37 Hours in Boston

Summary

The author recounts a brief yet rich 37-hour business trip to Boston, filled with historical exploration and a reflection on the city's blend of past and present.

Abstract

The author's experience begins with an early morning arrival in Boston after a redeye flight, highlighting the less glamorous side of business travel. Despite a previous visit 26 years prior, the city's history and charm quickly recapture the author's attention. After indulging in a local lobster scramble and a nap, the author enjoys the city's historical ambiance, particularly at the Boston Tea Party site. The trip concludes with a reflection on Boston's unique ability to harmonize its storied past with a modern economy driven by education, entrepreneurship, and biotechnology. The author notes the city's high rate of philanthropy, juxtaposing it against its historical resistance to taxation.

Opinions

The author values weekends at home highly and considers sacrificing one for work travel to be painful.
Business travel is not as glamorous as often perceived, especially when it involves weekend redeye flights.
Boston's historical significance is acknowledged, with the author noting the architectural evidence of the city's past.
The author finds the city's blend of history and modernity striking, particularly the ease with which Boston integrates its historical identity with its contemporary economy.
There is an appreciation for the irony that Boston, known for its historical tax protests, now boasts the highest rate of household philanthropy in the U.S.

37 Hours in Boston

Photo credit to the author

The jetBlue redeye from Portland disgorged me into the terminal of Boston’s Logan International Airport at 7:00 on a Sunday morning. I flew east to attend two days of a conference, sacrificing half of a weekend at home in the process. People who think business travel is all glamour have never taken a cross country redeye on a weekend for the purpose of your job. With as much as I travel for work, I value my weekends at home like gold bullion so it is always painful to get on a plane for work between Friday and Monday.

I hadn’t been to Boston since, I believe, 1997 when I came here on a high school trip to the east coast. My memories of Beantown have gotten a bit hazy over the preceding 26 years, but my general recollection is it was cold (I visited in March) with a ton of history. Deep, I know.

Checking into my hotel in the Seaport district I immediately celebrated my arrival with a lobster (lobstah?) scramble and promptly fell asleep afterward for two hours thanks to both the overnight as well as the combination of lobster and scrambled eggs cooked in what appeared to be one full cup of butter. Upon waking back up at 11:30 local time I immedeately downed a large coffee and decided to pay homage to being in this cradle of American history by going to the hotel pool. The sun was poking through the east coast haze and the temperature was a perfect 70 degrees, so I can’t be too much at fault for that decision.

I could choose to bore you with details of this conference and associated hijinks, but that isn’t really the purpose of this story. At the conclusion of the business portion of my trip I decided to play tourist, briefly, and took a walk to the Boston Tea Party. Most of the major cities on the east coast tend to be architecturally different than the west coast due in large part to their relative age, and Boston oozes history through that architecture from every corner in its city center. Rounding a curve to come within sight of Boston Inner Harbor I could see the Tea Party replica ship and tourist attraction, resplendent with tourists throwing reusable and presumably waterproof boxes full of what I can only presume was fresh New England air into the water in homage to that Sons of Liberty protest against British taxation in 1773.

It was a picture perfect New England fall day, nary a cloud in the sky as I watched this historical reenactment take place against Boston’s gleaming modern skyline. What I found most striking about my brief time there was how effortlessly the city blends its modernist economy built around higher education, entrepreneurship, and biotechnology with its historical role as the birthplace of what eventually became the United States.

The Alaska Airlines jet took off to the east from Logan Airport shortly after 8:00 PM, 37 quick hours after my arrival to take me back to my west coast life. Reading about the city while on the plane, I discovered that in a wonderful irony of those protests against King George’s taxation of the colonies, Boston today claims the highest rate of philanthropy from its households of any metropolitan area in the country. It is a quintessential American city.