Boston, MA | Walking the Freedom Trail & Candlepin Bowling

Our second day in Boston was a busy one! All in all, I walked 21,000 steps and let me tell you, it is definitely time to invest in a new pair of shoes and some comfort inserts because my feet and calves were screaming at me by the end of the day.

We started our day with breakfast at a spot within walking distance of our Airbnb, called The Paramount. It was a sit-down restaurant but they request that you order your food at the counter and pay for your meal first before taking a seat. I ordered a breakfast sandwich on an English muffin and it was the biggest English muffin I’ve ever seen! It was quite apparent it was a homemade muffin and so delicious!

After breakfast, we took a bus into the city so we could walk the Freedom Trail. Originally, we planned to take a free guided tour but there weren’t any spots available so we guided ourselves around the trail using an online guide that talked about the significance of different spots around the city.

We started our adventure at the Massachusetts State House, where the Freedom Trail begins, and then followed the brick road throughout Boston.

We visited Granary Burying Ground where John Hancock, Paul Revere, and Samuel Adams are buried.

We saw the Boston Latin School, which is the oldest public school in the U.S. (founded in 1635!) and where five signers of the Declaration attended (Franklin, Adams, and Hancock among them). What’s astonishing about this school, though, is that it didn’t start accepting girls until 1972! So, basically, my mom wouldn’t have been able to attend it until she was in second grade. !!

After that, we quickly walked through a bunch of other sites, like the Old Corner Bookstore (that is now, unfortunately, a Chipotle), Old South Meeting House, and the site of the Boston Massacre. Then, we decided to take a break and my friends indulged me in a VERY touristy visit to the Cheers bar.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the original bar (i.e., the pub that was the inspiration for the TV show and I am rather sad that we didn’t visit that one – something to do next time!) but a replica bar that was established in 2001. However, I still sat at the very same spot as George Wendt (NORM!) did when the bar opened, so there’s that. I enjoyed a mug of their local cider (Downeast) and then just had to pay an extra $8 to keep the mug because how could I not? It’s perfect! (They gave me a brand new mug, btw, wrapped in bubble wrap.)

After our brief visit to Cheers, it was back to the Freedom Trail we went! We stopped at Faneuil Hall, which hosted the first-ever Town Meeting in America.

Then, we took a slight detour off the Trail to walk through the Holocaust Memorial set in the middle of town. I didn’t take any pictures because it just didn’t feel right to me. It’s a beautiful yet harrowing memorial, featuring six glass towers that symbolize the six major concentration camps. Etched on the outside of each tower are numbers to represent the six million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust. The numbers are tiny, stacked on top of each other, and it helps you grasp just how many people were killed. How many families were gone forever, lives destroyed. On the inside of each tower are quotes and stories from people who survived, and many of the stories had me gasping in disbelief. It’s a reminder of what humans can do to one another.

After the Holocaust Memorial, we visited a few more landmarks, including Paul Revere’s house and the Copp’s Hill Burying Ground. Then, we crossed the North Washington Street Bridge for the final two stops on the Freedom Trail: the USS Constitution and the Bunker Hill Monument.

But whew, these last two stops took the longest to get to! From the Copp’s Hill Burying Ground to the Bunker Hill Monument is 1.3 miles and it felt never-ending to me! Finally, though, we got to the Bunker Hill Monument, and oh, how happy I was to be finished! Ha. The Freedom Trail is quite the journey!

After we’d completed our tour of the Freedom Trail, it was time to say goodbye to one of our friends for the next few hours as she was going to visit a friend while we were on our next adventure: a food tour in East Boston! My friend found us this tour: Boston Bowling & Bites that was right up our… alley. (Honestly, didn’t mean to make the pun, but I’m leaving it.)

We took an Uber to the meeting point and found our guides. It was going to be the four of us and an older couple, which was a nice small group! Our first order of business was to take a ride on the subway to East Boston, which was an area we hadn’t visited yet. East Boston was a city built and maintained by immigrants and it shows in the eclectic mixture of restaurants and culture.

We stopped at an authentic Colombian restaurant for empanadas. It was a delicious snack! I loved the cornmeal crust and potato and beef filling. So yummy! It really hit the spot and I was looking forward to what other “bites” awaited us on this journey.

However, that was all she wrote for bites. Yep. ONE snack is what we got during this tour when we were promised “two to three.” Super disappointing!

What was not disappointing, though, was playing candlepin bowling! We went to such a unique spot in East Boston for candlepin bowling called Central Park Lanes. When we stepped inside, it was like going back in time. This bowling alley hasn’t been renovated since the 1960s, which means there’s no technology like we’re used to! You even keep score on a piece of paper! I felt like I was on a movie set. 🙂

Candlepin bowling is vastly different than “regular” 10-pin bowling. The pins are much smaller and so is the ball. It’s small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, so it feels more like playing ski ball than bowling. You also get three chances in each frame rather than two and the pins are not moved out of the way with each roll. Instead, they can actually help you knock more pins down!

The verdict is that I was pretty awful at candlepin bowling. Like, got the worst score in the whole group awful. I think I scored a 28? Yeahhhhh.

On the other hand, I think we discovered that one of our friends is a candlepin bowling phenom! She easily killed us all (not that she had much competition with me, ha).

It was fun, though! I enjoyed trying to learn how to play an entirely new type of bowling! And sometimes it’s fun to discover you are just fricken awful at something and just try to enjoy playing something new with your friends. I mean, that’s what I tried to do! I’m not sure if I was successful at it because my competitive streak means I always want to be the best, argh.

Once bowling was over, so was our tour. We could have paid $20 for the second part of the tour, which involved more “eats” but we wanted to get back to Southie and back to our friend!

(Also, a very funny moment of this trip is when we’re all standing outside the bowling alley and the four of us Florida girls are wrapped up in our coats and talking about how much colder it got. The tour guide, a Boston native, steps outside and says, “Wow, it’s really warm tonight!” LOLZ. Weather is relative, y’all!)

We Ubered back to Southie to meet up with our friend and decided to go to a place called Coppersmith, based on a recommendation. It was a really cool place with a really great bar area and an actual food truck inside the restaurant. It was definitely overstimulating for me, though, especially after such a full, active day. It was loud, between the music and all the competing conversations from the bar area, and hard to hear my friends. I enjoyed my food, though! It was really good, and I’d love to go back at a time when I wasn’t so exhausted and it wasn’t so crazy busy.

And that was our second day! Next up, a day in Salem!