This morning I finally opened up the pre-reading packets for Term 5, and discovered that going to Boston on August 21st may have been the better choice academically. Final exams are due August 30th, not September 6th as I'd originally thought, so taking 36 hours out of the weekend of August 28th would have been colossally stupid.
The flipside of that, however, is I actually get a long weekend for Labor Day. So it works out.