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                                                             on Gopher (inofficial)
   URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
       
       
       COMMENT PAGE FOR:
   URI   Boston and Bermuda
       
       
        jvanderbot wrote 20 min ago:
        > The cruise ships still make their runs, usually in the spring and
        fall, and they remain popular. But if you’re going by air, today your
        options are JetBlue or a tiny upstart called BermudAir, both using
        small jets.
        
        I work with that tiny startup! Bermuda Air has been a fantastic partner
        for us developing automated routing/alerting for pilots, dispatchers,
        and ops.
        
        We even got to do some work during the big hurricane season last year.
        Pretty special to see your code operating in that real of a real-world
        application.
       
        Stratoscope wrote 29 min ago:
        This must be Bermuda Week. Just yesterday I saw an interesting video
        about Bermuda from Geography by Geoff:
        
   URI  [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NVb5M7m9xg
       
        ilamont wrote 47 min ago:
        I grew up in the Boston area around the same time. Another factor that
        limited interest in flying to sunny beach places was we already had
        options close to home during the warmer months, such as Cape Cod, Cape
        Ann, Hull, Rhode Island, Southern Maine, and so on. Lots of people
        including families of modest means had cabins in these areas.
        
        For the winter months, there were two "sun" locations that weren't too
        far away: Bermuda and Florida.
        
        As the author described, new flying options and generally cheaper fares
        have upended the old vacation order. People are also more open-minded
        to going places that were never considered as vacation destinations in
        the past, such as Iceland (only 4 hours from Logan).
        
        But a few strange geographical outlooks remain. For road/train
        vacations, for as long as I remember, the dominant perspective has been
        focused on New England, New York City, and maybe Washington DC as a
        stretch (7-8 hour drive). Montreal is less than 5 hours away but I
        never knew anyone from my generation that went there until we were in
        our 20s. Other parts of Quebec and the Southern Maritimes and Northern
        New York are still basically terra incognito to 90% of the population
        of Boston. It seems further away even though these locations are closer
        than Washington DC.
       
          jghn wrote 6 min ago:
          There's another effect beyond cheaper flights.
          
          We moved to the area in a very middle class neighborhood when I was
          young, around the same time as the author of TFA. Like you said, what
          I saw was a lot of families had family summer homes on the Cape or
          one of the NH lakes. Everyone but the Dad would pick up for the
          summer, and then he'd work during the week & then go to the summer
          home on the weekend. But these weren't luxury homes by any stretch.
          These were small, often rustic, closer to shack than nice summer
          home. A place to sleep at night and not much more.
          
          In the intervening decades, that's all changed. Today's summer homes
          are so much more different. I've seen a lot of those families I knew
          back then sell their homes over time. Developers scoop up several
          properties in a row and build some huge McMansion. So now these areas
          are the sort of wealthy person summer home people picture when the
          term is used.
       
        raddan wrote 1 hour 24 min ago:
        It really is surprising how much air travel has changed during my
        lifetime.  I remember feeling like kind of a loser in (public) high
        school back in the 90s when a select few kids would return from some
        exotic location for the winter break.  But the consolation was that at
        least, like me, none of my friends went anywhere.  There was one kid in
        my friend group who had flown once before.  But if I recall correctly,
        it was to visit a divorced parent or something, so even though flying
        struck all of us as a crazy and aspirational way to travel, we all
        still felt bad for him.
        
        By the time I was in my 20s (in the early 2000s), the situation was
        totally different.  The most ridiculous: sometime in 2009, JetBlue had
        a deal, announced on radio, that you could purchase unlimited flights
        for 3 months for only $500.  As my fiancee had moved to the western US
        for her medical school residency program, this was a godsend.  I
        visited her every weekend... I don't remember if I took a full 12
        trips, but it was more than 10.  I would leave Boston immediately after
        work on Friday and then take a redeye and arrive back in Boston at 7am
        on a Monday.  I haven't seen a deal like that in a long time, and
        flying has increasingly gotten worse since that experience, but it
        still is relatively affordable compared to my high school years.
       
          technothrasher wrote 1 hour 12 min ago:
          Huh, different than my experience.  In the early 90's when I was in
          college, I was flying back and forth between Rochester and Boston
          several times a year because it was only slightly more expensive than
          driving the six hours.
       
          helterskelter wrote 1 hour 13 min ago:
          American used to offer the AAirpass back in the 80's, you could pay
          around $250K and get an unlimited lifetime ticket. It gets brought up
          in the news occasionally, usually when American cancels the person's
          lifetime ticket, or to run a story about a guy with a craving for NY
          pizza and decides to fly into JFK for a day from another corner of
          the country.
          
   URI    [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAirpass
       
        lo_zamoyski wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
        Not much meat to this article, but I do wonder how much lower prices
        were then in Bermuda. Almost everything needs to be imported and
        shipped over. Today, it is incredibly expensive. You can easily pay $30
        for an incredibly mediocre breakfast (though cheaper options can be
        found, if you look).
       
        neilv wrote 3 hours 3 min ago:
        Great photo up top, of author's family members entering the
        "America[n]" airliner.
       
       
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