After a day with fabulous weather yesterday, today was the complete opposite. During the day, it was either raining or raining heavily. However, we’d planned ahead and already decided that today we’d do things that were mainly indoors, starting with…
Fenway Park
I have to admit that I am not much of a sports fan, unless it is motorsports, and even then I’m only really interested in F1. So, to visit a sports ground for a sport that I know less than nothing about might seem a tad strange. Nevertheless, here we were at 10 am outside Fenway Park the home of the Boston Red Sox baseball team.
It’s the off-season now, and it wasn’t possible to see a game so, getting a tour around the stadium was the next best thing. For the next hour, we were taken right around the historic stadium, the oldest in the baseball league. This included places such as the stands, on top of a wall called the Green Monster and the press areas.
We also got an insight into the history of the team that seems to be a bit like Williams – successful and then long periods in the doldrums although I hope that Williams doesn’t have to endure an 86-year wait until their next championship. The Red Sox were also the winners of the first ‘World Series’ – this being a world that only includes North America, of course.
The guide was realy knowledgable and it was an hour well spent and (mostly) out of the rain.
University Town
Boston has not one, but two world-class universities: Harvard and MIT. We actually visited Harvard yesterday and is full of old(ish) buildings and a lot of charm. MIT is newer and has some new(ish) buildings some of which were pretty funky.
We reached MIT as we had Fenway Park on the T – the Boston subway. We experienced three different lines while we were here: orange, with its clean modern trains, red which looked as if the trains had never received an upgrade and green which had trains that looked like trams with modern interiors. There is always a great deal of satisfaction when you have successfully navigated the public transport of a foreign city and this was no different.
After walking around the main buildings of MIT we decided to walk back to our hotel which was only half an hour away back over the Charles river. Of course, as we did so the heavens opened and it was more of a trudge that it could have been. As we got to the Back Bay area we could see that the Prudential Tower was shrouded in low hanging clouds which wasn’t great news as…
On Top of Boston
One of the few things that we had booked while we were in the UK was a trip to View Boston – three floors at the top of the Prudential Center tower giving views over the city. Given that just a couple of hours earlier it would have been impossible to see anything, we were pleased to see that by the time we’d arrived, the cloud had lifted and even the sun had come out!
We stayed for 90 minutes seeing the city below us go from day to night and the lights come on in the buildings around us. It was a lovely way to end the day.
