Raiders of the Lost Blog

Chris and I went to Boston this weekend. We went primarily to catch the Boston Museum of Science’s Lord of the Rings exhibit. You can see all of my Boston pictures in my photo gallery

We left early Saturday morning and drove off to Boston. We took the parkways up to I-684, then I-84 towards Boston through Connecticut. The trees were all in peak leaf season, with wonderful reds & golds.

It’s about a 4 - 4 1/2 hour drive from Brooklyn to Boston, depending on traffic. It was pretty easy getting out to Boston, we found a place in a garage by Boston Commons and parked for the day. We decided to walk along the Freedom Trail.

The Freedom trail is a red line either painted or in bricks that runs throughout Boston and links most of the important Revolutionary War sites. It starts in Boston Commons, and you follow the red line through the city.

The city was buzzing with World Series fever. That night was going to be the first night of the series against the Cardinals. Everywhere you looked there were anti-yankee shirts on display (”My two favorite teams are the Red Sox and whoever’s playing the Yankees”). Also rally socks were on sale, white socks with a red stain like Curt Schilling’s ankle.

Even Paul Revere is a Red Sox fan!

So we walked the trail, it takes a couple of hours. Along the way we stopped and had lunch at the Union Oyster House (see the CitySearch review). Great chowder (or “chowdah”) and great seafood. It’s been open since 1826!

We walked by Faneuil Hall and Quincy Markets. Lots of tiny shops are in these buildings, and other shops are around them. It’s along the Freedom Trail, so fun to see.

The trail ends at the USS Constitution, but we arrived just as they were closing. We went back to Boston from there, got coffee, wandered over by Cheers and saw a great pumpkin festival in Boston Commons.

Sunday we went to the Museum for the Lord of the Rings exhibit. They didn’t allow you to take pictures inside the exhibit (copyright issues, we were told) so this was the only thing you could take pictures of:

The exhibit itself was fun, but not nearly as large as the Star Wars exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum was. They were very draconian too about what you could do inside. No pictures allowed. No cell phones or PDA’s (afraid of camera phones). No water, no gum, no food. They ahd a 10 minute spiel of what you couldn’t do before you went inside.

They had props from the movie, a life size cave troll, swords you could hold, costumes, prosthetics and some fun interactive displays. You could run a motion capture animation, and they had a forced perspective photo booth where you could take the place of Frodo or Gandalf on the cart from the first movie. (I’ll put our picture up once I scan it in).

After that it was time to drive home and watch the Jets lose to the Patriots. We had a fun trip, and a great time.