Travel is hell

I wrote a nice long screed yesterday about the joys of traveling in and out of Logan now that the tunnels are closed. I didn’t get to post it thanks to a very long day out of Internet contact, but here are the highlights:

  1. No parking at Alewife—I wanted to avoid the nightmares at the Callahan and Sumner tunnels and take the T, but the parking garage was totally jammed at 10 am (which I should have foreseen). I drove to Harvard Square, which was the closest T location with pay parking garages that I could think of (never mind that they cost $24 a day).
  2. The Silver Line—It’s been said before, but honestly: the Silver Line is a bus and shouldn’t get equal billing with the Red, Green, Orange, etc lines. And that lack of air conditioning thing? Not nice.
  3. JetBlue—I liked this carrier, and some days I still do. Yesterday—not one of them. I don’t know if it was their fault or Logan’s that they put so much fuel in the plane yesterday that they would have exceeded their landing weight at JFK and had to idle on the tarmac for 45 minutes (after already arriving 45 minutes late) to burn it.
  4. Finally, Amtrak. I took the train back because I figured there was no way I could get back to JFK in time for my flight. But the Acela was capped at 80 MPH because of the effect of the heat on the rails. I certainly don’t want any trains to derail, but good god! Had the designers never experienced an Atlantic coast summer? Didn’t they know that things get really hot?

Bottom line: left the house at 9, back at 12:15 am when I should have been back by 9 pm. I’ll take the 3 hour shlep to the Berkshires any day.