Freedom Trail Two

Friday we joined E and Z on their fifth grade class trip to walk the Freedom Trail in Boson. We had a memorial to attend in Rhode Island the next day, so C, M, and I all went (and we got to drive our own car, rather than spend six hours in a bus with 26 eleven-year-olds). This trip felt a lot faster and more frenetic than M's trip four years ago did, but then I looked back at the post from that trip and saw that I wrote that it was "like the ADD tour history," so I guess it had been a hectic tour then, too. 

We started with a climb up to the top of the Bunker Hill Monument.

Hit a couple of cemeteries.

Took a peek in Old North Church.

 Visited the Statehouse.

 And everything in between.

We finished it off with a visit to the Tea Party Museum.

 

 And a taxi across the water back to Charlestown.

The kids have been studying the Revolutionary War all year and this trip is meant to put places to the names, make history come alive. The kids, though, mostly seemed to enjoy the bustle and energy of a big city, waving at the cars driving by over the bridge and parkour-ing around the steps and benches and curbs and parks whenever we stopped for a break. In the long run, though, I think some of it will have sunk in--the 290 steps to the top of the monument, the really great interpretive presentation about the Battle of Bunker Hill, throwing replica tea boxes off a boat into the Charles River, the actual windows where the two-if-by-sea lamps were hung, the spot where the Boston Massacre took place.