Boston: The Hub

Welcome to Bean Town! Explore the city known for its baked beans, cream pie, and a certain famous tea party. Walk down Newbury Street’s upscale boutiques and outdoor cafés and past million dollar Victorian brownstones in Boston’s historic Back Bay neighborhood. Continue on to Beacon Hill, with its narrow streets, brick sidewalks and desirable living; it is also the site of Massachusetts’ state government. From there, stroll through Boston’s Public Garden, the first public botanical garden in the United States, to see its famous swan boats, diverse collection of plants and flowers and impressive statues.

Get a panoramic view of the Boston skyscape from the Prudential Skywalk. Currently the highest observation deck in New England that is open to the public, you can see all the way to the Boston Harbor to the east, and all the rest of this major Eastern metropolitan area to the west. See if you can spot the Old North Church, the Clock Tower, Quincy Market and many other Boston landmarks from your airy perch.

Follow a portion of the red brick trail that lines Boston's sidewalks and visit some of the most important historical sites of the American Revolution and the Abolitionist movement. This 2.5 mile walk, beginning at the Boston Common and ending at the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, also includes the site of the Boston Massacre, Paul Revere's house, and the Old North Church.

Salem, site of the first colony in Massachusetts, is remembered more for the fantastic events that occurred in 1692, when local girls accused three women of witchcraft. The accusations spread, and in one year nineteen women and one man were executed as witches. Theories about the reasons behind the witch hunt abound -- tension over traditional Puritan values conflicting with new commercial interests, fear of recent smallpox outbreaks and Indian attacks manifesting itself, even hallucinogenic fungus growing in the town's rye -- but not conclusive answer has been found. Explore the history, theories, and myths with your local step on guide. Want a more chilling witch experience? Visit the House of the Seven Gables, made famous in Nathaniel Hawthorne's short novel. In his version, the spooky, rambling house was cursed when bought unfairly from a witch. Even if you ignore the ghost stories, the house offers a great inside look at the oldest surviving 17th-century wooden mansion in New England.

Owned by relatives of Nathaniel Hawthorne, this house became the inspiration for the setting of one of America's most important first author's novels. Now reconstructed to specifically match some of the fictional liberties Hawthorne implemented in his novelistic descriptions of the house, the House of Seven Gables gives visitors a first-hand look at a re-creation of a novelist's vision, as well as a look at the architecture of a bygone era.

One of America's first cities, Boston straddles the Old and New World, its winding streets and busy harbor evoking Victorian England even while its skyscrapers and cutting-edge institutions reflect the American penchant for growth and change. See the city's (and nation's) origins at the Boston Common and State House, site of the Boston Massacre that helped spark the American Revolution. Copley Square and Back Bay bring to mind the literary Boston of Emerson, James, and Thoreau, with graceful houses and wide sidewalks testifying to the area's historic wealth (the posh area had more humble beginnings, however; it started out as a swamp!). The intellectual fervor continues in Cambridge, home to MIT, Harvard University, and all the students, cafés, and bookstores you'd expect in such a big-name college town. You'll also see Boston's North End, which the city's large Italian population has claimed for its own since the 1920s. While the gelato and cannoli here may be sweet, they're no match for Boston's weirdest disaster -- in 1919, a giant storage tank of molasses collapsed, sending a 15-foot-high wave of the sticky sweet goo through the neighborhood and killing 21 people.