Holiday to New England in Oct 2023: Day 2 – Boston to Kittery

We were looking forward to our first proper day on holiday in New England, where we were assured the leaves would be turning a reddy-brown and would look gorgeous.

Having turned off the light at 10pm, we both woke briefly during the night and were both up around 3-3:30am. Vick made a milky coffee for us both and we tucked into our little snacks, purchased the evening before.

Vick sorted out an early-opening Starbucks and we headed down to Arlington St, near Park Plaza. It was quite cool out in the early morning in Boston, but it was nice and refreshing. At Starbucks, a Delta pilot introduced himself to us and gave us some tips for places to visit as we headed north today. One of those places was Kittery – we will come back to that later.

After getting back to the hotel, we popped in for breakfast, which opened at 7am. We were given $18 vouchers when we checked in and of course almost all breakfast dishes were $19! Anyway, the quality of the food was pretty good and we avoided getting another coffee.

After finishing off packing, we were ready to pick up our car from Hertz from their Park Plaza office.

This was another example where the downtown location was a load cheaper than an airport pickup.

I had already noticed two attempted charges from Hertz of $1500: one to my now defunct Amex Platinum and one to my Monzo card, which (luckily) didn’t have enough credit on it.

When we reached Hertz, we were the only renters in the queue and we asked what was going on with the attempted charges. The rental they had on their system didn’t match what we had ordered over twelve months ago, so it took the lady about 15 mins to manually create a new booking which matched the one we had a receipt for.

We drove off in an Audi A4, which for $600 for two weeks was pretty good going…

We left Boston heading north on Highway-1, which was busy but not too challenging. We had attached my mobile to the windscreen so that we could use it to record the journey.

The gadget with a windscreen sucker was less than £20 and looked half decent. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a shake since the camera needed a bit of support underneath. However, it didn’t last very long after the sucker lost grip as we drove around a roundabout.

We had set an initial target of Saugus to stop and take a breath, but somehow managed to miss that, so we decided to press on to Salem where we could grab a Starbucks. So our second Starbucks was achieved before 9:30am. However, that did give us an opportunity of fixing a few things.

Vick fixed the shaking phone with a Heath-Robinson solution using my hanky. That was just enough to provide the support it needed. No more shaking!

Vick declared she had a problem charging her phone, so we found an AT&T store in Salem and she bought a new charging cable.

We had a play with the Audi sat nav system and we found the option to turn on the audio directions. We did conclude that the Audi interface wasn’t very intuitive.

From Salem we headed to Kittery (just past Portsmouth), which was recommended by the Delta pilot we met in Starbucks in Boston. It was very quaint, but there wasn’t any real focal point there, so we drove around a bit and decided we needed something else to do.

Follow the whole story here: Holiday to New England in Oct 2023