Searching for Home, Leg 4: To Boston

Several years ago, I made a huge change in my life: I quit my job in Chattanooga, TN so that I could move back to Colorado to be near my family and the home that I loved.

I decided that to commemorate the 9 years I'd lived East of the Mississippi, I would take a grand road trip to visit all of my friends in the Eastern US, and that in the process I'd contemplate the meaning of "home" and explore some new places.

Leg 1: To Charlottesville

Leg 2: To Balitmore

Leg 3: To New York City

Late in the afternoon on October 10, 2011, I grabbed my 1987 Nissan 300ZX from the unbelievably-expensive parking spot where I had left it in Manhattan, immediately took a wrong turn which left me lost in Queens for an hour, and then finally managed to find a freeway that pointed me towards Boston. I'd just spent the past several days in the metropolitan sprawl of DC-to-NYC, and I was tired.

From time to time, I'd find a nice-looking New England town and pull off the freeway to enjoy the idyllic beauty of these old towns. This one was in Connecticut, I believe:

I spent a good portion of this afternoon and evening off of the freeways, partly because there was excessive traffic, and partly because the countryside is quite beautiful in that area.

It took me a very long time to get to Boston. It was dark, I was exhausted, and I was trying not to lose my cool with the crazy Boston streets and drivers. My destination, specifically, was Cambridge, MA - home of MIT and Harvard. I was going to spend two nights with a dear friend I'd known in high school, but who I hadn't seen much of since because our lives had taken us to different parts of the world.

I finally found a spot to park, and went in to her little apartment for some incredibly-heartwarming homemade pizza. I can't tell you how wonderful it was to have a home-cooked meal that night. I just sat in her kitchen, catching up and meeting her roommate, as she kept showering wonderful bits of food on to me. "This is good," I thought. "This has a bit of home in it."

The next morning, we set out to explore Boston. We visited Harvard! This is me meeting John Harvard himself:

We took a jaunt across the salt-and-pepper-shaker bridge, and enjoyed the brilliant Autumn day over the Charles:

The next two are at the Boston Public Library, which is now one of my favorite libraries in the world:

Just as I did when I visited Baltimore, I asked a resident of Boston what her thoughts were of Boston. She said "it's a quaint country town with a nice downtown." I thought this was curious, since Boston isn't exactly a small city by most standards. This particular person was from New York, so that's part of her perspective on Boston. But it's stuck with me ever since.

In my visits to Boston since, I've been struck with how soundly family-friendly it is. It's almost like a Disneyland of American Revolutionary history. It makes "a quaint country town" feel a bit more reasonable.

The rest of my Boston trip was filled with the sorts of things you can't capture in photographs. Catching up with my friend after so many years, visiting churches and talking about God, reading bits from her Book of Common Prayer. It felt like a deeply good place to have gone on my journey towards home.