Our tour guide Tim was entertaining for the most part and had a lot of good historical facts to share. We started off with a little game he plays to get to know everyone’s name, while we waited for the late arrivals, then off we went. We made several stops to eat….. a bakery for a slice of bread, a cafe for cappuccino and a cannoli, a sandwich shop for a part of a sandwich, when we finally reach our first stop of the Freedom Trail, Paul Revere’s house. At this point we were just over 2 hours into our tour. As we reach our second Freedom Trail stop (Old Church) a woman in our group realizes her husband (Tom) is missing. While Tom wasn’t doing a good job paying attention, I have to partially blame our tour guide that kept changing directions last minute to avoid other tour guides/groups we kept running into.
So our second stop of the Freedom Trail becomes a search party for Tom. We were all worried sick about Tom because he was older and we all imagined him lost and afraid.
20 minutes later, Tom’s wife calls him and he finally answers. While we were stopped and retracing our steps, Tom had been tagging along with a different tour guide enjoying the Freedom Trail and ended up a mile a head of us at Washington and Causeway Street, about to cross the bridge to Bunker Hill.
So we skip stop 2 and a few other stops on the Freedom Trail to pick up pizza and head over to pick up Tom that’s over a mile away.
Then….we notice our tour guide on the phone a lot. We overhear something about 4 new people joining the group.
Lot’s of walking and following but no stops are being made. What we didn’t realize was that we were heading back to where the tour initially started to pick up 4 more people and starting the tour all over again. It is now 1:30 pm and our tour guide starts playing the name game with the new people.
We decided to leave the tour at this point. We ended up using a self guided tour to complete the Freedom Trail.
While Tim had a good grasp of history, he definitely exaggerated or made things up to make the tour more interesting, which we didn’t mind.
With that said, one stop in a 3.5 hour timeframe and going back to the starting point seemed ridiculous to us.
It was the biggest waste of our time and money.