Think I’ll Move to Boston…

I didn’t have a chance to pick up Harry Potter on Saturday, so when I saw it at one of the airport newsstands at 4:50 a.m. yesterday morning as we walked to our gate for our very early flight, I stopped and purchased a copy at full price. Ten minutes later, the airport Borders opened offering the same book at 40% off. Borders proceeded to mock me again in the Cincinnati airport. Who knew that the airport store would open at 5 a.m.? Not me.
I read 285 pages yesterday, between bouts of napping. After the 3 hours of sleep we got before heading to the airport, once we got home I slept from 1:30 to 5:30. I took a nap that was longer than my previous night’s sleep! Though funny, I worried that the nap was too long and I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep last night. Silly. I crashed again at 11:30 p.m. The book is good so far, but I still don’t have a clue how it’s going to end. More questions than answers so far.
The Harry Potter mania is amazing to me, not because of the particular characters or subject, but simply because the mania is about a book. Has this ever happened in my lifetime? Such anticipation, such excitement, parties everywhere? It’s happened for movies, for technology (iPhone anyone?), for sporting events. But as I passed through the airports yesterday, I spotted the thick book and orange cover peeking out from under dozens of arms. On my flight from Boston to Cincinnati, four of six people in my row were reading it — only Jose and another man were immune. The guy next to me sat down, looked at my book, pointed at his, and just said “yeah, me too.” All this for a book? It seems unprecedented to me.
Our vacation in Boston was absolutely exhausting. Exhausting and awesome! We had a great time and walked all over that freaking city. There are very few fat people in Boston, probably because they can walk everyone. It’s no coincidence that Houston is regularly named the fattest city in America; you don’t want to go outside in the heat, and even if you wanted to, you can’t walk anywhere. Houston is a city designed for vehicle travel alone. Most places don’t even have sidewalks.
But Boston is, of course, incredibly walkable. We walked all over Boston Common, the Public Garden, and Newbury Street on Thursday, we walked the entire Freedom Trail on Friday with another lap of Newbury and across the Mass Ave bridge, and on Saturday we walked from Fenway back to Cambridge across the bridge again. In four days, I estimate we probably walked about 30 miles.
I’ll be posting more photos as I have time, but for now I’ll share the batch of “look at us” shots.
On Saturday, we took a whale-watching tour from the New England Aquarium. It was Jose’s idea, and it was awesome! After traveling about 20 miles off-shore, we came across a trio of humpback whales that seemed just as interested in us as we were in them. They came right up to the boat and we got some great views. Here I am doing my standard “arms in the air” thing on the front of the high-speed catamaran, as well as both of us on the boat.

After the whale-watching tour, we had just enough time to grab lunch before heading to Fenway Park for the Red Sox-White Sox game. The Red Sox won big, 11-2, so it was a lot of fun despite the guys behind us that couldn’t hold onto their beers. Seriously, when you’re paying $7 for a beer, you think you’d be able to avoid spilling it! Oh well, it’s part of the Fenway experience I suppose.

On our walk home, we stopped along the Massachusetts Avenue bridge to enjoy the view of the skyline at dusk. It was very pretty, so we asked a passing man to take our photo. I told him that we wanted the skyline in the background, but apparently this was too difficult for him, and so our photo looked like this.

Some people just cannot take a photo! We waited for a bit until another man passed by, and asked him to take a photo for us. Again, the photo was crap. What gives? Finally a third man passed by, and he had a digital SLR. I decided to go with the assumption that a guy with a nice camera should be able to take a decent picture, and fortunately I was right.