travel woes

travel fatigue

I arrived back home yesterday at 5pm eastern time, which required me to get out of bed at 3am pacific time. My travel home was remarkably snag-free, which I should have known would be short-lived.

Tonight my flight to Boston was delayed by over an hour. When I got to the Rochester airport, I realized I'd forgotten to make a car reservation. No problem, I thought, I'll hop online and do it over the airport's free wifi. Except I couldn't get a valid IP address. Finally I found a working router in the middle of the terminal, and quickly discovered that every single car rental vendor at Logan airport was completely sold out for the night.

So, instead of picking up a rental car at the airport and zipping to my hotel (in Waltham) when I arrived, I had to take an expensive shuttle (which costs more than a day of car rental) to the hotel, picking a car in Waltham in the morning (the hotel website claimed Enterprise had a desk here, but they lied; I guess Enterprise will come pick me up instead), and paying a surcharge to drop the car off at the airport on Thursday night. So my ground transportation costs (which I pay out of pocket and then cover out of my training fee) are double what they should have been. And there's no telling how long it will take to get paid for this gig, either (see my next post for details on those trials and tribulations).

When the shuttle dropped me off here at the Holiday Inn Express in Waltham, I found I'd have to carry my two bags to the "annex" building behind the hotel, which required a trek through a puddle-filled parking lot. When I got there, my room cards didn't work, so I had to trek back. They gave me two more cards, and I returned, only to find that those didn't work either. So I called the front desk, and one of the clerks came out and found that the new keys she'd made still didn't work. So she let me in with a master key and someone else came out 30 minutes later to give me a keycard that worked. And while there's free wifi here, it's incredibly slow. There's no room service and no hotel bar, so no glass of wine in my room tonight.

I think that about wraps up my whining for the night.

On the bright side, I made it to my room before midnight, I remembered to bring some granola bars so I won't go to bed hungry, and it's entirely possible that things tomorrow will go more smoothly than I anticipate. And when I get home Thursday night, it will be two weeks until I have to travel again!