What's more fun than waking up at 4:00AM to catch a Shuttle Express van at 4:50? Not much when you're looking forward to a real 2 week vacation. Actually, the Shuttle Express connection was perfect. On time, very professional and got us to the airport 10 minutes early. We had expected to be a bit later so we had plenty of time for a breakfast burrito at Wendy's and a cup of Dilettante coffee for breakfast. Not the dream breakfast for which we'd hoped.
We had bought in to Southwest's new Earlybird Check in for $10 per person per flight to get ourselves positioned at the front of the line for the cattle car rush to the airplane. IT WORKED. Actually we had confirmations A16 and A17 but since A1 - A15 are reserved for business people, we were at the front of the line. It was nice since the plane was totally full when we left and we were able to get in and get good seats before anyone else boarded.
When we got to Chicago Midway, we had 30 minutes to change gates and planes for Boston so we grabbed a quick lunch. As sucky as it might be, we barely had time to get a McDonald's sandwich and get on the next flight. It was a few minutes early getting into Boston. We had a pre-arranged car rental through Alamo (in hindsight, that's the only way to go) so we got on the shuttle bus to the car rental location. When we got there, we saw a line of about 15 people lined up to get a car. There were 3 do-it-yourself kiosks so we did that and were out of the building in less than 10 minutes. The line of people waiting was still about 10 long when we left. Now the fun started. It turns out that Alamo doesn't reserve a particular car for you. They reserve a car type, Compact in our case, and then send you out the building in search of any car you can find that meets that car type. Well, that's fine but there were only 5 Compact cars in the row and 2 of the them had Not Available signs on their windows. We grabbed a new Chevy Cobalt and started checking it over and hooking up our personal GPS (boy has that been a lifesaver). While we were doing that, people started coming out of the building looking for their Compact cars. None to be found. Don't know what happened to them but I know we had our car and we peeled out as soon as we could. Except, I refused to listen to the GPS voice and proceeded to get lost and headed into Boston before getting back on track toward Woburn for our hotel.
Finally made it to Woburn and the Fairfield Inn Hotel. Very nice, clean and quiet. That ended a long 12 hour day. Oh yeah, instead of the nice seafood dinner that we had hoped for, we ended up with a burrito from Chipotle. Off to a super start.
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