New England Fall Break (aka Boston with Kids)

Back in the old days, Dave taught in a different school district and had a week long break in September, and we went to Disney  every single year for a long time. Our kids were young, the parks were uncrowded, and it was (relatively) cheap. Then he changed schools, to pretty much the only county around without a fall break. It was sad. But then! Just this year, his county finally got on board with a fall break, and it happened to coincide with family weekend at August’s college, AND Dave’s parents recently moved from New Hampshire to the Boston area, and, basically…we went to Boston/Amherst for fall break this past October, and now I’m going to blog about it.

If you want more Boston content, I have it for you here and here , and I have reviews of the two best options for RV camping in the metro area: Normandy Farms and Minuteman (and that second one includes info on touring Minute Man National Historical Park).

(not so fun fact: after this experimental year, the county has decided that NEXT fall the students get a full week break and teachers get 3 days plus 2 teacher workdays. I am super pissed off about this. Messing with my travel plans is one of the easiest ways to get on my bad side).

So anyway. We flew out super early on Monday morning and arrived in a very stormy, windy Boston (we likely wouldn’t have made it if we’d been on a flight later in the day; I think there was a full ground stop a couple of hours after we got there). Dave’s cousin’s wife picked us up at the airport in the monsoon (thanks, Mary!) and deposited us at his parent’s new place, where we were staying until Friday. We spent that first very rainy day just hanging out with Dave’s parents (and napping) and did other catching up with extended family stuff during the week as well.

But Dave’s parents live very close to a commuter rail station into Boston, and we took advantage of that to get into the city a couple of times, too. We were determined that on this trip we would not do what we usually do in Boston, which is yet another trek on the Freedom Trail. Not that I don’t love the Freedom Trail! I do! As is evidenced by how very many times I’ve walked the whole thing. And then other things we did not do were determined by the government shutdown that was happening while we were in Boston. JFK Library? nope! Adams National Historical Park? Not this time! And so, deprived of presidential history, we turned to science and baseball. And…other history.

Museum of Science

Dave’s first job out of college was doing web development at the Museum of Science, so we were very frequent visitors when we lived there, particularly after Ari was born. But it had been awhile since we’d been back, so we decided on it as our destination on our first full (and still very cold and rainy) day. We took a couple of trains and then walked from the Science Park station on the Green Line. The Museum of Science sits on a bridge that spans the Charles River, which is the first of many cool things about it.

Also it’s ginormous.

Fun fact: back when Dave worked there, we occasionally brought our dog, Oliver, to wander around with us after hours. He was a very good boy who loved science.

Anyway, this was our only plan for the day, so we pretty much spent all day here and did All The Things. We made sure to check out exhibits that were new since our last visit. We saw an omnimax movie about dogs who help people. We had truly terrible Starbucks coffee (hint: don’t buy coffee from the Starbucks here. It’s somehow not a real Starbucks (they don’t accept gift cards, for example), and we actually ended up throwing the coffee away barely touched. And we’re not coffee snobs!)

We saw several scheduled shows, like this one with dry ice:

And this one with a turtle eating lettuce:

And, of course, the Lightning Show! The Lightning Show has been around forever (featuring the world’s largest Van de Graff generator!), but Abe had never seen it before:

All in all, it was an excellent way to spend a cruddy weather day (and we had a reciprocal membership to use, so it was also free except for the terrible coffee and the Omnimax tickets).

Tea Party Ships and Museum

In sharp contrast to the Museum of Science, we had never been to the Tea Party Ships and Museum before. I just did some googling to get the facts straight about exactly why that is, because I spent a lot of time right next door at the Children’s Museum when I lived in Boston with a baby/toddler, but I seem to remember walking past a closed Tea Party Ship site to get there. So it’s because the original museum was destroyed by a fire in 2001, the same year I had my first baby! And didn’t open again until 2012, when we had long since moved away. We did consider the new museum a few times over the years, but it’s a pretty pricy ticket…and the Freedom Trail is, well…FREE.

But on this trip we were down to three people (and no open NPS sites), so we decided it was finally time!

Here is where we learned that taxes on imports is a really good way to get people riled up about wanting to change the government. Shipping soldiers in to occupy the cities is another good way to do it. People don’t like that. Weird. (Oh, btw, abolish ICE).

We really enjoyed the experience, but it is undeniably expensive ($35 for adults and $26 for kids up to 12 as of this writing), so it would be a lot for a bigger family. Also note that it’s a very scripted and regimented kind of deal. While they call it a museum, there’s no point where you get to just wander around on your own looking at things. But it’s fun, and we learned a lot.

The first stop is this meeting room where costumed interpreters get you all mad about how terrible the British are and also give you a card assigning you a character (which isn’t really particularly important, at least not except for a couple of people to get to say stuff during the rabble-rousing meeting):

So all of the actors we encountered were very good and very all in, which is always nice at such places.

Then they take you out to the actual ship (well, a replica of the actual ship), where there is more talking, a quick walking tour down below, and then a photo op where you throw tea in the harbor like a real colonist!

And then this guy talks to you for awhile before you go into the “museum” which is really just more scripted presentation, with a movie and then a room with some actual artifacts.

And that’s it! The whole thing lasts an hour. But we stretched it out with a pleasant visit to Abigail’s Tea Room after. You can try 5 different historic teas here if you buy the unlimited tea option, and they also sell some snacks and sandwiches.

Later that same day we were meeting up with Dave’s parents for a tour of Fenway Park. It was about 2.5 miles away, but we decided to walk it as a way to see more of the city. The walk took us past the Boston Common and Public Garden and then down Boylston Street, so a fairly scenic stroll.

Fenway Park Tour

Once upon a time we toured the Braves’ ballpark, also with Nana and Grandpa, and we were the only ones on the tour.

The Fenway tour was not like that. It was an enormous group of people (to the point where it was often difficult to hear our tour guide, who was excellent from what we could tell, from wherever we ended up during the stops). And, theme for the day, it was expensive (thanks to Nana and Grandpa for taking us!) But it was really cool. I guess Fenway is a little more iconic than whatever corporate sponsor the Braves place is named after these days.

You walk all over the park, stopping for fun facts and anecdotes and all that, and eventually end up above the Green Monster:

…before being deposited in a room at the end where (unlike in the Tea Party museum) you can take your time looking at some exhibits and memorabilia:

And then it was time to leave Boston and head west for August’s family weekend! We didn’t get to actually spend all that much time with August because he had an orchestra concert that weekend (so we DID get to see him play) and a paper due Sunday night, but it was good to see him as much as we could in his new natural habitat and meet some of his friends.

He gave us a tour of the printmaking studio, where we spent approximately 80 million hours last semester:

The trees were starting to be very pretty, and it had warmed up a good bit since our arrival in Boston:

Family weekend coincided with the No Kings protests, so we wandered into town for that while August was doing a dress rehearsal or something. Abe met a lot of dogs:

And that was it for fall break! We flew back out of Hartford, taking advantage of the chance not to drive all the way back to Boston and of the joys of small airports.