90% awesome, 10% epic disaster

So I went to Boston for the Fourth of july! It was such a cool place to be on the fourth-surrounded by people in their very best flag t-shirts, wandering about historic churches and meeting halls where the whole party got started.

The day was almost entirely awesome-we wandered around the parks and markets and the riverfront, stopping frequently for drinks and food. I tried mussels (a brave step for someone who vomits at the smell of most seafood). We ended up at a Mexican restaurant in Cambridge where we had an actual dinner accompanied by some ill advised tequila shots. Dark fell, and it was time to head back to boston for the fireworks. And then things went south. Due to a lot of factors, mostly involving drunken belligerence, we walked back to boston. Despite my repeated warnings that we only had 45 minutes after the fireworks ended to get back to the train station to get our train back to Providence, and thus we needed to watch the fireworks from the riverfront subway stop, we did not take the short, five minute subway ride back to the riverfront, but instead walked. The map below shows our path. You may have trouble seeing the scale, but our trip was nearly five miles (after wandering around boston for most of the day).

I've helpfully illustrated with self-explanatory symbols the points where my feet started to bleed, the point where we stopped to watch the gorgeous, gorgeous fireworks over the river, and the point where I realized that the cop had misdirected us to a much further subway station than we wanted, that we were likely were going to miss our train, that I was going to have to sleep in my clothes on a couch of a friend of a friend and turned into a total bitch. We did indeed miss the train, slept on spare beds at the home of a friend of a friend, took the six AM train back to providence and drank gallons of water. My feet are still bruised and shredded,and today is the first day I can walk relatively painlessly. Not the best fourth of july ever, but far from the worst and certainly one to remember.