Boston Bound

Day 5 - August 1st

There were some new B&B guests at breakfast this morning; a pair of botanists, one from Austria and one from New York state. The New Yorker seemed surprised that as Brits we'd never been to Kew gardens and weren't keen gardeners, and suggested that we might infact be terrorists. A botanist's view of Britain is apparently rather different to reality.

After breakfast we left Providence and drove up to Boston. The journey was just an hour, so by midday we'd already parked up - despite a slight sat-nav confusion (it doesn't like Boston's freeway tunnels) that resulted in a couple of extra laps of the downtown one way system.

We stopped in a cafe to plan the rest of our day, then went on one of the swan boats that float around on the lake in the park. I'm not sure who's idea the boats were, to me they just seemed like oversized pedalos and since the lake really isn't very big it was all a bit odd.

They've been running for over a century though so it's clearly a popular attraction.

We had lunch at a seafood restaurant in the area known as Boston's Little Italy, remembering to order appetizer sized portions but still leaving stuffed with our plates only half emptied.

After that the plan was to check out one of the duck tours (like the usual bus tours, but on old WWII amphibious vehicles so part of the tour is on the river) but they were booked up for the day so instead we booked one for tomorrow morning and went for a stroll round china town and some other areas of downtown. Boston has a really nice feel about it - it's nowhere near as hectic as New York and it's much greener and cleaner, but unlike Providence it's not dead either. And there's plenty of history and architectural variety.

In the evening we visited the Oak Bar, situated in the ultra-posh Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel

(which counts among it's past guests every president in the last 100 years, various royal families and plenty of film stars). The bar is as fancy as you'd expect but drinks weren't outrageous - $10 (7 pounds) for a cocktail is hardly unreasonable when it comes with free bar snacks and the waiters wear bow ties.

We had dinner as a slightly less upmarket, but still delicious, middle-eastern restaurant where true to form we ordered way more food than we could possibly have eaten. Their 'set menu for 2' should really be called 'set menu for 4-6', yet it still only cost $15 each. Bargain.