IF YOU'RE A BRIT AND YOU want to impress anyone in New England, there's only one way. Tell them you drove round Boston without getting lost.
In the first place, most of them are secretly scared of the casually aggressive, un-American way in which Bostonians drive. Secondly, there's a rumour that somewhere around Boston there's the odd roundabout or two, and not a lot of Americans know exa
ctly how they work. Then there's a one-way system that can easily spew you out towards New York when you're really aiming for New Hampshire. And finally, there's the Big Dig: at 15 billion, the biggest public works project in American history, which essentially means you do the bulk of your cross-city navigating underground and at speed.
At this point you should gently ease into the conversation the fact that a) this is the first time you've driven an automatic b) the first time you've driven in the States and therefore c) you're doing all of this while driving on the wrong side of the road. Jaws start to drop, eyebrows to raise and heads to bow in admiration.
You'd spoil everything if you admitted you'd already done what all Brits really should do before putting pedal to metal in Boston. Don't tell a soul that you've spent four days there getting your bearings.
Actually, it doesn't take that long. If you want a crash course in avoiding a crash course on the streets of Boston, just spend an hour looking down at the city from the 62nd floor of the John Hancock Tower.
Out to the west, the Green Monster: the Red Sox home base at Fenway Park, expanded this year to take 37,000 fans but still the most intimate and historic of baseball grounds. Beyond that, across the Charles River, you can't see much of Harvard, which is blocked out by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but is well worth mooching around later. Every September a quarter of a million students flood into the 60 colleges and universities in the Boston area, which in theory should make it the best-educated city in the English-speaking world.
Look north-east, and the hard core of revolutionary American history is laid out before you. Boston Common, where the Redcoats made camp before heading out to Lexington and Concord; Beacon Hill, the small cluster of privilege in the shadow of the gold-domed State House, where the ultra-snobbish Boston Brahmins used to live (and Senator John Kerry still does).
Just to the left, but still in the same direction, is the Leonard P Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge, the widest cable-stayed suspension bridge in the world. When it was opened five years ago, Boston tourist chiefs thought it would give them the one thing the city lacked – an iconic image recognisable throughout the world. That hasn't worked: it's beautiful, but it's just another bridge. In any case, its name is too long.
So what's Boston to do? The Hancock Tower may be tall enough for its observation deck to have been shut in the wake of 9/11, but ultimately it too is an uninspiring skyscraper, dwarfed by New York's and in any case so badly constructed that, just after it was built, scores of its 500lb windows popped out and went crashing to the ground beneath (miraculously no-one was injured in the process).
Other landmarks don't do the job either. Bunker Hill isn't an imposing battle site, and in any case the battle was on an adjacent hill and was technically a defeat. The old headquarters of British rule in North America is such an unimposing building that for most of the 19th century it was used as a warehouse. The Green Monster at Fenway Park would work for baseball fans, but as they're nearly all in America anyway it's not going to do the trick for foreigners.
What could? Harvard? Yes, it's the best university in the world, but when Bill Gates gets where he did by dropping out and George Bush manages to graduate in business studies, you're entitled to a few doubts. The Museum of Fine Arts? A world-class collection, certainly – last year's Edward Hopper retrospective was one of the best I've seen – but the building it's housed in lacks the panache of the Guggenheim or the Hermitage. And while you'll get all the bargains you want in Filene's Basement, I've yet to see that on any postcard either.
But really, why bother with a globally recognisable image? It's easy to make a convincing case that Boston already has more going for it than any city its size on the continent.
According to Forbes business magazine, it's the best place in America for culture, and its excellent restaurants, vibrant club scene and lower housing costs made it the third best for singles (after Austin and Denver, but well ahead of eighth-place New York). Unlike New York, "America's walking city" is a manageable size for the short-term visitor. And while Philadelphia has its cracked Liberty Bell, and other places further down the eastern seaboard may have been the sites of battles that squeezed the British out of America, it's Boston and nowhere else that was the true heartland both of British and rebel American power. If you want to see where the United States began, go to Faneuil Hall's bustling market and look around you.
If it's culture you're after, take the Green Line "E" train west to the Museum of Fine Art, then wander round the corner to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, as serene, impressive, eclectic and occasionally eccentric a collection as you will find anywhere in the world. After taking in its two heavenly Botticellis on the third floor, check out the café by the ground floor courtyard, which caters for Brahmin palates at only slightly more than blue-collar prices.
The Botticelli Virgin and Child with an Angel mixes deep emotion to perfection: Mary's joy at motherhood and sadness at her foreknowledge of her baby's death. There's a more earthly parallel to that back in the city's historic heart, where a moving glass Holocaust memorial, with six million numbers engraved on six empty glass towers, is deliberately placed across the road from the raucously loud Irish bars near the Union House Oyster Tavern, America's oldest restaurant and (booth 18) JFK's favourite eating place.
By the time you've discovered all these – if you've got children, you should certainly also take a ride on the amphibious landing craft used on the Duck Tours – your own inner map of Boston should be functioning perfectly. You're now ready to hit the road and get out of town.
Most people will head south along the coast to Plymouth Rock and Cape Cod, but we're a contrary bunch so we aimed north – first via Salem (eldest daughter having just studied The Crucible in Higher English) and then to Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, where the shape of the economic world to come was outlined at the 1944 conference that gave birth to the IMF, the World Bank, and established the dollar as the world's main trading currency (eldest daughter being about to go to university to read economics).
Yet although Bretton Woods in 1944 changed the world far more than the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, the casual visitor to both places could be forgiven for thinking it was the other way around. True, at the imposing Mount Washington Hotel, where the conference took place, there's a small display about its position in history. "But no, you're right," says the hotel's PR lady. "Generally it's just Europeans who want to ask about that."
Instead, Americans put more store by the fact that the Mount Washington is right in the heart of the hunting, skiing and walking paradise that is the White Mountains. "America's Switzerland" is the boast, although the real Switzerland doesn't have moose grazing the salty verges of the roads after the gritters have gone by. It doesn't have bears hunting for strawberries lower down the valleys in July, moving up the mountains for the raspberries in August and the blueberries right near the top of the 6,000ft peaks in mid-September.
But this is where richer Bostonians looking north rather than east to Cape Cod have their second homes, while their New York equivalents ("altogether higher maintenance", I was warned) move up to colonise Vermont.
You can argue about who gets the better deal (although if you're looking for real estate bargains, remember that while Vermont has a state sales tax, New Hampshire doesn't). But by the time you come to head back home again from Boston's Logan Airport, if you follow this plan you'll have had a family holiday that mixes a city and country break to something pretty close to perfection.
Factfile How to get there
Return fares to Boston's Logan Airport from Edinburgh and Glasgow, flying Aer Lingus via Dublin, start at £285. For details, tel: 0870 876 5000 or visit www.aerlingus.com
Where to stay
The Hyatt Regency, on Avenue de Lafayette in the Theatre district, one block from Boston Common, is an ideal base. Rates start at £150 per room (sleeps three) per night. Tel: 001 617 912 1234 or visit www. regencyboston.hyatt.com
In New Hampshire, the Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods offers golf, tennis, horse-riding and fly fishing in summer, and alpine and Nordic skiing in winter. Tel: 001 603 278 1000 or visit brettonwoods.com
And there's more
Boston Duck Tours (www.bostonducktours.com). Tickets cost £14 for adults, £11 for children.
The full article contains 1606 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
