Boston: Red Sox & the 4th of July

One of the things Joel told me early on in our marriage was that he wanted to go to two baseball games. One at Fenway Park and one at Wrigley Field. Hey, he's pretty easy to please! So, one of the main reasons we chose to go to Boston was so we could fulfill half of this dream of his. I found great seats (not great prices) on the 4th of July. It was a 1:05pm game.


We left early to be able to go and walk around a little before the game started. The trains were packed! There isn't any parking around the stadium and it was basically a sold out game. They close off one of the streets next to the park called "Yawkey Way" (pictured left). You have to show your ticket before you can get into this area. here are street vendors and t-shirt shops lining the streets. Oh yeah, and lots of people!

The stadium is not like any other stadium I've been to. Normally you walk down to get into the stadium, this one has tunnels below ground and you walk up to the field--it is at ground level. Very cool. We were forewarned not to eat the hot dogs, so we had some other food--great french fries and sat back and enjoyed the game! I guess their version of a ball park dog includes a bun made from a piece of wonder bread white bread.

It was an action-packed game against the Tamp Bay Devil Rays. And, in the end the Red Sox won. I'm not a huge baseball fan, but I would go to another game at this stadium!

After the game we went back to our hotel to gear up for our big night of fireworks. We had heard that they had a huge fireworks display and concert by the Boston Pops. So, we left our hotel with a newly purchased blanket from Filene's Basement (a great store, by the way) and headed down to the water. We had no idea what we were in for!

About 500,000 other people had the same idea that we did (we knew there would be a lot of people there), we just didn't expect it to RAIN for the 4 hours we had to sit outside! Other people had tents (literally) and coolers and had camped out for the entire day. The rain didn't bother them (or surprise them) one bit. Us? We just had two $3 ponchos we happened to buy at the CVS store on the way, our totally worthless blanket--it was soaked in the first 10 seconds of drizzle (I'm sad to say we left if behind). Needless to say, we were miserable for about 3 hours. We tried to play cards to pass the time in between rain, but then it just rained and rained and rained. We thought that we needed to stay on our blanket to save our spot because we were right on the water. In the end, we got up and walked closer to the fireworks and we probably didn't need to sit in the rain, we could have arrived about 10 minutes before the show and been fine.

The fireworks started about 9:30 and lasted about 25 minutes. It was UNBELIEVABLE. The Pops played the 1812 Overture with fireworks and canons. I'm not a huge fireworks fan, but these were AMAZING. They shot them right over the water from a barge and it was awesome. They had music and it just seemed to go on and on forever. It was totally worth the rain-soaking wait!

We went home happy, tired and a little damp. Our last day in Boston we slept in and relaxed at our hotel, packed up our little suitcases, had lunch at the local food court and headed off to the airport. It was a great trip--one we hope to repeat in the near future!