My second month: Road trip to Boston and Niagara Falls
As time went by, we built up a big group of friends in the residence. Some of them were roommates (I shared room with a girl from Mongolia) and normally we met to have dinner together in the upper floor of the residence, along with other spaniards and latin americans.
It wasn't until the first week of August that we finally decided to rent two cars and ask for a free weekend at the same time. We were so lucky that ten of us were able to pick those days off, and on a saturday morning (Dawn, actually) we started our trip to Boston, MA. Considering the fact that we were in Pennsylvania, we had to drive for almost 5 hours until we could eventually get there. As we didn't have a SIM card (mobile phone taxes in the US are pretty high) there was no way to keep contact with the other car, but luckily we in our car had no problem to reach our destination.
On the contrary, the other one didn't have the same luck. It got lost at almost the beginning of the journey, because they didn't set up the GPS properly. When we finally met again, it was almost time to leave Boston. So I'll tell you what MY CAR did. There were 5 of us in it, all girls. Four of us were spanish and Abigail was ecuatorian. She was my work mate.
We arrived at Boston at almost 11 AM. We stopped once for gas, but it wasn't expensive at all. We had previously put a deposit of money for the whole trip and for gas, food, hotels, renting of the car and tickets I spent less than 200 dollars. I know, we set it up soooo well.
Boston is one of the eldest cities in the US, not to say the oldest. It was one of the first colonies from England. So I finally saw ancient buildings with more than two hundred years history. Everything seemed british in some way. There were these red brick houses, old churches... You could follow the Freedom Trail and see the whole city. It is a red tile path that goes through all the important monuments in Boston, and that's what we did.
We had lunch at the Boston Market. I was dying for some fish, so I bought some hake with chips. It was a very nice and warm city. We visited Franklin's grave, amongst other things, and we ended up in a park where we took a bath and a nap while we waited for the rest of the group to join us.
When we finally gathered, we took the car again and went to visit Harvard University. I was so excited because I always dreamt of studying there. It was such a beautiful area, and even in summer you could feel that college environment.
At about 7 PM we hit the road towards Niagara Falls. We had booked a hotel for the night, but as we lost track of the other group, we lost a lot of time, so we would sleep in the car and take turns to drive.
When we finally reached the hotel it was about 6 AM (long way) and we slept about 4 hours until at 10 AM we had breakfast and bought some coffee at a Starbucks on the other side of the road. We arrived at Niagara Falls at 10. 30 AM.
What an awesome place to visit! We bought the whole package and went on a boat just next to the falls. We met up some workers from Dorney that had the same idea as us and was spending their day there. The views were spectacular.
Once we had finished, we had lunch in a restaurant (I think it was called Fallsview Buffet) with very beautiful views. I had a burger that was indeed pretty good.
Sometime after 5 PM we went back to Allentown. We arrived at 11 PM. We spent more than 24 hours in the car and were dead (not to say that for example I had to work 14 hours the following day), but it was one of the funniest trips I've ever had, and our friendship grew up so much.
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