Tales of Three Cities

I. Boston: Literally Little Italy

After four days in New England we departed on Wednesday after emotional farewells with with our aunties and cousins. Cousin Thea was sensibly still asleep on her midweek day off, so I forbore to wake her when Greg and Scott came by at 6:45 to spirit me away; the hurried note I left for her in the kitchen was a poor expression of gratitude for her many kindnesses.

We'd spent much of the previous day in Boston, arriving by commuter rail from Lowell early in the afternoon. After a bit of aimless wandering, and some wilting in the generous humidity, we ducked into an air-conditioned tavern for some lunch and some cooling adult beverages while we plotted our next move, which was in the event to place ourselves in the hands of one of the many tour operators haunting downtown. We took an “on-again, off-again (certain restrictions apply*)” tour that included a spin around the harbor and an hour stay at the Charlestown naval shipyard, where Grandfather Fleming worked during WW II.

Following the tour we set off to the “North End,” which proved in the event a delightful little Italian district of winding streets and enticing aromas. Alas, lunch was still too recent to make dinner a realistic proposition, so we merely knocked around the neighborhood for another couple of hours absorbing the local color, both ethnic and historic (e.g., the Old North Church and its weathered nearby burial ground, and Paul Revere’s charming pied-à-terre, the latter locked up tighter’n a drum by early evening) before taking the commuter train back to Lowell. In the course of that ride we sat near a young man who talked business (marketing, heaven help us) volubly and at high volume to a friend or colleague before he was obliged to take a call from his mother. Thereafter his conversation consisted of soft grunts at longish intervals.

*Among the unexpected restrictions: at one point we were commanded, while awaiting the arrival of an “on again” tour bus, to line up in the sweltering sun rather than under the shelter of a nearby shade tree. When we politely protested, and explained our reasoning, we were told to go pound sand and again directed to stand in line under the glare of a Beantown afternoon. The “Silver Trolley” does not receive our custom again.

II. Mensches Take Manhattan

From Cousin Thea’s rustic New Hampshire dacha we headed for our night’s lodging in Jersey City, stopping for breakfast at Chet’s Diner in Northboro (?) MA and making an unscheduled stop at Mystic Seaport, a scenic little theme park of a town, in Connecticut. With an abundance of neither time nor funds we skipped the paid admission (too bad, in a way, because the sailing ship Joseph Conrad, on which der Alte trained during his brief stint [pre-USMC] as a merchant marine cadet, was docked in the paid area) but availed ourselves of the well-stocked gift shop, where Rand, who had up to this point rather been letting down the side in this respect, purchased his first souvenir tee-shirt.

With young Kinster at the wheel now we proceeded on to Jersey City via Manhattan, at one point overruling Eleanor, our onboard GPS-based navigation thingum, when she directed us onto the Henry Hudson Parkway. “Recalculating,” she replied sullenly, plotting her eventual revenge, which she was to savor nicely chilled—but I anticipate myself. Our hotel was in a slightly seedy section of Jersey City (if there are posh districts of the town we contrived to miss them), but conveniently close to the Port Authority train into Manhattan, and thence, once having settled ourselves, we ventured without Jeanne, who begged off pleading exhaustion and a lowered resistance to crowds.

With just six hours to take in Manhattan we could scarcely give first-timers Kinsey and Scott a comprehensive tour, particularly since Greg’s impressions were fourteen years out of date and Rand’s twenty-seven, but we wandered around sundry parks and squares, through packed streets bustling with low-end storefronts and sidewalk vendors, past awe-inspiring architecture old and new, to Times Square, to Radio City Music Hall (breaking from our rambling for long enough to enjoy a nice dinner in the theatre district), through Central Park, to “The Dakota” and “Strawberry Fields,” via cab to the Chrysler Building, and finally, via a series of Turkish baths cunningly disguised as subway stations (ah, but the cars themselves are air conditioned: how unimaginably awful the waits would have been without that in prospect!) back to the PATH terminus for the ride to Joisey City. And the evening and the morning were the eleventh hour.

III. Byzantium on the Potomac; Après moi, le déluge

We rolled through the grimy industrial suburbs of northern New Jersey and only gradually noticed that the passing scenery was starting to take on a bucolic (OK, comparatively bucolic) character during the hour or so we approached northern Delaware. An untimely sneeze caused Rand to miss our transit of that state, and before we knew it we were in Maryland heading for Baltimore as traffic thickened around us and the skies darkened above. As we crawled around Baw’mer a couple of premonitory raindrops spattered our windshield, following which the clouds disgorged a volume of water approximately equivalent to a January’s worth of rainfall in Northern California. Greg, at the wheel, was steely-nerved as he steered us through the onslaught; the same cannot be said, alas, of Eleanor, whose behavior started becoming erratic as she developed an arbitrary preference for congested surface streets over freeways and, as we drew near our motel in Alexandria, for obscure airport service roads over broad city thoroughfares. We finally had to disconnect the poor thing over her piteous protests (“I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission”) and proceed to our destination under manual control with advice from The Great Gazoogle delivered over the magical team of Greg’s iPad and Rand’s magic MiFi card. Just as we arrived, the weather really went berserk, drenching the entire party as we sprinted across the twenty feet between our parking spot and the motel office.

It was starting to look as though we might have to confine our visit to the DC metro area not merely to leafy Alexandria but to our modest rooms at the Travelodge, but an hour later the storm had petered out and the sun was shining, so we girded our loins and strolled half a mile to the nearby rail station and rode into Washington, emerging at the “Federal Triangle” station, and thence to the National Mall, where we variously inspected or favored with our passing glances the Washington Monument, the World War II Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial (regarding which it occurred to me that it might be a nice gesture to record the names of all the Vietnamese who perished by the force of American arms during the same period, but a moment’s reflection persuaded me that this would be impractical, since a comparable treatment would require a wall seventy feet at its highest point and stretching nearly the length of the Mall) and the FDR Memorial, this last being visited by Greg and Scott only, and proving farther away than our cheap not-to-exact-scale tourist map suggested. When they rejoined us after the better part of an hour we decided to catch a bus down Constitution Avenue to the center of town, where both eateries and DC Metro stations might be expected to be thicker on the ground. As we waited for a scheduled bus, clouds swiftly congealed anew overhead and opened up on us, so a quick Plan B, involving two taxicabs, was improvised. We agreed to rendezvous at the Capitol, where the brief storm conveniently dissipated. Although we had all been soaked during the few minutes before we flagged our taxis, everyone was in good humor about it, because what with the walking through the heat and humidity we’d each of us been feeling slightly oppressed. The magic of evaporation as we dried off in the newly cooler air post-cloudburst cheered everyone up, and we strolled to the magnificently-restored Union Station retail complex for dinner and a ride home.

This morning Scott departed by air back to California (demands of work) and the rest of us soldier on to Greensboro NC, where we’ll pass the night, and from the ride toward which—somewhere north of Richmond at the moment—I post this update.

Above: Expedition staff photographer Kinsey G in Times Square