And now the way home

While our trip to Martha's Vineyard was not without its hiccups, the way home has been far more challenging. First my older daughter and her boyfriend had their flight canceled because of fog. That wasn't the worst thing, because they got to stay an extra day. We, on the other hand, were not quite as lucky.

There are a bunch of ways to get from Martha's Vineyard to Philadelphia and they're all lousy, involving either 2 flights or multimodal transport. There are no direct flights at all, ever. The closest we ever got to that was the late Continental Airlines used to fly out of Newark, 90 minutes away, but they stopped that years ago. Now the closest place is JFK airport, which is more like 2 hours and far more prone to being subject to traffic.

We also are limited to some extent by the fact that peak airfares to the Vineyard, as people who are either in the know or too impatient to say or write the whole name call it, are typically over $500 each way (to go about 265 miles all told). So we've tried everything. They're cheaper but it's hard to say they're better. They all take significantly longer.

We decided to make this trip at the last moment because we were in Boston for my daughter's birthday and decided while we were there to go. So for the way back, we were scheduled to do a ferry to Rhode Island and then a train back to Philly. We've done this before. It's long, but if you train first class it's reasonably comfortable, and half the price. So we were standing in the line to get on the ferry. We saw it go by, and I thought it was just going to turn around and back in. But we never saw it.

Eventually, the guy managing the line told us that they'd lost their steering and were trying to fix it and that they would update us shortly. About 15 minutes later there came a new announcement, that rather than steering loss the boat had suffered what they called "catastrophic engine failure" and would not be making the trip. I don't even want to know what's become of the people who were on that boat, if they ever got to the Vineyard or if they had to get towed back to Rhode Island or what.

What they offered us was transport on a ferry to Cape Cod and then a bus to Rhode Island (from which point we would take another shuttle bus and then a train. We wanted no part of that, so instead we're on our way, still by bus, to Boston Airport, from which point we can fly home.

Once we made the decision to do this, there really weren't any problems, aside from the passage of time. The whole trip, door to door, is going to end up taking over 11 hours. To give you an idea of how slow that progress is, in 11 hours I could have bicycled more than halfway back. Assuming that I could ride a bicycle on water that is.

Now our plane is getting ready to land and hopefully we can get our luggage reasonably quickly and get home to our normal house and our very cute dog and our non-working upstairs air conditioner. It hasn't been an awful day, just a wasted one.