This morning we took a cab into the Hilton Hotel on the corner of W53rd Street and 6th Avenue and from there boarded our Limoliner for our trip up to Boston. Limoliner is an bus service that delivers one from NYC Hilton to Boston Hilton with no stops in between, which makes for a quick 4 hour trip north, subject of course to the usual NYC caveat – ‘depending on the traffic’.
As it turned out our trip departed at 11am so the morning rush hour was over and traffic, though solid, was moving steadily. While we were waiting to board the coach we had time to look over the final preparations that were being made for the Bike Share Program that begins in NYC on the 6th June.
The 30 or so bikes that are to be positioned at the 53rd Street pick up point were taking up parking spaces on the roadway, which seems unusual as all the other Bike Share locations use the footpath. A similar program seems to work in Paris so why not here? 
Well, according to our cab driver (who obviously has a vested interest in people taking cabs) no real New Yorker would ever willingly ride a bike when he or she can ride the subway, and no real New York cab or truck driver will willingly respect a bike lane. So our driver was fearful that the scheme’s 3000 bikes will be used almost exclusively by tourists, most of whom will have no idea where they are going and will therefore be certain to cause chaos and delays on the roads and (when they are injured in a crash) even longer than normal queues in the hospitals.
I suspect that he is probably right to be sceptical about the scheme, but Mayor Bloomberg is determined to push it through to completion before he retires. So it is definitely going to happen!
We arrived in Boston by 4pm and after a short walk found ‘40 Berkeley’ our hostel for the next four days. We checked in, ‘freshened up’ at and then took off for a walk around town. And what a civilised town it is. 
Our hostel is located in the ‘Back Bay’ area so it was just short and enjoyable walk for us to reach Boston Common where many of the little league baseball games were being played. They love their baseball here and the Red Sox and Fenway Park are highly revered.
We walked North through the Common, past the Frog Pond (a kiddies wading pool) and emerged on Beacon Hill at the monument to General Shaw and the Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th an 10th Union Army regiments (the first ever ‘black’ regiments in the history of the US military). When we looked across the road to the Massachusetts State House we noticed that a Union Jack was flying over the golden dome? We soon found out that the British Prime Minister David Cameron, who had met earlier in the day with President Obama in Washington, had flown up to Boston to meet with the Governor of Massachusetts and pay his respects those who lost loved ones in the Boston Marathon Bombings.
No doubt he had some salient words of advice, since England is very familiar with bombings. Stopped for dinner at a strangely deserted Faneuil Hall and walked home via the Heritage Trail. The streets were empty! Is Boston always this quiet? When we got home we learned the answer. There was no one out and about because everyone was either up at the Boston Dome watching the Bruins versus Maple Leafs (Game 7) live, or at home or in a bar glued to a TV watching the broadcast of the game.
I am not an ice hockey fan but even I could appreciate what a great game this was. Unbelievably, the Bruins managed to come from 4-1 down with only two minutes left on the clock to tie it up at 4-4 and then go on to win 5-4 in extra time. They now advance to the next round of the play offs against Dancing Larry and the New York Rangers … sorry Boston but we can’t support you in that clash! “Let’s go Rangers, Let’s Go!”
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