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somewhere in Connecticut.
anyone know why the signs have
those teeth on the edges? |
Tuesday morning, we slept in (are you seeing a pattern? This is a good vacation pattern) and then took a quick walk to Starbucks for breakfast. Could we have found a little local place? Sure. Did we? Nope. Because this was easy and walkable and everyone was happy. Grabbed one last fun photo with the Empire State Building, loaded up the car, took one last spin through the fancy revolving door, and onward towards Boston. Traffic was a bear for a few blocks. Then we got on the FDR parkway (FDR drive?) and all was well. We moseyed through Connecticut and then on the Massachusetts Turnpike, and then into Boston. Final destination: The Verb Hotel. This was a fairly easy leg. We arrived in Boston early in the afternoon.
The Verb is Fenway Park's next door neighbor. We could see the brick wall out our window. It's a retro style little hotel and the girls were fascinated by the record player in our room. We picked out a few albums from the lobby and gave it a whirl. Once they understood how it worked, they had a blast changing the tunes. The Beatles (I don't recall which album) and a Disney greatest hits were their favorites. It was a gorgeous day in Boston so we went for a leisurely walk to meet some friends for dinner. We hit Copley Square and a few other sights on the way. Our dinner destination was a restaurant called Picco.
This was by far the most anticipated moment of the trip for the girls. They had seen an episode of some show on the Food Network in which they featured the top 5 chocolatiest desserts in America. I think they saw it over a snow day or winter weekend. Anyway, they begged me to check out and see if the Boston restaurant was a place we could go. Thank you, Google ... it looked like a little mom and pop pizza joint, and walkable from our hotel. So we decided to add this to our itinerary. We have some Nats friends who live in Boston and we invited Mr. Dan and Mr. Steve to join us for the Picco adventure. Reminder, this dinner was all about dessert. We trekked down to the restaurant and put our name on the wait list. (Not a long wait. Maybe 30 minutes on a Tuesday evening.) We got there a little earlier than the planned meetup, so this worked well. The 3 of us sat down on the sidewalk with our MadLibs book and a pencil and settled in to wait. Mr. Dan arrived soon after, and joined in the MadLibs fun. (Side note, this has yielded many post spring break fun tweets with fill in the <PLURAL NOUN> and lots of <ADJECTIVE> laughing. I think I need a whole post about MadLibs but I will put a few pages here in the photos.) Mr. Steve was the last to arrive and he, too, hopped into the MadLibs adventure. When our table was ready, we headed inside and settled in with menus. The girls wanted to order something large, but I reminded them of dessert, and they quickly changed the plan. We ordered a pizza to share, and Mr. Dan and Mr. Steve each ordered an individual pizza. After we finished pizzas (they were tasty!) it was time for dessert. The LONG ANTICIPATED DESSERT. We got dessert menus and spied out the "thing" of interest. It was some kind of homemade chocolate chip brownie square, that came with your choice of ice cream flavor plus whipped cream and chocolate sauce on top. We ordered two of these to share (different ice cream flavors) and then Mr. Steve also tried a beer float. (Which was also tasty for the adults to share). 2 sundaes, 5 spoons. There was nothing left. Better than anticipated and there were high expectations to be met.
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| my turn at MadLibs |
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| the spoons |
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| before |
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| after |
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| the gang |
After we ordered dessert, while we were waiting for the sundaes to be assembled, Mr. Dan breathed a huge sigh of relief and then shared a story with us. We were seated across the table from each other. Turns out, the wall behind me and the girls had some menu items listed on a chalkboard. Including what appeared to be the whole dessert menu. Mr. Dan knew that we'd been looking for this special dessert and nothing on the dessert menu on the wall looked even remotely like something that would warrant a feature on the Food Network. He spent the entire meal dreading the moment we would get to the dessert menu and realize there wasn't anything special available at all. He said he was contemplating how he could throw some money on the table for dinner and run out of the restaurant before the inevitable meltdown arrived :-) Thankfully, the printed dessert menu had the special feature and the mad dash was avoided. We all got a good laugh out of that. Dan and Steve drove us back to our hotel and we settled in for the night.
