First drive in the second home

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Today was our last day in Boston, I felt quite sad to be leaving as it was an amazing city with excellent culture and history and I had enjoyed a great couple of days there. Today was the day that we picked up the car that we would be using for the next couple of weeks and it was another lengthy walk down at Atlantic avenue following the red brick road for one last time! The car was an absolute monster and was much bigger than the car I had driven the last time I was in the states and felt fairly apprehensive about my first drive. Initially I thought we might be able to have the layout of the car as 2 in front, middle and back but this was not possible and had to have 3 in the middle and have 1 crushed right in the back. We decided to have a rotation system where we all had the front passenger and back seat an even number of times. Alex's drive proceeded smoothly out of Boston and we stopped off at a Mcdonalds in a really dodgy little town somewhere in New York state. It was here that we met a person who had once had one of his songs broadcast on radio 2 which was crazy! Jake wanted to watch the football and asked if there was anywhere that we could go and he pointed us towards a massive casino that may potentially have the game on.



Grant took the next driving stint and I headed to the back seat of the car, thankfully I was quite small so it was not too uncomfortable for me. Grant completely forgot that he was driving an automatic car so twice he used his left foot for the brake thinking it was a clutch, the first time he did this the car jolted so badly I though that we had been hit! The luggage came all over me as well. Thankfully Grant got the hang of it after that and there were no more of those incidents. The casino called Turning Stones was literally in the middle of nowhere and when inside one of the people queried whether we had made a wrong turn somewhere! I actually though the place itself was quite nice and they had really cheap beer and were able to put the game on for us although by the time we got there it was nearly over. The cheap beer nearly convinced a few of us to stay there a bit longer but it would have been unfair on Grant who still had a fair bit of driving to do before we got to the hotel. Just before we got to the hotel we had another near death experience when Grant turned onto a road with 2 lanes but it turned out he was on the wrong side of the road and we had to take evasive action as there was a car coming from the other direction. Once we arrived at the hotel I think Grant was relieved that his driving stint was over!



The woman at the hotel really liked our accents and as a result she upgraded us to the rooms that had recently been done up and they were really nice. Me, Jake and Alex were sharing and as Alex had booked the hotel we let him have a double bed to himself and me and Jake shared the other one. Syracuse was only a stopping point on the way to Toronto as I though it would be unwise to complete the whole journey to Toronto in one day, considering we did not even get to Syracuse until 8 it ended up being a very good idea. Everyone was really hungry by this point and thankfully there were some restaurants down the road and we went into Ruby Tuesdays. The food was pretty good in there and there was a great moment where the waitress was bringing out all the beers and she spilt Jake's beer down herself. Later I would find out that another waitress was really annoyed that I was so far out from the table and asked that I moved but because I did not hear she made some sarcastic comment about being able to get through anyway! Back at the hotel we played some exploding kittens where Grant and Jake made it their mission to screw me over all night becoming my enemies of the game for the rest of the trip. After about an hour of this we headed up to the room as it was going to be another long day in the car and I would be driving!

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