Day 1—Our Vacation Begins

Our big family vacation this year was an enjoyable week in New England. On August 7th, we flew to Boston (via Chicago), paying for most of the airfare with vouchers we had received for all the schedule changes United had thrown at us during our 2000 vacation to San Francisco. As a pleasant surprise, all of our flights to Boston and back were on time and uneventful.

In Boston, we rented a car and immediately set out for our first stop: White River Junction, Vermont. You might wonder, since we didn’t arrive in Boston ’til about 6pm, and White River Junction was about a three hour drive away, why on earth did we have to go there the first night? Well... there were only three states east of the Mississippi River that Tony had never been to, and one of them was Vermont (the other two are Florida and Mississippi). Since we had never made it up to Vermont (despite lots of talk about it) while we lived in Pennsylvania, Tony wanted to make sure he didn’t miss out this time. And this was the only way we could squeeze this out-of-the-way excursion into our vacation plans.

White River Junction is a small town on the VT-NH border, and there really wasn’t anything to do there. Which is fortunate, since we arrived about 10pm and left by 9am the next morning. The hotel that Tony had reserved for us, Hotel Coolidge, is a registered National Historic Site in “downtown” White River Junction. Tony still claims that the hotel had an old Vermont charm to it... the rest of the family thought it was a little spooky. Half of the hotel is actually a youth hostel, but we stayed in the other half. The interior decorations reminded us of the 1930s or 1940s. Our “suite” consisted of two small bedrooms with a bathroom in between. Although the hotel lobby and hallways were not air conditioned, there was an air conditioner in one of our two bedrooms (the one Tony and Denise claimed) — this was important, because the high temperature that day had been nearly 100 degrees!