MRand

Just finished a super four day spur-of-the-moment (about the only way we travel now) family trip to Beantown / the Crade of Liberty / home of the Red Sox, with 19 year old daughter and 16 and 12 year old sons. The short synopsis:

Saturday
- Flew in to Providence, RI on Southwest Airlines
- Late afternoon: Spontaneous detour to Newport, RI
- Dinner: Stanhope Grille at Jurys’ Hotel
- Hotel: Jurys

Sunday:
- Morning: Edward Hopper exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts
- Lunch: b. good (Back Bay)
- Afternoon: Dorchester Heights and Fenway Park (dad and sons), Newbury Street (mom and daughter)
- Dinner: Legal Sea Foods
- Hotel: Jurys

Monday:
- Morning: Freedom Trail
- Lunch: Wagamama (Quincy Market)
- Afternoon: Freedom Trail (cont’d)
- Dinner: Pagliuca’s (North End)
- Hotel: Jurys

Tuesday:
- Morning: Lexington, swim in Walden Pond, Concord
- Lunch: fast food on drive back to Providence
- Flew out of Providence on Southwest

Details to follow as time permits.

missypie

Yes, I need details. Our family of 5 (kids ages 16, 14 and 11) will be in Boston July 12-16th. Restaurant reviews, please.

traveler100

Glad you had fun! Pagliuca's is one of our favorites in the North End. Consistently good. Legal's too. How wsa Jury's?

Did you and your daughter love Newbury St.? Look forward to more details when you get settled!

MRand

missypie - Stanhope Grille was very enjoyable for the adults; excellent food, wine, and service, but relaxed, not overly crowded or noisy for a Saturday night. Daughter and sons actually enjoyed Jurys' room service and a movie.

B. good's, 131 Dartmouth St. in the Back Bay, was delicious, very reasonably priced health food (veggie burgers, smoothies, etc.)( www.bgood.com ).

Legal was somewhat disappointing. I'd had great seafood at other Legals in the past, but the problem may have been the venue I chose - the Copley Place location. I opted for the second story view, but the mall setting and the indifferent service just didn't get it done for us.

Wagamama has opened their first American location on the south sidee of Quincy Market. It was a good choice for us - inexpensive and light Asian noodle fare in the middle of a hot afternoon of siteseeing.

Pagliuca's, 14 Parmenter St. (just off the main North End thoroughfare of Hanover Street) was the family dining highlight - quintessential North End Italian with the right mix of boisterous atmosphere, accordion music, and large quantities of classic Southern Italian pasta dishes and wine. We were walk-in customers and waited maybe 20 minutes for a table. The hostess had promised wife and daughter a table for 5 right next to the large open window, but then gave it away at the last minute to some apparent locals who showed with last minute "reservations." She must have sensed wife and daugther's irritation (they were on the verge of walking out), because she placed us at a nice large table near the air conditioning (it was a warm evening) and had her staff lavish attention upon us. I think she may have even cut our bill or comped us drinks or appetizers because the tab at the end of the evening seemed very reasonable for what we had consumed. The family loved it and I would give it a high recommendation.

traveler100 - Jurys Hotel was excellent. A little pricey, but we had a very nicely furnished, quiet, clean room, a large nicely furnished bathroom, and the upstairs and downstairs bars were hopping in addtion to the very good Stanhope Grille restaurant downstairs (see above). Would definitely stay there again for pleasure or business.

Mom and daughter had a blast shopping and window shopping on Newbury Street while dad and sons drove to Dorchester Heights for a great view of the city and to see where Washington strategically placed his cannon to chase the British out of of Boston in 1776 (David McCullough has an absorbing account of this in his recent book of the same name.)

We then went to Fenway although, disappointingly, the Red Sox were not in town last weekend. Nevertheless, sons - baseball players themselves - gave the official tour of the ballpark the ultimate adolescent compliment - "completely awesome."

