Day 1: “Chinatown”
San Diego→ Nashville → Boston
Yes, I’m aware that this new post is called “CANEDA”, not “CANADA”. That isn’t a typo.
There will be some discussion of my travels to Canada in this next trip I’m documenting on “Inside A Wandering Mind”. That’s why it’s called CANEDA, after all, but when trying to come up with a cool-sounding name for this trip I didn’t just want to say “CANADA2025”. We spent a lot of time in the states; the first few days of the trip, as you will soon read, was focused more on New England; and towards the end of the journey, we also spent some time in upstate New York.
So I decided that the most appropriate name for a trip like this would be “CANEDA”. The “NE” stands for New England.
As we went along the trip, me and my brother Casey (who has already proven in JP2024 and VN2023 to be notorious when traveling) both worked together to keep a timeline of the entire trip; we both took pictures, took a list of all the experiences we had in these eleven days; from meals to attractions to long hours of driving… we ended up with a total of seventy-one different stories to tell, some of them far more notable and memorable than others.
I’m not just going to tell about each of these experiences now that I have a full list and some information on them all; I’m also going to try and start critiquing all of these experiences; I’ll give my thoughts on the places we went and the food we tried, give recommendations to where and what we did… and anyone reading this who plans a trip to this area will (at least, I hope) have a better idea of where they want to visit and what to do in their own vacations to Canada and New England. On top of the general critique, I’ll also give each experience an official rating of A, B, C, or D, (A being absolutely surreal and D being an experience that I don’t ever want to re-experience). Keep in mind that this is largely based off what I think and what my opinions are on things, so they may not match yours. Feel free to comment your own thoughts if you have ever been to any of those places!
This trip, although it was already my third time in Canada (first two times were pre-COVID), would be the first time I ever visited its Eastern side. The other two times were centered around the city of Vancouver and also included a few days in Seattle; we would be visiting the city of Montreal by driving North from Boston before heading West to Ottawa, the Capital of Canada, and then to Toronto City. After two nights there, we would go down to Niagara Falls (Canadian Side) for two-day long grand finale, before driving to Buffalo and ending up back at home.
Our trip began on August 2nd, 2025… at home. Getting on that flight and heading to New England (Which I’d never been to before) was something I was really looking forward to, and I could tell my brother had the same sentiment, because he did something he’s never done before in his life: He set an alarm to get up early. And I mean really early. 3 in the morning.
To be honest, it wasn’t entirely a “by choice” thing. Our flight out to Boston left really early in the morning— about 6 or so. Normally, making my brother get up before seven in the morning is pretty hard, but boy, was he excited; as we got up and started packing our things into our family SUV, he didn’t complain at all. We’d spend most of this trip with our family: my dad, mom, my grandma (on my dad’s side), and my grandma’s younger sister were all going to stick with us the entire time for this trip. We crammed everything we had into the very back of our SUV while everyone sat in the front (for some reason, I chose to sit in the cramped area in the back. I don’t know why, but I really liked the idea of all that private space)
The drive out to the airport was a really interesting one, and marks Experience Number 1 out of 70 on the list of experiences we would have during this trip. You’d think this experience would be something I could instantly put in the “C” or “D” category, but to be honest, it was a little surreal to drive through the streets of my community at 4 in the morning. My brother’s first of many Instagram stories on the trip featured the sort of “dead” looking streets in our community at 3:59. There was nothing as we drove through the local streets of our community; not a single soul in sight. We didn’t pass a single car as we drove through the town, which made it feel almost dead; it was almost like being the only people in the town at all. It was only once we got on the highway when we started to see a handful of early 4AM commuters on the streets, and even then the traffic was unusually low (I’m starting to get why adults in my life go to work at four)
Rating for Experience #1, Driving At 4AM: B-
We reached this parking garage at around 4:30 or so. After getting checked in and taking out our bags (which took quite some time) we eventually got in a shuttle that would take us to our first airport of the trip; San Diego International Airport. The shuttles didn’t have seatbelts, so the ride to the airport was a little bumpy. The city was really quiet for 5AM, but that would quickly change once we arrived at the front of San Diego International Airport.
The check in process took quite some time; it was a bit of a walk from where the shuttle dropped us off to checking in and getting through the TSA. Not much really happened during that time until we eventually arrived at the gate of our flight by around 5:30 in the morning.
At that point, we still hadn’t had breakfast yet, so my brother Casey and I ended up having our first meal of the trip, which was some bánh mì (Vietnamese baguette) that we brought from home. If you haven’t had it before, I recommend trying it out. My brother and I both finished our food by around 6; after a quick trip to the airport restroom (which is surprisingly clean) we got ready to board our first flight: but it wasn’t to Boston. At least, not yet.
We first had plans for a side trip to Nashville, Tennessee. We only planned to stay there for a few hours before continuing on a second flight that would take us North to Boston, so there wasn’t much we planned to do there; it was, to be honest, really just one of those stops that you take and jump over without giving a crap about ever again, so nobody was really talking much about all the crazy things we’d be doing once we got to Boston.
