To enjoy Boston, bring good shoes, imagination

You can pack your guidebook for Boston, if you wish. As well as your Sunday clothes and a big wad of cash.

The self-proclaimed hub of the solar system can certainly devour all you bring, with its laundry list of tourist destinations, restaurants where your tab might match your mortgage payment, and high-end shopping districts that will have your head spinning.

But all you really need to get the most of your visit to Boston are good shoes and your imagination.

Few American cities offer what Boston does to inspire flights of fancy, thick as it is with historic sites of brick and stone wedged improbably between towers of glass and steel.

Find a bench near the waterfront Custom House and imagine the mob scene that became the Boston Massacre, exploited by patriots to heap hatred upon British troops and scorn upon John Adams, the principled attorney who agreed to defend them.

Or lie in the grass around the Bunker Hill Monument and marvel at the courage of the ragtag colonial force that dealt the redcoats a surprising blow, losing this first real battle of the Revolutionary War but showing the fight that would win independence.

And whether you're seeking historical sites, a trendy "Life is Good" T-shirt from the streets that gave rise to the movement, or a succulent lobster roll and a pint of Harpoon IPA, walking is the most efficient way to get there in this compact city.

It's all centered on the Freedom Trail — 16 historical sites strung along 2½ miles, no farther than the walk from Channelside to the University of Tampa and back. Still, it's a whole day's commitment done right.

The city's website notes that Boston can credit the Freedom Trail with its reputation as a great place to see on foot. Most of the stops can be enjoyed for free or with a small donation.

But many other trails have been laid out here, too, guided and unguided, to attract tourists of all interests. These include the Black Heritage Trail, the Irish Heritage Trail, photo tours, harbor tours and, in a city this old and well-preserved, ghost tours chock-full of chills for those with just a little imagination.

Just as important as getting you to the next destination, though, walking Boston gets you to places you didn't even know existed.

The serendipitous finds, in fact, may be the most memorable, and you'll zoom right by them if you explore Beantown in a cab, by T train or, if you're really foolish in this city of skinny old streets and ridiculous parking fees, by rental car.

Among the sights we stumbled onto:

• Inviting grassy malls strung through the North End, made when surface expressways went underground upon completion of the interminable public works project known as the Big Dig. Collectively, they're called the Rose Kennedy Greenway.

• The small plaque at your feet as you exit King's Chapel, commemorating the early education of Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, among others. It's an easy-to-miss spot teachers won't want to miss, marking as it does the first public school in the country.

• A spirited lunchtime break-dance performance by a troop of local summer-camp youths near historic Faneuil Hall, beneath the gaze of a bronze Samuel Adams. The fiery rebel and failed brewer was the only one in the crowd unmoved.

• A public demonstration worthy of Boston's revolutionary days, as sign-carrying crowds of mostly young people took to the steps of the statehouse to urge not an end to the king's usurious taxes but expansion of the deposit-bottle law.

• A piece of Tampa, by way of Connacht, tucked at an angle into the ground floor of towering One Boston Place. This is Four Green Fields, complete with an indoor replica of the thatched hut that is the Irish pub's original Tampa home.

It became clear how lucky we were to find Four Green Fields when we couldn't locate it at first on a return trip, as if it were some ephemeral Tir Na Nog of the Freedom Trail. But we were determined, and thirsty, so find it we did, along with pleasant conversation.

Proprietor Patrick Clark, an Armwood High School graduate, chatted with us between bar orders from local scavenger hunters — walkers all, working from a smart-phone list that included famous Irish rebels. They found their prey framed on the walls here, just as they are at Four Green Fields on Platt Street in Tampa.

Clark will tell you all about the virtues of walking in Boston. Between snowdrifts, parking citations and constantly moving to avoid them both, he was making plans for a relative to come drive his car back to Tampa where someone might actually have use for it.

"It's great," Clark said. "Super convenient. I walk to work and wherever I need to go in the city."

With its grand opening last February, Four Green Fields is one of Boston's newest taverns. The oldest one in town (thus justifying its claim to be the oldest one in the country) is a place you're not likely to stumble onto.

It is the Warren Tavern, an establishment where — as a friend from Boston likes to say — both George Washington, father of our country, and Whitey Bulger, famed mob fugitive, were known to have a drink.

The Warren Tavern is across the Charles River in Charlestown, a short hike down Bunker Hill after the last stop on the Freedom Trail. You could probably use a drink by this point, if you've trekked all the way from the start in the Boston Common.