MRand

This trip has its genesis only a couple of weeks ago when I arranged a business meeting in Boston. My trip coincided with a few down days in sons’ busy summer schedules. Middle son, who had done an art project on Edward Hopper this year, was dying to see the large Hopper exhibition that kicked off in May at the Museum of Fine Arts, and as neither son had been to Boston before, they jumped at the chance to accompany dad on “guys trip.” Easy enough for them, because they share their dad’s passion for history and sports, but soon however, wife/mom was saying she wanted to go. Then daughter-returned-from-freshman-year-at-college astonished and delighted us all by saying she was up for the trip too, and would ask for two days off from work to go with us.

I selected Jurys Hotel because of the excellent reviews it has received from TripAdvisor and Zagat’s, and booked it through Expedia. As explained above, we were not disappointed.

SATURDAY

Newport - Flying into Providence on a beautifully blue afternoon, we were intrigued by the sight of hundreds of sailboats anchored in Narragansett Bay, as if at the starting line of a regatta. We picked up our Hertz rental car, intending to drive straight to Boston. My wife, however, has a friend who had grown up in Newport, Rhode Island, and told her incessantly through the years what a special place it was. Seeing the poster-sized ads for Newport in the airport stoked my wife's interest and she asked whether we had time to detour there. It certainly looked doable on the map so we headed south on the highway instead of north. Suddenly, jets from the Navy’s Blue Angels flight demonstration team swooped low several times over us on the highway, revealing the reason for the sailboat swarm. The scene of the jets flying high in formation over the bay as we drove over the bridges to Newport was amazing.

As I anticipated, downtown Newport was very crowded on a summer Saturday afernoon. Yet I was surprised that the traffic eased after we left the town center proper and began to drive past the magnificent Gilded Age mansions on Broadway Avenue. ( tickets.newportmansions.org ) My teenagers, and especially my middle son who had just studied this era in his American history class, were surprisingly interested. We decided on the spur of the moment to tour The Breakers, perhaps the most astounding Newport estate and built by the Vanderbilt family in the 1890s. Admission was expensive (about $60 for the five of us) as we caught the last hour-long tour of the day, but the local elderly gentleman who was our guide was concise and informative. Everyone was glad we made the detour to Newport. The drive from Newport to Boston took a little over an hour.

SUNDAY

Edward Hopper Exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts - We began the day with our 10:00 a.m. reservations for the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. Hopper fans will not be disappointed by this showing: ( www.mfa.org/hopper ) It is a large exhibit and includes most of his major works (though three of my favorites, “Railroad Sunset,” “Gas,” and “Rooms by the Sea” weren’t there). But I also think this is an excellent exhibit for teenagers, or those who don’t generally like art exhibits. If you’re only going to go to an art museum once this year, this wouldn’t be a bad choice. There’s none of the twentieth century abstractionism that drives so many people away from modern art in evidence here. Hopper was a realist whose art features brilliant colors and familiar settings (lighthouses, city scenes, neighborhoods) but often presented in a new — and sometimes strange yet compelling — light. All five of us thoroughly enjoyed this.

MRand

SUNDAY (cont'd)

Getting around Boston – We took the T from Jurys to and from the Museum of Fine Arts. We debated whether to buy single tickets for $2 per one-way trip for each family member, or a week T pass for $15 per person. I thought we might take up to seven trips apiece on the T, so the week pass seemed a good deal, especially to avoid the hassle of having to purchase a ticket each time we rode the trains. In retrospect, it probably made sense, as I took eight trips and my sons took seven each, although wife and daughter only ended up taking five T trips each. After lunch at b. good’s (see above), I retrieved the rental car from the valet at Jurys for our short excursion to Dorchester Heights in South Boston. (Overnight car storage at Jurys was a ridiculous $38, which I reluctantly paid because the nearby Hertz location on Park Plaza was closed by the time we arrived in Boston Saturday night.)

