My own personal Freedom Trail

After today Freedom Trail means something different to me as a mommy to two young ones. More about that later. Today we walked a majority of the Freedom Trail in Boston with the coolest tour guide EVER.

At the end of the tour we tipped him hoping he’d come along with us for the rest of the day…but he didn’t seem to be thinking the same thing we were…so we wandered around the rest of the day by ourselves. We even had our first taste of a Boston original: Boston Cream Pie, which looked like a piece of cake to me. I want to try one that has more cream.

Here is a picture of the girls eating with the enemy at The Green Dragon Tavern. That’s ok, the girls are spies and were gathering good intelligence. They’re so cute people just blab stuff to them.

Here’s a seemingly innocent family picture, but if you look closely you will see Ashlyn performing an ancient oriental fighting maneuver called the behind the back eye poke. Take that you lobsterback! He was caught off guard due to Ashlyn’s lightning quick reflexes. I should know about those; she almost poked my eye out with a pencil using this technique.

Boston reminds me of bigger cities in Europe. Bigger cities in Europe in the winter. Today it was COLD, the skies were grey, it was threatening to rain, and it was COLD. That reminds me of Europe in the winter like nothing else can. Maybe mulled cider at a Christmas Market would be better, but where can you get those over in America? Plus the city looked kind of dirty. I’m attributing that to the gray* in the sky, but that also reminds me of European cities. Northern cities are dirty in the winter because of all the dirty snow that gets left shoved to the sides of the street. The snow melts but the dirt stays and it just dirties everything up. It hasn’t snowed here yet this year, but that’s what it reminded me of.

That’s not to say that I don’t like Boston. I like big cities, and this one is great in that it mixes old with new. Like Washington D.C. and Atlanta. Boston is more compact than those other two cities, like European cities are. There’s nowhere to go except closer together! We really didn’t see much today and I’m looking forward to going back tomorrow to explore more. That is if I don’t run off on my own freedom trail, escaping the incessant talking of little girls. And yelling. And fighting. And question asking. And noise making. And general not listening. No wonder Kevin Leman said in one of his books (and I’m paraphrasing heavily) that it’s bordering on insane to take a family vacation with young children. Who ever thinks they’re going to relax on a family vacation is kind of stupid. Ahem. Hand raised. Maybe if this were one of those go to one secluded place and sit there for five days without pressuring yourselves to explore or be seen in public kind of vacations, maybe then I wouldn’t be ready to forge my own freedom trail. I persevere though, knowing that He who is in me is greater than he who is in the world…and tomorrow? Tomorrow just may be a more relaxing day.

*I used both spellings here because I’m a terrible speller and even googled the differences in the spellings. Take your pick, apparently it doesn’t really matter. I personally prefer “grey” to “gray”. “Gray” looks too loud and as a Southerner I’m tempted to lengthen that diphthong into aaaayyyyyyyy. “Grey” is just shorter to pronounce to me. Whatever.