May 9, 2011

Monday: A full day in Boston! We drove a short way to the small town of Ayers, parked the car, and took the train to downtown Boston. And I know this is goofy, but it was fun to see the ticket-collector punching holes like crazy in our ticket. It reminded me of Polar Express!

First stop - the USS Constitution, aka Old Ironsides. It’s the oldest commissioned ship in the world. It’s docked in the Boston Harbor. And - it’s closed on Mondays. So we had to be content going through the museum. Much of the ship was made from live oak, which is incredibly hard; so hard, in fact, that in its first battle, enemy cannonballs just bounced off it. Hence the nick-name Old Ironsides. In 1938 a storm pushed her away from the dock and into a modern destroyer. The destroyer’s mighty steel hull was damaged, while the Constitution’s wooden hull just got some minor gouges.

About once a month they take her out into the bay. She can operate under her own power but they usually don’t let her, as a matter of safety. But next year is the bicentennial of her battle with the British in the 1812 war, so the Navy is working to get the ship totally functioning. It’s a really, really beautiful ship. Since it is Monday I couldn’t get close to the ship and didn’t get good pictures.

Docked next to her is another ship, this one in dry-dock, which looks pretty cool.

Next we did one of my favorite things - visit old graveyards. The 3 graveyards in downtown Boston are so old that they aren’t even called graveyards - they are calls burying grounds. I think these are FASCINATING!!! The script is written in Old English - “Here Lyes (or Lyeth) Y Body of xxx” Those folks were very particular about the fact that only the body was buried, not the person. Most of the headstones are small, relatively thin and have macabre carving.

Here’s something I learned in one of these graveyards - way back in 1755 there was a pre-nup for the marriage of James Smith and Elizabeth Inman - and it was requested by Elizabeth! She was a successful business woman and didn’t want to lose her property.

Granary Burying Ground has some famous residents - Samuel Adams, Paul Revere and John Hancock. Paul has 2 monuments - a pillar and a small headstone. Don’t know if the headstone is where he’s buried and the pillar is a memorial, but people have been leaving pennies at both stones - probably a reference to his work with copper.

To me these old burying yards look like right something out of Masterpiece Theater.

But enough about my weird fascination with graveyards and on to other things, such as lunch. We enjoyed yesterday’s dinner at the Express so much that today we went back for one of their calzones. Once again, getting one and splitting it was more than enough. I kept finding bakeries I wanted to try, so we got a fresh cannoli from Mike’s Pastry and a lobster roll from Modern Pastry (there isn’t any lobster in it, it’s sort of like a huge crescent roll stuffed with a thick cream cheese filling).

For some reason one of the intersections has brass representations of trash. Nearby is the Haymarket Pizza, so perhaps that area used to be a Farmer’s Market and this is their way of memorializing it, but it seems a bit odd to me.

And we noticed that a lot of the buildings have copper on them - not just decorations, but copper siding. I'm afraid these wouldn’t last in the Midwest.

We really got our exercise today. We toured the second floor of Faneuil Hall, where the “Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts” keeps a great weapons display.

And we found the Omni Parker House Hotel. It’s been a hotel since 1855 and is really gorgeous today. It’s got a rich history of notables who have been there. A literary group called the Saturday Club met there, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and several others. JFK announced his Presidential candidacy there, and John Wilkes Booth stayed there a few days before he shot Lincoln. Malcolm X, then known as Malcolm Little, was a busboy at the Parker house around the time of the Pearl Harbor invasion. And Ho Chi Min apparently worked there as a pastry chef - who knew?

Boston is a great city and we wish we had more time to explore. Heck, we still haven’t gotten to the point where we can fully understand the Boston accent! But we have a schedule to keep. So at the end of the day we stopped by the Green Dragon for a local beer, then boarded the train home.