I finally made it to Boston about 9:30 this evening. It was touch and go there for a while in Houston while we waited on the taxiway for thunderstorms to clear the area. For a while I thought it was going to be a repeat of last week’s aborted trip. At any rate, after renting a car and negotiating the maze of streets, tunnels, construction detours, and poorly-signed freeways and turnpikes in the Boston area, it was 11:00 by the time I got to my hotel in Natick, MA. Natick isn’t much, but the Hampton Inn there is a decent hotel. The best part of the hotel is the restaurant and bar: Owen O’Leary’s. The food is about what you’d expect in a hotel restaurant, but the bar also serves handcrafted beers that are brewed on the premises. I had a Golden Ale that was very good: coppery color, very hoppy, somewhat fruity, and smooth. After eight hours in airports and airplanes, it was a very welcome surprise.
I try to find brew pubs wherever I travel. On my trip to Minneapolis, I discovered the Rock Bottom Brewery, which had about a dozen handcrafted beers on the menu. They offer a sampler special: for one dollar you get a taste (a shot glass full) of each of their beers. Their darker beers were good, although they had a little too much chocolate malt for my taste. But their Kolsch was excellent, as were their other beers. Rock Bottom is apparently a national chain, with 23 restaurants across the country. I’ll make a point to visit them whenever I land in one of their cities.