This is my "home station". It's boring but really quite nice.
-- Bus: The Greyhound/Amtrak transfer at Syracuse is trivially easy. Changing buses at Binghamton is frankly kind of unpleasant, with extremely poor information from the bus providers, confusion, and rude behavior, but there is an indoor waiting room.
-- Driving: The Pennsylvania Turnpike Northeast Extension is a nice drive any time of year, any weather conditions. It peters out at Scranton. I-81 is OK from Scranton to Binghamton. But the drive is kind of awful from Binghamton to Syracuse -- the drivers are worse in New York than Pennsylvania for some reason, and the pavement is "washboard" the entire way. In bad weather, there are often multi-car pileups on the expressway which shut it down (thank you, bad drivers). In addition, the final elevated section through Syracuse is actually unsafe and parts of it have collapsed within the past few years. I take NY 281 and US 11 (which parallel the expressway) instead, which are much emptier, but in winter you had better be *really* good at rural heavy-snow driving to handle that.
-- Being bored at the station: you can go around the corner to Carousel Mall (sorry, "Destiny USA") -- even ride the carousel if the hours are right -- or go to an even closer collection of "farmer's market" shops (if they're open, which they won't be at 8 PM). This is unfortunately significantly easier in a car than on foot, due to a deplorable lack of sidewalks. If you get there *truly* early (like 6 hours early) you can take the city buses downtown and back, since the Syracuse station is also a city bus hub.
-- Yes, the parking lot is open-air.
