Today was the most ambitious sight seeing day of our trip… downtown Boston. More specifically, we planned to walk the entire 5-mile (online sources say it’s 2.5, but my step counter said otherwise) Freedom Trail that winds through the city. There is a red brick line that traverses the city, beginning at Boston Common, which takes you past many of the historic sites located throughout the city. 
It is a self-guided tour; trail maps and information are available around town, online, or even in app form, so there’s no excuse not to know what you are looking at. There are brass disks along the red line that alert you when you need to look at your guide to see something specific. The rest of the time, you can just follow the line and enjoy strolling through a vibrant city, no GPS required.
BOSTON COMMON
We parked in the garage under Boston Common, a budgeted expense. It was the most convenient place to park to start the trail. Plan to start early because if you want to complete the trail it will likely take you all day. Boston Common is a America’s oldest park, established in 1634, that was once used as a grazing area for residents’ livestock. The 44-acre park includes a lake with beautiful swan boats and lots of fun activities throughout the year.
MASSACH
USETTS STATE HOUSE
The trail begins by taking us through the park and up to the current Massachusetts State House, built in 1798. The sparkling gold dome is gilt in 23k gold and can be seen from locations throughout Boston, capping off a beautiful, impressive building. It sits on the site where John Hancock once lived. T
he State House is available for tours on weekdays, and they are free, but we opted to save that for something we might do when we returned to the car, admired the exterior, and continued on.
PARK STREET CHURCH
We continue around the park for about a block before coming to the Park Street Church. That’s how the Freedom Trail works; sometimes you walk a few steps to get from one thing to the next and sometimes it’s quite a long stretch, so just be flexible and enjoy the journey. The church was built in 1809 and was the site of the first Sunday school in 1818. The iconic 217-foot-tall steeple used to be the first thing you would see when you approached Boston.
GRANERY BURYING GROUND
As we continue onward, we come to the Granery Burying Ground. Famous residents include Paul Revere, three signers of the Declaration of Independence and Mary (Mother) Goose. As interesting as cemeteries may be to some people, they aren’t particularly to us, so we didn’t take the time to wander among the graves, just observed from the sidewalk and moved along.
KING’S CHAPEL & KING’S HILL BURYING GROUND
With a congregation established in 1686, The quincy marble King’s Chapel building was built in 1754. Paul Revere recast their bell in 1816 and claimed it was, “the sweetest bell I ever made”. The same congregation still uses the church today. You can go inside for free, although they do request a donation, but the inside was jam packed today, so we decided to move along. As much as I may long to tour these structures endlessly inside and out, my fiancé really doesn’t enjoy that. There are key important places coming up that I rea
lly want to tour, so I’m choosing to wait for those. If we have time at the end of the day, we can always come back to some of these other spots of interest. There is a graveyard, King’s Hill Burying Ground, attached to the church that seems to entice visitors as well. They seem pretty proud of their residents, but again, we aren’t really big on cemeteries so… moving on.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN STATUE & BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL
Founded in 1935, The Boston Latin School was the oldest school in the US (then known as the colonies) and is still in operation today. The original building no longer stands and the school has moved to another location, but there is a lovely sidewalk hopscotch mosaic depicting the site. There is also a statue of one of it’s more famous students, Benjamin Franklin. Other well-known alumni include Samuel Adams, John Hancock and John Adams.
One of my favorite parts of the location was the Starbucks adjacent to the site. You may have noticed I’m a bit of a coffee nut and I hadn’t had my morning brew yet. Time for a pit stop.
OLD CORNER BOOKSTORE
Coffee in hand, we continue along the red brick road until we come to the famous 
Chipotle… I mean, the Old Corner Bookstore. The brick structure, constructed in 1712, is one of Boston’s oldest surviving buildings. Continuously used as a commercial site, at one point in it’s history the building was the headquarters for a famous publishing house and attracted a collection of famous authors like Nathaniel Hawthorn, Harriet Beecher-Stowe, Charles Dickens and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Literature, poetry and politics were among the subjects discussed within the upper rooms.
OLD SOUTH MEETING HOUSE
If you pivot your gaze from the Old Corner Bookstore, you’ll see a brick church. This is the Old South Meeting House. This building, built in 1729, was a meeting location for the Sons of Liberty. On December 16, 1773 they met here and later dumped tea in the Boston Harbor… better known as The Boston Tea Party. Paul Revere also cast the bell in this tower in 1801. There are 46 remaining Paul Revere bells, many located somewhere in the Boston Area. There is an admission fee to go inside, so again, we tabled that as a possibility for later and walked on.
OLD STATE HOUSE
After walking a few blocks, you come around the back of the Old State House. As soon as I stopped to take a picture, several people stopped and told me, “it looks much better from the front”. They were right.
