Both Rog and I are experiencing a bit of travel sickness: were both getting sick of travelling.  Being away is great; seeing sights, experiencing different locations and people, and so on.  What’s tedious is the process of travelling; taxis, airports, bags, departure gates, and all that rubbish.  If you could travel anywhere without having to manage all that crap then it would be so much better.

Speaking of bags, Rog has again experienced the joy of having a bag break while travelling.  This time, the handle on his brand new suitcase has been rendered non-functional, most likely at the hands of an American Eagle baggage handler (the force-sheared screwheads rolling around at the bottom of the bag are a hint there).  So a good chunk of today was lost to getting that sorted out.  Between that and me shopping for a new pair of boots that I ended up not buying, we fairly-well wrote off today — which has worked well, since the last week (only a week?) has been run at a frenetic pace.  We’ve been on the go constantly since leaving Seattle last Friday, and a day of simply strolling around some shops was some useful downtime.

So at approximately mid-journey, there are mixed feelings: gladness that we’ll soon not have to worry about luggage and taxis and hotels and things, but the obvious sad realisation that the trip is mostly over and will soon end.  Still, I won’t let it bring me down: we haven’t hit Europe yet so we’re a long way from finished!

It was certainly not the purpose of the visit to Boston, but possibly the most significant Boston-related thing I’ve done since arriving last night is to enjoy a Sam Adams or three.  As the saying goes, it would be rude not to…  We passed his gravestone today; he’s buried in the Old Granary Burial Ground on Tremont Street in the city, along with Paul Revere and others.  That’s one of the remarkable things about Boston — there is so much of America’s early history here that just walking down the street seems like walking across the pages of a living history book.

So what’s Boston like?  Cold!  There’s a wind that’s kicking in from somewhere, presumably the harbour, that whips through the narrow streets like a… well, like a cold wind kicking in off the harbour.  The parts of Boston we’ve seen so far have quite a different feel to the other US cities we’ve ever visited, the narrow streets putting me more in mind of old European cities than American (and perfect for directing icy winds straight into the poorly-protected faces of unprepared Australian tourists).

We’ve seen only a very small part of Boston so far, a situation which should change tomorrow with a trip on one of the several trolley-bus tours that run here.  Rog is curious to see Chinatown (he has a hankering for yum-cha; looks like the Vancouver Asian food marathon has worn off already for him), and we noticed that the trolley goes past MIT — that’s the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for the non-propellor-heads — so I’m keen to check that out.  The USS Constitution is on the agenda as well.

That’s all this post: I’m off to thaw my cheekbones…