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09/22/2004 Archived Entry: "Boston, MA"

Last week (Sept. 13-17) I spent five days with a private charter in Boston, MA. I had been to Boston several times before, but not enough to really get comfortable with it, so this was a good experience. I stayed at the same hotel as my group -- the Copley Square Hotel -- one of the oldest (if not THE oldest) continuously operating hotels in the country. It's located on Huntington Avenue in the Back Bay area of Boston. Parking is an issue, but fortunately there is parking less than four blocks away on the street in front of the Christian Science Center on Huntington -- it's marked for tour bus parking with a three hour limit, but there are regularly coaches parked there overnight without a problem.

Streets around the Big Dig are different everytime I've visited Boston, so that area is always a bit of a challenge. But the Big Dig is finally approaching completion (it's supposed to be completed in 2005 -- it started in 1991), so hopefully things will soon be much better. Most of the new highway that makes up the Big Dig is now open to traffic, but there is still lots of peripheral work around exits, etc.

The group I had as passengers were part of a historical society, and they visited a number of the older homes in Boston. Only one had parking nearby (the Shirley-Eustice House in the Roxbury section), so most of the time I had to drop off the group and go find parking until they were ready to be picked up again. There were two other highlights that I really enjoyed; one was a visit to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in southeast Boston (photo above right) -- there was plenty of bus parking with room for about nine buses. The second was a visit to the Plimouth Plantation, near Plymouth, MA, where we spent much of the last day in Massachusettes. Plimouth Plantation is a recreation of the village where the Pilgrims settled in the 1620s. It is very historically accurate, even down to the actors who play the Pilgrims in the first character -- they speak in Old English dialects and know nothing beyond the year 1627, the year the village represents. Conversations can be very interesting, as they never speak out of character -- they know nothing of events or any history following 1627, so conversations must be limited to that period of time or earlier. They do an excellent job, and even though several tourists asked questions trying to draw them out of character, none were successful from my observations. The photo above left shows the small militia in a training exercise. More photos from my trip to Boston are in a photo Web gallery here.

Plimouth Plantation has a large bus parking lot by the main entrance. We also visited the Mayflower II, an actual size replica of the original Mayflower the Pilgrims sailed from Europe, docked about three miles away from Plimouth Plantation. There is a bus drop-off/pick-up right near the pier where the ship is docked, but bus parking is about a mile away in a public bus parking lot.