Girl Scout Troop Trip to Boston: On Wednesday, We Eat Doughnuts and Visit Paul Revere

We had SUCH nice weather all three of our days in Boston, but this day was particularly beautiful and mild. The ten of us in our troop enjoyed the complimentary hotel breakfast (if only I'd known that this would be our only bacon morning I would have appreciated it more. I did like the sausage mornings, as well, but bacon is OBVIOUSLY superior!), then Google Mapped our way by foot to Chelsea station, took the SL3 bus to South Station, and walked a leisurely walk--

--to Kane's Doughnuts, where we were meeting the Underground Donut Tour company for a Boston Historic Downtown Doughnut Tour. 

Here's a rock one of the kids found on the way. Our troop really likes interesting rocks:

Just between us, if you were going for straight dollar value this tour might not be worth it, because, as some of the kids later noted (MUCH later, during the time we set aside to gripe well AFTER the thing we want to gripe about, FAR out of earshot of the subject of our griping!), we only each got 1/4 of a doughnut per stop! 

My college kid, in particular, was VERY sad that these salted brown butter crullers were sold out by the time we eventually got back to Union Square Donuts on our own. One-quarter of a salted brown butter cruller is not enough salted brown butter cruller!

To be fair, this was likely mostly a reaction based on our previous food tour experience in Cincinnati, in which we were stuffed so steadily with Cincinnati delicacies that not only could I not eat more than a bite of the most delicious waffle I've ever encountered, but I also then felt queasy on the streetcar, ahem. But still. At 68 bucks a person that was supposed to be LUNCH! 

ANYWAY, quibbles about doughnut quantity aside, I love a good city tour for how well it shows you your way around a place. We walked ALL OVER downtown Boston, so much so that I felt a lot more comfortable with navigating to and from all our subsequent adventures, and we also revisited some of our favorite eateries that we wouldn't have otherwise known would have been favorites. 

Check out how pretty the Boston Harbor Hotel is! They switched out their usual American flag for an Irish one for St. Patrick's Day week:

This is the clock tower of the Boston Custom House. Our tour guide told us that the clock faces are usually not perfectly in sync because of gravity's effect on the hands:

Here, equally fascinating to the kids (and to me!) is a group of window washers we walked underneath. The encounter inspired one of the kids to later look up what the requirements are for becoming a window washer (that kid IS particularly good with heights, so it wouldn't be a bad line of work for her!):

My partner and I are nerds and really interested in the history of Boston's Big Dig--if you're also a nerd, you might like this multi-part documentary from GBH News in Boston:

So I, personally, was pretty stoked when our tour took us across part of the Rose Kennedy Greenway and our tour guide pointed out how many of the historic buildings were chopped off during construction. The ends were bricked up and made into their new outside walls, but you can still see the jagged edges where the facades were chopped:

My quarter of a cream-filled doughnut:

It was particularly helpful to walk past Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market, since we'd planned to spend plenty of time there on Friday:

 

Our tour guide explained why there's a grasshopper there, and told us the story of the Great Grasshopper Heist.

Our tour guide took us past some other historic sites that we'd have otherwise missed--

--including The Green Dragon, beloved by Paul Revere and John Hancock, and where Daniel Webster claims the Lexington and Concord invasion plans were heard, leading to the Midnight Ride--

--and then into the Boston Public Market for more doughnuts and apple cider:

We'd head back to the Boston Public Market on our own later that day for all the delicious food we didn't grab the first time!

After the Boston Public Market, we walked through the Italian neighborhood, probably my favorite culinary neighborhood EVER. So many restaurants advertising fresh pasta!

Our tour guide showed us various implements embedded into the sidewalk in front of businesses so that even immigrants who weren't yet functionally literate could find what they needed in the city:

This is an "authentic" Boston Cream doughnut: you're actually supposed to split them in half and fill them!

During Gripe Time most of us agreed that we prefer our Boston Creams filled instead of sliced, but now we have the knowledge base to support that preference!

After our doughnut tour I'd dictated that we were done having fun for a while, so I force-marched everyone straight to Old North Church to begin the Educational portion of the day:

I thought I'd treat the kids by springing for the crypt visit, as well--I mean, what kid doesn't love a crypt?--but unfortunately, the Old North Church crypt was a huge bust. There were NO BONES!!! Who ever heard of a crypt with no bones?!?

I bet all the British kids get to see LOTS of nice bones whenever THEY tour crypts...

Oh, well. We did see some empty coffins--

--and place that had bones hidden away inside them:

--and a bunch of pipes with cute signage to keep us from bonking our bored little Girl Scout heads:

I'm sure the kids would not agree (I wonder if they have their own separate Gripe Time just about their troop leader? That would be very clever of them!), but I personally thought that the inside of the Old North Church, particularly with the included audio guide up to one's ear, was quite interesting. 

These box pews were SO WEIRD. I've never seen anything like them! Apparently people paid for them back in the day, but the docent said that these days people just pop into whatever one they want. They look massively uncomfortable even compared to the pews of my own Methodist childhood, but I do think that the ability to essentially have your own baby/toddler playpen during a church service has great appeal:

The audio guide spent most of its time gossiping about notable Revolutionary-era inhabitants of various box pews, and I was so into it!

When those two lanterns were lit in the steeple of Old North Church, EVERYONE could see them, not just the messengers who were on the lookout for them! It's said that the church's sexton jumped out of this window while fleeing from authorities who'd come to investigate the mysterious lights:

These candelabras hold real candles, which the church still uses for occasional services. The church community comes together to clean them once a year:

Just me taking a billion photos of windows because I'm obsessed with wavy old glass!