Our Fenway view room provided entertainment far into the evening. We tuned into the Red Sox game on the TV and then muted the sound. Since the TV is about 19 seconds delayed, we could hear a big cheer and then know when to look up and watch the play go down on our screen. The girls started to get the hang of hearing a home run / good hit crowd cheer as compared to a long fly ball crowd cheer. My favorite part was the singing of Sweet Caroline in the 8th inning. You could hear the whole ballpark singing along and I was happy to contribute my voice in the room. After the last out, we turned the lights out as Wednesday was going to be an early-ish day.
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| our evening view |
Wednesday we woke up to another beautiful day. A little chillier than Tuesday, but still sunny and pleasant for early April. We took a tour of Fenway Park and heard a lot about the history of the ballpark and some interesting trivia. The girls filed away a lot of fun facts to pull out when watching the game Wednesday night. S's favorite part of the tour was sitting in the original wooden seats. A's favorite part was sitting atop the Green Monster. After the tour, we stopped in the team store to get some postcards to mail to friends back home and then we headed out for lunch. The plan was to grab lunch and then walk down to take a Duckboat tour. We passed an ice cream shop that was next to a burger place. The girls asked for ice cream. I made them a deal that we would eat at the burger place and then get ice cream before we walked on to the Duckboat. The sky was starting to cloud over, but for the moment it was still dry. The girls agreed to the plan ... and it worked. Until we saw the "Freaky Frappes" on the menu. In this case, Frappe was a fancy name for a milkshake. The girls ordered milkshakes, and when they arrived, the ice cream plan was abandoned. I have NEVER seen a milkshake like this in all my life. The top of the glass was rolled in cake icing with sprinkles. They were huge and sugary and delicious. The girls did manage to eat a little actual lunch as well, and then off we continued to the Duckboat. Just as we got on the duck, it started to sprinkle. Not to worry - we pulled down the windows and enjoyed the tour of the city. This was a good way to get a little history and see a few things and still have a quiet afternoon after the ride. Our tour guide was fun and the girls learned a lot. We all loved the conversion into a boat and our journey along the river. When we got back at the end of the ride, we took a cab back to the hotel because of the rain. We nestled in at the hotel for a nap. By the time we were ready to go to the Red Sox game, the rain had passed and it turned out to be a great, if cold, night for baseball.
We met up with a few friends at the game: Doug, Allan, and Allan's son K. The 6 of us enjoyed the game, despite the Red Sox loss. The girls enjoyed the little side stories that we had learned during the tour. The favorite was watching the scoreboard. If you don't know, Fenway Park has a manually operated scoreboard at the bottom of the Green Monster. There's the in-game section (managed by person A), the American League out-of-town scoreboard (managed by person B) and the National League out-of-town scoreboard (managed by person C). The first 2 segments are handled from within the Green Monster. But when they added the seats on top, the concrete support column came down and blocked the internal access to the National League board. So person C has to use a stepladder (for the top rows) and has 2 minutes and 20 seconds in between each half inning to run out of the Green monster, change all the scores, and get back inside. The girls watched this with great amusement and amazement. He made a few errors that night and we watched the Braves score go backwards (wouldn't it be nice if that happened in real life. LOL) a couple of times when he placed the wrong game score on that game. We all sang along to Sweet Caroline and my kiddos thought I was nuts. (They are not necessarily wrong).
After the end of the game, we walked back to our room across the street, said farewell to our friends, and snuggled in for one more night.
Day 4 mileage: depart NYC at mile 300, arrive in Boston mile 517. Day 5 mileage: zero. All on foot, duckboat, or taxi.
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| Fenway during the tour |
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| all of us on top of the Green Monster |
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| freaky frappes |
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| feets with Tessie |
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| with Tessie, in our David Price shirts |
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| see the scoreboard guy? |
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| with Allan and K |
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| with Doug |
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| MadLibs |
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| MadLibs 2 |
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| our stamp! |
