Boston

Our first morning in Boston, Lia crouched on the brick sidewalk of Acorn Street trying to photograph the cobbles without a single tourist in frame — an impossible task, because Acorn Street is possibly the most photographed lane in America. We gave up, laughed, and let a woman walking a corgi wander straight through the shot. That, it turned out, was the right way to meet this city: not by chasing a perfect image, but by letting Boston be its lived-in, slightly stubborn self. It is a European-scaled city wearing American history like a well-worn coat.

Walking the Freedom Trail

There is a red line painted and bricked into the pavement of downtown Boston, and if you follow it for four kilometres it drags you through the entire founding drama of a nation. Lia and I traced it from Boston Common past the gold-domed State House, down to the Old State House where the Boston Massacre unfolded, and on to Paul Revere’s small wooden house in the North End. What struck me most was how casually the past sits inside the present — commuters cut across the Granary Burying Ground where Samuel Adams and John Hancock lie, barely glancing at the slate headstones tilting like crooked teeth. We lingered there longest, reading epitaphs worn nearly smooth by three hundred New England winters.

The North End and the harbor

By early afternoon the Freedom Trail delivered us, conveniently, into the North End — Boston’s Italian quarter, all narrow streets and the smell of garlic and baking pastry. We joined the line outside Mike’s Pastry, argued gently about cannoli versus lobster tail, and bought both to settle the matter on a bench overlooking the water. Beyond, the harbor did its quiet work: ferries crossing to the islands, the masts of the USS Constitution pricking the sky across in Charlestown. We walked the waterfront until the light went amber, and I understood why this town, so bound up in revolution, still feels first and foremost like a port — a place that has always faced the sea and waited for ships.

Cambridge and the student city

The next day we crossed the Charles River to Cambridge, where Harvard Yard opens like an outdoor cathedral of red brick and old elms. Students cut across the grass in that unhurried way of people who belong somewhere, and we let ourselves be tourists — rubbing the worn bronze foot of the John Harvard statue along with everyone else, then escaping into a secondhand bookshop off Harvard Square. Lia found a battered paperback of New England poems; I found a coffee dark enough to reset my French standards. Back across the river, we ended the evening with clam chowder in a Beacon Hill tavern, the kind of thick, salty, buttery bowl that tastes like the whole coast distilled into a single spoon.

Getting There

Logan International Airport sits remarkably close to downtown — a fifteen-minute ride, or a quick hop on the Silver Line bus and Blue Line subway. From New York, the Amtrak Acela reaches Boston’s South Station in around three and a half hours, and we found the train far more civilised than the drive up I-95. Once in the city, park the car and forget it: Boston is gloriously walkable, the subway (locals call it the “T”) is old but reliable, and the compact centre means most days you can cross from Beacon Hill to the North End on foot in the time it takes to finish a coffee.