All We Were Missing Was a Tricorner Hat

What I really want to blog about is the Boston marathoner we saw this afternoon who pulled a garden gnome out of his backpack, set it on the edge of a fountain and snapped a photo. I have never actually seen anyone do that in real life! But I wasn't fast enough to snap a photo of him. So I will blog about Jack's first Patriots' Day celebration instead.

I suppose I dragged Jack out of bed before he was really ready. But I was dying to share one of my favorite childhood memories with him: the Isaac Davis trail march, in which we hiked with the Acton Minutemen seven miles to the Concord Bridge, basically following the route they took in 1775.

Here is Jack at 6 a.m. You can see how he'd caught the vision of reliving my childhood.


I was especially excited to join the march this year because Steve, a high school classmate, was the captain of the Acton Minutemen. He's the guy in the lead. He did a great job captaining.


When we got to the bridge, the Minutemen fired their muskets three times in honor of the men from Acton who were the first to die in the battle with the British that day.


After lunch we went to the Hosmer house in Acton to pick up our scrolls, commemorating our participation in the trail march. They had all sorts of Revolutionary War era activities for the kids, including an entertaining and informative lesson on loading and shooting muskets taught by the Minuteman pictured with Jack here.


If that wasn't enough Patriots' Day patriotism to pack into our day, Jack and I headed to the North End of Boston with my sister Maryann to see the iconic statue of Paul Revere, sculpted by a favorite son of our hometown in Utah, Cyrus Dallin.


As an added bonus my nephew Tim and his wife Ashley met us in the North End for dinner. Italian, of course. You can imagine how hungry we were after our long morning hike and our traipsing around Boston, but honestly, we ate as if we'd actually run the Boston marathon.