Best Things To Do

Boston's headline experience is the Freedom Trail, a red-brick line on the pavement linking sixteen revolutionary sites from Boston Common to the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown - free to walk, rich to guide, and easily split across two days with children. Around it cluster the city's other icons: Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market, the Paul Revere House in the North End, and the USS Constitution, the world's oldest commissioned warship still afloat. Museums are a genuine strength. The Museum of Fine Arts ranks among America's best; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is an intimate palazzo with a famous art-theft story; the Museum of Science and the New England Aquarium anchor family days; and the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum turns history into theatre on the water. Across the river, free student-led tours of Harvard Yard and a walk through MIT's campus give a feel for the universities that define the region. Outdoors, ride the historic swan boats in the Public Garden (seasonal), picnic on the Rose Kennedy Greenway, take a harbor cruise or whale watch from Long Wharf, and consider a ferry to the Boston Harbor Islands in summer. Fenway Park tours run year-round for sports fans. Full details, tickets, and Muslim-traveler pairings for each site follow in the places list.