Lots of Walking in Boston

I've spent a fair amount of my time lately doing travel planning. At one point I (figuratively) looked up and realized that we were going someplace almost every weekend for the next month and a half. Right now, we're in Boston, where we came to visit our daughter who's in school here. Boston is a pretty easy trip either by train or plane, and this particular weekend the airfare was too good to pass up ($165 round trip). We visited my daughter, who was singing in a choir performance, and spent the night.

Sunday morning, I walked from the hotel over to Cambridge. We had heard this was an easy and pleasant walk and it was in fact so. Even in a state of not feeling particularly well, it was very nice out. The sky was clear and a still, cold breeze was blowing, but this was Boston, after all. I resigned myself to my feet being cold (I had only sneakers for walking) and looked briefly at MIT, stopping in the student center to warm up and go to the bathroom. It's a nice-looking campus, I must say.

On my way back, a couple of things made it nicer than the average walk. First, as I was walking across the bridge, someone was walking in the other direction. There were lots of people out jogging, but not that many just walking around. I also noticed that the person was looking at me. I'm not used to that. Most of the time people ignore me (and everyone else) unless I'm in the way. But this person was looking at my face.

I realized it was a woman, youngish, I think (she was bundled up) and as we passed each other she smiled at me, and I smiled back. That was it, a little moment. I try to savor the moments that I have every day, but this one was totally unexpected, and it made me happy for no reason beyond the pleasure of an unexpected moment.

Once I got off the bridge, I wandered around a bit, passing the local bike shop. The photo speaks for itself, I think.


Whatever you want to say about the sign, it seems to have been effective.

The rest of the day consisted of brunch at Trident Bookshop and Cafe, our favorite breakfast place in the area. It's about 50-50 bookstore and restaurant and always bustling and the food is good. The waiter kept calling me "Boss," as in, "More coffee, boss?" I kind of liked that, and somehow it seemed at least somewhat unaffected coming from him.

After that, my daughter had too much work to hang out, so we wandered around in search of a place to sit and read, eventually landing in the so-called lobby of the Westin Hotel (it's on the 2nd floor and further shields itself from the street-ruffians by having all the bathrooms, even those in the lobby, require a room key for entrance. Ronnie and I did some intrepid exploring and eventually found one that didn't require credentials.

The Westin is a nice hotel, for a huge hotel. Our own hotel, the Marriott Copley Place, was too huge to be manageable, even for the hotel itself. It just felt like a mob scene throughout and was very unpleasant for hanging out. I didn't care for our stay particularly anyway, the room was okay but incredibly noisy.

I spent much of our time at the Westin helping students prepare for a test on my cell phone. Ridiculous technology. Eventually, we headed to the airport and home. According to my cell phone pedometer, I walked 8.1 miles all told. Not too shabby.