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[jfb]

The big travel feature this week takes us to the midwest: canoeing in Minnesota's Boundary Waters, vacationing up at the lake in Wisconsin, and biking around Bloomington.

There's also on article on road trip web sites: Trip planners from AAA and Rand McNally, destination guides from hotel and weather sites, and advice on where to refuel.

A special section on the Democratic National Convention in Boston is part politics but mostly travel. Pam Belluck lists some of John Kerry's haunts, and Times correspondent R. W. Apple offers some of his own. Charles McGrath contrasts the Boston of his childhood with that of today:

The FleetCenter, host of this year's Democratic National Convention, is built on the site of the old Boston Garden, home to the Bruins and the Celtics. It's a charmless, soulless and unsatisfactory replacement. The Garden leaked and was infested with rats, but its acoustics magnified and intensified fan-sounds and turned them into music. The new building turns music back into noise.

The first piece in the section (also by Belluck) says stereotypes of Boston--parochial, racist, liberal, and/or just messy--are out of date. (Raymond Chandler is quoted: "I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday.")

Oh yeah and there's a convention going on. Where there's a convention, there are protests: James Carroll reviews Boston's anti-war tradition, and Tom Hayden offers advice to today's demonstrators. (The delegates themselves are anti-war, much more so than Democrats in general or the candidates they'll be nominating.) This year's convention will also commemorate the conflict between civil rights Democrats and segregationists at the 1964 convention.

Also in Boston this week: The Zeltsman Marimba Festival! And lots more articles where these came from.

Comments

[localcharacter.livejournal.com]

I wasn't going to be insufferable and post about the Bloomington article myself, but it's a good one.