My First Grown-Up Vacation (part one of a series)
My alarm was making all of the weird noises it does every morning, in a vague attempt to wake me up. I looked at it, and it said 3:39. I squinted to make sure I read that right, and hit the button to turn the alarm off. I could have sworn I set it for 3:30… I don’t remember hitting the snooze button…
The clock read 3:42 when I finally rolled out of bed, nearly clunking right back to sleep there on the hard wood floor. I shuffled into the bathroom and took a shower, the whole time muttering to myself, “Don’t fall asleep in the shower; that would suck.”
I woke up Mike and started shoving last minute items into my backpack. I made sure I had my passport. I collected the trash and took that out to the dumpster. I checked again that I had my passport. As we piled the bags by the door, mike handed me the headphones I’d forgotten while I was busy making sure for the fifteenth time that I had my passport.
We brought our bags – one for checking, two carryon bags, one purse, and one small overnight bag for later – out to my car and took off eastward. The drive to the airport was relatively uneventful, and by this point, I was pretty sure I was awake. We successfully found the off-airport parking in Chelsea, and took the shuttle – which seemed to be waiting just for us – into terminal B.
We got our boarding passes, checked one ginormous dufflebag, and went over the ridiculous security station. Shoes? Seriously? You want me to take my shoes off? O… k…
Once I managed to get those back onto my stubborn feet, we went down to gate B30, where we’d wait for a shuttle that would take us to the special (as in ed.) terminal where American Eagle flights leave from. We waited in the deceivingly short line for some Dunkin’ Donuts and filled our slowly awakening stomachs with muffins and bagels. The shuttle came shortly afterward, and we were really on our way.
If you’ve never been to gate B30 at Logan, you’re missing out big time. To get to the shuttle, you have to walk out an exit clearly marked “Emergency Exit Only,” and walk down a sketchy stairwell that looks like it belongs in a decrepit public middle school. The shuttle has about 10 seats, but they cram about 40 people and all their carry on bags onto it.
I just remembered one neat thing about riding on the shuttle. From where I was standing, I could see straight out the front of the bus. We had stopped, and I looked out to see if we had reached the terminal, but no, we hadn’t. We were stopped at a traffic intersection, yielding right of way to a 737. That was neat.
Once you get to the Amelia Earhart Memorial Satellite Terminal (or some such thing), you walk out into an area with no obvious markings. We followed the bulk of the people and found ourselves looking at a sign that read B30d-h. We were supposed to be on B30b. There was no obvious sign for B30b, but there was definitely nothing else in front of us except for the one door for five “gates.” So we turned around, and it turns out that the dinky little waiting room we’d walked through was for B30a-c.
We sat down, and were soon joined by the people who had been in line in front of us when we were getting our boarding passes and checking our luggage. They were obviously Red Sox fans, in full regalia – well not FULL regalia, but definitely wearing tons of gear – and we struck up a conversation based on our common ground of identical vacations. I never got their names, but they were very friendly people – approximately my parents’ age.
Our new friends had bought their vacation as a package – airfare, hotel, game tickets, airport express bus tickets, everything all together. I cannot imagine how much more they must have paid for such a luxury. We bought the game tickets on the Blue Jays’ website the day they went on sale, at actual face value. We got our flight and hotel together in a remarkable deal on Hotels.com. And we figured on public transportation for everything. The internet is awesome, by the way.
After a brief trip to the bathroom to wash my face, I went to the ridiculously small news stand / food stand to purchase some chewing gum to go along with my ginger ale that I’d bought earlier from the Double D. See, I’m not exactly good at flying. In addition to my fear of heights and of enclosed spaces, I also had a terrible incident where I got an ear infection at high altitude, then proceeded to fly on two three-hour long flights. The second landing, I screamed the whole way down, and ever since, I’ve had a terrible time getting my ears to pop. The ginger ale makes me burp to get rid of the adgeda from the fears and the gum helps my poor little ears.
Our plane finally was ready for boarding, and we headed out into the cardboard tube jetway. We followed directions and our new friends, and found our seats in row 8 – on the wing. See, American Eagle flies these ridiculously small jets (at least their jets!) that have precisely 37 seats (I counted). The shuttle we took to the satellite terminal was bigger.
Despite all of my fears and adgeda, the flight was quite pleasant and very short. Then the most awesome announcement ever came from our flight attendant – “We will be deplaning [cool word!] via steps, so be careful!”
Steps! NEAT! It’s like I’m some kind of international superstar or leader of the free world! I get to walk on the tarmac!
We got off and found that we were once again in a satellite terminal. We took the Canadian (and therefore much cleaner and brighter) shuttle to the main terminal, and went through the friendliest customs ever. I got a smirk from the customs officer when I said we were there to see baseball games. We collected our luggage from the baggage claim, and were off into the wilds of Toronto…