Blogging in Boston - Part 1

2019-09-23

On the road in Boston, Massachusetts for a few days while my wife attends a conference for the product that her company uses. I needed a few days away from my normal routine to do some thinking and I love to travel with her so I came as a guest. I get to do the fun stuff in the evenings and I get to see a little of the city and write during the day.

The City

We arrived at Logan Airport on Saturday afternoon. We decided to ride the trains into town. First we had to catch a Silver Line bus to the South Side Train Station, transfer at the Park Street Station, then on the third train to the Prudential station. I was humping a fifty pound rolling duffle on and off the trains and up the station stairs. I am going back to my travel pack for these trips. Mindy is fine with her carry on bag.

I love the public transit and bike lanes. There are even e-bikes available for one way rental. I know that an area needs density for these services to be affordable, and we probably do need to quit building suburbs and start moving people closer together.

The one thing that would clinch the deal to live in Boston or Cambridge would be a ban on private vehicles within the city. The extra noise and pollution really makes sidewalk travel unpleasant.

Things to Do

We walked up to see the "Make Way for Ducklings" statue in the Public Garden. I was surprised to see how many people were out in the park and the number of young people. I know Boston is a college town, but I really had to look for the older generation.

We had some time on Sunday to go to the Mary Baker Eddy Library. They have a room called the Mapparium with a three story stained glass globe of the world circa 1935. I was impressed, it is worth the trip if you are in the area. We wandered back to the hotel and I set out to explore the sky walks and find some lunch. There is an extensive network around town, maybe because it gets cold here.

Last night we had a welcome reception at the Prudential Tower Skywalk Observatory. It is a nice venue for a few hundred people, although I suspect we had more than that. It was pretty tight. I did enjoy seeing all of the city from above, and the sunset over the Charles River was cool.

Spending today working on some of the unpublished posts in the blog. I break it up with Udemy lessons on ReactJS. I want to be able to do some of the lighter weight front-end coding at work. While ReactJS is not my first choice for a web component framework, it is what most of our clients are asking for lately.