Hello, Beantown!

Boston. Home to clam chowder, the Red Sox, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and one of the greatest accents in the world. Also home to the Freedom Trail, a trail that makes its way through the history of the American Revolution.

We drove to Boston and managed to avoid any really terrible traffic. Somehow found a public parking lot with some not-so-affordable spots still open. And we bravely walked out into the sunshine.

It was warm, to say the least. We stopped off for lunch at Faneuil Hall Marketplace, or Quincy Market, depending on whether you ask me or Brian. We’re both right, even though neither of us really quite believes it. Good thing for us we all took the anti-grumpy pledge about 5 days ago, an event that we all remind each other of frequently. Have you ever noticed that if you make a promise, and other people continue to remind you of it, it becomes even harder to keep that promise? Yeah, exactly.

We knew we wouldn’t make it through the whole Freedom Trail in this heat with a wilting 9-year-old. So we hit the Paul Revere home (awesome—did you know he had air conditioning?) and the Old North Church, with all of its family booths that seem both practical and impractical at the same time. You can be closed into your own compartment, so no one can tell that your children are reading books, or pinching each other, or eating lunch. But on the other hand, it’s hard to imagine communion—it must be quite a process.

We walked back to the city center and took in a few more sights. Probably the favorite was a team of street performers who combined gymnastics, breakdancing and humor. Their grand finale was having one guy do a flip over 4 women from the crowd. Then we hit Boston Common and the public garden, two gorgeous adjacent parks. I love it there. The heat did not make our progeny quite so excited about it. I mean, the “Make Way for Ducklings” statue? Come on! Allison did come out of her heat-funk enough to sit on the mama duck and get her picture taken.

We made one impromptu stop on the way to the hotel, which threatened to be a disaster. After all, it meant paying money for both parking and admission, and it was an art museum. We don’t do many art museums. But I started a novel this week, “The Art Forger,” which will be coming out soon. So far I’m hooked, and it talked about the unusual Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a museum designed to look like a Venetian palace. It is so cool. Plus, there was a major art heist there in 1990, and there are still empty frames here and there in remembrance and in the hopes that someday they’ll be returned. This is also in the novel, so the experience was quite satisfying.

I didn’t share with Brian just why I wanted to stop there, just that I’d heard it was really something. The last time he humored my desire to visit a place that had been featured in a book, it was the Newberry Library in Chicago from “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” I had to see the staircase. Turns out the Newberry Library is for genealogical research, and we had to register and get membership cards. We felt compelled to do some research for about an hour because we couldn’t just sign up, walk around, and then leave again. We searched everywhere I dared to trespass, all for nothing. I’m not sure Brian’s recovered yet.

On to the familiar and slightly expensive Embassy Suites hotel. This is an old standby when we go to Chicago—you can get great deals at Christmastime. You get a “manager’s reception” in the evening, which means we can order pizza in, and we can get drinks and snacks from the reception and call it dinner. Then we get an enormous breakfast in the morning. Between times, we get a 2 room suite and a swimming pool. This time it even had a laundry room, so we are all clean again. And we're getting a quick fix of the Olympics tonight before we go back to being the Ingalls family. Nothing quite makes me feel like Caroline as much as saying "I've got to put some water on the stove to wash up from dinner."

Time for bed. Tomorrow we drive to Maine to set up camp!