Our journey from New York to Boston on Saturday was pretty uneventful:  rather than pick up another $60 taxi fare we used the subway to get out from Brooklyn to JFK , which delivered us to the airport in plenty of time for our 37 minute flight.  Likewise, the relatively short trip from Logan International Airport through the centre of Boston and out to our AirBnB hosts in Cambridge (home of Harvard and MIT) was easy – public transport seems to be something that both New York and Boston have got right.     We then managed to give ourselves a severe scare by struggling to find the key to  our accommodation (our hosts were away for the weekend) and at one time I had visions of having to sleep in the garden whilst waiting for their return!  All my fault – I hadn’t looked carefully enough and eventually managed to find the key exactly where they said it would be.  Oops!Yesterday was spent strolling around Boston , following the Freedom Trail, mixing with the crowds and enjoying the early autumn sunshine of the Columbus Day celebrations.  The city is a little less frenetic than New York and its good that the residents are happy to celebrate their history, so we enjoyed our trip down their ‘Independence Memory Lane’.   I was particularly struck by the hotel where former members of staff are claimed to include both Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh (though not at the same time!) and by visiting the site of the Battle of Bunker Hill – which was neither an American victory nor actually on Bunker Hill (in the early morning mists of a June morning in 1775 the rebels managed to build their fortifications on the wrong mound!).

The Columbus Day Parade through the North End of the city was colourful fun.  A chance for marching bands to march and play, for city politicians to wave and throw Hershey Bars to their electorate,  and for portly city cops  to sit astride their Harleys and gaze out inscrutably from behind police issue Raybans  Only in America …………