Well my phone didn't heal itself, so for the time being we will just be using Joe's phone (480-385-8180). We headed out fairly early this morning. Since we had scoped out the ferry route yesterday, we drove right there and got on board without incident. We made the 8:20 ferry. It was a nice ferry, with tables at some of the seats. Very quiet. No one talked (except us).
We could see the Boston skyline grow larger as we got closer.
Arrived in Boston Harbor, walked down and caught the hop-on/hop-off bus (Old Town Trolley Tours), and began our tour.
Our driver/narrator was very Bostonish, and Joe couldn't understand her too well, so we got off at Stop 4 to tour the Bruins/Celtics stadium (TD Garden). Our initial plan was to ride the entire route (2 hours), then go again and get off at the places we wanted to explore further, but we changed our minds. The Garden isn't the old Boston Garden where Larry Bird played, unfortunately, and the Celtics are definitely secondary here at this stadium -- they don't have any financial interest in it, it's owned by the owner of the Bruins, and the Celtics offices and practice areas are held somewhere else, so they only play their home games here. We had to wait until 10:00 for the Pro Shop to open (everything in it was out of our price range), then we had to wait until 11:00 for the tour of the stadium. But it was an interesting tour. The floor was being worked on so we didn't get to see the parquet floor (it was stacked up in back), but we learned a lot of interesting facts about the building and both teams, and got to see some great pictures.
There was a nice statute of Bobby Orr with his goal that won the 1970 Stanley Cup.
The stadium is pretty interesting. The bottom floors is a train station, with several different lines coming right inside. There was a McDonalds, a Starbucks, a little magazine/convenience store, and seats to wait for your train. The 3rd floor is actually the hockey/basketball floor, and the top floor was the 9th. In that "lobby area" on the first floor were lots of big posters, and a couple of interesting plaques -- one of the famous Red Auerbach, and another one of a four-leaf clover which we "touched for luck."
Walking into the stadium was pretty awesome. Even though Bird didn't play here, the Celtics are Larry Bird to us, so this was pretty hallowed ground. We certainly thought of John here -- he would have enjoyed all of the pictures for sure.
They had 4 life-size statues, wooden!, that were amazing. On the one of Larry Bird, you could even see the dimples in the basketball. It was all made of wood, even his shoelaces.
Our tour guide (who was very good) told a story about the first zamboni. The horse wore special shoes to keep his feet from freezing on the ice.
Several pictures of Larry Bird and a "case" of things devoted to him, but I was disappointed that there wasn't a group picture of either the Olympic "Dream Team" or one of the championship team pictures when Bird's team won the NBA championship. I thought there might have been something like that in the pro shop, but there wasn't. The pro shop was more about hockey than basketball.
Another item that John would be interested in -- a pair of Shaqueal O'Neil's shoes -- size 23 (John would know). You can see by my size 9 that they were LARGE!
They had one section of the old parquet floor on display. We were told that they actually incorporated some pieces of the old one into the new floor (removing the dead spots).
And of course, there were the retired numbers.
We finally finished here, that took about 2 1/2 hours including our wait-time, and got back on the bus, passing the Boston Common. Joe was getting hungry so we got off at a P.F. Chiang's and had a nice lunch, then continued on our bus tour. One of the next stops was the bar that inspired the original "Cheers" so we should have waited and had lunch there. Maybe tomorrow.
You can do duck boat tours here and we passed several of them this morning. Here they were all lined up, and Joe told the driver that they "had all their ducks in a row." I think he stole the driver's line on that one.
Our next get-off was Fenway Park. The Red Sox are playing the Yankees tonight, oldest rivalry in baseball so we didn't even try to get tickets, but we had a nice tour of this stadium too. They too had some statues outside.
We congregated again at the Pro Shop, where they had a nice baseball-glove-seat.
Everything in here was very expensive too, and when we got over to the stadium, we could see that they liked their beer.
Our guide explained the story behind "Boston Strong" which became their mantra after the Boston Marathon bombing. Very nice story.
It's been a long time since we have been baseball fans, but it was pretty awesome to be here at Fenway Park. But this field seems SOOO small compared to our Diamondbacks stadium. Fenway Park is the smallest, as well as the oldest, stadium in baseball.
You can see the Green Monster (Wall) on the far side.
They still have a lot of the original (small, uncomfortable) seats which they are very proud of. Inside their museum area are a lot of artifacts from the Babe Ruth days, as well as some of their other biggies.
There was an interesting story about this one "red" chair in the middle of the bleachers, where someone got hit by a home run ball way back in the day.
And we got to see a little bit of the Sox and Yankees warming up as we worked our way over to the
Green Monster, where we got to sit on the wall.
They also have the only manual scoreboard still used in baseball.
We finally left here, and got back on the bus to finish the route, which took us through MIT. We saw a few of their buildings, and a memorial to a cop killed by the Boston Marathon bomber.
We got back to the ferry and had a leisurely 30-minute ride back to Bingham. We sat on the second deck this time. This is a really nice ferry, a catamaran, very smooth ride. People did talk a little more at this time of the day.
Another passing ferry, very similar to ours.
Senior pricing was a nice surprise here. Our ferry tickets were half-price ($8.50 round trip), and we got half-off on the tour of the Celtics stadium. Parking, at full rate, was only $4 for all day, another pleasant surprise. No discount at Fenway Park though -- the 3:00 tour was a flat $20 for everyone on game day, so we didn't even get the $1 off for seniors on that one.
We bought two-day trolley tickets, so tomorrow we will be back at it, in Boston.
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