Boston: Sat. Apr. 7 & Sun. Apr. 8 (Happy Easter!!)

And early it was!! Marv was easily up by 6:00 and I followed soon after. We went downstairs to enjoy the Deluxe Continental Breakfast, which included scrambled eggs and waffles, plus bagels, English muffins, cereal, etc. We ate our fill while we waited for Kris and Heidi. We also took food back to our room for the next morning since we would be on our way before they opened. We caught the 8:00 free shuttle to JFK/UMass station and took the Red Line down to The Commons. It was mostly sunny but the temperature was never out of the forties and it was windy. None of us really had warm enough clothes but we were here, so what could we do? We walked all 2½ miles of the Freedom Trail, taking a break for coffee fairly early on, both to warm up and to give places a chance to open up. We decided not to pay the extra to go inside places that charge a fee but enjoyed a talk at Faneuil (he pronounced it to rhyme with Daniel) Hall by a National Park Ranger. We had a great lunch at an Italian Restaurant on Salem Street recommended by our waitress the night before. Afterwards, as we climbed up the nearby Cobbs Hill, I was shocked to get a call from Sallie telling me that Mom had had a small stroke and was at St. Joe’s Hospital awaiting the results of an MRI. She was weak and having a little trouble walking but there seemed to be no other problems. There was nothing I could do right then so she said to just wait and she’d let me know more soon. We spent a long time in the excellent USS Constitution Museum, getting all the history of Old Iron Sides but chose not to go through security and stand in line to go aboard her. Marv & I had done it before and Kris and Heidi didn’t care to take the time, which was fine with us. While we were in the Museum Sallie called and said that the MRI didn’t show anything and that Mom was being released. Sallie took Mom to Sallie’s house for the weekend until she could make some arrangements for a bit of help starting Monday at Brecon Village. We hiked on over to the Bunker Hill Monument and climbed all 294 steps up the obelisk to look over the town and harbor. That just about did us in, so we dragged back to the docks and found the water shuttle to take us through the harbor back over to Long Wharf, where we took the subway back to JFK/UMass station. The free shuttle was quite late coming for us and we were pretty cold and grumpy by the time she made it. We ate a nice dinner at the restaurant on the other side of the motel and went to bed by about 9:00. We had to be up at 3:15am to get to the airport to take the flight that United had assigned us after taking over Continental. Luckily, our bodies had stayed somewhere between Azorean and Eastern time zones so we were able to function well enough to pack up and make the 4:00 shuttle back to the airport, even though the Easter Bunny didn’t manage to find us in time. There were no glitches getting onboard and flying to Chicago O’Hare. We rode a shuttle from one terminal to another that dropped us right next to the gate so we easily made the next flight, although we didn’t have much time in between the flights. There was a glitch on the second flight and so after we boarded we sat at the gate for an hour and a half before we managed to take-off for the 30 minute flight back to Grand Rapids. It was ironic to us that we could fly to the Azores and back without any problems until the last half an hour. We gathered our luggage while Kris retrieved the car and he still managed to get us back to Lansing in time for us to take Thelma out for Easter Dinner at the Kellogg Center. It was a very nice conclusion to another fabulous Spring Break trip with Kris and Heidi. I wonder where we’ll go next year.