The Freedom Trail!!

Yesterday was all about one thing: the Freedom Trail. After riding into Boston on the subway, we had a little trouble actually finding the National Park Service informational building, which is where we wanted to start, but after that first snafu, the day was off to a start. Our first stop (though not the actual first stop on the trail) was right across from the informational building, the Old Statehouse. It was here that we probably spent the longest, because we listened to two talks - one about the Boston Massacre, which happened right outside the Old Statehouse, and one about the building itself. Then we went through the little museum they had about the American Revolution. So by the time we were done with that, it was actually pretty late in the morning/afternoon (which might have been due to the fact that we didn't leave until quite late). After that, we saw the plaque that commemorates the site of the Boston Massacre. It was then that we realized that the trail was  demarked by a red line, and that you just had to follow it to find the next stop on the trail, which made our lives much easier. From there, we walked a little bit to Faneuil Hall and heard the end of a talk a park ranger was giving. The next stop, the Paul Revere House, was quite ways off. On the way there, we went through a farmers market, and I really wanted to stop and buy some of the fresh fruit to eat on our walk around Boston, but no one else, apparently, thought that was a good idea, so we kept going. Since it was getting around lunch time, and we were a bit hungry and thirsty, we stopped at an Italian bakery that was on the trial and bought some fresh baguettes and water bottles. Man, were those delicious - especially after our long walk thus far!!
When we got to the Paul Revere House, we had some problems actually buying the tickets to get in. For some reason, we didn't read the sign that clearly demarked the prices of tickets, and so got confused at which level we should be bought for each person. That being said, the ticket person didn't have to get snappy with us! And after that debacle, the house wasn't that cool. We only got to see walk around and see four rooms. I did find out some interesting facts about Paul Revere, like he had 16 kids between two wives, and as time went on, he got richer, so his younger kids got the benefits of his wealth and could go to college, while older kids were kind of screwed.  I thought that kind of stunk for them.  Next was the Old North Church, which was interesting in that it had boxed seats in the church and it was actually functioning as a church. What was weird was that I saw a group of people coming down from the steeple, which was what I really wanted to see, but the door was locked after them. I don't know if there was some special tour we had to sign up for, but I thought that would have been pretty cool to see where the lanterns were hung. The Copp's Hill Cemetery was next, and I found it interesting that a lot of gravestones had skulls on them, which seemed pretty morbid to me. Then, we walked across a bridge to cross the Charles River, where the USS Constitution and Bunker Hill were located. Since it was one big circle, we first went to the USS Constitution, where we had to go through security, which I thought was weird. What did they think we were going to do to the ship? We waited in the cold for the guided tour, which was pretty interesting. The tour guide yelled at us a lot, and kept on picking my brother out of the crowd for listening to music while on the tour. At the end, he even said that if you didn't like the tour, his name was David.
From there, we walked up to Bunker Hill. It was probably for the best that we left this for the last stop, because afterwards I was exhausted and my legs felt like spaghetti. The reason for that was we climbed up all 294 steps up the monument there, which seemed to go on forever. It was nice because they put the number of steps you've gone up every so often, so you could gauge how far you had to go and pace yourself. Even so, that climb was quite a cardio workout and I was winded by the end. So, we decided to end yesterday's adventures then, and not visit the remaining places on the trail, and took the subway back to where we are staying. I was so exhausted, I could have fallen asleep then, but my parents dragged us out to this restaurant for dinner called Legal Sea Food, where I got a delicious clam chowder and ate off my parent's deserts of Boston cream pie and banana's foster. Yum! That was pretty much it for the day, which was good for me because I was tired. Today we are going to the Kennedy Library, so I will update you on that later.