Boston {Day 1}

Justin travels once or twice a year for work.  He gets to choose some sort of tax conference to attend and even though he's traveling for "work" the trip usually ends up having a vacation aspect to it as well.  I tagged along with him to San Francisco in 2006, New York in 2008 and we took the whole family to Phoenix in 2007.  Having Justin's airfare covered, all of the hotel expenses paid and some meals too makes it tempting to turn every "work" trip into a pleasure trip. Since we've always had young kids it hasn't been easy for me to go along very often.  Justin’s Dad has met up with Justin during several of his trips.  However, now that the kids are older it’s become easier leaving them at home.   For the most part I feel comfortable with the girls being in charge, especially now that Abigail has her license, but since Drew is still at home during the days and the girls leave so early in the morning I had to coordinate quite a bit a childcare.  Thankfully we have access to some inexpensive childcare through Justin's work; but I still needed someone at the house in the early mornings and a few evenings that both the girls were busy.  I didn't think it would end up being quite as complicated as it did - the college gal we hired cancelled three of her shifts in short notice so that caused some stress and last minute scrambling and favor-asking.

I've wanted to go to Boston for many years.  In fact it's been on the top of my US cities bucket list.  So when Justin told me there was a conference in Boston I told him to book it.  Justin really wanted to see a Red Sox game in Fenway Park while we were there.  His conference was Tuesday evening through Friday at noon and the only game during the week was scheduled for Monday at 11am.  In order to make that work we had to leave earlier than we'd originally thought - taking a red-eye Sunday night and arriving in Boston early, early Monday.  Thankfully our red-eye flight had lots of empty seats so I found myself an empty row and improved my chances of getting a little rest.

Unfortunately, the weather Monday was miserable - so, so wet, windy and cold.  The baseball game was cancelled so we decided to take a little nap before heading into town.  I didn't realize that Monday was the Boston Marathon.  What a terrible day to be running 26 miles!  As we walked around town that afternoon we saw some pretty miserable runners.  The hotel we were staying at during the conference was right downtown and when we decided to travel to Boston early it was way too much money to add on Monday night so we had to stay somewhere else that first night.  It was pretty far away from the hubbub of the city.  We took an Uber into town and walked around Quincy Market - it was pretty dead because of the weather and the race.  We ate some yummy mac & cheese at mmmMac N’ Cheese and shared some delicious treats from Magnolia Bakery. 

We decided to get out of the rain and go to a movie - there wasn't much playing so we went to see The Quiet Place.  I was pretty leery since I don't really like scary movies, but it wasn't as bad I feared and I haven't had any lingering effects (in fact I just saw it a second time with some girlfriends).  We ate some yummy pizza at Regina Pizzeria and T-Mobile also treated us to some pastries at Mike's Pastry.  We both preferred the cannoli to the lobster tail.

We had to wait quite a while for a bus to take us back out of town to our hotel at the end of the night and then walk a fair amount along a busy highway.  We were both excited to relocate to a better location and hotel the next morning.