I got my teenager to take a photo of me also looking contemplatively at Washington's bust and remarking on how lifelike it is, just like General Lafayette was said to have done. I then tried and immediately failed to do his super fast rap part from Hamilton:

After we'd toured Old North Church and, even more importantly to some, its gift shop, we took about a billion excellent photos of this Paul Revere statue. It has a horse, which was on some kids' BINGO cards, and taking a photo of another specific kid with a statue was on some other BINGO cards, and taking a photo of the troop chaperones was also on some BINGO cards, so, you see, we really had a lot to do there:

I did not remind my own kids about the other time we've visited this statue, because then they might remember that they've already done the Boston National Historic Park Junior Ranger badge and would kick up a fuss about repeating it. Don't you tell them, either!

In related news, I really messed up by not making my kids repeat all of their memory work at regular intervals. They both worked so hard to memorize "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," and now they don't even remember that they once had it!

Walking the Freedom Trail was just as pleasing as *I* remember, however, and extra fun because I could get off my Google Maps for a minute and let the kids lead:

Starting the next day, I'd begin having one kid or another nav us places using their own Google Maps--it's a crucial life skill!--but for today, discovering this Freedom Trail path was plenty.

I'm very irritated that the Paul Revere House doesn't allow photos inside:

It does have plenty of docents inside, though, who could all happily chew the fat with me on the subject of historical preservation--I'm always really interested in how various properties came to be preserved, especially in contrast to similar ones that obviously weren't, and how they come to be furnished and the provenance of the furnishings... you know, super interesting stuff like that!

After all the kids had successfully endured Paul Revere's House and I'd been dragged kicking and screaming from my scintillating conversation about Paul Revere's personal silverware with a very patient docent, we had a break for snacks, the pestering of pigeons for BINGO squares--

--and this freaking awesome tactile map of the North End:

Then, because we'd completed most of our itinerary for the day, we got to decide what else we wanted to do!

We'd passed, but not stopped at, a really cool-looking Holocaust Memorial during the doughnut tour, that also happened to be across the street from a cool playground I'd marked in my Google Maps (even though all I've got are teenagers now I still can't get out of the habit of marking cool playgrounds!), and that also ALSO happened to be across a different street from the Boston Public Market that we'd also been to earlier and so knew had delicious things, so back we went! My favorite thing about downtown Boston is how walkable it is!

I really don't know about the purposeful choice to have the steam vents coming up through the memorial to represent both the gas chambers and the incinerators, but the effect IS beautiful:

And there's just so much detail to the memorial. Everything is thoughtfully done and evocative, even the shadows:

A Number the Stars reference!

After the memorial, we chaperones jollied the kids into frolicking for a bit in the Boston City Park Plaza Playground (one kid worriedly read the sign at the entrance and said, "It says it's only for ages 2-12." Another chaperone wisely replied, "Play doesn't have an age range." I mean, I know why they put age ranges on playgrounds, but still. Our delightful, gentle teenagers are obviously exceptions to any rule, and if confronted, I'd planned to just say that we were tourists from the Midwest and we don't know any better), then we went back to the Boston Public Market. Other people got themselves clam chowder and smoothies and boba tea, but my college student and I desperately needed more Union Square Donuts--

My college student apparently ordered the last lemon and raspberry doughnut they had in stock, so the clerk asked if he could also give us the "display doughnut" for that flavor for free. You bet he could! Also, my Cosmic Brownie doughnut was DELICIOUS.

--I could not get my mind off of the pepperoni pizza popover from The Popover Lady and so had to buy one (and a pack of mini popovers for the kids)--

--and the teenager managed to find a creperie:

Then, back to the North End and the Italian neighborhood! I was pleasantly surprised by all the kids' capacity to simply walk around an interesting neighborhood and window shop. I'd thought ten of us would make it too unwieldy to be popping into and out of all these little shops, but people sort of self-selected who wanted to pop into any given shop and who preferred to stand on the street and gossip, so I don't *think* we overwhelmed too many places:

I photographed this as a mental note to learn more about the Mob, since our tour guide had mentioned it numerous times in conjunction with the Italian neighborhood we were in...

We used the troop budget to let the kids each pick out another treat from Bova Bakery to eat back at the hotel later, and most people also used this chance to pick up dinner for later, as well. There were lots of Italian subs and pizza by the slice!

There's a train that goes right from North Station to Chelsea Station, so we got to figure out how to do that, and I also got to see where the Bruins play:

After my college kid took this photo one of the other chaperones was all, "Oh, no! You're wearing your Rangers hat!", so I took it off and had her retake it, but this photo came out better. Sorry, Bruins!

Here's my very elegant set-up for eating an Italian sandwich on top of my hotel bed. Not shown: the salt and vinegar chips from the grocery store that I'm eating straight from the bag, my Diet Sprite also from the grocery store, and the hotel TV playing its mandatory Office marathon:

Because the day apparently hadn't been quite long enough, the troop met again after dinner down in the lobby so that the kids could make and play travel games inside the Altoid tins I'd packed for them (this is possibly the only trip I'll ever take in which I had MORE luggage on the way there than I did on the way home!):

 

While they worked, I admired my very first Boston stamp in my National Parks Passport Book:

I'm going to collect SO MANY MORE stamps when I force-march the kids through Faneuil Hall on Friday!

Here's our entire trip:

• Day 1 in Boston: Underground Donut Tour, Old North Church, Paul Revere's House, New England Holocaust Memorial, Boston City Hall Plaza Playground, Boston Public Market, and the North End
• Day 2 in Boston: Tours of Harvard and Simmons, Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, and Chinatown
• Day 3 in Boston: New England Aquarium, Faneuil Hall, bookstores, and Boston Ballet

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!