4th of July in Boston, Part II

On Saturday morning, day 2 in Boston, our major activity was walking the "Freedom Trail" in Boston. The Freedom Trail is a red (mostly brick) path that goes through downtown Boston and takes you to a bunch of historical sights. It starts at the Boston Common and finishes at the Bunker Hill monument. One of the early stops was a cemetary (I can't remember the name) where 3 signers of the Declaration of Independence are buried (the one at left is Paul Revere).




This one is Nate by the USS Constitution, aka "Old Ironsides". I can't remember all the details about it, but it was instrumental in a war...or two...or it (I guess the people on it) fought in some wars.

It was fun walking the trail on the day after the 4th of July because there were a lot of people out and we saw multiple bands like this one performing. We stopped at Faneuil Hall, which used to be kind of a town hall place and now just has gift shops inside, and there were tons of street performers outside who were pretty entertaining. We took a break from our walk and stopped to eat lunch at Quincy Market, which is basically a REALLY long hallway lined with little food places on both sides. It's pretty crazy, especially on a Saturday after a holiday - the hall down the middle is just crammed with people. You would think with so many options it would be easy to find something good, but I went all the way down and had to come all the way back before I could find (aka decide on) something that looked good.

I think the part of the trail that stood out to me most was Paul Revere's Midnight Ride. We saw his house, where he started the famous ride (see pic below), and the Old North Church (tall steeple behind Nate) where the lanterns were lit for "one if by land, two if by sea" (how the British were coming. He didn't actually light the lanterns himself - the caretaker did). At first I was thinking that it was a really short ride to have received so much attention / prominence in history, since we had just walked the distance in less than 1/2 hour, and he was on a horse. But that just showed how lacking my remembrance of American History is (for those of you who, like me, haven't had a history class in 10 years or so, he continued on to Lexington and I think Concord to warn the colonists out there).
















The other highlight of the trail for me was the last stop, Bunker Hill. You have to walk up the hill, then at the top is a monument with 294 winding / steep steps to climb up. There were some pretty neat views from the top, although my legs felt like Jell-o once we got back to the bottom (grr!!! does anyone else get frustrated working with pictures and text and the random spacing and formatting issues they create in blogger???). Here is a picture of little (relatively) Nate and the big monument.

We finished off the day by going to Fig's - a little pizza place on the street I took a picture of below - for dinner, stopping at Harvard Square for some yummy ice cream, and swimming in the pool at our hotel. I'm pretty sure Nate watched a movie or two, but I was exhausted and fell asleep.

4th of July in Boston, Part I

We arrived in Boston at 11am on Friday the 4th after a red-eye flight from Salt Lake to New York and a four-hour layover in NY. We hauled our luggage through the airport, onto the "T", through a couple of T stations when we switched trains, and about a mile from where we got off to our hotel. We were pretty tired when we got there, but we didn't have a lot of time to relax because we wanted to go down by the river to stake out our spot for the fireworks show that night. We ate lunch and got our stuff to the hotel, then went down to the "Esplanade" - a grassy area on the bank of the Charles River. We got there around 4:00pm and were able to find a little spot in between other people's blankets. It was crazy how many people were down there. We didn't have blankets or chairs or anything, so we had a space just the size of our two jackets to sit on. It felt like forever until the pre-fireworks concert started, but we had brought our books and had fun people-watching. Here's a picture of us while we were hanging out there. The lady next to us insisted we borrow her statue of liberty hats for the picture. A couple other pictures - another one of us waiting, and the sunset over the river.

Every year before the fireworks, they have a concert with the Boston Pops. This year, Rascal Flatts also performed with them, which I must admit I was more excited about than the Boston Pops. The concert was great though - we weren't close enough to really see well, but they had it broadcast over loudspeakers so we could hear, and it sounded really neat with the orchestra (symphony? I'm not sure what the Pops technically are) as the accompanying music. It was really fun to be down there for the concert.