Of course for me and many others, Boston is all about the history too. However, Dorchester Heights is one site I’ve never visited in many trips to Boston. This is the high ridge from which, in 1776, newly appointed General George Washington forced the British out of Boston. He had formed a close friendship with Boston bookseller Henry Knox, who had read vast amounts on military history and artillery. Washington had Knox, in the dead of winter, lead a team which dragged large artillery pieces from Fort Ticonderoga in New York, which had been captured from the British a few months earlier by Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys (and is well worth a visit too), about 200 miles southeast to Boston. Once those artillery pieces were placed on Dorchester Heights and pointed towards Boston city to the north, the British has little choice but to evacuate, giving Washington and the colonies their first major victory over the British in the Revolution.

Today the Heights are located in an older residential neighborhood, and the National Park Service maintains a small park there. The views of the Boston skyline to the north and Dorchester Bay and the hills to the south are spectacular. There is a white masonry tower on the top of the Heights commemorating the patriots’ victory ( www.nps.gov/archive/bost/Dorchester_Heights.htm ), but it was closed when we were there. We returned to Boston and turned in the rental car at the Hertz mid-city location on Park Plaza.

Newbury Street – While the guys diverted to Dorchester, wife and daughter shopped and got coffee on Newbury Street. Their favorite stop was the H&M clothing store at 100 Newbury Street.

Fenway Park – Sadly, the Red Sox weren’t in town this weekend. Although I didn’t grow up anywhere close to the Northeast, I became a Sox fan for a few years as a kid after the ’67 World Series, which the great Carl Yastrzemski, Jim Lonborg, and company lost to the St. Louis Cardinals their incredible pitcher Bob Gibson in seven close games. Most baseball game including the World Series were played in the afternoon then, and I remember I could hardly wait to get out of school to catch the series games on a grainy black and white TV.

Once again, we caught the last tour of the day ($36) for the three of us that began at 4 p.m.
( boston.redsox.mlb.com/bos/ballpark/tour.jsp ). The guys were reticent about taking a “tour” of the ballpark when no game was going on, but after sitting in the various luxury seats, hearing stories of Red Sox legends and their rivalry with the Yankees, and seeing the famed Green Monster wall in left field, they thought the visit was well worth it. They were amazed by a stadium that appears from the street as a modest two story brick structure plopped down in the middle of an older neighborhood, rather than an island in a vast parking lot like most modern stadiums. I enjoyed seeing the wall plaques profiling the famous Red Sox through the years, and was particularly moved by the one for Tony Conigliaro, the promising young outfielder whose career with the Red Sox was cut short in 1967 when while batting his cheek bone was shattered and vision permanently impaired by a fastball.

That evening we had a mediocre dinner at the Legal Sea Foods at the Copley Place location (see review above), but overall a very good day.

MRand

MONDAY

Freedom Trail - I had a very early business meeting and then an excellent breakfast at the Stanhope Grille while the family slept in. After everyone got moving, we walked through the Public Garden and Boston Common to the Massachusetts state house. My youngest wanted to see the large Civil War monument to the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of black soldiers who were celebrated in the movie “Glory” that he loves: ( www.54thmass.org ) The monument is across the street from the capitol building and is a good place to start the Freedom Trail.

The Trail itself is of course well know and described in detail in some good web sites on which you can take virtual tours of the stops on the trail. See for example
www.thefreedomtrail.org/visitor/visitor.html and http://www.nps.gov/archive/bost/freedom_trail.htm
The trail is only about 3 miles long, but because it winds mostly over concrete and asphalt, it can get quite hot, as it did even on this mild early summer day. We broke the trail up by stopping for a light lunch at the new Wagamama (see above) at Faneuil Hall, but even my older crew was beginning to tire as we crossed over Charlestown Bridge to see the U.S. Constitution (Old Ironsides), which we found was closed on Mondays anyway. A cool hour respite in the Constitution’s museum revived us, but we decided to pass on Bunker Hill (which I had seen before), and recrossed the bridge to downtown Boston where we boarded the T Green Line at North Station to head back to Arlington station and our hotel.

I would advise any families with younger teenagers or children who want to walk the whole trail during hot days to strongly consider doing it over two half days rather than one whole day, or pick out a few highlights to see in a shorter day. The Old Granary Burial Ground (burial site for Paul Revere and Samuel Adams among other early patriots), Paul Revere’s Home, and the Old North Church (where the lanterns were hung to warn the rebels that the British were marching on Lexington and Concord) were my family’s favorite stops, and I would add Old Ironsides to that list based on a previous visit.

