Boston 250- Cambridge & Dorchester Heights- Friday, March 13, 2026

     After our hotel breakfast, we continued on the proverbial road to Boston.   We were on the road by 6:30, and the GPS in the phone said we had four and a half hours to drive, but we knew it was going to be longer than that from the stops we would make.  Scott took the opportunity to continue reading the book that he had bought a few weeks ago on the way back from Florida-- David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize winning history, 1776.  He hadn't really opened it since he read some on the way back from Florida, so it surprised and amazed him when he opened it to where the bookmark was and read the first line:  

On first arriving in Cambridge, Washington had been offered the home of the president of Harvard...

Cambridge was our first destination of the day, and we were planning on starting at Washington's headquarters!  In fact, Scott had just enough time to finish that chapter and the next one about the cannons on Dorchester Heights and the day the British evacuated Boston.  For him, it was a great introduction for the day.

      Knowing it could be hard to find a place to eat later, we stopped at a McDonald's in one of the Massachusetts Turnpike rest stops. It was cutely decorated and had its dining area was divided up into lots of little areas that made it feel cozy.  Scott and Julie ate at a two-person table while Abby ate from an easy chair nearby.

     It was a good thing that we stopped for lunch earlier because much of the rest of the day was spent fighting traffic in Boston.  This city is infamous for it confusing roads, its notoriously bad drivers and its nearly complete lack of public parking.   The phone's GPS took us to Cambridge where we found Washington's headquarters.  (It was also later the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.)  However there was no parking that we could find for it.  Julie navigated the confusing streets and we eventually found a space at parking meter some blocks away.  By that time, several of us needed a restroom, but they were even harder to find than parking spaces today.   We were near the park called Cambridge Commons, and after asking a passer-by, we learned that our only choice was pretty much one grungy porta-john there.  We used it because we needed to.  Then Abby saw the playground there and wanted to be play.  She needed a break after being pretty good in the car, so Julie said she would stay with her while Scott took a walking tour of Continental Army sites in Cambridge. 

     Scott's first stop was to walk back to the house known as the Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site.  It was here that Washington set up his residence for the practically all of his time here for the siege of Boston.  It was also here that he had his councils of war, meeting with his generals to plan the operations and strategies.  His wife Martha also lived with him here for a while.  The tour Scott was listening to didn't say much about the poet Longfellow's time here, but it did say that the house had previously belonged to a Loyalist/Tory named John Vassall.  Some say Washington chose the house because he liked big houses with river views.  They reminded him of Mount Vernon.  As expected, the house itself was closed for the season, but Scott was able to walk around it and view the grounds.  He was surprised when he came across a pair of wild turkeys, especially since there is so much traffic and so many people around here.  Julie always says that seeing turkeys is good luck, but they didn't seem to be doing that today.

     The next stop on the NPS tour that Scott was listening to via the phone was Cambridge Commons, the same park that he had left Julie and Abby at.  That made sense because the big green area in the middle of town would have been an ideal place for soldiers to camp and drill.  Boston Commons was certainly used that way by the British.  Unfortunately, the NPS app didn't really give directions to the next stop.  Scott typed the name "Cambridge Commons" into the phone and started off, expecting to find Julie and Abby.  In fact, the phone was taking him towards a cafe called "Cambridge Commons" that wasn't actually by the park.  By the time Scott noticed that he was not headed to the park he had gone a little ways out of the way.  He did see Julie and Abby, calling to him from the car, but they were parked on the opposite side of the street.  It was pretty cold today, so Abby had finished up at the playground and they were warming themselves up in the car.   (We had checked the weather forecast a few days ago, and it had predicted high 50s and partly cloudy skies today and tomorrow.  In fact the high was only in the low 40s and a steady wind made it feel even colder.)   Scott pressed on with his walking tour.

     In the Cambridge Commons park there are several monuments to different wars, but there was one group of several Revolutionary War monuments clustered together.   As the tour's narration pointed out, they offered quite a contrast in the way the war might be remembered.  The first was a group of two cannon (There were supposed to be three, but one was not there) that the British had left behind when the evacuated Boston.  The second was a marker for the Washington Elm, where Washington was supposed to have accepted command of the Continental Army.  The tour pointed out that the story was fictional and Scott knew that the tree that it was next to wasn't even the original tree anyway.  The third was a very modern looking semi-circle of polished black stone memorializing an African American citizen of Cambridge named Prince Hall.  The three monuments certainly presented three very different styles. Oddly, the tour didn't mention two large tablets on the fence nearby to the two Polish leaders who aided the colonists- Tadeusz Kościuszko and Casimir Pulaski.  

     The next two stops on the walking tour on on the grounds of Harvard University.  The first was the building that was the president's home and was where Washington originally stayed when he was here, but after only a few days, he moved out to the headquarters that was the first stop on the tour and stayed there for duration of his time here.  The second stop was Massachusetts Hall,  It is a Georgian-style building and is the oldest surviving building and was used as barracks for 600 Revolutionary War soldiers.  Scott initially got confused and photographed the wrong building, but the style of that one was obviously from the 19th century.  Scott did get to see some of the other buildings in the Harvard Yard area.  He had been to Harvard briefly once before back in 2002, but didn't get to this area.  He got a quick picture of the statue of John Harvard, which was easy to spot because of the many tour groups around him.

     That part of the tour was over and Scott headed back to where Julie and Abby were.  When Scott had passed by them earlier, they probably thought that Scott was almost done, but he hadn't heard the narration for tour stop for the park yet and there were 3 more stops to go after that.  Scott really didn't know how long it was supposed to take, and only knew that the audio parts were 18 minutes long.  Julie assumed that the tour wouldn't be much more than that, but it took him over an hour and a half, almost two hours, to finish the tour and return to Julie and Abby.  By that point they had an incident with someone in the porta-john.  Julie didn't want to go into details, but the door wasn't locked and they walked in on someone who got pretty angry at them.  Anyway, they were done with that spot and ready to go on.

    We had to drive to the last stop on the tour.  It was Fort Washington, which is the only surviving piece of the fortifications that were made by either side for the siege of Boston.  The entir  ety of the small fortification was surrounded by a decorative black iron fence but multiple openings allowed people to stroll into the park.  The park is next to MIT, and we parked briefly in one of their lots while we walked around the earthworks that were left.  Several cannon point out to the direction of Boston and the Charles River.  The guns would have been meant to keep the British from coming up the river, but there is no indication that the cannon here were ever fired during the siege.    

     By this point it was after 3:00 and Abby needed to find a restroom.  We drove across the Charles River several times in a futile attempt to find a place to park that might have restrooms.  We finally had to give up and set the GPS to where we wanted to go that evening-- the Dorchester Heights Monument in South Boston.   We hoped that we would find a place to stop along the way.  We crossed through Boston near the Public Garden where we saw the "Make Way for Ducklings" statue with 2-year-old Anna so long ago.  There was no place to stop this time, though.  We continued on to South Boston, and once we were there, we were able to find a Burger King that actually had a parking lot.  We stopped there for a much needed break.

 *** If you're reading this now, please check back.  We plan to write more about the evening we had, but we probably won't until tomorrow morning.