To the Vineyard!

I'm in Martha's Vineyard now, hanging out at the family house. This is about as mixed as bags get as far as having a good time. The beach is pretty and there's a nice pool and stuff, but having this many people around and being related to nearly all of them is not the most relaxing thing for me.

Getting here is its own thing. There's no direct service from Philly, so you have to change planes somewhere and get over here on something called Cape Air. Cape Air is a regional carrier that has a bunch of little planes that they fly around Cape Cod in the summer and Florida during the winter.

The planes they fly are these little 10-seaters, with the pilot being one of the 10. Someone gets to sit next to the pilot and look at all the instruments. This is really flying. If you get on a major airline plane, you might as well be on a bus. Youre pretty much completely removed from the whole airplaneness of it. When you're flying Cape Air, you feel every wind current and you see absolutely everything, out both sides of the plane and out the front window as well. You feel uncomfortably close to everything that's going on. 

Adding to the spirit of fun this trip was a series of operational issues, as they call them. The staff is Boston appeared to be a half dozen college students working summer jobs. They have several flat screen monitors that display nothing except the airline name and an offer for discount tickets. They called a bunch of people to the podium and told them that their flight to Nantucket was canceled and that they were getting what they called a party bus (pronounced patty bus in the local accent) to take them to the ferry.

Then, it was time for our flight. There were two sections, numbered 1 and 2. For some reason, the second section got called first, then our section. You board these planes by going down a staircase and huddling at the bottom until they let you out onto the Tarmac to walk to the plane. We get called, check in, and go downstairs, then outside, then someone calls and says they weren't supposed to take us outside yet. We go back inside and wait for 10 minutes or so. Then someone comes downstairs and tells me and my family that the 3 of us have to go back upstairs. We do, and 2 other people go down to take our place. 

They had miscounted how many people were getting on the plane. This is hard to do when there are only 9 of us. Then it took them a while to figure out that to have one fewer passenger, that they needed to take a party of 3 off and replace them (us) with a party of 2. Then we joined another group for what I guess was the secret third section. Downstairs we went, then outside and then to the plane. We get there and there was no pilot. I guessnit really was a secret section. So we stand outside the plane while we wait for the pilot to show up, inspect the plane, then invite us in. 

So a half hour after we originally boarded, we were finally on a plane. At least the flight itself was routine. I hope things go more smoothly dealing with my extended family, but I'm not confident about that. More to come.