The Walking City

A bit late but better than never. Last weekend I went on a road trip to Boston with an outstanding gentleman (one Mr. Wolf) and two fine young ladies (Brittany & Shay). What follows is a brief account of our trip with an emphasis on the cool things that we did and saw upon it:

There - we started off after work on Wednesday night, an ambitious move to be sure, and soon found ourselves in a Canadian immigration office. Apparently we're just as sketchy as we look. No worries though, they let us in to Canada ehventually. Mr. Wolf is a rather sleepy man, I assume he was tired from work, and I confess that I was extremely tired myself. Luckily for us the fairer sex was far more energetic (and willing to drink energy drinks) so we did actually make it to Massachusetts without having to stop and stay the night somewhere. I drove one measly hour before succumbing to low grade hallucinations and thinking better of it... Mr. Wolf did not drive at all.

Thursday - we rolled into Beantown and found the Marriott we wanted to stay at, unfortunately, our room would not be ready for a number of hours. So, we decided to go in search of food. Yeah, that was probably a mistake. Apparently there is no food in the outskirts of Boston until 11am. We hung around a mall until The Cheesecake Factory opened and had a rather lethargic lunch there. It made me especially sad because it's one of my favorite places to eat and none of my companions seemed to enjoy it very much. Nobody even had cheesecake :(. After that disgrace we went back to the hotel for some sleepy time, of which I got none. When the collective snoozing was complete we headed out to a couple of places, the first of which I don't remember well, but we met a friend's Mom who, being the amazingly awesome person that she is, gave us the key to her condo to stay at! Needless to say this was a financial boon since we would have had to pay more to stay at the Marriott again on Saturday night. Finally we shuffled over to the legendary Johnny D's that Brittany used to work at. This place is awesome... I'm actually kind of surprised that she likes it so much because it really seems more of my type of place than hers. That probably has something to do with the family like atmosphere that the people who work there seem to have with one another. We even caught part of a performance by Canadian Celtic rock band Enter the Haggis. I'm not gonna lie, I had my doubts about wanting to hear this band. But as it turns out they are kind of awesome. They kept busting cool new instruments out until I began to wonder where the fuck they were keeping all of them when they weren't on stage! After the D's we went back to the Marriott to catch some more (or in my case, some) Z's. After an excellent night / morning / afternoon's rest, at least on my part, it was a new day.

Friday - we started off a bit late but it was well worth the wait to go to The Black Rose, an amazing Irish pub if I've ever seen one. An actual Irish band was playing and though the place was really crowded it was totally worth staying there to hear some classic Irish drinking songs. By and by we headed to a slightly sketchier but no less interesting pub with a name I can't confirm since the building was not marked. I can't say that I had much fun there beyond extremely cheap beer and people watching (there were pool tables but nobody wanted to play with me and some of the locals were a bit protective) but my partners in crime seemed to enjoy it. We actually closed the place down then split up as Shay and Mr. Wolf seemed rather keen on going to some dude's house. Predictably, about 20 minutes later they ended up coming back to the condo. Unfortunately they did so with said dude in tow. Don't get me wrong, he seemed like a nice enough fellow, but Brittany and Mr. Wolf went to sleep and all he seemed interested in doing was trying to convince Shay that he had telekinetic powers. Whatever, if all we'd done was hear one good Irish drinking song it would still have been a fine evening by any measure.

Saturday - by the far the awesomest night in my book but also a little sad because in addition to Brittany getting sicker and sicker as the trip went on Shay was feeling rather under the weather from the night before. We headed out sans Shay and grabbed some food at this amazing indoor market (I had a Boston style hot pretzel and some fries), ran into a tree lighting ceremony, then went shopping at this awesome place called Newbury Comics. They have everything! Like, you know all the DVDs you have on your list to buy but never see anywhere? Yeah, they have them all. In the bargain rack no less. I picked up Army of Darkness, Brazil, and Dick Tracy. Brittany got Who Framed Roger Rabbit (I wants to watch!). From there we went back to Johnny D's for an evening of mead (well, not literally mead, but still), merriment, and a performance by legendary Blues guitarist Duke Robillard! I think I was the only one in our group into the performance but hey, it was still freakin' amazing. Kind of made me want to work at Johhny D's, or at least live in Boston, lol. We met this awesome lady named Bridget who we talked to extensively. I'm pretty sure she bought at least a round or more of drinks as well lol. After I got cut off, not from drinking but from buying other people drinks, we headed to this dude Andrew's house for what would quickly become an impromptu wine drinking dance party. Thank God there were no cameras. It was mega fun. The only downside was that we stayed the night there and the place was freezing cold.

Back - a flash and a bang and we were on our way back to Detroit. The driving schedule was far more balanced this time and we didn't get stopped by customs though I'm pretty sure the other kids in the car wish my iPod had been confiscated. All in all I'd say it was an awesome trip. I'd really like to go back sometime next year, or maybe to Chicago in June, or perhaps to New York. I don't really care for traveling but I do enjoy being with other people on trips since it really seems to give them an excuse to talk and have lots of fun. It was especially cool to get to know my three comrades better (including Mr. Wolf, who I had only met once or twice before).

Back | POSTED BY Robert Otlowski ON November 27, 2008 @ 12:06 pm EST