Looking for With Fred Holidays in its corner,


American Cruise Lines has been making waves in the UK. Jane Archer samples a new cruise-and-stay package from Boston


i 28


could have sworn I’d spent yesterday flying over the Atlantic, but we’ve just passed Exeter Street. Over


there is Dartmouth Street. And hang on, where’s that? Ah, Newbury Street. Boston, I’m discovering, is like a mini-Britain. Even the US city’s name was chosen by puritans from Lincolnshire who fled to the New World in 1630 to escape religious persecution but couldn’t bear to sever all ties with England.


PARTY POLITICS Fast forward to 1773 and their descendants were not so sentimental. At the Boston Tea Party, 342 chests were dumped in the harbour in protest at the taxes paid to Britain and revolution soon followed. Boston’s 2.5-mile Freedom Trail takes in 16 museums, churches, ships and parks involved in the uprising.


How fitting, then, that I am in town for


a cruise around the coast of New England on a ship named after the charter signed in 1787 by the newly independent US. With


room for just 170 passengers, American Constitution is small enough to nip into the multitude of tiny ports we’re visiting that promise history and scenery in spades. Plus lobsters, some 98 million pounds of which are caught each year in Maine. Until recently American Cruise Lines’


(ACL) New England Explorer cruise was just that – a cruise. Now it’s offered as a cruise-and-stay, starting with a night in Boston and a tour of the city that ends at the ship. Judging by the numbers at breakfast, I’d say most passengers took up the option to make sure they didn’t miss the ship. As the only Brit in a sea of Americans, many of them ACL regulars, it is a welcome²


Portland Head Light, Maine PICTURE: American Cruise Lines


1 FEBRUARY 2024 travelweekly.co.uk


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