Boston; Sunday, 01 April, 2018

I had just finished breakfast and was back up in my room getting ready to head out when my phone pinged to show a text message had come through, and once again that opening line that British Airways would like to apologise set the panic levels rising. When they had cancelled my flight back from Vienna a few weeks earlier the cancellation had been accompanied by a rebooking for a flight a few minutes later, and if it hadn’t been that had only been Austria. This time there was no rebooking details, just a message to contact customer support if I still needed to travel and getting stranded on the wrong side of the Atlantic is much more difficult to get out of than being stuck less than a day’s train ride from home.

I immediately got onto the phone to British Airways to try and find out what was happening. The very nice lady in the contact centre wasn’t certain why the flight was cancelled, but she went off investigating options for me. In the end, nearly 20 minutes into the call whilst I was on hold another text pinged into my phone to let me know I’d been booked onto a flight 2 ½ hours later than my original one, so I could at least get home. The same information had just made its way to the lady in the call centre as I came off hold, so I was able to continue on with my day and let my blood pressure come back down.

I could have walked back through the city to pick up the Freedom Trail where I had left it off the previous evening – which would have involved walking across a not particularly pleasant looking bridge (the fact it is due for demolition within weeks of visiting is only part of the issue – the three lanes of traffic in each direction weren’t appealing) – or I could take the ferry that runs every 30 minutes on a Sunday from the aquarium across to the naval base in Charlestown right by were the trail is picked back up again, it was an easy choice to make.

I was the only passenger for the ferry, which I thought was a bit odd, but it meant I had the whole upper deck to myself to be able to take some good photos of Boston harbour and the Boston Skyline as the ferry crossed.

From the naval base I followed the trail up the side of Bunker Hill to the site of the Bunker Hill Monument, built to commemorate one of the early battles of the War of Independence and one that showed early on that the British could be defeated. The Bostonians held on to the fortified high ground until the third British attack of the day, before finally retreating. Whilst it was a loss, the British had suffered casualty figures at close to 50% of their men, so any victory was pyrrhic.

Next to the monument is the Bunker Hill Museum which tells the story of the battle along with the history of the monument and how it had taken on its current form. After looking round the museum and walking up to the monument – but deciding not to climb the 240 or so steps to the viewing platform at the top – I headed back down to the Subway station to catch the subway back into town.

In the city centre I changed lines and headed out to Cambridge on the north bank of the Charles River and Harvard University to have a look around the worlds premier university campus. The university also houses several excellent museums and I spent quite a lot of time looking round the Natural History and Peabody museum, so long in fact that they were starting to lock up the museum as I was leaving.

I headed back into town and stopped in the centre for an earlyish dinner before heading back to the hotel for an early night