After finishing school at noon we grabbed a cab into Harvard Square to pick up our rental car.
We being myself and Mark Young who is, as I have described previously, a South Australian from Adelaide who is the CFO at Adelaide Airport. He is a thoroughly decent bloke and provided to be a very easy and laid back travelling companion.
After having a bit of brain fade and first visiting the Hertz shop, where they didn't have our car, because as the lady pointed out so graciously my booking was with Avis, we proceeded across the road and waited most of the rest of our vacation in order to be served.
Once served I was informed that this Avis outlet did not rent pick-ups as they were too big to fit in the garage (the roof is too high) and that I wouldn't have been able to book one. Armed with documentary evidence to the contrary which I duly produced they then decided that it must be as a result of a computer glitch. Computer glitch or not I had the strong sense that somehow the issues at play we my fault. I was asked if I specifically wanted a pick-up and I said "yes that is why I booked one" (my humour often seems to fall a bit flat over here).
This thing is truly massive. The photo of it shows beside my friend Craig's Ford Ranger which is also a 4x4 but is visibly several sizes smaller.
Navigating out of Boston wasn't overly enjoyable as it is wide and long and the law necessitated steering and positioning it on the wrong side of the road.
Once on the open highway it was a joy to drive, even if it was consuming an overly representative proportion of the world's fossil fuel reserves. Luckily it had a huge fuel tank, I don't know exactly how big, but at one stage I got over 33 US gallons into it, which I think is around 130 litres. Gasoline is only $2.50 a gallon, so about NZ$0.90 per litre . And if anyone actually cares it averaged about 18mpg.
Mark and I had decided we would head to Niagara Falls first which is about 750kms from Boston, so we had preplanned to try and knock as much of the trip off as possible on Thursday. I suspect we drove for about 5 hours west along the I90, a toll road which runs east/west across New York State, and eventually ended up staying in a town called Syracuse (population about 150,000).
Accommodation at a reasonable, but not flash, hotel was typically around US$130 per night.
We went into town for a meal and a drink and met a few interesting people. The most enjoyable was talking to a couple of young 21 year old guys who were in the military and are off to Iraq in a few weeks. They were nice boys but had no idea what they were going into or any real world view.
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