My brother Casey, as expected, had his own agenda. My brother is the only person in our family that has a really big appetite for fried and hot chicken; I wouldn’t be surprised if it was his favorite food. For the past few years, he’s asked my mom and dad for just about every opportunity that he can get to eat at Dave’s Hot Chicken or KFC. He never turns down the chance to get to eat it if he can’t, and he’s talked about eating it so much that I’m pretty sure he’d only eat hot chicken for breakfast, lunch, and dinner if he had the choice.
And so, when told that we were going to have a two-hour layover in Nashville, conveniently around lunchtime hours, he thought of this:
And he immediately said, “Oh, Tennessee! They have great Fried Chicken!” and immediately began asking over and over again if we could please eat Fried Chicken once we were in Tennessee.
But Tennessee, at least for now, was still quite a few hours away as we boarded our plane. Nothing too out of the ordinary happened as we boarded the plane that morning and took our seats. It wasn’t long before the plane was rolling down the runway and heading into the air.
The plane moved really quickly, and I felt the gravity coming over my body; and the buildings of San Diego became smaller and smaller as we ascended across the city and into the air. I was pretty eager to get a video of us flying across the county through San Diego, but we ended up running into some clouds after just a moment; everything around us was just the grayness of the clouds (kind of like we were on another planet) so I chose to end the video recording pretty quickly.
In case you want to see it, here it is:
Over the next two or so hours, we traveled across the desert, through several Western States: California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. I watched (with a few short power naps in between) as the terrain slowly evolved from a yellow, desert landscape to a more green, grassy field. Cities passed across my vision, one by one. Albuquerque. Amarillo. Oklahoma City. The cropfields on the ground evolved into hundreds of little shapes— circles, squares, and grids. I don’t know what it is, but there is something very satisfying about watching the cropfields move slowly across the view outside your plane window. I guess it’s just some excitement over what landform you’re going to see next.
It was (roughly) the fourth hour of the flight when I noticed this abrupt stop in the middle of all the grids of cropfields.
That was a hard feature of the American landscape to miss: that was the Mighty Mississippi River, and we had finally crossed the border into the state of Tennessee, with less than an hour to go before we arrived at Nashville. As the little band of water passed below our plane, I snapped some photos of the wavy river, even managing to identify the border with Kentucky due to this awkward curve up top, called the Kentucky Bend:
And after hours of watching the American countryside pass by, we were quickly approaching the city of Nashville. As we got closer, buildings became more numerous, and the plane started to descend. I also took this video of the Southern countryside as we were making our final approach towards Nashville. Enjoy!
And finally, the landing video:
And I could now officially claim that I’d been to Tennessee. Just like how I felt when I visited Taipei two years back, it was a little discouraging to be excluded from seeing the main skyline, but it was still really interesting to get a view overhead of a typical Southern neighborhood.
Rating for Experience #2, San Diego to Nashville: B
We arrived at the Nashville Airport at around lunchtime, much to Casey’s excitement. After cruising around the airport a bit, trying to find our gate to Boston’s Logan Airport, we settled down and started looking for some food to eat. There were quite a few options, but my brother immediately found what he liked: the airport had a restaurant serving some fried chicken. We ended up buying a box of fried chicken for the family to have, a piece of white bread, some extra fries on the side, and of course, ketchup.
For the rest of our time at Nashville (which wasn’t very long) I ended up just looking around the airport a bit to see what shops there were and what the place had to offer; there wasn’t very much that set this airport apart from any old airport.
But the trip was about to get a whole lot more interesting with the next flight from Nashville up to Boston; it would fly through states such as Virginia, New York, and New England, which were places that I rarely ever flew over. I was very eager to see what the terrain of the place looked like in person, and I got my camera ready as we got on the plane. After a brief battle against Casey for the window seat of the plane, I took my camera and recorded the takeoff.
And there we traveled Northwest through Kentucky into Virginia. A thick, endless carpet of trees passed below us except for the occasional patch of grass or the small rural town of ten people that passed under us every few moments. Eventually we reached Maryland and began to turn north, heading straight for New York City. I was pretty eager and excited to see it with my own eyes after having not visited it for a good six years. Our plane traced the Delaware River that George Washington crossed a little under 250 years before. I prepared my camera for an epic picture of New York City’s skyline and…
Umm… I’ll be honest. Fatigue kinda caught up to me. I was really tired after getting up at 3 in the morning from San Diego to get to New York, so I ended up falling asleep once we got there. By the time I woke up again, not much more than fifteen minutes later, we had already passed the main part of the city and were now soaring over Long Island, about to approach the New England Coast itself.
I’d never been to New England, so I was very excited to see what the landscape looked like from above. Our plane descended lower and lower and I started to snap photos left and right of Rhode Island. I was expecting it to be quite a bit longer before we arrived in Boston, but we had passed out of Rhode Island and entered Massachusetts in what felt like no time flat.
The thing about New England and the Eastern part of the US in general is that its states are way, way smaller than those on the West Coast. It can take hours to get from the bottom of California to the top, but it took only a few minutes to get over Rhode Island. So if you’re ever flying over this part of the world and taking pictures over each of the states and cities, don’t expect to be in Connecticut for too long. As we found out later, driving in this place was a completely different story.
