HSU Insider

On the town

• By Dave Coffield
• Posted July 3, 2006 7:33 PM
• 0 Comments

You may have noticed a lack of content yesterday. With a couple of days to see Boston, students were out the door yesterday morning, early, going in 48 directions. I didn’t have a chance.

I do know that the Six White Horses riders took their mounts on a trail ride in a botanical sanctuary (at the invitation of the owners), and discovered how black, thick, and sticky New England mud can be. Six half-white/half-mud horses (and riders) got a scrub-down when they returned. Fenway baseball park was a popular destination for the guys, and we’ll see quite a few Red Sox hats around HSU for a while.

I had a plan for today, though. I was to meet Debbie Jones (Six White horses program director) and Dr. Wayne Dorothy (Cowboy Band director) at 9:00 a.m. to walk the Freedom Trail, a marked route of historical sights, with a contingent of band members and horse riders. Can't go wrong with a plan, right? By 11:30 there was no sign of them, and I had a hint this wasn’t going to be easy. We linked up by noon and an hour later we’d traveled six blocks. The route is marked by a painted red stripe and a path three bricks wide, but a marked path is an affront to a Texan; so each turn resulted in a dozen spontaneous interpretations of where the route really lay. It was like herding cats.

We started with a group of 25, but gradually lost most of them along the way. Every once in a while we’d look around and ask “where’s so-and-so?� We can only hope they are still shopping, or decided to strike out on their own. Nine of us made it to the Old North Church (where the lanterns indicated an invasion by land and sea during the American Revolution), and we were down to six by the time we crossed the Charles River and found the USS Constitution.

For once, pictures can’t really describe the day, although here is a shot of Tressie Smith navigating for the group by the old Anglican church on the north side of Boston Common, the oldest city park in the nation:

And here Erica Muzljakovich discovers the final resting place of Paul Revere:

And, two riders pose near Old Ironsides; which was preparing for its annual sail around the harbor:

Tonight a brave group heads out on the Ghost Tour. That’s right, our kids are going to follow famed ghost hunter and storyteller Jim McCabe on a tour of Boston’s most infamous haunted locales. It may be that McCabe is the brave one. He gets to try to keep that bunch together, I say more power to him!

Tomorrow are the final performances of the Cowboy Band at the Lion’s Club International convention. Okay, I had it wrong…there are 110 countries participating this year, not the predicted 99, and since there were 10,000 marchers in the parade alone, there have to be more than 12,000 attendees at the convention. Whatever the number, it's a bunch of people. The band plays for the entire assembly at 8:45, then performs during the inauguration of the new president, Texan Jimmy Ross.