After arriving at Honolulu airport we thought we’d have a bout of time to just relax in the lounge before out flight because we’re flying “first class” – which is really business but never mind. The lounge was full so we only had a short amount of time there, but enough for a nice cold drink at last. The walk to the gate was around 20 minutes, Honolulu has a pretty big airport!

Boarding started right on time, everything went smoothly. There is no “until….” in this sentence – everything just went well, Delta really had their act together. The seating pod was a good size and looking comfy. The only wrinkle is, for my ‘window’ seat, check there the window actually is 😂

If I craned my neck around I could still glimpse outside, so, all good?

The service from the crew was great, and the good was really impressive – a little entree of asparagus prawn and beef with sundried tomato, and a giant ravioli for mains, plus salad and bread. All super-tasty, really nice.

I guess the only downsides to the cabin is all the seating pods were quite low-walled, so it offered very little privacy for anyone – not that it much matter coz with any luck we were all to be asleep soon anyway. Also, for a nice big seating pod it was quite low on storage – a flat area, and a kind of seat pocket that wasn’t big enough for an iPad.

We were supplied with a pillow and blanket (in the ‘COZ-Z-Z’ packet sitting on the chair in the photo), so after I dinner I pressed the good old ‘Turn this chair into a bed’ button. The chair itself was pretty recalcitrant,  needing some extra encouragement to go through the motions and actually lie flat, though considering the weight the poor thing had to bear with me sitting in it, I’m sure it was trying doing its best. Eventually the chair and I came to an agreement and it laid itself out fully flat.

When folded into a bed, there is *just* enough room to lie down, and not a centimetre more. I did eventually drift off for maybe 2 hours, not near as much as I would have hoped but much better than nothing. I eventually gave up and held the ‘please turn yourself back into a chair’ button and, again with additional encouragement and persuasion, it did eventually comply. I guess one advantage with the lack of sleep was that I finally got to finish reading The Picture of Dorian Gray – I was hoping to finish it before we see the play in New York so at least that mission is accomplished. And now I’m even more interested in how the play is going to work. Give it a week or two and we’ll find out, I guess.

In time, breakfast was served and it was another great meal – a quiche with chicken sausage and roasted potato bits, I’d out my phone away by this stage so no photos to show.

Breakfast was hastily tidied away as it was almost time to land – some 10 hours or so after we started. The whole flight was smooth, as was the landing, I’d happily fly Delta again.

Boston’s Logan Airport is big, shiny modern, and did I mention big? There’s like 130 or so check-in desks in a massive hall – the whole place seems to everything at a huge scale.

The area from which you catch an Uber wasn’t really well signposted, but when we did find it, it was a really well designed space making it easy to passengers to meat up with the Uber or Lyft, and get them on their way. It may be no surprise that it involved walking through some very long corridors though.

I can recommend getting an Uber from the airport – if you like a nice long walk to the pick up area at least, after that it was smooth sailing. Traffic was already very heavy at 7am, but before too long we found ourselves at the hotel.

Check-in was a right mess. I’d (accidentally I think, but I’d like to say it was definitely on purpose) booked a night early, so we didn’t have to wait til 3pm for a room to become available. I’d confirmed through the app beforehand, even checked in and selected a room, so it should just have been a matter of picking up a room key.

“There’s no booking here. I can see your confirmation number but since you didn’t turn up on the day itself you are presumed to be a no show and have no booking”. The cheek! This wasn’t called out at any point, and they didn’t bother checking in with me either. Maybe I’m a naive traveller but I’d never heard such a stupid thing. Anyway the front desk said we can’t do anything you have to ring the global pre-purchase-bookings line to sort that out. Reluctantly, they eventually gave me the number, so I called.

Would it be a big surprise that the pre-purchase line said “we can’t do anything you need to sort it out at the hotel”? Coz that’s exactly what happened. I guess the people at the front desk were already having a bad day because they’d already faced many grumbling customers with various issues, and tbh were a little dismissive toward all of them (including me). After a little polite to-and-fro (be kind to retail staff everybody, the stupid policies aren’t their fault), the hotel decided they could ‘find’ my booking after all, and eventually provided a room key and we were on our way, maybe 45 minutes after we arrived. I was glad we had a room, even if it was much smaller than the room I’d picked out myself via the app. But with 2 hours sleep if lucky (and even less for Perry) it was good to finally be able get a bit of a snooze in before we completely turned into zombies. So yeah, not a great experience – my first, and also probably my last, stay with this particular hotel chain.

Once we got out to explore though, Boston seems lovely! It’s also 20 degrees colder than Hawaii (6 degrees here, 26 degrees there) – so definitely a different feel. It has a real mix of old and new, a chaotic street layout like Sydney, (plus chaotic drivers who like to use the horns lot like Sydney) and overall a pretty good vibe. We walked around for a short while, found some (very average) coffee and a bite for lunch.

More importantly, we found squirrels!

After that we decided to jump on the train/tram to visit Boston Public Market coz it sounded cool. NO need to worry about train tickets just Tap-on with Apply Pay so that was nice. The trams themselves are a bit on the old side, but still do the job, and they are very frequent. Which might explain why they’re not exactly in a rush either, all queued up waiting behind each other I guess.

Maybe we were just there are the wrong time, bit the Boston Public Market wasn’t exactly a hive of activity, but we had an early dinner and walked around the small number of food providers who were there. Apparently Quincy Market is the one to watch out for, which we’re bound to visit in the coming days. We stopped in at Trader Joe’s for snacks and that’s about it – it’s only half past 8 but I keep falling asleep so I think it’s time to hit Publish and leave it at that after a looong day.