America, America! Part 3, Boston
In all too short a time, it was time to leave Texas and head back to the Big Apple. I crashed again on a friends couch and the following day I met Mum at the Bolt Bus stop in Manhattan and we caught the bus to Boston to stay for a couple of nights. Turns out Mum and Lyn had gone back to TKTS and had been to see both War Horse (which I had wanted to see) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf. They had also put their passes to work and had been to a number of other attractions including a Brooklyn Bridge walk and a few other sites. The Bolt Bus got us to Boston without any hiccups and we headed out towards the university to a little B&B type place I had found for us to stay in.
We bought 2 day hop on hop off trolley tickets to go around to all the Boston sights. I hadn't mad it to Boston previously and had always wanted too. We had dinner one night at the Cheers Bar, lunched a the No Name fish restaurant which was very good. Over the two days we got around as much of the route as we could, including a river boat cruise and a duck tour. Boston is famously the cit that started the duck tours, vehicles ha could drive on land and the chug through the water as a boat. The tickets we had entitled us to a free Splash Duck Tour, which turned out to be pretty crap. But Mum hadn't wanted to go on a city duck tour because the vehicles were embarrassingly ugly. S we got the experience and that's enough really.
On our last night, we chose to have dinner a the pub just up the road from our accommodation as hey had a steak special. Boston in a University town, and it turns out that pubs don't accept Australian or any other countries' drivers licence as proof of age, because they are too easy to fake (I'd love to see someone make a ate Aussie licence, holograms and all), they wanted us to bring our passports - because my 60 year old mother clearly looks under 21... I promptly produced a huff, said I didn't want to go back and get passports simply to have dinner and we'd take our money elsewhere. Instead they decided to let us in for dinner but we couldn't drink any alcohol, fine by me, their loss really. I remarked on this to the waiter and how ridiculous it was (Mum had even brought a photocopy of her passport but that wasn't good enough either) and the waiter mentioned it to the manager who came and discussed it with us. In the end he graciously let us order alcoholic drinks but pleaded with us to bring our passports next time. KT Huff 1: Boston licensing 0. It was a trivia night, and we played, it didn't do that well and ended up leaving before the end because it did go on a bit. But generally we had a lovely time in Boston, we saw the beautiful range of autumn leaves in their various shades and colours and saw a great deal of the city.
The next morning we got up and headed for the Bolt Bus back to New York. I was flying out to Paris that afternoon and had it all planned out with enough time to get out there by train. That was until the Bolt Bus was caught in extremely heavy traffic coming in to New York and was 2 hours late. Stupidly, I panicked and decided a taxi would be the fastest way to JFK. Boy was I wrong! S much stress, if I'd taken the train as planned, it would have been fine, but instead I was stuck in a taxi in traffic with the minutes ticking bye and nothing I could do about it. The taxi driver did all he cold, cut people off, changed lanes, anything he could to get me there in time, as such I had to tip him well and I managed to arrive late, probably technically after the flight should have closed, but managed to get checked in and escorted through security to get to my plane on time. Weirdly enough, as the airline staff was walking me to secure, we came across a little old lady who was a bit lost. She'd checked in but hadn't cleared security and as it turns out, was supposed to be on my flight! S we hurried her along with us and I didn't see her again but can only assume she caught the flight safe and sound.
I slept as much as I could on the flight as it was an overnighter, the change in Dublin broke whatever length of sleep I might have otherwise can't, so I arrived in Paris again at 9am have only a few hours sleep, a wee bit tired and clutching a can of Red Bull. I headed back to the apartment in Montmatre where I was meeting a friend to spend another week in Paris modeling for her current painting project.
Sleep when you're dead as they say ;)
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