We had quite a busy last day in Boston before we moved on to our next stop, which is where we are now, in Portland (Maine, not Portland Oregon). On our last day in Boston we went on a student-led historical tour of the Harvard University campus. It was an interesting hour-long tour around the campus, hearing the history of various buildings and the university as a whole, and getting to learn more about the whole place. Our guide was really good, she was from Canada and studying Human Biology, with extra classes in Armenian History and Feminism. She was also on the tennis team.

She gave us lots of interesting facts about Harvard, one of which is if you touch the foot of John Harvard (see pic below) it’s supposed to bring you luck with your studies. Also interestingly there are no surviving images of him so a student modelled for the statue at the time, so who knows if this is what he looked like. Also a lot of the history of the place makes you believe that he is the founder of the university, and again this is false, it was founded by Massachusetts Bay Colony 2 years before he was credited with it.

The gate above is called the kissing gate because historically its where the men from the all male Harvard campus used to meet with the girls from the nearby Lawrence women’s college and rather than walk them home they used to make them walk the 15 minutes back themselves so the saying on campus now is never date a man from Harvard as they make you walk home alone.

After the tour of Harvard we went to an area near Fenway Park, the home of the Boston Red Sox, to a few bars around the area. There was a home game on at the stadium, so the area was busy and lots was going on.

We had a drink at a place called ‘Loretta’s Last Call’ which has regular live country music on (they had a guy playing guitar while we were there in the late afternoon), and then to a tap room place called ‘The Yard’ which must have had about 100 beers on tap! Very cool there!

Portland

The next day we packed up and drove the 2 hours or so to our next stop which is Portland, Maine. We left the state of Massachusetts, passed through New Hampshire, and into Maine, all in the space of a couple of hours. We stopped at an amazing place called ‘The Friendly Toast’ in Portsmouth on the way, a really popular spot for breakfast and brunch. It was lovely!

Our Airbnb is very nice again, in a remote area outside of the city in an area called Falmouth. It’s only about 20 minutes to get in to the main part of town if needed.

On our arrival day we had the afternoon spare so we went to do a local 3.5 mile hike around the ‘Back Cove’ area, a circular walk which basically takes you on a loop around an inland cove. It was dry but a bit grey, so apologies there’s no sunny pics 🙂

More updates from our time in Portland coming up soon

Si