18th Sept: I have only just got round to writing this because we were so exhausted after the journey I could not really do a lot all weekend and still got the dregs of this virus!
After the cool trip into USA’s Northampton, we continue to make our way towards Boston to a Hertz car rental. we stopped off at another services car park to eat our remaining Chinese from last night at about 1.30pm, and we have to get the car back for 5pm. It seems we only about 50 minutes away so plenty of time to stop.
I put in our destination to the satnav, and we set off. We hit Boston and the traffic. It is not the most relaxing place to drive (how many huge cities are!), although it has a beautiful river that we’re driving along the side and an absolutely gorgeous day again. Stuck in some traffic, I have the inspiration to just doublecheck where we’re going and realise I have had the wrong branch of the car rental company in the map! It’s now showing as just under two hours away, and we are in standstill traffic. This will be cutting it fine to get the car back in time. We also need to refuel the car before delivering it back and I spot two stations near the car rental place/airport. We have quite a serious drive across Boston through the thick of traffic, fairly hideous a bit hairy.
I would like to be able to say that this next choice was through some wisdom or careful planning, but it was just sheer luck! We stopped at the first of the two petrol stations and refuel, only to join a ridiculously long queue into the car rental area. it is now about 4:45 so I check the car rentals terms and conditions of how long grace period we have… it’s 29 minutes! After sitting in the queue for a little while we noticed that on the left side, there is hardly any queue and we take the risk going into it as we don’t want to have a penalty fine. We drive along the queue and realise the one we were sat in was for the other petrol station! It is absolutely heaving! Mental note to self: never go for the petrol station that is nearest the airport when refuelling before delivering a rental car back!!
So we get into the correct area to deliver our car back and there is a rather handy system that you just dump your car in a lane amongst hundreds of others and leave your keys. We oblige, and can’t wait to get out and be done with this element of our journey home.
After scurrying into the airport, going to the toilet, finding which bus we needed to get to the correct terminal, even getting on the bus sandwiched like sardines between other passengers, I realise we are a bag missing! I try to think if it is something we can do without, and no, we have my scarf, and some special little mementos in there. I barge our way off of the bus, and we hurry our way back to try to find the car amongst this car park of abandoned rental vehicles. Scouring through, retracing our steps, we hunt for our Subaru Forester, luckily with quite an unusual orange red stripe along the bottom of the door. We are really hoping the car doors are still open! We finally find it and I can see that the key has been moved onto the dashboard where we had left it in the central console… my heart skipped a beat as we try the boot… it opens! To our delight there sets our near abandoned white plastic bag of goodies. Phew! Back to get the bus… off we dash again!
This bus that we get on is not quite as crowded so every cloud has its silver lining! When we get to the correct terminal, we scope out where we need to go. Through security, when they scan your bags and person. We don’t need to remove any of our liquids this time as there is some kind of new ruling. We stand in a line and I realise that all the other queues are going much much quicker and some people in front of us abandon our queue so we do get forward a little bit. After we had been stood there 10 minutes, I realise that the lane we are in that is also being used for disabled people, and they are going straight to the front of the queue through a porter, and obviously taking a lot longer to get processed. There is clearly a backlog, and we get moved to another queue! The rest of the airport journey is fairly dull, and I will summarise that we got on the first aeroplane that was for 5.5hr to Iceland at 7pm, an annoying man behind me kept trying to sleep against my seat, keeping me awake, (along with the extra sinus pain caused by having a head cold in a pressurised cabin) and we got to Iceland about 3am their time. Got on the next plane that was 3hr to Stansted, and finally got through onto UK soil at about 10.30am.
We were both shattered, still needing to drive 2hr to get home, hungry, tired, and wanting our bed. Lots of wonderful memories though, and a definite feeling of making the most of it/ totally overdoing it!