Boston with two tots? It’s totally quackers!
THE tourists on the duck bus raise a smile when our guide, dressed as a Salem witch, hands the steering wheel to my four-year-old daughter. They’re still grinning as Belle powers this amphibious sightseeing vehicle through the blue-brown of Boston’s Charles River.
Our chatty witch continues with her patter... but I’m not listening, my gaze glued instead on Bunker Hill Bridge, which we’re heading straight for.
A nanosecond before I can scream ‘STOP THE KID! WE’RE GOING TO HIT THE BRIDGE!’, the witch calmly takes back the wheel. I exhale, and the tour continues. It’s five years since I’ve holidayed with Uncle Sam, and it is, reassuringly, as quackers as ever.
Crossing the Pond for the first time with young children, Belle and her little sister Cleo, two, we quickly discounted 49 states for reasons including ‘too much driving’ (Deep South), ‘too damn far’ (Big Sur) and ‘saving for later’ (Walt Disney World). Step forward then Boston, America’s most ‘walkable city’, and her elegant weekend playground, Cape Cod. Smaller than New York, this east coast metropolis can lay claim to a dazzling skyline of its own plus family-friendly museums galore and a slice of America’s intelligentsia, care of Harvard University.
We hadn’t realised our stay at The Liberty, housed in the city’s former Charles Street Jail, would be quite so entertaining, but with clink keys for room cards and prison-themed paraphernalia, it was doing porridge in style.
Boston is a grown-up city and we’d anticipated meltdowns with the children, but they didn’t materialise. Good timing, decent bribes (ice cream, pretzels, $1 punnets of grapes…) and dovetailing an attraction for them with
something we wanted to see worked a treat.
We made it to Harvard, where the students didn’t blink at the sight of a toddler dancing in front of John Harvard’s bronze form. We even managed flat whites and apple juice in the cafe at the cerebral Coop, the historic students’ bookshop on Massachusetts Avenue.
Admittedly, Sleepy Hollow, the cemetery in upmarket Concord, east of Downtown, that is the resting place for famous literary names including Little Women writer Louisa May Alcott, might have pushed the familyfriendly boundaries a little too far. Little Women fans can indulge in Alcott’s life, too. Her 19th Century home, Orchard House in Concord, is a roomy abode well worth the 20-mile trip out of Boston.
Back in the city, we towed the family line, racking up visits to the New England Aquarium (impressive, with very clever seals), the three-floor Boston Children’s Museum (role-play heaven) and the Legoland Discovery Center (headache-inducing).
A week of urban life proved a perfect precursor to Cape Cod, the curled finger of land four hours south, where immaculate houses and wide expanses of caramel sands reign. From our base, a villa on the sporty Ocean Edge resort between Brewster and Namskaket, three days’ pinballing between the Cape’s villages passed in a whirl.
Freeway 6, the main artery, flows to the peninsula’s furthest point, Provincetown, the most celebrated tourist bolthole. Known as P-Town, this gay-friendly community huddles around rainbow-flagged Main Street, awash with day spas and art shops.
The Museum of Natural History in Brewster provided the kids with stingrays to pat, and they loved the watersoaked walkway that leads out to the salt marshes.
First family trip to America conquered, there was an unexpected sense of relief on the flight back – not at the thought of going home but more that a big holiday with small people had gone so well. Next stop, Big Sur.