New England 2022 {Part 2: Boston!}

Good morning!

Today I’m sharing part 2 of our trip to Boston. If you want to see the very beginning of it, click here.

Friday was one of my favorite days of the whole trip. It was beautiful, sunny, brisk fall weather all day long. We had the perfect day full of all of our favorite things. If I could encapsulate all of my favorite things to do on a trip with Nate into one blog post, it would be this one!

Good morning! We took the elevator downstairs to the hotel lobby where we walked into…

…George Orwell. There’s a beautiful location of this specialty coffee shop connected to the hotel lobby, so it made mornings super easy. It was packed on a Friday morning! We ordered our drinks and browsed the retail area while we waited.

Such a gorgeous little shop.

George Orwell specializes in hard-to-find coffee beans, roasted in small batches. This bag was $59! (It was a 4 oz bag…so maybe 5 small cups of coffee worth of beans?)

They had 4 different options for pour-overs on the menu ranging from $7-12 per cup. So definitely not your typical coffee shop!

We got two of them and enjoyed them slowly (gasp!) instead of gulping it down during the morning madness with two babies. It was just so much fun to sit and taste the coffee and talk about what we were tasting and compare notes.

A slow morning cup of coffee. My favorite.

But it’s even better…with my man! I’m probably a broken record here, but it’s still just so crazy to me how much FUN it is to enjoy the simple, everyday things that used to be mundane occurrences in my life before kids (drinking coffee slowly, walking through a park, sleeping until I feel rested). I love vacation!

We wandered around the corner to Brattle Book Shop, one of America’s oldest used book shops.

…and enjoyed browsing three floors of books.

They even had the outside alley set up with books!

And then a morning walk through Boston Common. I can’t say this enough: the weather was PERFECT. I couldn’t have dreamed of a better fall day! Sunny and 60 degrees.

Coffee and fall leaves = happy Kelsey.

We jumped on the T (and honestly…our luck with this was about as good as it was in NYC last weekend. But we found our way eventually.)

And ended up at Trillium! They have a taproom near Fenway. It’s all glass walls and modern build, so it looks really pretty amidst the old brick buildings nearby.

Here’s the thing about my husband: he is a total beer nerd, which means he’s also a total beer snob. He will 100 PERCENT judge you based on the beer you’re drinking.

He says he’s not judging you…but I know he is. When I talk about our first date back in 2015, he still brings up two of the beers I ordered in my beer flight makes fun of me for ordering them…and we were at a craft beer bar with 100% local Texas beer! I’m not kidding…the man has very high standards for beer…and he WILL make sure you know what they are.

I’ve learned to live with this. It’s ok. 😉

And one of the things he often criticizes is the rise of the hazy IPA movement. BUT, he said that as long as we’re in New England, he would embrace hazy New England IPAs and taste New England’s version of them. Which is how we ended up at Trillium, a brewery that specializes in hazy IPAs.

We tried a lot of them. (7 or 8?)

And here was the consensus we both agreed on: Trillium’s hazy IPAs had less of that kind of thick, syrup-y feel that you often find in mainstream hazy IPAs around the country. I really enjoy them in small pours. I’m not a huge fan of a full pour of a 7% IPA, but I could get down with a half pour of one of these.

It definitely doesn’t hurt that I was enjoying this delicious beer by a beautiful park on a sunny Boston day in the shade of an oak tree that was turning the most beautiful shade of orange.

Cheers!

Trillium is next to Time Out Market (too funny that I was at New York’s version of Time Out Market just last week!) so I ran inside and ordered a few things for lunch. 

Time Out Market is such a fun concept! As someone visiting the city, I love having easy access to a bunch of great restaurants and chefs all under one roof.

Chicken Dumplings and Noodles in a slow-simmered bone broth for Nate…

…and crispy nori tacos for me.

Wow. Gogo-Ya is from a James Beard Award-winning chef and his wife, and these tacos were phenomenal!

And then we grabbed a Union Square Donut for dessert.

I think this flavor was pecan-crusted maple.

I might be wrong (we ate a lot of donuts on this trip!) but I do remember that it had a thick layer of crushed nuts on it and the donut texture was absolutely perfect.

^ Eating donuts and waiting for our Lyft ride to pick us up and bring us to…

Fenway! Neither of us had ever been to this historic ball park (duh…first time in Boston) and even though I’m not a huge baseball person, I’ve wanted to see it forever. It’s 110 years old and rooted in so much history.

There’s no denying that it’s a pretty epic place.

Fenway offers official tours nearly every hour, every day, rain or shine. (Glad we got shine!) They cost $25/pp and last about an hour, and they take you ALL over the ball park!

We sat up in the “Green Monstah” seats, walked through the media boxes (where Brad Pitt sat in Moneyball)…

…by the rooftop gardens where Fenway grows their own greens for the salads/burger toppings that are available in the ball park…

…past the historic seats that have been there since the 1930s..

…all the way past the outfield to the Red Seat, which signifies that longest home run hit at Fenway.

It was such a great tour! I absolutely loved it, and I can’t wait to actually attend a game at Fenway someday.

After Fenway we headed a bit north to Cambridge to walk around Harvard!

Wow. Absolutely gorgeous.

We walked through campus (and hoped we were becoming more educated, well-rounded people by association…)

Walking. Talking. Enjoying the evening together. 🙂

Dinner was at The Hourly Oyster House. (Note: I also had Saltie Girl on my list to visit while we were in Boston, but it didn’t work into the agenda. But if you’re looking for good restaurants in Boston, I’ve heard wonderful things about it!)

A half dozen oysters to start, please.

I LOVE oysters! They feel so special and celebratory.

My first lobster roll of the trip! (There were more later..)

Lobster rolls and good times.

The Hourly was a really cute spot! After dinner we grabbed a ride share to…

Notch Brewing.

Nate was way more excited about Notch than he was about Trillium (the brewery we visited earlier in the day) because Notch specializes in Czech lagers.

Yummmm..

A word about coats… (ugh.) I am always cold. Nate actually proposed to me a day later than he had planned because we were in San Francisco and he was trying to propose and I was cold and asked to go back home. (I didn’t know he was going to propose that night…) Haha.

So I really try to pack warm clothes for trips! But when you’ve been in Texas all summer, you just forget what “58 degrees” feels like. I mean…is that cold? Is it FRIGID? Is it just slightly brisk? Honestly, I don’t know. So I packed a few jackets and layers, but I didn’t bring my warmest Patagonia or North Face coats.

And I should have.

I was planning on staying inside at Notch and keeping all cozy and warm, but they had ALL of the garage door/wall things opened all the way, so it was cold inside. (I’m sure it felt very comfortable to local Bostonians.)

Anyway, surprise surprise…I was very cold on this night. We went outside to the beer garden area and found a heater and I stayed as close to that as I could without catching my hair on fire.

I might have also taken Nate’s coat…

But here’s the beautiful beer garden! It was such a beautiful place to sip on lagers all evening!

It’s a space called The Speedway, a marketplace with historic buildings and a central courtyard. There was the brewery we went to, a wine shop, an ice cream store, a shawarma place, a hair salon, and a few other little stores surrounding this beautiful central courtyard.

At the end of the night we ducked into Super Bien for dessert.

We sat at those two little bar stools on the left and split some flan.

They also sold a single spoonful of dulce de leche for $1. How cute is that? Perfect way to wrap up the evening.

After that we went back to the hotel to get some sleep before heading to Portland, Maine the next day!

I’ll share that tomorrow. Xx.

PS: you can read every single one of my trip recaps here! 

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