The Last Hurrah

Well, I have been home for a week.  I guess I have no excuse but go ahead and conclude this.  For those who have asked me, and for those who have wondered, a book is not likely to follow the publication of these last posts.  Why?  Well I believe I have a perfectly acceptable written account of my travels here for all to read.  But don't be too disappointed, for we still have the final leg of this journey--or as we called it, "The Last Hurrah"--to cover.

As I mentioned in the very end of my previous post, we were in Boston.  It was an interesting change from the trail environment, to be sure, but not as startling as one might accept.  I guess we still viewed it all through the lens of a traveler, except we had exchanged forests of trees for a forest of glass and steel.  We laid low the first day at our Air BnB; eating, shmoosing Netflix, tossing the frisbee around, and generally being lazy.  It was lovely.

We began our Boston experience in earnest the next day by navigating public transit systems to downtown Boston (now here we could stop and have a entirely separate post about the adventures aboard the trains, buses, subways, Ubers and more throughout the cities, but I will forgo since there is so much else to write about).  We then started the Freedom Trail.  It's not a trail in the sense of "hiking trail," but rather a series of cool historical sights that this trail of red brick set in the side walks leads you to.  You meander through the city, stopping at grave yards to view the resting places of Signers, the house of Paul Revere, the monument to the Battle of Bunker Hill, chapels where notable figures such as Washington attended, and meeting hall where the Founding Fathers debated and planned the Boston Tea Party.  All in all, it was very cool.

The following evening, we went to a Boston Red Sox game in Fenway Park.  It was a post season game, and boy, what a game!  Within 30 minutes of us arriving, the Red Sox had put two over the fence and that was just the beginning.  The Red Sox, who had been doing poorly up to this point, dominated the game.  And in line with all home field games, the fans went berserk.  Thus ended our time in Boston.  We were headed for the Big Apple.

I have a cousin who lives in Yonkers, and he offered to host us for a couple nights.  What a treat!  Though we spent most of our time in Manhattan, it was nice to come back and hang out.  We spent both days visiting as many sight as we could.  The Empire State Building, Times Square, the Two Towers memorial, the Statue of Liberty, and more.  It was fun and crazy.  The item of note is we did get a New York style pizza, in New York.  To be honest, it was a little disappointing because it looked and tasted like any old pizza.  But it wasn't all bad, well, because it was pizza.  And it's hard to go wrong with pizza.  What was even cooler, we sat in a Subway and we feel the subway running under the store.

Two full days in New York didn't feel like enough time, but we moved on to Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.

Some old collage friends of my parent offered to host us while we were in town.  They were super awesome and made our time in Philly really enjoyable.  The first day, we went on an adventure at Valley Forge and ended our day at a gunpowder factory.  While we got to the factory late, we still were able to poke around in the machine room.  It was full of industrial grade tools from the late 1800 and 1900's that still worked.  Drill presses and saws that run off of gears and pulleys, it was all pretty cool.

Day two in Philly, we wen down and visited Independence Hall and spent hours in a museum about the creation and evolution of the Constitution.  For those of you who know me, I am a politics/debate nerd.  The art nerds have their museums, the car nerds have theirs, but this was a museum for debate nerds.  It was beautiful.

We finished off the day with a trip down the Fulton Alley, the oldest continually inhabited street in the US and an intense debate about state rights/necessity of the Senate.  Then, after church the following day, we were off to Washington DC.

Now, unlike the previous three cities, both of us had been to DC before.  We revisited the National Mall and the myriad of monuments, which we both had seen before, but we also visited the Air and Space Museum, the Holocaust Museum, and Arlington which each one was new for at least one of us.  We tried to tour the capitol, but you couldn't take food or water into the building and we were loaded with lunch and snacks for the day so it we missed our window of opportunity (I guess they're worried that the politicians will get pelted by fruit).  Regardless, we still had a blast.

Then, after almost six month of travel, we headed for home.  We had completed the AT, visited the major cities of the eastern seaboard, seen the sights, and now it was all drawing to a close.  It was an all-nighter Greyhound bus, headed for Nashville TN.  Not the most ideal vehicle to try and sleep in, but it was heading home, and that is where were we wanted to go.