Spirit Airlines: Chicago to Boston|Maritimes, Day 1

9/4/19 - Wednesday
This year, we decided to keep things relatively simple by traveling to Canada for our annual trip. 2019 was starting to wind down, so time was getting short and we hadn't prioritized planning a trip. Traveling to Nova Scotia had been on my wish list for a while, so we started checking out flights and realized there was a sweet spot that involved flying to Boston and renting a car from there.  We literally ran dozens of flight/rental car combinations and found that we could save hundreds of dollars by building our trip this way. This came with the one sizable caveat that Boston doesn't exactly border Canada, so this would entail oh, just a 6.5-hour one-way drive to get to our first stop in New Brunswick. I like saving money, so extended road trip it was!

Now, another notable caveat of doing the trip this way is those low-cost flights to Boston required flying out of O'Hare in Chicago. Which we're a good 5 hours away from. But we made a long weekend of traveling up to Chicago to spend time with family, enjoyed a Labor Day picnic with my cousins, and even got to present my mom with an early 60th birthday cake. We would've had to make our way up to the region for her birthday regardless, so it worked well for us to combine occasions.

We had four lounge passes from our United MileagePlus Credit Card, so we planned to get to O'Hare early so we would have plenty of time to eat and take advantage of them. We were traveling only with backpacks as a personal item, and we were a little concerned about size, but they fit in the test display just fine. The security line was a breeze with basically no wait whatsoever.

So, we beelined it to the United Club Lounge. The timing of everything couldn't have been better, because the rules changed in November and now require that you are flying United to be able to access the lounge.

We ate a LOT of food. The Tomato Basil Bisque was my favorite. This lounge definitely had a better food selection than the previous one we had visited at IAD.  Besides the soup, we had bread and butter with hummus, cheese cubes (which paired perfectly with the soup haha), Mediterranean Salad, brownies, pretzel snacks, and water w/ fresh orange and strawberry. This was also my first time having a drink in the lounge where we learned that tequila cost money, but Francisco told me I could have all the gin and tonics till my heart's content.

Obvs, coffee goes great with G&Ts.

The lounge was in Terminal 2, about a 20-minute walk from our gate in Terminal 3, so we begrudgingly departed our buffet of free food and drinks to make it over there to board at 1:30. Except our flight was delayed, and we didn't find out until we got there.

Everything had been going so well up to that point!

We weren't sure if we could get back in the lounge since we had handed over our one-time use passes. We thought it would be best to call instead of walking all the way back over there to potentially be rejected. After Francisco finally got someone on the phone, he was told there wasn't really an official policy, and it would be up that location's discretion. We decided to just find a quiet corner and wait it out. It didn't stay quiet for long because then a group of loud Russians came to eat lunch.

Our flight that was originally slated to leave at 2:16 ended up leaving around 4:00. From what we'd heard, this wasn't unusual for Spirit Airlines. Because they are a low-cost carrier, I guess they are usually first to get pushed if there is a delay, so I wasn't terribly surprised. But at a cost of $52.30 per person for each flight, I wasn't terribly upset about it.

Once onboard, the pilot explained that there was a storm over the Boston airport that had caused the delay. Apparently, the storm wasn't completely over before we arrived as we got stuck circling in a holding area outside of Boston.

We weren't the only plane stuck circling here:

Unsurprisingly, Spirit doesn't offer any complimentary beverages, food, or entertainment, so I occupied my time mostly by reading Horns.

As I mentioned, we were traveling only with backpacks for this trip, and this made the arrival process so much simpler. We had everything right on our backs and didn't even need to wrestle a carry-on out of the luggage bin of the plane, let alone go watch a conveyor belt of bags go around. We could head straight to the shuttle to pick up our rental car.

The state of Massachusetts apparently did away with all of their toll booths, and all tolling is done electronically. From what we were told by Dollar, there is no way to exit the airport without having to pay a toll. You could rent a toll pass device from the car rental company; however, since we were literally just picking up the car and heading out of the state, we didn't want to pay a daily rental fee. The only other option was to essentially be billed a $10 fee + the cost of the toll. I think this would apply per toll, but we planned to avoid as many as possible. We thought we'd at least have two fees, one for leaving the airport and one for returning, but we were only ever billed for one. 🤷

We went to actually get our car, and an older attendant told us to go pick whatever compact car we wanted, the keys were in the car, and just head towards the exit when we were done. We were so perplexed. Do we just drive off with a car? How do they know which one we took? Is no one going to make note of any dents or scratches? The guy wasn't particularly helpful, so we picked out a Ford Fiesta and headed towards the exit. Turns out there was an exit gate with an attendant who collected our rental details before we headed out. Sheesh, that whole process could have been done a lot more clearly.

It was about a half-hour drive to the Holiday Inn Express we had booked. This was my first Holiday Inn experience, and we were happy to finally put our IHG credit card to use and use up some credit card points from our sign-up bonus. We were  a bit caught off guard when the attendant offered us a Welcome Amenity for being Elite Members. He explained we could either collect 1,000 bonus points or select something from the little snack station next to the check-in desk. For clarification, we asked what snack we could pick, and he responded anything we wanted.

We stocked up on chips, candy, ice cream, and drinks and took them to our room. I was practically giddy. We had tried to go to a grocery store before checking in, but they were closing, so we weren't going to have anything for dinner otherwise. It wasn't until the next night's stay at a different IHG when we were offered a single snack that I started to question our interpretation of "take whatever you want". Knowing what we know now, I'm pretty sure he meant to take any single item that we wanted.🤦

Oh, well, it sure was a nice ending to a long day!  And a great introduction to the IHG brand. Our room was spacious, clean, and quiet. The shower seemed particularly indulgent, and the breakfast in the morning was enjoyable as well!