Leg 4/4 13th -18th Jan
Travel Information: Flight: Hawaiian Air 10/10 - Couldn't fault a thing!
Hotel: citizenM Boston, booking.com 11/10 - One of the best we've ever stayed in
Flight 2: Tap Air: 7/10 - Flight was decent, layover was crazy.
So, how do you get over the fact that you're leaving your dream destination? You randomly bid to fly first class of course! Now this isn't something I would usually do in normal circumstances BUT with it being our Honeymoon and me working every hour under the sun prior to it we thought, why the hell not?! I am so glad we did! What an experience it was, it was like it's own little destination. Now, I am petty easily pleased but I mean when you get greeted with a Mai Tai and excessive leg room how can you complain?
We also picked this flight because of it's 11 hour length and being the longest domestic
flight! (In the USA anyway, from reading there's a slightly longer one in Russia!) The food was amazing, the flight attendants were so lovely and I actually had a half decent sleep. I would 100% do this again but I would recommend doing it through the bidding options some flights have as you save a tonne of money.
We landed in Boston at 6am so we were mentally preparing ourselves for a long day ahead. So bare in mind, we had just travelling from 30oc Hawaii to 0oc Boston and Matt was still in his shorts for some reason, wandering around from the train station to find our hotel. Luckily this was about 30 seconds from the exit so Matt didn't get frost bite.
Arriving at the hotel at 7/8am there was no way on earth I though our room would be ready. I was prepared to drink a tonne of coffee and wander around the street like a zombie for the day. I was so wrong! We stayed at the Cityzen M Hotel (find out where) from the first glance of the inside of the entrance it looked super cool. Check in took the whole of 30 seconds and off we went to our room for our stay.. or so we thought.
The room itself was very cool, the bed was right next to the window with an amazing view of the city, after about 4 seconds of admiration, jet lag took over and we were out like a light.
This is where the fun starts, apparently in my sleep, if I hear the phone ringing I just hang it up. I'm really glad there wasn't a real emergency or anything... oops. After about the 3rd time of calling we got a note that there was a problem with our room and would we mind moving. No problem! So up came a lovely man to greet us with our new key and show us to our next room.
I actually thought you couldn't get any better than the first room but wow this was something else! 1. The room itself was huge and the view of the city was bigger and better.
2. They'd moved us so they could put us in a room they had decorated because it was our Honeymoon. It was so personal and lovely too! The pictures just don't do it justice! This justifying my 11/10 rating because we've never had anyone go over and above anywhere for us, surprised I didn't cry.
After this emotional roller coaster it was time to wake up and get out into the City. Matt had been to Boston before so we just spent the day getting to know the area and having a good old walk around the park. Boston has such an upbeat vibe to it too!
An early tea at a sports bar was needed as we wanted to make the most of the day in the morning. A key theme through this visit was definitely the food, my god it was all so good!
On day 2 and we found Quincy Market. Not going to lie, I could probably live in here. The smell of all the food was incredible. We decided that this was the perfect spot for me to try various foods for breakfast/lunch and for Matt to get some pizza. I had a good 10/20 min debate with myself eat day with what do try because it honestly just all looked amazing. I tried lobster for the first time and I even had a philly cheese-stake with chicken (due to beef tolerances) which I didn't even know existed. Click below to see all the delights :)
Once suitably full we started the Freedom Trail. I know very little about history and even less about American history. Matt is the opposite, so it was like having my own personal tour guide. I could spend my time writing about the history of the walk but in all honesty I couldn't recall too much about it. This is not taking away anything from the reason of the walk itself but there are definitely better websites that can do it more justice than me! :)
Even if you're not bothered about the history side of it for some reason then it's still something good to do! The walk itself is marked on the floor and is pretty fun following this around the city. It takes you to some impressive buildings and provides information about the attributes of each landmark. It took us about 1.5 hours moving time to do the whole thing.
What do you need after a long cold day of walking around? Pizza of course! Regina Pizzeria was so good! A pretty smallish place just off some of the main streets, with some amazingly good pizza. I opted for a regular and Matt a large, we ate everything between us and we were so full. I'll go out on a limb and say it's one of the best I've had.
Another day, another walk. We decided to go up the Prudential Center to the Sky view observation deck. It was a bit of a trek from the hotel but we enjoyed the walk over. Situated on the 50th floor, a short lift up to some amazing views of the city. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.
It was a beautifully cold day so we finished off with a walk through Boston Common. The blue backdrop was a big contrast to what we have had in the first couple of days.
SMOOTS, new day, new walk.. walking to find some SMOOTS. Apparently as part of a fraternity prank, a 'Smoot' (170cm) was invented as a unit of measurement to see how many of this one person makes up Havard Bridge. Turns out its 364.4, I really hope they did this in the summer because the bridge is icy cold in the winter brrr. It was a rather cold day so we had a look around MIT Museum and the exhibitions in there, worth a look if you are in that area.
When I thought of Boston it never even crossed my mind that there would be some very photographable (is that even a word) streets. Off recommendation from a friend we headed to a lovely quaint area of the city with some very pretty little streets. Obviously this was the opposite side of town to where we were, wouldn't be as fun without
the walk though?!
Its time for what
we've been waiting for the whole trip. HONEYMOON HOCKEY. Fun story about this game. We originally booked the flights before the schedule was released and missed the game by a day but also planned to do a quick stop in Portugal on the way home. We were a little gutted but someone, somewhere was listening.. for some random reason we've never worked out the flight never went through, a problem with TAPs booking system at the time. I noticed about 2 weeks before we were meant to fly! Safe to say we quickly looked for hockey tickets and changed the end of the schedule! I couldn't imagine what would have happened if we did try to fly without a return flight home....
Hockey was great, food was great, there was even a special presentation for Tuukka Rask where he received a massive piano!? We also made it onto the big screen! Which you can just about see..
Finally the time had come for our last day in Boston and last day of the Honeymoon! A little sad that our 3 week adventure was coming to an end we had the loveliest day just wandering around the city drinking coffee at every opportunity to keep warm. At a chilly -8 this made for a very cold but absolutely beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky.
I will definitively be back in Boston in the future. There's still way to much food to try! Maybe when Corona lets us again.. now here's a couple of the view from the hotel we had to leave :'(
We flew home with our newly booked TAP Air flights, some of the cheapest flights I've seen to America. Everything was great apart from the change of flight at Lisbon airport. This was very confusing and even resulted in myself and Matt in totally different areas of the airport?! But hey ho.. then back into Manchester with a 10p train home (yes 10p!) and hitting reality with a massive BANG. Totally oblivious to the year to come..
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