From Austin to Boston

Boston was fantastic. Bart said, on the last day of our trip, “I think this is the most fun trip we’ve taken together.” When I questioned him, he amended “except for our cruise, of course.”

And it really was that fun. We visited Lexington and Concord, Salem, and, of course, Boston itself. We saw tons of great things and just had a wonderful time together.

We rented a car and drove down from Vermont and New Hampshire which was breathtakingly gorgeous (of course I have no pictures of this drive because we were both too busy trying to stay awake).

Also, when Bart bought his new laptop back in May, it came with a GPS tracker and Microsoft’s “Streets and Trips.” We will never travel without this again. It was brilliant. We could find restaurants in the vicinity, find a toll-free route to our destination, and see when we’d gone off course (it did start having some serious trouble in downtown Boston where it could not tell where we were and kept leaping around the map, which made it very difficult to read the actual map and figure out what to do).

I LOVED Boston. I LOVE Washington D.C., but I may love Boston more. It was just so gorgeous in every way. There is SO much to see and do and we’ll definitely be going back in the future.A few highlights:

– This bookstore in Salem. Hello Heaven
– How hilarious we found it that there were Dunkin’ Donuts on literally every street corner. We finally went our last night – alas, my donut was stale.

– The Freedom Trail, especially this sign at the State House:
– Finishing the Freedom Trail by climbing this (wait, this wasn’t a highlight – I almost had a heart attack walking up the 294 stairs. I’m clearly way out of shape):

– Going to Harvard. This was so surreal. Also, we parked in a spot that may not have been legal, but we didn’t get a ticket, so this was DEFINITELY a highlight for me. Also, we didn’t have to pay $25 for a real parking spot.

The cold was terrifying, though. It hovered around 30-40 degrees for most of our trip (I KNOW, don’t tell me that that is not very cold – to me, that is nealy artic weather) and I had to restrain myself from cheering when we decended into Austin and they announced that the local temperature was 77 degrees. I stripped off my sweater and and jacket and stood outside in a t-shirt while I waited for Bart to bring around the car. I do love the warm weather.

If you’re interested in looking at all the pictures we took (and I won’t be offended if you aren’t), you can see them here:

Boston