Random Thoughts in Boston

The Boston leg has been great. We finished off our last half-day with a trip for me and the kids to the USS Constitution. Surprisingly, the kids wanted to wait in line for a guided tour and it was worth it.


I guess overall I am having a good time sharing places I have good memories of from when I was a kid with my own kids. My siblings and I joke that if there was a brown sign on the highway (noting places of historical significance), our Dad stopped and we all went to check it out. I don’t know how many battlefields we walked, but the time combined should qualify us all for military benefits.

After Jen picked us up we went to a place called Trani, which despite it off-putting name (not that there’s anything wrong with that) serves perhaps the greatest desert ever made. Well, the Whoopie Pies of Maine are up there, too, but these are unbelievable. We had Trani “Bust-Outs” -- okay, are you finished giggling yet? – which are cupcakes injected with vanilla or chocolate soft-serve, and then covered with magic shell chocolate. Oh, yeah. It’s that good. It’s like Minnesota State Fair good. Anyway, we got them to go and quickly realized they couldn’t be eaten in our car, so we ate them on the sidewalk. Literally, on the sidewalk. Desperate times, people, desperate times, indeed.



More thoughts on Boston. First, this funny clip:


That sums up what we learned in Lexington and Concord. It’s weird, when learning how the Revolutionary War started, we’re supposed to think it was scrappy and ingenious how the Provincials used “unconventional” warfare to pick off the British Regulars. We showed those arrogant imperial bastards, didn’t we? Who were they to come all the way over here and think their superior skills and weapons would just roll over us? Do you see where I’m going? Replace “provincials” with “insurgents” and “unconventional” with “guerilla” and it begins to look a little like the debacle our current President got us into. Okay, I know that's a bit simplisitc, but I just can't understand how you can go to these historical sights we've been to -- Lexington and Concord, Saratoga, Boston -- and not see *some* parallels. By the way, if anyone reading this is thinking, “But Saddam had nuclear weapons, and we had to stop that madman,” I hereby revoke my respect for you.

On a completely different subject, how do you know you’re traveling too far into South Boston on the T? Answer: When the three guys next to you, one of whom doesn’t know the other two, begin to compare how much time they’ve each served. Apparently doing six months in prison is not enough to prevent you from being teased. I was all ready to bust out a, “Oh yeah, well I just spent two weeks I Maine with no internet access and no cable.”

Also, this: We were getting ready to walk the Black Heritage Trail on Boston and Jen told the kids that it involved a bit of walking, but not as much as we did on the Freedom Trail. She then added, “We spent the whole morning at a place you two chose (the Boston Children’s Museum), so we don’t want to hear any complaining.” “Can we air complain?” replied Calvin. “What do you mean?” I said. “You know, like air guitar, but complaining instead,” he said. There it is, ladies and gentlemen, a knew form of talking back: the “air complain.”

Calvin’s had lots of ideas on this trip. At least three times a day he says, “You know what’d be cool…?” I told him he should write them down and become an inventor. The best one lately was the pants with built-in underwear. “You have to change your pants everyday, and you have to change your underwear everyday, so why not put them together? It would make peeing a lot easier, too,” he says. He still pulls his pants all the way down at the urinals. I’ve tried to explain that he doesn’t need to, but he says it’s more comfortable. Yeah, it probably is.