adventures in not using the car

This weekend Sophia and I went to Grape Island the complicated way. The simple way, usually, is to drive to Hingham, park in the Shipyard, and take a short ferry ride. (The only stressful part is what if the place that gives you a hang-tag to park in the Shipyard is closed? Then you might worry about getting towed.) The daring way to get to Grape Island is by canoe. I know not where the put-in is. Of course, that was how Rich got to Grape Island this weekend, but I was not up for that.
So Sophia and I would have gone the simple way, but the 93 Fast 14 website basically said that for this weekend, I93 was going to be fucked, and if you thought you could get around that, well, Route 28 was going to be fucked, too, because everyone else already had that idea. So I figured it was the occasion for us to try the complicated, zero-driving way to go, which was:
1. walk to commuter rail
2. commuter rail to North Station
3. orange or green line to blue line
4. Blue Line to Aquarium station
5. ferry to Georges Island
6. looong water taxi ride from Georges Island, via a few other islands, to Grape Island.
The trip there was pretty pleasant. Georges Island was kind of interesting, with a little museum, and the water taxi ride was scenic and refreshing. However, having gone that way, we were stuck with reversing it as our only option for getting home. Being at the mercy of the ferry schedule, we had no control over when we arrived at North Station, and since the trains only run every 2 hours on Sunday, we had a tedious wait there. Also, Sophia is wiped out and slightly sunburnt. She has been a trooper, trying to carry her own luggage from one means of transit to the next. Poor kid!
Georges Island has a food stand  run by Summer Shack. I figured we would make use of our wait there between boats to eat some seafood. Everything is fried, though, and they have no lemonade. But the batter on the fried stuff is this thin cornmeal coating that doesn't absorb much oil, so it was not bad. They were packed, though. They were not ready for the volume of people on Georges Island today. During our meal, all the trash compactors jammed up, and people started abandoning their trash all over in frustration, much to the displeasure of the park rangers. So not cool on the Boston Harbor Islands.

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