After showers and a pleasant happy hour in the lobby floor bar at Jurys, we took the T Green Line back to the Haymarket station for our fantastic dinner at Pagliuca’s at 14 Parmenter Street (just off Hanover Street) in the North End (see review above). However, there are many other options in the North End along Hanover Street and its immediate side streets like Parmenter. A long line in front of Giacomo’s, 355 Hanover, suggested that restaurant will be worth investigating on our next visit.

MRand

TUESDAY

Lexington, Walden Pond, and Concord - After renting a Hertz car at the center city Park Plaza location and taking a quick spin around Harvard at our daughter and sons’ request, we headed out Massachusetts Avenue to the northwest through the suburbs of Arlington and Lexington, essentially paralleling the route of Paul Revere’s Ride in April 1775 to warn Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and others of the approaching British soldiers. After a brief stop at Lexington Green, the site where the British troops first fired on the Minutemen, we moved on to Walden Pond, another trip highlight.

No summer trip with our family is complete unless we can find a place — beach, river, or old swimming hole — to swim. Of course we knew of Walden Pond and Henry Thoreau’s residence in his small cabin there in the 1840s, but I did not realize until I checked on the internet while we were in Boston that the pond is now a Massachusetts state preserve. It is still largely pristine, and a great place to swim in the summer: http://www.mass.gov/dcr/parks/northeast/wldn.htm

The parking lot is reported to fill early in the summer, but when we arrived shortly after 10:30 there were still plenty of parking spaces. The pond (we’d call it a small lake where I’m from) is a beautiful body of water surrounded by evergreens. There are facilities for changing either in the parking lot restrooms or after a short work across the two lane road and down a slope to the water’s edge. The short walk led to a sand swmming beach where a lot of young parents and their children were splashing, but we set up a little farther down the lakeside. The clear cool water and peaceful setting was immensely refreshing on a summer’s day on which the temperature would reach the low 90s.

We wrapped up our trip with a short drive into Concord to see the Minuteman statue and the Old North Bridge, where the Minutemen confronted the British troops and exchanged fire with them, igniting the Revolution. The Bridge is in another rural, peaceful setting that belies the momentous events that were set in motion there. I would have spent more time in the park
but the rest of the family was ready for lunch and as it was now one o’clock, we needed to hit the road for our departing flight from Providence at 5:00 p.m. While my family shares my interest in history, they understandably like it in smaller doses than I. However, on the way to Providence, after seeing the sites on the Freedom Trail and Lexington and Concord, my wife and kids remarked that for the first time, they really understood what had happened in Boston in 1775-76. That alone made the this thoroughly enjoyable short trip worth it for me.

cw

Hi MRand,

Thanks for writing such a good, detailed report. Glad you went to Dorchester Heights. Few people go there, including Bostonians.

I always learn things when I read reports on the places I know. Sounds as though you had a great trip, and you did see a lot.

CW

TahitiTams

Outstanding Trip Report!
I am so glad you liked Jurys Hotel..
It was between Jurys and Langham hotel for me in September but chose the Westin Waterfront for the killer deal I got on Expedia..(they gave me over $400 in travel coupons)
Yankees will be in town when I am there and hoping to score some tickets..its a longshot but I'll try.
So you advise not to go to Legal Seafoods at Copley?
Thanks again MRand for your wonderful report!

MRand

TahitiTams - I first off have to thank you for your fantastic tips about La Jolla that made a similarly short vacation there the highlight of our summer last year: http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...me=MRand&fid=2
Can feel the sea breeze at Windansea and taste the breakfast at Harry's as I'm sitting here.

I would not recommend the Legal Sea Foods at Copley Place; however, on previous business trips to Boston, I have had very good meals at one or more other locations in the city that I can't now remember, so I recommend that you scout one of those out before abadoning Legal in its entirety. It really has been a local institution.