We are not fans of big cities. A few years back we drove up to Cape Cod and enjoyed aspects of New England - particularly the relatively small town of Plymouth, before we arrived in Boston. There we parked our hire car, noting that if we stayed two days, probably we would have to start negotiating with our bank manager.

We tend to do these tours off the cuff, journeying until we think it is about time we looked for a motel and call in at one or two to find the best bargain. That policy came sadly awry in Boston, where we spent what remains our most expensive overnight bill.

We had visited the aquarium in Boston Harbour and were duly impressed but then came our search for a hotel and our budget was hit for six. We returned to the centre the next day and, after a couple of circuits of the system, we gained a feeling that Boston was not for us. We moved on and I recall some 30 miles later we stumbled across a gigantic Barnes and Noble bookshop where we spent a very pleasant two hours.

Yet people told us we had missed out for Boston is a great city. So we decided, some seven or eight years later, to visit Boston. We had to book a hotel some miles from the city centre, in Watertown. There we caught a bus into Cambridge and a few stops on the subway later, we were in the heart of Boston. We suggested to the hotel manager perhaps we could skip the bus and drive to Cambridge. “You can’t park there," he explained.

Sorry, Boston did not register. It is a big city without any quirkiness or character. The JFK accents apart, it lacks originality or personality. We were determined to give it a further chance so we paid the eqiuivalent of £25 per head for a tour on the hop-on-hop-off trolley, round the city. The charge also included a boat trip round the very substantial harbour for 45 minutes. We tend to take these tours upon initially visiting a city and then mentally list what we want to hop off and explore further. We were never truly tempted to hop off in Boston.

Being in this neck of the woods, much of Boston's local history concerns the War of Independence, in which those who rebelled against their king and country seized the propaganda high ground and called themselves Patriots, presumably with a little embarrassment.

We heard a lot about Paul Revere, who was immortalised in the Longfellow poem, while his co-rider was lost to history, because Longfellow was unable to rhyme his name. On the bus we were informed much about Revere, but happilly the guide did not parrot the myth that Revere came through breathlessly to inform the rebels: “The British are coming”. As they were all British, including Revere, he just told them “they have broken out the regulars”: meaning the troops.

This fact was pointed out by the guide on the boat but she failed to draw attention to the little detail of the Battle of Bunker Hill which saw 2,000 soldiers taking on 4,000 rebels, who held the high ground. The stupidity of the British commander, who ordered his men to charge up the hill twice, was underlined by the fact he lost half his troops. On the third charge, they took the hill because the rebels had vacated it, having run out of ammunition. All of which suggests the British commander had missed a trick by not surrounding the hill in the first place.

There has been much land reclaimed from the sea but the Bunker Hill we saw, is more like a hillock attacked years ago, it would seem, by a pillock.

Such is history, and to add to folklore, the battle did not take place on Bunker Hill but another hill nearby. There are other such examples in Boston, such as John Harvard, whose statue carries the inscription that he founded the university of that name at a certain date. As it happened, he neither founded the university, and nor is the date correct for it is out by two years. The third lie is that the statue depicts a man of advanced years. In fact it is not even of John, who died aged 31 although the tour guide said he was 28, when drawing our attention to the "three lies”. Nice statue, though just a pity the facts got in the way.

All of which enabled the guide to take us through the first 15 minutes of the tour, because talking about history managed to take our focus off the fact there was very little worth seeing from the bus. Unfortunately that was true for most of the trip. Boston does contain some old buildings dating back to the 18th and even 17th centuries but they are unremarkable, having been designed by Puritans for functional purposes.

Ellie enjoyed the Hancock Tower, the glass white elephant, which reflected the neighbourhood on its tall sides. It is impressive but so too was the bill and the massive problems experienced in its building, not least replacing the glass.

The Trinity Church (a Romanesque 19th century structure) caught the eye and we enjoyed the sight of Boston Common. Another sight that interested me was the ‘Brownstones’: a typically American street of substantial terraced houses of the famed chocolate brown stone.

And that was basically it. We won’t be going to Boston again and I would not recommend it. Doubtless it has great galleries, museums, bars, shops and eateries but so do most cities.The Bostonians are nice and friendly but, for my money it was just a plain and largely architecturally unimaginative city, with a readily forgettable skyline. San Francisco, Memphis, Charleston, Asheville, Atlanta, Savannah and St Louis had miuch more going for them.

There is a street in Boston that is quite attractive and the guide quoted Winston Churchill, presumably after he had been overdoing the brandy, as saying it was the most attractive street in the USA. It was pleasant but there are back streets in Savannah that look finer.

Boston, incidentally has 2,000 (two thousand) Dunkin’ Donut outlets, according to our guide, which scores with me as I am a donut addict but, to be frank, I preferred the neighbouring Cambridge, which is as Croxley Green is to Watford. It has quaint parts and character and I was delighted to be served in a shop by two African-American ladies: Meron and Kadisha. I love the names they come up with.

Ellie admitted she had been less than enamoured a few years back when I included a visit to Washington on our itinerary, but she was extremely pleased when we had stayed there. There was no such change of heart over Boston.

We also enjoyed the bus ride back to our motel in the evenings, and while some people in the USA will tell us we were taking a risk mixing with the poorer elements of society, we numbered the bus trips among the highlights of our Boston visit. People, we found, were very helpful and while we did not “people watch” as such, we certainly “people glanced".

Of course, when it rains, cities or indeed countryside, do not look so great but we saw Boston in the best light: near 90 degree sunshine from a clear blue sky. All it confirmed was that our initial instincts almost a decade earlier had been correct: it left us cold.