Since we were renting a car we knew we wouldn’t need to figure out any public transport logistics. That would hopefully simplify things and the hotel had free self parking as well.

Even with a car, we still needed to figure out where to go and how to get there. As always we were going to rely on Google Maps for driving directions and to help find restaurants, gas, landmarks and everything else.

Connectivity

In order for Google Maps to work, we’d also need some level of cellular service. For my wife, she has her phone plan with Cricket Wireless. Her plan has free roaming in all of Canada and Mexico. Her phone would basically work exactly as it does at home for no extra coast.

My phone, on the other hand, is with AT&T. While I have one of the most expensive plans they offer and AT&T owns Cricket Wireless, my plan doesn’t have free roaming in Mexico and Canada. Boo!

Instead I would use the world wide SIM card I had gotten from Keepgo for our trips to Rome and London in 2018. The SIM card doesn’t expire and the data doesn’t expire. Though the card is data-only it works perfectly for what we need it for.

The night before our trip I loaded up the cards to make sure they would work only to find that all the data was gone from both of them. As I read the details, the data doesn’t expire IF you add more data within a year. In other words adding more data extended the expiration date of any existing data by 365 days.

I wasn’t too upset because there wasn’t a lot of data that had expired so it wasn’t a big loss. I’ll have to remember that for next time. I ended up refilling the cards with 500MB of data each. There wasn’t an activation fee because the cards were still showing as activated, as expected. If the data is about to expire, next time I’ll be sure to refill it with some data. The lowest amount was 100MB for $10 which is pretty reasonable considering how little data we actually use when traveling. We only use the phones to find out how to get around and do the very basics. If we used the roaming on my AT&T plan it would be $10 per day which quickly adds up to more than the amount of prepaid data we use.

I also intalled the second refilled card in the spare phone we were bringing. The kids usually use it to take their own pictures. It was working as expected and I’d wait until we got to the airport in the morning to change out my phone since I needed it to get the Lyft to the airport.

Scheduled Lyft

We normally use Lyft to get to the airport because parking at the airport so terribly expensive, even in the inconvenient long term parking. It’s usually a lot less stressful to have someone else drive as well.

That said, one stressful thing about Lyfts is if cars keep getting canceled on you at 3am and you keep getting matched with drivers further and further away. We had a 5:30am departure time so we didn’t have a large cushion to play with if drivers were going to be playing those games with us.

During one of her rides, a driver had told my wife about the feature to schedule a ride. I had used that once before many years ago and at the time it seemed like it would just automatically put my ride request in 10 minutes before the time I scheduled it for. That time I still ended up waiting 20 minutes for the ride so it wasn’t a great experience.

From how my wife described it, it seemed like the feature was different now so I decided to give it another try. I scheduled the ride for 3:10am and it said I could expect it to arrive between 3:10 and 3:20.

A quirk of where we live is that Google Maps doesn’t have our street in exactly the right place. If we enter the right address, it tells the driver to go to the wrong street. We end up having to put the wrong approximate street address and be on the lookout for them driving by and hope they see us. Hopefully they could find us in the morning!

Later that night I was thinking of adjusting the address a little to try to make sure they got closer to us, but then noticed that it said the ride had been accepted by a driver already so I didn’t touch it. We’d see if that same driver showed up the next day on time!

Getting Things Ready

Before we went to bed, we had both suitcases packed and by the door. Our backpacks were double checked and next to the suitcases. Our clothes were set out for us to put on when we got up. There would be no time wasted in the morning. I had two alarms set up and double checked AM/PM just to be sure!

We were ready to get up, get dressed, and get out!