The 127th Boston Marathon has come and gone, now, and it was a great weekend overall.
For first time in 6 years, I flew up on Friday for the full weekend's festivities. This year, I wound up connecting through Newark Airport (ugh). It was a long enough layover, I wound up making my first Dunkin' run there:
Apple fritter. No great shakes from Dunkin' -- I've had FAR better fritters. But it was sufficient to tide me over for a little bit and get me even more in the Boston mood.
Finally landed at Logan Airport, I got my Charlie Card for the week and board the Silver Line to the Red Line towards my hotel in Quincy. I had heard about the delays on the T prior to my arrival, but didn't realize just how bad they were. Good lord! First of all, once I transferred, I had to wait about 35 minutes for the Red Line to arrive at South Station. (It was 20+ minutes for about 15 minutes.) Then, aside from it going slower than normal through much of it, there is one segment of two consecutive stops where it CRAWLED -- between JFK/UMass and North Quincy, which should be somewhere around 7 minutes (I think) was taking 20 minutes (!). Great; note to self: pad on a fair bit of extra time!
Finally checked in at HoJo's (don't judge me -- it's actually a really good, comfortable room, they have breakfast included, and it's comparatively inexpensive), I unpack my bags and hit the road, hoping that I could get to the expo before it closed at 6pm. Nope, no chance. Not only did it take a while for my train to arrive in the first place, but the travel time to the convention center took me past 6pm. Conveniently enough, though, there was a huge meet-up scheduled for dinner at Wagamama's in the Prudential Center, so I made my way there a bit early. Plenty of people were already there. I chatted for a while with some friends sitting at the next table over, and gradually as my table filled up, conversation shifted to the people I was seated with. It was definitely a good time. Good food, good company -- what more can you ask for? Before departing, the Trattoria Dopeys (+1) took a "reunion" photo:
Look at that -- it's nearly 8pm. Time to book it over to the Fairmont Copley Plaza for Boston Lights.
Alas, I don't have any ay of effectively transferring the videos that I took on my phone onto my laptop to then upload here. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights the marathon put on a different show (about 3 minutes long repeated every 15 minutes for 2 hours) that showed different scenes from the history of the marathon (typically from the past 10 years, actually) and had different music and/or voice-over to match. It was well done, and certainly helped amp up the mood, especially in the lead up to the anniversary being commemorated on Saturday.
No comments:
Post a Comment