The front façade of the 1713 building is decorated with statues of both a lion and a unicorn. The Old State House was the epicenter of civic debate in colonial Boston and the Declaration of Independence was first read from the balcony in 1776, a tradition they still continue every year. The original lion and unicorn were destroyed after the first reading; a tradition that doesn’t happen any more.
SITE OF BOSTON MASSACRE
Right out front of the Old State House is a marker for the site of the Boston Massacre, which took place March 5, 1770. On this date a group of men were harassing the British soldier guarding the Custom Hou
se 9remember from our day in Salem (that would be where goods were kept that came into port). Other soldiers came to his aid and the crowd of 60+ men grew restless and started throwing snowballs, rocks and other objects at the soldiers. One of the objects hit a soldier in such a way that it discharged his weapon, firing into the crowd. The other soldiers quickly fired into the crowd as well, ultimately killing a total of 5 men, depicted by the 5-pointed star in the center of the marker. The incident was used a propaganda to fuel the patriots’ cause.
FANEUIL HALL
I visited Boston once before with my folks when I was a teenager and I absolutely love 
Faneuil Hall. It is a beautiful building. Unfortunately, the outside is having some restoration work done and is completely covered in blue sheeting. The site is known for the protests and meetings that were held there prior to the revolution. At this point it really seems that patriots were meeting all over town and arguing to whomever would listen. The National Parks Service maintains the building now, so we added a few more stamps to our passport book. Be sure to go upstairs to the meeting hall and then even further upstairs to the museum. It’s all free, so get in there and poke around. There are a few familiar paintings of George Washington in the building, so make a point to see them as well.
QUINCY MARKET & REPLICA CHEERS BAR
After Faneuil Hall, we veered off the red line for a bit and took in the fun and excitement that is Quincy Market, also Known as Faneuil Hall Marketplace. Quincy market is located just behind Faneuil Hall and is a bustling and busy indoor/outdoor neighborhood market. There are restaurants, stores and little stalls. The North and South hall buildings on either side continue the market-feel.
Our purpose in visiting the market was to see the replica Cheers Bar they’ve recently added. My fiance and I are both fans of the old tv show. We sat in Norm and Cliff’s chairs and had a beer… well, my fiancé had a b
eer and I had a water. The replica bar is fun for fans of the show and also really touristy. Know that you are going to pay top dollar for your drinks here.
HARD ROCK CAFE BOSTON
Since we were all ready in full tourist mode after the Cheers Bar, we stayed off the red line long enough to have lunch at the Hard Rock Café in Boston, across the street from the North Hall. This is probably one of my favorite Hard Rock Cafes that I’ve visited. Their wall of cymbals was really stunning. After fueling up, we were ready to make our was back to the Freedom Trail and continue our walk through history. We only veered off by about a block, so it wasn’t hard to pick back up.
PAUL REVERE HOUSE
Its a bit of a walk before you get to the House of Paul Revere. It’s a cute, modest, little black house built in 1680 and reminded us of the historic homes we saw a coupe days
ago in Salem. You can visit the inside, for a fee, but we didn’t stop. The house currently occupies a spot on the edge of Boston’s Little Italy, which is a great neighborhood to stroll through, and not just because of the amazing smells coming out of every building. We saw a lot of people carrying little white pastry boxes with blue writing from Mike’s Pastry. I have since learned that this is THE place to get cannoli. I wish I would have known before our trip because I would definitely have planned a stop. Guess you’ll have to go and eat an extra one for me.
OLD NORTH CHURCH & PAUL REVERE STATUE
After a wonderful walk through the scents of Little Italy, we
came to one of the most photographed things in Boston, the statue of Paul Revere. It is well place, at the end of a public park (prado), with the Old North Church steeple rising above it in the distance. I’m sure you remember the story from your history books, or from my Minute Man NP blog post yesterday. On the evening of April 18, 1775 the British soldiers left Boston to visit Concord to look for weapons and military supplies. There were two routes they could have taken; the longer route which included a land crossing or the shorter route ove
r sea. A signal was planned ahead of time to alert the patriots as to how the British were coming, “one if by land, two if by sea”. They chose the sea route and Paul Revere arranged for two lanterns to be hung in the tower of the Old North Church (build in 1723 and the oldest church building in Boston) before mounting his horse and alerting the countryside that, “the regulars are out”. Again, read my post from our visit to Concord if that wording seems off to you. The church used to be free to enter, but the upkeep required from so many tourist visits required them to start charging admission.
COPP’S HILL BURYING GROUND
Up the hill from the church is the third and final cemetery on the Freedom Trail, the Copp’s Hill Burying Ground. There are some notable residents, including the man who actually hung the lanterns in the Old North Church tower. Robert Newman is a name our history books never mention. I always believed it Paul Revere who hung the lanterns, but learned on this trip that wasn’t the case. He had other tasks that night and left the lantern display in the hands of Robert Newman.
