Now here we are in Boston, our last stop on our journey around the world. Our hotel is in the heart of Old Boston, across from Boston Common and the Old Granary Burying Ground (in which there are monuments to three of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, though whether they are actually buried there is apparently not entirely certain)!
We arrived late in the afternoon so, rather than rushing to see something which would no doubt be about to close anyway, we had a free drink in the hotel lounge (and enjoyed “the rapturous, wild, and ineffable pleasure of drinking at somebody else's expense”, which. H.S. Leigh described) before heading to Beacon Hill’s upmarket and stylish Charles Street for dinner.The next morning we hit the Freedom Trail, an official walk (indicated by a row of red cobbles on the pavements and across roads) which takes in the historic sights which played their part in Boston’s revolutionary past. The most interesting part was the first building we came across; the grand Old State House with its small but detailed museum. After that we headed to the Custom House tower which, as well as being an interesting piece of architecture from the mid 1800s, has a very good panoramic view over the city from its quiet observation deck (quiet because it is badly signposted and not advertised at all since, despite being open to the public, it actually sits atop the hotel which is now housed in the building).
Having spied it from above, we next visited Quincy market where we stumbled upon the opening ceremony for the annual Harborfest, complete with a drum and fife band in period costume playing old American tunes… which put us in the mood for some good old New England clam chowder in one of the inns of Blackstone Block – the city’s only remaining area of 17th century lanes, and the home of the oyster restaurant which was the haunt of JFK.On our walk to the imposing gold-domed Massachusetts State House we passed by a small Holocaust Memorial – not on any of the maps but which was by far the most moving we’ve seen anywhere – as well as the modernist concrete New City Hall and Center Plaza, a building so long but low it has been dubbed the ‘skyscraper laid sideways’.
The State House itself was a gorgeous marble building, but more amazing was that there was no separation between the parts open to the public and the parts which were the working legislature, so we got a good feel of American government at work. 
Finally, we visited the Boston Athenæum, one of the country’s leading public libraries and home to the personal collection that once belonged to George Washington!Yesterday, we took a trip out to Harvard University. Before meeting a Bostonian friend of ours for lunch, we took the unofficial but informative and amusing, student-led tour called Hahvahd Tours, poking gentle fun at the local accent and leading to a whole host of souvenirs to compete with the official Harvard ones! Unfortunately that’s all we had time to do since our luck with the weather (which has been forecast-defyingly good throughout our whole holiday so far) finally changed… and it has been raining ever since. It is our last day today (we leave tomorrow morning) and hopefully we’ll manage to get a couple of dry hours to see one or two more things before our epic journey comes to its conclusion.
Addendum: As it turns out, our luck hadn’t quite left us – we got enough dry spells between showers of torrential rain to visit the Kings Chapel church and the Old South Meeting House (sometime puritan church-building, bastion of American free speech, debating chamber of the leading American revolutionaries and abolitionists, and centrepiece of Boston’s colonial history).
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