2004/04 Boston and South Carolina trip - Boston area |
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We quit mining after lunch and headed east on the New York Turnpike and then the Massachusetts Turnpike. We hit heavy traffic as we ran into roadworks and the East 
Coast rush hour but we made it to Bolton’s Crystal Springs campground on schedule. We had reservations and had to be there by 6 pm. It was a well worn campground, with lots of summer residents living in rather tired trailers. However, they assigned us a site in a distant corner amongst the trees backing onto a babbling brook, so it was a good spot for us. Temperatures began in the 60s but cooled off rapidly as it got dark.
Saturday 17th April
This was our first night above freezing, and it warmed up nicely in late morning. Our plan was to take the train into Boston to pick up my race number and packet, but we were up too late for the train from Southborough, and headed for Framingham instead and got stuck in the Saturday morning rush hour, watching that train leave too before we could find a parking spot. So we had three hours to kill before the next train, and looked for a restaurant for lunch.
Half the stores in Framingham seemed to be Brazilian and we ended up in a Brazilian restaurant. I was going to ask about the Brazilian connection but the waitress only spoke – yes, Brazilian, a dialect of Portuguese. However, we ended up with enormous quantities of good food, more than we could eat. I found out later that Boston is “the destination” for Brazilian immigrants, both legal and illegal, and there are hundreds of thousands of them in the area.
The 2.50 train was about 20 minutes late, so it was quite late when we got to Boston South, and then we had to queue for the shuttle buses that took the runners to Boston’s World Trade Center. As usual, 90% of the space there was taken up with stalls selling running gear and body repair stuff, with a little left for handing out our numbers and timing chips.
We’d hoped to take the subway across to the finish line area in central Boston so that we could agree on a meeting point for after the race, but, by the time we’d been shuttled back to the station, there wasn’t enough time for that and still catch the train back.
On the drive back from Framingham, though, we did have time to check out the start area in Hopkinton and also my drop-off point for race day morning in Hopkinton State Park. This all sounds very complicated and it is. The organizers have 22000 runners to deal with, all on roads that are much like England’s, narrow and with no big parking areas, so everything depends on shuttle buses. An added complication for us is that we were taking the cheapest approach, staying in a campsite outside Boston rather than staying at a downtown Boston hotel, so most of the organized transportation didn’t work for me.
Sunday 18th April
First thing, we checked out the access to Hopkinton State Park where the shuttle buses run to the start of the race, and also Southborough Station where Sandie would leave the truck and travel by train into Boston. Then we tried to do some food shopping. The first place we found was really a pharmacy with food, no meat or dairy. The second place had only Brazilian Food. Finally, we found a Jewish supermarket that supplied most of what we needed, albeit at high prices.
The affluent suburbs of Boston are much like those of Philadelphia, lots of trees, stone walls, and narrow roads that wander. A favourite road sign around here is “thickly settled” to warn you that there might be peds behind the next tree. There are no corresponding “thinly settled” signs.
We went back to the state park for the rest of the day. The park’s trails turned out to be just short connections between the park’s massive parking lots. The park is obviously well used by Bostonians in the summer. However, it’s a smart usage of a reservoir, with trails, kite flying areas, and a boating pool in the summer.
We dialed into the Internet that evening for e-mail and found that our friend Maynard Magnusson had died the previous evening. This was not a complete surprise as we’d driven up to Alexandria to see him the day before we left. He’d aged 20-30 years, just a shell of the person we used to know. He knew us, but was confused about everything else. Barb said that there had been a rapid decline from someone who could play crib a week before. The assumption was that he now had tumours in the brain too. We passed the news on to the kids and asked them to represent us and go the funeral ceremony at Fort Snelling.
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