USS CONSTITUTION, USS CASSIN YOUNG & CHARLESTOWN NAVAL YARD
From the burying ground it is a bit of hike across the river to get to the Charlestown Naval Yard and home of the oldest ship in the US Navy, the 1797 USS Constitution. The wooden ship was nicknamed “old Ironsides” after never losing a battle in the war of 1812 and changing the was the US Navy strategized during battle. The ship was so strong that cannon balls would bounce off it and that allowed the crew to save their ammunition until they got much closer and were able to cause significantly more damage to enemy ships. It is free to board and tour the ship, but you will need a valid ID and will go through security, so leave and pocket knives or other potential weapons at home that day.
The USS Cassin Young sits in striking opposition to the USS Constitution. This grey, all-metal beast fought in World War II. It was really cool to see the difference between these two vessels that fought a little over 100 years apart. And yet in many ways they are the same. Aside from the materials used, technology is the main difference between the two vessels. The USS Cassin Young boasts state of the art typewriters, telegraphs and radios… all the modern conveniences of it’s time. Both of these ships seem outdated by today’s standards and seeing them side-by-side is a great reminder of that.
The museum charges a fee and it was getting late into the afternoon, so we didn’t go in, but they do have a passport book stamp at the entrance, which we added to our book.
BUNKER HILL MONUMENT
After leaving the ship yard, we make our way to the final stop on the Freedom Trail, the Bunker Hill Monument, which appropriately sits atop Bunker Hill. The monument was added to the hill in 1843 and bears a striking resemblance to the Washington Monument in Washington D.C. There is a museum located across the street where you can get a pass to climb the 294 steps to the top. My poor knees weren’t about to do that, so we simply viewed it from the bottom. We did visit the museum to add to our passport stamps though.
So what is the significance of Bunker Hill? After the defeat of the British soldiers on their retreat from Concord, militia men from all over began to assemble in the area and a battle ensued on June 17, 1775. The colonists learned the British were planning to secure the local hills in an effort to control the harbor and secretly took up places on Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill in the night. The colonists won the first two battles for the hills, but ultimately had to retreat when they ran out of ammunition during the third battle. While the British technically won the battle, they lost more lives than the militia men and it was proven that the undisciplined patriot forces were not going to be quite so easy to defeat. This changed the way the British strategized in future battles and may have helped the colonists ultimately win the war.
BULFINCH PUB (EXTERIOR USED FOR CHEERS TV SHOW)
By the time we finished at Bunker Hill, we had walked 5 miles. The Freedom Trail may
be 2.5 miles as the crow flies, but plan to do a lot more walking than that if you want to see anything. My knees had hit their limit and were screaming in pain, and I desperately wanted to just take an Uber back to Beacon Hill, but we decided to walk. The walk wasn’t terrible and eventually we ended up across the street from Boston Common at the old Bulfinch Pub. They used the exterior of this location as the exterior of Cheers Bar in the tv series. I usually try to avoid people in my photos, especially close up, but here it was entirely unavoidable. “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name,” but I didn’t know any of the people in these photos. The area was crowded with tourists, but a cool piece of our television viewing past and we wanted to see it. 
We thought about eating dinner in the replica bar they’ve constructed upstairs (in what would have been Melville’s), but there want anywhere to sit. Instead we wandered into the Beacon Hill neighborhood and found a quaint little restaurant (read: expensive) for dinner. After dinner it was back to the car and goodbye to Boston. We headed back to our hotel for one last night before heading home.
AN IMPORTANT NOTE
Today was a lot of walking for my bad knees. According to my Apple Watch, I hit 20,700 steps (about 8-1/2 miles) today. If you have any type of mobility issues, consider investing in the Trolley Tour. Much like the tour in Salem, it allows you to get off and on wherever you would like throughout the day.
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Turns out Jean Bonnet Tavern was a charming historic tavern and had amazing food. It is also a bed & breakfast, for anyone who might be looking for that sort of thing in the Bedford, PA area. Read a full review of our dining experience.
so we felt rushed through our lunch and may have pressed our server to hurry a lot more than normal.
with nicely spiced chicken and veggies with just enough cheese to hold things together. I’m used to people overdoing the cheese in quesadillas, so this was a refreshing change and I really enjoyed my meal. The refried beans and rice it was served with were typical Mexican restaurant fare, but good. I was so hungry after walking all day that I forgot to take a picture of my food until I was halfway through, so I had to get a little creative.
ay remember from an earlier post. He already has one from his last visit to Niagara Falls, but we visited the 
Live The Bucket 