Honeymoon, Day 10
The USS Constitution is America’s oldest commissioned Naval ship, and as such follows protocols like raising the flag each morning and lowering it each evening. This ritual is accompanied by a cannon shot. We discovered they do this at 8 am. It sounds (and feels) just like a lightning strike hitting close—the kind that rattles the windows. We were very excited to hear it though. I remember from our last visit, they only use a quarter charge of gunpowder.
USS Constitution – Bunker Hill monument to the left
We readied ourselves and moved on to our next adventure, finding breakfast. It took us 3 tries, but we finally located the restaurant where our free breakfast waited. Once we located it, we had to figure out how to get to it, and then how to park, but our magic held and we pulled up just as someone was leaving. We ate and checked our email and discovered our wedding photos are posted! We took some time to view a few of the shots—about the first four pages of eleven. They turned out really great!Our next adventure was Bunker Hill. It’s not hard to find, since the monument is a huge obelisk towering above Charlestown. The problem is, all the roads seem to be one-way, the wrong direction. We managed to arrive at the park and discovered it’s closed. They appear to be doing some major landscaping or something, judging by the earth-moving equipment. We snapped a couple of photos from the car window.
If you’re looking for thrills in downtown Boston, just get behind the wheel of a car. Your task: find the Boston Tea Party ship on the southeast end of downtown. Are the crowded, truck-filled main arteries too scary, with their constant detours and crane booms swooping within inches of your car? Then turn off into the residential district, where the narrow old streets barely allow one lane of traffic to squeeze through and pedestrians don’t even bother looking before they dart out between cars. It’s guaranteed to get your adrenaline pumping. Fortunately, Grace is an excellent navigator, and armed only with a cheesy tourist map (the cartoony kind where the size of the buildings is proportionate to the amount of money the business gave to the map company), we circled around and finally found it. Well, I say we found it… we found a half-obscured sign saying “Coming Soon: The New Tea Party Ship”. It was under renovation two years ago when we were here and apparently still is. I guess they have enough problems to deal with what with the leaky tunnels caving in on people and such.
An informal gathering of planes
By then it was raining on top of everything else, so we figured we’d just head to the airport early. Fortunately this is much easier – in fact, it’s actually hard to drive around downtown and NOT end up at the airport. We even found some cheap gas to fill up the rental car, and after a bit of standing in lines we got here with time to relax (and finish this blog). We’ve had a wonderful trip, and believe it or not, it will be nice to get home again!!
Bloggin’ at the airport!
