Breakfast

As every day we started the day with a nice breakfast. After all we were going to spend half the day in the car. We had a nice late breakfast in the room after Ran picked up the Pancake special from the Pick a Bagel place that we went on our first day. In the mean time I was freshening up my knowledge about American driving culture.

Road

Especially for me this was going to be pretty exciting to drive on US roads for the first time. Depending on which material you read you either get the impression that Americans cruise all relaxed without any of the typical rowdiness you find on European roads. Or you read that the days of relaxed driving along the Interstates is long gone and that every drives like a New York taxi driver; pushing, changing lanes and only vaguely respecting the speed limits.

Picking up the car

The day before we already organized a ride on the Hotels airport shuttle which arrived a bit early and the Hotel called us about 10 min before we were planning to go down to the lobby. No problem though I put the luggage into the bus, yeah a small white version of those iconic Americana school-buses, while Ran checked us out.

The driver had the right idea about coming earlier as the traffic was really bad, especially around Times square. It was so bad that even though he picked us up early the other Hotels kept bothering him all the time when he was going to arrive. To which he only said "I can't fly man, I just around the corner, have all the people meet me outside". you have to imagine this with a Italian accent.

The driver was so kind to drop us off at Federal circle. This is the first stop of the Airtrain (green and red) to Queens. This is where all the car rentals are located. We gave him a nice tip and walked to the office of Nationals. Nationals you ask, after all we booked the car through our Luxembourgian travel agency with Sunnycars which uses Alamo as their local provider which in turn uses the Nationals rental station at JFK. Pretty confusing yes I think so and after asking around and following the small Alamos signs we got our car. We had a reservation for a Ford Escape or similar which meant a mid-sized SUV with a GPS. They did not have one and so we got a Jeep Compass which unfortunately did not have any built in GPS. They actually gave us the same Garmin GPS that we borrowed from Friends. Thanks a lot you know who you are. I trust our GPS more than theirs knowing that ours is all up to date :)

Driving to Boston

When i got the car I maded sure that it had Cruise control. That was a stroke of brilliancy. The first two hours i was basically stuck in slow moving (~30 to 50 km/h) traffic and only after getting on the Massachusetts Interstate the speed limit was raise from 55 mph to 65. Another specialty of the US traffic code is that because everyone drives quite slow you can pass cars on the right AND on the left. This means that you better check your mirrors! Talking about speed limits, in the beginning I was driving exactly on the speed limit using cruise control while even trucks and RV's were passing me left and right. In the end I set it up to 1-3 mph higher according to the GPS speedometer but still people were all driving faster. At one point the Coca Cola truck drove past me, haha.

Not far from Hartford (Connecticut) we rested a bit at a local McDonalds and ate some burger and our first Crab roll.

![Cromwell Connecticut]

Crab fest

We arrived, parked the car in the Hotel's (Hilton Boston Back bay) garage and went to our room. After staying in a Hilton Garden Inn this looks a bit fancier even.
They have an indoor pool which we wanted to try out but we did not bring any swimwear so went to the Mall on the other side of the street and had a look but did not find anything yet. That's not as bad as it sounds because we ate at the Summer Shack next to the Hotel which was recommended by the Hotel staff as a casual and not too expensive Lobster Locale with tasty Seafood.

See for yourself.

![Lobster]

Afterwards we went back to the Hotel and Ran in particular who was looking longingly at every ad we saw in NYC was quite satisfied.