A Newcastle family is happy to be safe at home after a sightseeing expedition to Boston turned into a surreal journey through a war zone.
David and Jennifer Bolling, with their 10-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter, were minutes away when two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon finish line at 2:50 p.m., killing three and wounding 176.
“We certainly count our blessings,” David Bolling, Newcastle’s Town Administrator, said the next day. “It could have been a lot worse.”
The family took the train to Boston to spend Patriots’ Day following the Freedom Trail and visiting some of the city’s many historic attractions.
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum was one of their first stops, and they were there for most of the morning.
The library was the site of a fire in the afternoon, which police initially connected to the explosions, although it was later said to be unrelated.
In the afternoon, the Bollings set out for the Freedom Trail, a network of historic sites in the city.
The family could see the Boston Marathon finish line from one of the sites, and David and Jennifer wanted to watch the race for a while, so they began to walk toward the area.
Before they arrived, however, they realized the detour would take too much time to allow them to take the kids everywhere they wanted to go.
The family turned around, began walking in the other direction and were at another Freedom Trail site when the explosions went off.
“It was like thunder or cannon fire,” David Bolling said. Initially, like many others in the city, he thought it was someone firing a cannon to mark the holiday.
Immediately thereafter, however, he began to hear screams and sirens and see people running from the finish line area.
“Had we decided to take the extra time, we would have been right there when it happened,” Bolling said. “Things happen in mysterious ways, but fortunately we just didn’t go.”
The family continued to move away from the area and, as they walked, witnessed people everywhere checking their cell phones or gathering around any available television to watch the news.
They ducked into a restaurant, the Green Dragon Tavern, to avoid the chaos outside and eat an early dinner. Cell phone service in the city was down from about 3 to 4 p.m., and the servers at the restaurant were giving out the restaurant’s Wi-Fi password so they could communicate with family and friends.
The Bollings ventured out of the restaurant after the meal to make their way to a nearby subway station.
Outside, the streets were deserted. The authorities were telling people to stay home, and businesses, restaurants, and even the Freedom Trail attractions had closed early.
The only activity was the law enforcement and military response to the bombings.
Armored vehicles and hundreds of soldiers with machine guns patrolled the streets, helicopters hovered overhead and bomb-sniffing dogs searched the train station; all to a soundtrack of blaring sirens.
“We kind of felt like we were in a war zone that we had no choice but to cross,” David Bolling said. He and his wife did their best to reassure their frightened children and were grateful for the gesture of a soldier, who waved and talked to the kids, to do the same.
“It was moving to see somebody take time at a moment like that, to comfort a little girl,” Bolling said.
Police officers stopped the family a couple times to ask what they were doing, and Bolling explained they were from out of town and had to get to the subway station.
Eventually, the family made it to the subway station and from there to the train station, where they were able to wait until their departure at 9 p.m. They arrived in Newcastle in the early hours of April 16 and were grateful for the comfort, peace and quiet of home.
“It was nothing I had ever experienced and I certainly don’t want to experience it again,” Bolling said.
“We were all around it, but luckily never in the wrong place,” he said.
Despite the chaos and feelings of fear, Bolling also remembers many moments when he was grateful for the generosity and kindness of strangers in the chaotic aftermath of the blasts, from the restaurant servers helping people contact their families to the soldier reaching out to his daughter.
He said he hopes to return to Boston in the near future so his children can see the city under less harrowing circumstances.
