SBRT Day 2-4: Boston, MA

When we get to Boston, we meet up with Kip & Steph, college friends of Steve.  With them we travel to the Harvard area to meet up with my college friend Tim.  He’s a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Harvard, so it goes without saying that he’s ready to party.  We go to an Irish pub (yes, a trend is forming) called John Harvard’s to enjoy some brews and sandwiches.  After that we decide to head back to Tim’s dorm room to play some drinking games.  Let’s take a moment to enjoy the fact that Tim lives in a dorm room…….OK, now we can come back to the fact that he’s smarter than anybody writing or reading this can probably ever hope to be.  So I guess it all evens out.

After a few games of “Shoulders” and “3 Men in a Boat”, the five of us head out to another bar, where we tell  stories and all get to know each other better.  After closing out the bar, we tried to get some late night Mexican, but the place was closed.  Weak, Harvard, very weak.  So we bid adieu to Tim and headed back to Kip & Steph’s for a nightcap and some rest.

The next day started with a bit of irony: while the rest of us slept in, Kip had to get up at the asscrack of dawn to go to work.  Kip was easily the drunkest of us the night before.  So when we awoke at a leisurely noon, we reveled in that fact a good deal.  Then, heading out to a delicious, hangover-curing breakfast, we locked ourselves out of the apartment.  So after breakfast Steph dropped Steve & I off downtown to walk around and explore, while she drove to Kip’s work to get the other set of keys.  We all met up again later that night to make spaghetti, which was a good rest for our wallets and livers.  When Steph started getting ready for bed, Kip and I introduced Steve to the glorious soft core porn/self-hating diatribe known as Californication, and called it an early night.

In the morning, we left as Steph went to work, and found ourselves leaving Boston around 9am.  To spice up the trip down to New York, we decided to drive down to the Rhode Island coast and go on a “Cliff Walk” in Newport.  Newport is quintessential New England, in that it feels a lot like regular England: loose stone fences surround roadside homes, sheep lazily graze on grassy knolls, and rain quietly, coolly, and constantly blankets the area.  The cliff walk is cold and windy, but even with the dreary weather, it is an amazing sight.  We soak in the ocean waters (figuratively and literally) and make note of the fact that we’ll be seeing the other marine border of this country in a few short weeks.  A German man takes our picture and we head off to New York.