And the fireworks show was awesome!! They had music playing over the loudspeakers during the whole almost 1/2-hour show (not live, just recorded), and the fireworks would be timed with the music that was playing. One of the cool songs the Boston Pops did was the 1812 overture, with cannons and the fireworks going off at the exciting / climactic parts. The fireworks were amazing too - they had some that looked like cubes or 3-d balls, smiley faces, and some neat colors that we hadn't seen before. The only downside was that there wasn't enough wind to blow away the smoke from all the fireworks, so by the end we could see part of the fireworks and we could see the smoke light up and change colors, but we didn't get the full effect of the cool fireworks. Here are some of our attempts at photography, and a video of the fireworks with the music [ok, so the video doesn't work. I may try it later, but I can't figure how to upload it].

After the fireworks, the long line outside the train station convinced us to just walk back to our hotel. We were pretty exhausted by the time we got home - I don't how how far it was, but it took over an hour to get back, and after the red-eye flight the night before we had no trouble going to sleep that night!

PS - I couldn't get motivated to write about the whole trip at once, so I'll just do a few short posts :) More to come...

Up on the Sidewalk, Off the Trash Can, Right in the Hole

Those of you who have requested pictures of Boston (all 2 of you) will be disappointed to see that this post has no mention of our trip. I figured I had better get caught up before I write about our vacation. A couple of happenings from the week before we went:

On Friday night, we went to the Ernst & Young "Entrepreneur of the Year" awards ceremony. It's a competition E&Y puts on annually at the regional level, and the winners then go to a national event. This was the first year I had gone to one, and it was pretty impressive. I had signed us up to volunteer at the "issues table", where we helped people who had problems with their nametags. They had a fancy dinner, and then presented the awards Oscar-Style - they had videos with a little info about / interviews with the finalists in each of 8 categories, then a presenter (EY people and local business people) would come out and open up an envelope and announce the winner. It was interesting to learn about all the different companies, and there were all sorts of Utah business people there - I think there were about 800 people. Here's a picture of us helping at the issues table.
The next night, we were planning to go to the Lehi Round-Up Rodeo but went to get tickets that afternoon and it was sold out! Jake and Stacey came up for dinner anyway, and we went down to Trafalga to play some miniature golf. Dave and his roommates met us there too, so it was a fun night. This is where the title of my post came from. On one of the holes, I hit the ball a little too hard, and it hit a wall and bounced off to the side, bounced off one more wall and up onto the sidewalk, hit the trash can, and rolled back onto the course and straight into the hole for a hole-in-one!! It was pretty impressive, if I do say so myself. It reminded me of those old-school Michael Jordan - Larry Bird (was it Larry Bird? I can't remember for sure) commercials where they would go through a long list of where the ball would go, and end with "nothing but net". If only I had planned it that way :)

That Sunday we went up to Nate's parents' house for dinner, and we always seem to leave at just the right time to catch a beautiful sunset as we're driving home. This time I managed to get a picture of it:

Last Monday night, we attempted to have a group FHE barbeque with a bunch of friends from the ward up American Fork canyon. I say attempted because we had two groups that left at different times, and lost cell phone access in the canyon and were never able to find the other group. Instead, the group of us who found each other wandering / driving around in the canyon came back to Ivory Ridge and had a fun BBQ on the lawn.

That Wednesday, Nate and I went golfing with my brothers Jake and Dave at a golf course pretty close to our house. We had the last tee-time of the night, so we knew we'd have to hurry a little bit to finish before dark. However, we didn't realize that dark also meant sprinklers. Partway through the 7th hole, the sprinklers turned on and it was quite an adventure to try to hit the ball in the dark and try to see where it landed, all while avoiding getting wet - especially since they would rotate (as soon as some sprinklers turned off, others turned on). We managed to finish up somewhat dry - except for Jake, who got attacked in the side by a sprinkler when it turned on unexpectedly as he was trying to putt about 2 feet away. It was fun though - the golf course is really pretty, but as we discovered throughout the night, it has a lot of good hiding places for balls!

Pictures are of the 3 boys checking out one of the holes, and Nate (red shirt) and Dave (yellow shirt) teeing off. Sorry Jake - I didn't get a good one of you.