Trains, planes, etc.

This past Friday night, I went home to visit my family in Massachusetts. (By the way, I'm rather overly proud of myself for having spelt "Massachusetts" right on my very first try just now -- despite having lived most of my life there, it's on the list of words I have trouble remembering properly. Other words on this list include "maintenance", "convenience" and I just recently was able to remove "restaurant.")

It was the second trip in a row that required someone to cross state lines to retrieve me from Rhode Island.

The last time, it was the day before Christmas Eve, which, it turns out, is a rather popular time to fly. Having only booked our tickets a week or two in advance, Delta chuckled to itself and said "Hah, suckers. They paid for a full-price, regular fare ticket, but this plane is overbooked. We'll mark them as 'Standby' in our computers, but only notify ourselves. We'll also make sure to be extra crabby that day."

The way the twisted world works, we were somehow happy to have been able to get spots on a 4 pm flight to Providence, even though we'd originally been scheduled for, like, a 10 am to Boston. It sucked. But happily, my mom was willing to drive down to T.F. Green and pick up her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend, who, by the way, is the one who said "I think we should fly."

This most recent occasion, it was Amtrak's fault. Or, actually, it was not Amtrak per se, but some faulty power situation at South Station which prevented all trains from actually getting there. Our conductor sighed and said, "Well, um, they're going to see if they can re-route us to Ruggles, but uh," he paused, "Well, you can tell your family members you're in Providence, it's uh, near the State House, and, um, there are probably signs. From 95. I think. You might want to tell them that. If they can come."

We were told we could stay put and see if they could manage to get us on the schedule to get into Ruggles. "But I don't want to make any, you know, promises," the conductor warned.

Fortunately, I have a sister and brother-in-law with a great deal of patience and, also, four wheel drive. So I didn't get to find out what the hell one does when deposited in the Back Bay sometime around 1 am in a city that apparently finds it quaint to stop running at midnight. (Also, a city that has recently adopted the most irritating swipe card system I've ever seen. Instead of saying something obvious, like 'A single ride is $2.00, and if you buy a lot, it's $1.70 per ride' they have a really confusing chart comparing CharlieCard and CharlieTicket rates. They don't actually explain what is so different about these things. Also, their machines were apparently unable to read any of my credit cards, for reasons the machines and station attendants could not explain to me. But I guess you can't expect much from a place that confused Lite-Brites with bombs.)

In the last six and a half years, I've done a lot of traveling across the Northeast. Trains (some Septa/NJ Transit ordeals, a lot of Amtrak), planes (AirTrain, United, Delta), and automobiles (Greyhound, Fung Wah, and the occasional trip in a rental car or my mom's station wagon). And I've concluded that this is a really annoying part of the country to traverse. Going a mere 200 miles will take hours, and that's only if it goes smoothly. If it doesn't, it will take lots and lots of hours.

Generally, I prefer to be driven by family or companion, but that happens most rarely, seeing as how I don't know many people in New York with cars, and family drives are basically for major moving ordeals.

After that, I find that the train is actually best -- it costs about the same as most plane trips, but my mother is a lot more likely to come pick me up at Rte. 128 than she is to make the trek to Logan. And Penn Station is considerably easier to get to than any of the NYC airports (unless it's LaGuardia and I'm leaving from my house, in which case, hurrah.) And Amtrak, for all their irritating qualities and tendencies to break down (I've spent hour on stalled trains, waiting for stalled trains to be cleared, waiting for new engines to arrive, etc.), doesn't overbook. (Anymore; it used to be that you could end up spending a good leg of your journey sitting in the aisle, but they stopped doing the Unreserved trains in the Northeast a few years ago.) Also, their pricing system, while not cheap, is at least pretty transparent.

Buses, while the cheapest option, are also the most uncomfortable, and the ones that most make me feel like I really am getting too old for this crap. Sadly, while I may be too old to pile in with eager college students and the unwashed just-released-from-prison masses, I am not yet too rich. So. I took the bus home yesterday.