Old North Church

Planning a trip to Boston?  Well you should be!  WAY back in March when my family visited I took them to the Old North Church, in the historic North End of Boston.  The Old North of course is where Paul Revere got the signal before he started his famous ride, "one lamp if by land, two if by water".  I have a colleague and friend that is a bell ringer at the church every saturday and she offered to give us a tour and lesson on bell ringing.  It's one of the best views I've seen of Boston and the waterfront and the bell ringers are a fun group, consisting mostly of MIT alumnae and science nerds, because the "music" they use is all numerical patterns.  It was written like: 12345, 13425, 23154, etc.  Part sudoku, part rhythm, part music.  The bells are huge and the sound (turn your volume down before you play the movies!) is enormous, but surprisingly the bell ringing itself is not so physical (we all got to try).  We sat and watched them play for over an hour and laughed nervously as the entire bell tour swayed with the bells!