we still hadn’t walked far enough. I never realized the huge party that was going on at Harvard, though, all those years.



We trudged back into Harvard Square for lunch, trying to fend off all the crowds. Before lunch, I made Greg stop at this store called Black Ink that has the absolute coolest stuff ever. Got a few little odds and ends… some things for scrapbooking, mostly. Also, since we were in Cambridge ("Our Fair City"), we got a picture of the Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe sign in Harvard Square, for all our fellow Car Talk fans.

We had lunch at a place called Fire & Ice. It’s what I would call a Mongolian grill – basically, a huge round grill set up in the middle of the restaurant. They’ve got all sorts of meats, noodles, vegetables, sauces, etc. that you mix and match and then take to the grill. To give you an idea of what an old cranky lady I’m turning in to … in college, this seemed like a good idea. But now… a whole bunch of people serving themselves raw meat just sounds like a crazy idea. I had to keep washing my hands so I could eat.

But back to our day. We took the T into Boston, and walked along Charles Street, just to wander into some of the shops. This brought us right out to the Bull & Finch, the bar that Cheers was based on.

Back on the T to Kenmore… which brought us right to the middle of all the Red Sox craziness at Fenway. We walked through all the ticket scalpers, police officers, lines of people waiting to get into bars, and general mayhem to get to another art store I wanted to check out, Blick. Lots of cool stuff. I found some great rubber stamps, and some stickers.


We made our way back through the craziness to the T, and were headed to the North End for dinner. But when we got to Government Center, we found ourselves in the middle of a pumpkin carving festival (for charity). There were pumpkins everywhere. There are step that line the areas all over the plaza outside city hall, and they were just covered. In addition, in the middle of it all, was scaffolding, maybe 30 feet high, lined with pumpkins. It was crazy… and so cool!







We made it to the north end, and wandered until we found the Old North Church (one if by land….). It was just about dark by then, and there was a wedding going on, so we didn’t get to see much. It’s right in the middle of a city block, so it was really hard to get a picture of, too. We tried.

Back on Hanover Street, we ate at a place called Edelio’s (I think), partly because there wasn’t a wait when we got there! Lots of places has people lined up along the sidewalk. We did wait in the line, though, for Mike’s Pastries for dessert. Mmmm….


I actually made Greg wait until we got back to Government Center to eat dessert. Most of the pumpkins were lit by that time, and it was so cool to sit outside and have dessert. Luckily, the pumpkins made it feel a bit more like fall, because the weather has been abnormally warm. It was probably in the mid 70s during the day.

(I knew we’d eventually find some “Go Sox” pumpkins.)

We got back to the hotel at a reasonable hour, and I actually had a few minutes to catch up with some friends who had arrived for the wedding. (That was why we planned this whole trip, by the way…)