Boston

I went to Boston Sunday night with a few friends. We didn't get there in time to really do or see much, but I was enthralled with the architecture of the city.

As we were driving about, we passed the Berklee College of Music, where Patty Larkin went to school. I was much more excited about happening upon that site than I should have been. It had been a long day...

We went to Brookline and had dinner at a Mexican place called Boca Grande Taqueria. The food was huge and cheap and pretty good, and the place was packed at 8 o'clock at night.

What really made an impression that night was the number of folks out and about late in the evening on a Sunday night. It made me a bit wistful. You don't see that many people in downtown Cleveland at 5:10 on a Friday afternoon. I am sure the traffic and everything gets annoying, but I loved being in such a vital environment.

After checking in and getting situated at the hotel, we met in the lobby bar, where Charles, the English bartender took good care of us. I was very much into Knob Creek whisky on the rocks on this trip...I am finding it cool and refreshing, and very warm and satisfying all at the same time. Charles tried to upgrade me to Johnnie Walker Blue, but I was having a lovely time at the Creek, and declined to take him up on the offer.

We had a rental car, which was great, and because of a screw-up on the rental companies part, we were upgraded to a full-size car with leather seats. One of my traveling companions taught me a new term, "neutral-drop", and made it his goal in life to peel out of every parking space. And by the way, most of the streets in Boston (at least the one's we found ourselves on) are quite curvy. So, the passenger experience was not dissimilar to a rollercoaster ride.

The next night we went to Needham for dinner. We went to Masala Art, an exquisite Indian restaurant. We were fortunate enough to find a parking space across the street from the restaurant, and upon getting out of the car, we were already enticed by the extraordinary smells emanating from the front door.

The food and service were impeccable. The decor was stunning, especially the bar, which had three huge sculptures of Ganesha as a backdrop. The patrons there were also quite jovial, as we discovered when we all joined in to sing "Happy Birthday" to one of the ladies dining at the table beside us.

Other than the brief sights in Brookline, and the fabulous dinner in Needham, we spent all of our time in the hotel, so I could have been on the Westside of Cleveland for all I saw of the city. I guess my last impression was a lot of traffic, like Seattle...but with better (older anyway) architecture.

Flying from Boston to Cincinnati is not a terribly popular route I am surmising, as each of us had their own row for the flight back, which I do enjoy for the added leg room. As it was night, there wasn't a lot to see outside, so I spent most of the flight reading. When I did look out, framed perfectly in my window, at eye level and filling the window completely from edge to edge, was the Big Dipper. I thought that was very cool.

The final adventure of the trip came in the Cincinnati airport...we all hit the bar for cocktails before our final leg of the journey commenced. We were to get in to the airport at 11 pm, then most of us had about an hour's drive home, and two of us had to be at work at 7 am....

Well, our flight was delayed twice and finally, after midnight, cancelled. Taking our destinies into our own hands, we spurned the airline's offer to put us up in a hotel and to arrive at about 2 in the afternoon the next day, so we commandeered a rental minivan and drove from Cincinnati to Cleveland. That, by the way, is pretty much driving the entire diagonal length of the state. We let the two who had to work sleep in the back, and as the song goes, "We drove all night." (or is that morning?)

We realized that had we rented a car in Boston and driven from there, we all would have been home and asleep, rather than still on the road. That is not the sort of thing one wants to be aware of at 4:30 in the morning...