Between my week on Cape Cod and a few days of touring in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, I spent a few days with my brother Doug, sister-in-law Aviva, and lovely canine niece Lola at their place in central Boston. The long string of bad weather luck I experienced on the Cape continued into Boston with mostly rainy and cloudy weather through the weekend, so I didn't get out and walk around much or take many pictures of Boston on this visit. We took Lola out to a dog park in the South End where she could run around and play with her little doggie friends and then walked over to Chinatown for Din Sum lunch. Things cleared a bit as I was in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on Sunday, but really beautiful conditions didn’t hit until Monday.

I spent Monday in Cambridge but decided to hoof it back the four miles or so from Harvard Square and campus to Doug and Aviva’s house in Central Boston, partly because the weather was finally so nice but more so because I was interested in seeing more of the city of Cambridge and the MIT campus at a slower motion than you can get passing through in a car . So what is the PRC (Peoples’ Republic of Cambridge) really like when you get off of the two major college campuses? It’s a major residence for the American intelligentsia and not only the students and faculty at the universities but also the people who man the major research labs in the area.

My walk across the Charles River from Cambridge to Boston in the early evening light could not have been more gorgeous as the sun was being reflected off the John Hancock Center and other glassy buildings and the gold dome of the Massachusetts Statehouse. The Boston side of the Charles River is the Back Bay neighborhood, one of the city’s swankiest and most historic. Back Bay is quite long but only about four blocks wide with each major street being somewhat unique. This time I decided to walk down the median of Commonwealth Avenue, the major thoroughfare with a wide park between its eastbound and westbound lanes and numerous historical monuments along the way. It’s a little like Richmond’s Monument Avenue but with honored characters of prominence from the era of American independence, the Abolitionist movement, and education and literature rather than Confederate political leaders and generals. The multistory brownstones that line the park are also some of Boston’s most elegant housing. With tulips and daffodils in full bloom and trees just coming into leaf, the Boston Public Garden, a western extension of Boston Common was also about as beautiful as I’ve ever seen it on my visits.