Travel day. The trip technically begins on a bus to Boston Logan, but it really began weeks earlier — in Google Docs, Turo searches, and a slowly-tightening shared calendar. Today's job: get the four of us from coastal Massachusetts to a hotel curb at Denver International before midnight, with as little drama as possible.

It was the kind of trip-day morning that almost convinces you nothing's about to change. Edrik went to baseball practice. The girls finished packing. I took my usual 3.6-mile walk through the neighborhood — Apple Health logged it at 8:56 AM, the last "home" entry before a week of travel-route data. Laundry had mostly been folded the night before. With the 1:55 PM C&J Bus on the books, we didn't need to leave the house until just after one, which meant the morning wasn't really a departure morning at all — it was a Saturday with a duffel bag waiting by the door.

The C&J Bus is our standard airport play. Drive the half-hour up I-95 from Newburyport, park the car at the Seabrook terminal for the week, and let the bus do the rest of the thinking. About an hour later it slid us into Logan's central drop-zone with Boston traffic kept on the other side of the windshield where it belongs. We've done this route enough times that the boarding rhythm is muscle memory; nobody had to ask anyone where to go.

The actual cheapest fares the search engines turned up sent us southeast to Florida — or through some other improbable detour — before finally letting us land in Denver. We passed. United's two-leg routing through Newark was the cheapest option that didn't turn the flight day into an endurance test. UA1693 lifted off Boston at 6:19 PM and dropped into EWR ninety minutes later. An hour and change in the concourse, then UA1792 carried us out over the plains toward Denver, scheduled wheels-up at 9:24. Total airfare for the four of us in both directions: about $1,580 — United out, JetBlue home, the cheapest sensible combination across two carriers.

Two flight legs and a Newark layover meant we'd come into Denver right around midnight — which is the moment the Avid Hotel strategy earns its keep. Nobody wants to negotiate a rental-car counter at that hour with four tired travelers and a stack of bags. So we'd booked the Avid near DEN ($145.15) and arranged for a Turo to be hand-delivered to the hotel curb at 10:18 the next morning. The Avid runs a complimentary airport shuttle. Land, shuttle, sleep, breakfast, drive — no rental counter at midnight, no double-schlepping luggage.

We cleared the Newark connection. The Denver landing gear thumped down at 12:00 AM Mountain Time — 2 AM back home in Newburyport, the kind of arrival hour that makes faces look stretched and unfamiliar under terminal fluorescents. Only a couple of phone shots had survived the day: an EWR layover frame, the Avid lobby. The trip hadn't really started yet. But we were on the ground, the Turo confirmation was in the inbox for 10:18 the next morning, and the kids were asleep before the room key clicked the door open.

Tomorrow: pick up a Highlander and head northwest.

Click any thumb to open the lightbox. Use ← / → inside the lightbox to step through Day 1's photos.