Driving through the Hub

And I mean that literally. Haven’t been to Boston in a few years, and the Big Dig has made things weirder than ever. Oh, you can drive throughBoston in no time at all. But just try to get off in the actual city — that’s another story entirely. I am perfectly at home driving in New York City, Montreal, D.C., San Diego, Sacramento, and San Francisco. Once I have driven somewhere I do not ever forget how I got there. But Boston confounds me every time. Apparently, fixing all the leaks is taking up the money that otherwise would have been spent on signs that say “Downtown, Next Exit.” Not that they ever had that, but I used to know to get off at Storrow Drive/Government Center. That exit is gone or renamed, so we missed that — then bombed on through and kept looking for a way to get off the highway. There was none. The next thing we knew we were sailing through a tunnel. Then we hit some surface streets and thought we could just take one of the bridges back over, but there was a detour for one and it was apparently actually physically impossible to get to the other. Somehow we ended up in the Ted Williams Tunnel (he was the Splendid Splinter, you know) and at the airport, where, we reasoned, it must be possible to find one’s way back to the city. So, we did — and once again, could not find a single exit until we were all the way back at what used to be the Storrow Drive exit. Thrilled to find something at least slightly familiar, we took that in and then did a couple of spins around the Common before we found our hotel. I was never so glad to see a valet.

On the other hand, I found this amazing lobster hat.