And with that, we were now making our final approach to Massachusetts. I did take a few more pictures of the countryside as we started to get closer. Obviously I knew for sure I wanted to record the landing at Boston’s Logan International Airport, but this time I decided to try something a little different. I recorded a timelapse of our approach over Boston City, and managed to get this really cool view of the entire skyline as we passed by it and landed.
So I would say that overall the experience was probably better than that of the relatively boring desert flight.
Rating for Experience #3, Nashville to Boston: B+
We eventually got off the plane and after a luggage trip, we immediately set out to find a rental car, which would take us through the dozen or so hours of driving that we would need in order to get around during this trip. It took a little bit of time (due to some confusion on how Logan Airport was structured) but we were able to get on a shuttle which transported us straight to the car rental place.
After this came the search for our car in the several-story parking lot. There seemed to be hundreds of options, but most of them were quickly excluded; there were six of us in this party. We needed a lot of space for us, as well as a little extra space to fit all of the bags we brought along with us.
We spent several minutes trying to choose our car and eventually settled on a larger van; it had three rows of two seats, a lot of leg room (sadly, this was all occupied by our stuff, so we didn’t actually get too much leg room), some iPhone chargers in the back (which me and Casey fought over several times during the trip) and several small compartments to store our loose items. Once we had figured out how we were going to fit all our belongings inside of the car, we finally started it up, hit the road, and drove out into the city of Boston, where it was now time for some first impressions of the city. It was not at all what I thought it was going to be.
A bit of a misconception on my part: when I think of Boston, the first thing that comes to my mind is the American Revolution. So as a result, I imagined Boston as a place with a lot of old, distinctively-styled red-brick buildings, and a nice harbor. I later learned that this was definitely the case for some parts of Boston, it was certainly an oversimplification for what the entire city was like. Boston was a historical city, but it was also a metropolis; a large city with massive buildings and one of the best skylines I had ever seen in my life.
Well, I thought San Diego was a massive city. No doubt that it is, but the skyline of Boston is truly on another level. It’s certainly better than the skyline of San Diego, if I’m being honest. It’s probably even better than Los Angeles.
Anyway, the rest of the night was spent in Boston’s Chinatown district. We found one of those multi-story parking garages in the middle and went out to get some Pho at a place called Pho Pasteur for dinner. There we just had a quick meal before walking down the Chinatown street to get a first good look at the city, and to buy some water bottles for the trip. Overall, I thought the place was pretty nice; there were a lot of Chinese restaurants along both sides of the streets in different buildings that went several stories high; to be honest, in a way it was reminiscent of my time in Vietnam. Everything on the side of the street was a restaurant and everyone was in a building that was several stories high. What was different about this place was that there were very few motorbikes; pretty much everything on the road was lines and lines of cars. The cool thing about this particular Chinatown that I liked was that it was right in the middle of all the Boston action; there were hundreds of skyscrapers and tall buildings in every direction, and it created this sort of blend of an American city with a place that was filled with East Asian culture. For me, it was definitely a change from Little Saigon (where my family visits quite often) in California, which does not have the metropolitan feel that Boston’s Chinatown has.
Rating for Experience #4, Boston’s Chinatown, A-
A bit of walking through Chinatown and checking out restaurants later and we headed out to our hotel.
I’d partially hoped when we were in the “hotel booking stage” of the trip that we’d end up in some really cool tall building with badass views of all of the Boston Downtown, but we would soon find out that we had one of the worst views that any hotel could offer.
Now let’s talk a bit about the hotel room before we sign off for day one. The hotel room was a bit underwhelming compared to some of the other ones that we would soon encounter on the trip, but there were a few noteworthy things to say about it. (Name is Studio Allston Hotel)
For starters, it had your typical two beds, some interesting art on the walls, and a bathroom (because we were in a party of six people, we ended up booking two rooms for more space. My dad, my mom, my brother, and I took one room while our grandmas took a room of their own.) Casey also quickly discovered that the roof of the room was really low; he was able to not only touch the roof, but pick up and move the files that made up part of the roof. Apparently they were only held down by gravity.
And if you’re wondering what the hotel view looked like?
Yeah. I’ve definitely had better hotel views in the past; when giving a rating to this hotel on an A to F scale, the view certainly brings it down by at least one letter. I actually thought the hotel design was pretty good; it had some decent art, most of the basic essentials, free breakfast (which we definitely used), and a bathroom. However, there wasn’t really that much in it that gave me any reason to place it as exceptional. To be honest, the view ended up being the thing about this hotel that I remembered the most; the rustic buildings and garbage dumpsters. But besides the crappy view, I can’t say the hotel was a bad one either.
So with all of that in mind, I decided to give the hotel a rating of…
Rating for Experience #5, Studio Allston Hotel, C
And we aren’t even close to finishing the Boston phase of this trip just yet; oh, no, we’re only getting started here. We were about to explore some pretty crazy stuff tomorrow, starting with…