USA ’24 – Day 2 – A Rude Awakening

When you’re jet-lagged and know that you are going to have difficulty sleeping and most likely waking up early, the last thing you want is to be woken by an alarm in your room. But this is exactly what happened to us just after midnight.

Unusually this wasn’t a tonal allarm but spoken and rather worryingly it said something like that this was a pre-emergency alert and it was being investigated, if your floor needed to be evacuated there would be another alarm after this announcement. This message repeated three times and then stopped. There was no following alarm but who knew how long after that might occur.

To be honest, I would have rolled over and gone back to sleep assuming it was a false alarm, but Helen was having none of that. She went to the door to look and see what others were doing. I suggested not opening the door because if it was a gunman, that was asking for trouble, but she went ahead and opened it twice more! However, given that we were neither in a high school nor a presidential candidate we were probably safe. Political satire as Ben Elton would say.

In the end, we both got up, got dressed and went out. However, rather than going down the lift, we went via the stairs – I still don’t know why we did that. We walked down from floor 11 to two where the lobby was but the only door took us into the kitchen. A guy came round and showed us how to get to the lobby, and we arrived at the same time as the police.

I think what had happened was a drunken Irishman had set off an alarm which then set off a chain of events leading to us walking to the lobby. We went back to bed and fortunately, back to sleep.

Freedom!

I’ve actually been to Boston before, many years ago for work. I had a somewhat jaundiced view of Boston based on that trip where I’d been summoned to the offices of the lawyers of the investors in the business I was running and saw nothing but a conference room and a Wagamamas for a couple of days. This was an opportunity to change that view.

The Freedom Trail is a “2.5-mile-long path through Boston that passes by 17 locations significant to the history of the United States”. You follow a path of brick inlaid into the pavement as you wind your way around buildings and historical sites. Of course, in many of these sights the baddy is us, the United Kingdom or probably more accurately England and the crown.

The penultimate stop on the trail, the Bunker Hill Monument to the Battle of Bunker Hill, is one such site where we Brits didn’t come out on top but today we did as we climbed the 294 winding steps to the views.

The final stop on the trail is the USS Constitution which we’d intended to go round as it was free but on joining the line we realised that you needed photo ID to board, presumably as it is part of a naval base, which we didn’t have so here endeth our tour.