Round The World and other travels
A frequent flyer's collection of trip diaries
This is: Quebec to Florida, by Sea (2019)
Soggy Boston Halloween
We opened the curtains in our stateroom to watch our 8am arrival
into Boston - or at least, into a dismal location on the South
Boston waterfront. The weather was dreadful, as mist alternated with
heavy rain. Following breakfast and showers, we dressed for the
conditions and set off for a day in town. As the rain had stopped
when we went ashore, we made the 25-minute walk to South Station, a
familiar location close to the InterContinental hotel and the
'Boston Tea Party' tourist attraction. A huge amount of construction
work was in evidence along the way. Our objective at South Station
was simply to switch to the 'T' (Boston's mass-transit system) to
complete our journey to the Museum of Fine Arts, in the Fenway
neighbourhood. This required travelling a couple of stops on the Red
Line, followed by a longer ride on the tram-operated Green Line. It
was all straightforward and in good time, we alighted at the museum,
which has its own stop.
We began what would be a substantial visit by seeing Viewpoints,
a photographic exhibit. We then walked in heavy rain to Symphony
Sushi for a most enjoyable Japanese lunch. Afterwards, we
returned to MFA to see at least some of the other exhibits. I was
hugely impressed by the scale of the place, the standard of
presentation and the quality of the art collection. One exhibit was
sufficiently unexpected to leave me almost speechless: imagine me
walking around this American museum, taking in all the paintings and
sculptures, and suddenly finding myself standing in the reconstructed dining room of
the former Hamilton Palace in Central Scotland! Ancestral seat of the
Dukes of Hamilton, the palace was widely acknowledged as one of the
grandest country houses in the UK, yet it ended up being demolished in the
early 1920s due to a list of serious issues. These included massive
debts and subsidence, the latter caused by nearby coal-mining. The dining room - rebuilt in
Boston, of all places - is the only surviving remnant.
When we had seen enough, we walked over to Tremont Street for a drink before returning to the ship using Lyft. Later, I had a fish-based dinner in the Palm dining room on Caribbean Princess. Bruce had Sechuan shrimp, which he thought was one of the best shipboard meals he had ever eaten.
