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If you’re visiting Boston for the first time, and you only have a few hours to spend, what could you do to get the most from your visit? One suggestion is to go downtown and take a walking tour on the Freedom Trail.

After visiting Acadia National Park in Maine, I continued my New England road trip south bound through Massachusetts. I planned on stopping for the night near Newport, RI, but on the way, I wanted to stop somewhere in Massachusetts. I thought one place I couldn’t miss is the biggest city in New England, Boston. I had been to Boston a couple of times before for business trips, but never for leisure. So I thought at least I should stop there as it was on the way to my next destination. As I looked for activity that I could do in a few hours there, I found out about the Freedom Trail. The Freedom Trail is a 2.5-mile walking path in downtown Boston that takes you to several historical landmarks where some key events in the American Revolution occurred. The path is marked with redbrick line that you can trace starting at the Boston Common. You can get a map at the Information Center and do a self-guided tour, or like I did, join a 90-minute guided walking tour that starts at the Information Center in the Boston Common area and ends at the Faneuil Hall. The tour runs every hour, rain or shine, led by a tour guide dressed in the period attire (and typical role play an important historical figure).

During the tour, you get to learn about the historical landmarks and some of the key figures in the American Revolution (people like Paul Revere, John Hancock, and Samuel Adams). I think doing the tour is definitely worth the time and cost as it allows you to learn more than simply looking at the sights and reading printed materials. You can ask questions about the city history that you probably won’t find in any guide books. For example, why are the streets in downtown Boston laid out in somewhat confusing pattern? (It’s because those streets started as walking paths created by farmers herding their cattle). And you get more in short time if you have time constraints like I did.

Near the end of the tour at Faneuil Hall, if you’re hungry, you can check out another historic landmark, the Union Oyster House. The restaurant was established in 1826, earning it the distinction as the oldest operating restaurant in the United States. There you can get some traditional New England fare like clam chowder or broiled scrod. The food might be a little bit on expensive side, but I think it’s worth it for the experience.

The photo below was taken as we started our walking tour at the Boston Common. You can see the redbrick line on the trail and our guide leading the group at the front walking in the rain (by the end of the tour, the rain actually turned to snow). The building with the golden dome in front of us was the Massachusetts State House. The photo was nothing spectacular, but I think it conveys the sense of place and captures the experience of being part of the walking tour. This is an example of one point to keep in mind in recording a travel experience. Sometimes you have situations where it’s less than ideal to take photographs with DSLR (like in this case, we were walking in the rain, and one of my hands was holding an umbrella). In such situations, it’s helpful to have a backup plan like carrying a small point-and-shoot camera, and it’s better to take photos anyway even in less than ideal situation so you would still have a record of your experience.

Two years ago, I had an opportunity to do one of those ‘once in a lifetime’ trips. My brother was moving from Santa Monica, CA, to Brooklyn, NY. He had some belongings that couldn’t easily be carried in a flight or shipped, so he thought of renting a car for one-way drive from West Coast to East Coast and asked if I would like to join him in this road trip. While I had been to many places between the two coasts of the United States, this trip sounded interesting simply because it’s going from one end to another in one trip. There were many routes that we considered, until finally we decided to take one that partly going through a legendary route, Route 66.

Route 66 was an old route connecting Chicago, IL, in the Midwest to Los Angeles, CA, in the West, back in the early days of automobiles before the Interstate Highway system was built. There were many little towns within the route that made their living from providing services to travelers. For many of the travelers, the journey in itself was the attraction as back then not many people traveled extensively from their homes. Today with the emphasis on efficiency and going to the destinations, most people would focus on getting to their destination in the shortest amount of time possible (thus, the invention of the Interstate Highway system which is intended to provide a high-speed route that connects major cities in the United States). This contrast between then and now was portrayed well in the Pixar animated movie Cars. The movie’s story, its characters, and even some of the places and landmarks were based on real-life places and characters that the Pixar crew met along the Route 66 when they did research prior to making the movie. Prior to our trip, I did some research on these locations, and made them part of our road trip’s route.

The result was a memorable experience of seeing places that otherwise we would’ve ignored or skipped. The photo below was taken in Arizona on the old road that was part of the original Route 66. Today the Interstate Highway cut through the area and made the distance shorter for those traveling east-west. At the same time, it pretty much ‘killed’ the original route that went through the mountains. Now you only find ghost towns and places selling memorabilias from the old days on this route. If you’re reading this post and are interested in doing the trip of your own, you can take a look at my photo album on flickr to give you some ideas on places to visit along the way. There is also a list of resources to plan for the trip at the end of the photo album.