Our cruise reviews - A ship review of the Oosterdam

Cruise reviews of our vacation on the Oosterdam

Travel to Europe to begin our Oosterdam cruise ship vacation.

A Day In Boston

Finally the journey begins.

It's 4:00 a.m. and the town car we arraigned to pick us up arrives. We load in our suitcases and off to the Portland international airport we go.

Our flight on Southwest Airlines leaves Portland at 6:00 a.m., and our first stop and plane change is in Kansas City. Kansas City is warm and sunny and we spend about two hours before our next flight which took us to the Midway airport in Chicago where we didn't leave the plane. After a short stop the plane took off for Providence Rode Island.

In Providence we took a Taxi cab to the Amtrak station. It was at this point, at least in my mind, we discovered that we had too many pieces of luggage. One huge suitcase, one large suitcase, one small suitcase, two hanging bags, one tote bag, and a camera bag with the video camera and all of the cables for the digital camera and video camera, extra batteries etc. The tote bag had miscellaneous things like our reading material and laptop computer etc. . The tote bag was quite heavy.

Trying to get all of those bags from the Taxi down to the Amtrak tracks was quite difficult. We managed to do it, but Kathy and I were purple from exertion by the time we got to the train, which was ready to leave except a conductor was holding the door open so we could catch it.

The train ride was only about an twenty minutes long, and I would have checked out the cafe car except I was still trying to recover from getting the bags down the stairs and to the train. We hailed a taxi and proceeded to the hotel.

We arrived in Boston at about 9:20 p.m..

Next door to our hotel, the Four Points by Sheraton, was a bar and grill where we had a light dinner of soup. We asked for the Clam Chowder and were told that they only had one bowl left at the bottom of the pot and since theirs had been named the "Best Clam Chowder in Boston" the refused to serve the bottom of the pot.

The next morning we decided to go sight seeing in Boston since our plane to Europe didn't leave Logan International airport until 7:00 p.m..

The Sheraton was only about two miles from the subway system and we took the free hotel shuttle to the subway station where we caught the subway train to "Government Station", which is where we got off and did our sight seeing. We really enjoyed Faneuill Market Place and of course we visited Filene's Basement!!!

After spending the morning sight seeing in Boston we took the subway to it's end where we called the hotel and they sent the shuttle to pick us up. As it turns out the taxi ride from the train station to the hotel was unnecessary as we found out that the shuttle would have picked us up for free and taken us right to the hotel. LOL

This time handling our luggage was a little easier. The shuttle took us to the airport where we rented one of those little luggage carts, and rolled it on into the terminal. We discovered at the check in counter that we were only allowed to check four pieces of luggage and to check our 5th piece would cost an additional $90.00. So we took one of our hanging bags as carry on.

The plane was a DC10 and the flight to Amsterdam was about 6-1/2 hours. It was an uneventful trip. As seems to be typical we had barely enough time to get from one end of the airport to the other to catch our flight to London. The flight to London took about and hour and a half.

Kathy had arraigned for a car to pick us up and take us to the Thistle hotel in London, which is only about a block from Trafalgar Square.

We arrived at about 9:00 in the morning, and since our room wasn't going to be ready until 2:00 p.m., we had the hotel lock up our luggage and we set out on foot to begin our exploration of London.

We will continue our adventures on the next page.

The rest of this page is devoted to photographs of our sight-seeing in Boston.

Here are some photos we took during our short visit to Boston.

Kathy at PDX .. ready to go !!
I took a few shots of the subway for those of you who are interested.
Subway.

Kathy in the subway.
More subway.
A Farmer's Market by Faneuill Hall.

Farmers market much closer.
Faneuill Hall.
Market Place at Faneuill Hall.

We found this Christmas Store and Kathy loves Christmas stores!
Kathy and her New Friend.
Nutcrackers at the Xmas store.

More Christmas store...
Kathy thought these two large dolls were hilarious.
There were a number of these street performers doing magic and juggling etc.

I thought this was an interesting contrast between old and new... pretty common here in Boston.
One of those "Duck Tours". We took one last time we were in Boston and it was excellent.
Logan International Airport was cool enough looking for me to take a couple of shots.

We found the airport to be attractive and efficient.
Cool looking control tower.
Boston skyline in the background.

The line to pass through security.

The line looks daunting, but we made it through in only about twenty minutes.
The inside of our DC10 before taking off...the next picture will be in Europe.

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