The imagination won't need any help from libations here, though, as you sit with your refreshment of choice beneath low, dark, wood-beamed ceilings where many a plot was hatched. Have a bite, drink up, then ask for directions to the closest T train station, a few blocks west at Bunker Hill Community College.

The Freedom Trail, it turns out, is no loop. It's 2½ miles one way. Not counting the 294 winding steps up the Bunker Hill Monument. Or the wooden ladders that connect head-banging hatches aboard the frigate USS Constitution. Or store-hopping through all three buildings at the Faneuil Hall Marketplace.

At this point, you're ready for release from the red line of bricks and paint that has guided you through historic Boston. It's sure footing for the most part, except for the tracks and cobblestones you traverse en route to Paul Revere's house, the Old North Church, and Copp's Hill Burying Ground.

Still, by the time the trail winds to its end, you're not going to want to walk back.

Besides, it's worth trying some other modes of transportation during your visit, if for no other reason than to see how revealing it is to walk.

You can get a seven-day T train pass for $15, useful if you don't want to hoof it all the way from one end of town to the other — say, from Fenway Park and its built-in Bleacher Bar to the North End with block after block of creative Italian cuisine.

You can rent bicycles at a concession stand in Boston Common, America's first public park, then cruise the shady Charles River Esplanade. Or pedal over a bridge to Cambridge and take in Harvard, America's first university.

Just make sure to carry a flat kit; we learned the hard way no one will come pick you up.

Finally, there are boat tours for a view of the scenic Boston Harbor and the city skyline. We opted for a half-day whale-watching trip, more than 30 miles offshore, and lucked out: Warty humpbacks swam beneath the ship, a giant basking shark floated nearby, and the minke whales all around were too numerous count.

If you want to give your imagination a head start before you travel, immerse yourself in the library of books and movies that feature Boston.

You'd expect creative types to be inspired, after all, by the hub of the solar system — a term coined in 1858 by Cambridge's Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes, a doctor and member of Boston's literary elite, was actually referring to the statehouse and the important work done there, in a boastful passage from Boston's own Atlantic Monthly.

Working backward in time, then, you could …

• Watch "The Town," the 2010, critically acclaimed, blue-collar bank-heist flick by Ben Affleck. You'll wonder how they filmed those car chase scenes through this maze of a street grid, and you'll get a nerve-wracking tour inside that cathedral of baseball, Fenway Park.

• Dip into the crime-fiction series featuring righteous but emotionally scarred investigator Patrick Kenzie, the work of occasional Pinellas resident Dennis Lehane. Then visit the lounge at The Ritz-Carlton hotel, where it all begins, or imagine a fatal leap off the Custom House.

• Read "The Given Day," an educational hodgepodge of a historical novel about a grim but seminal era in the history of Boston and America. It's Lehane again, channeling James Michener.

• Read one or both of historian David McCullough's accounts of America's birth, the epic biography "John Adams" and the companion piece "1776." Original letters and documents are knitted into compelling human narratives, which will help bring alive every step of your walk through Boston.

If you go

Fly Jet Blue to Boston, with a Saturday stay in late October, for $280 round-trip nonstop. Flights with a stop via United and other airlines are $257 and up with a Saturday stay.

Stay in the heart of the city to get the most from your walkabout, but look for combo flight/hotel deals from sites such as Priceline. Otherwise, it's nearly $300 a night and up.

Eat at one of 15 Legal Seafood restaurants, a Boston original with cloth napkins. Also, try historic Union Oyster House or the Neptune Oyster House for tasty character.

Leave room if you eat Italian on the North End for unique takeout pastries from Mike's Pastry. They lower your giant serving into a white box and tie it up with string.

Gaze out toward Cape Cod from 52 stories up at the Top of The Hub bar in Prudential Tower, where you can get a drink and the view for the price of the $13 view alone.

Sip Irish whiskey from the Cooley Distillery at the cozy, shotgun-narrow Plough & Stars tavern in Cambridge. There are plenty of beer selections, too, and eclectic pub food.

See every creature you can imagine, and many more you can't, preserved and displayed at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. There's even a coelacanth and dodo bird.

Waddle like a duck at the brass monument in the Public Garden that honors the beloved Boston children's book "Make Way for Ducklings." It was first published 70 years ago.

Say a prayer at the working, street-front, up-and-down St. Anthony Shrine chapels. Or just visit for an antidote to the excesses of the many historic houses of worship here.