Best-laid plans gang agley

We are anchored in the Charles River, on the Cambridge side just downriver of the historic Longfellow Bridge (map). As of this writing this will be our northernmost terminus for the season, and whence we will depart for points south, whenever Hurricane Erin lets us out. For the time being we are hunkered down here to wait out the inevitable churn in the North Atlantic. It's been over three weeks since I posted here, and I am taking advantage of a rainy day here to catch up. (It's now past 10 pm and I started typing this morning.)

Vector in the Charles River, as seen from Cambridge. Longfellow Bridge at right.

Picking up where I left off, we had a decent cruise in good visibility back to the Weymouth Fore River, where we had to hold short for a departing cargo ship right in front of our old friend the Wessagusset Yacht Club. At Shipyard Point we turned up the Town River for a very short distance to the Bay Pointe Marina, part of MarineMax Boston, where we tied to a face dock (map) after a brief wait while the marina moved a boat out of our spot. We were tied up not a moment too soon, with another brutally hot day having us running all the air conditioners as soon as we were plugged in.

Our marina, just left of center near the tank farm, from my plane window.

The on-site Bay Pointe Waterfront Restaurant is dark Mondays, and so at dinner time we had a very slow walk, in as much shade as we could find, to nearby Bravo Pizzeria for decent pizza and a couple of drafts. It was still pushing 90° when we finished, and we had an equally slow walk back to the boat.

Tonopah, NV, where we've been both by motorcycle and motorhome. I do miss this kind of landscape occasionally.

Tuesday morning before the mercury climbed into the danger zone I offloaded the e-bike and rode up the hill to the Walgreens, where Louise had a script waiting. I retreated to the air conditioning as soon as I returned, and got packed for our early Wednesday departure for our week-long trip to California, the reason for our marina stay in the first place. I did have to step outside in the afternoon to meet with the insurance adjuster for the boat that hit us back in Hampton. On another brutally hot evening we walked to the on-site joint for dinner, which turned out to have a decent but enormous prime rib on the menu, which we split.

We had the boat all buttoned up, with surveillance cameras and the electrical system set for an extended absence, before bedtime. Uber picked us up on the dot of 5:30 Wednesday morning for our 7:30 flight out of Logan. The climb-out took us right over the marina and we got a last look at Vector before winging our way west. Alaska Airlines fed us a nice breakfast, and we were at the gate in San Francisco by 11:30. It's a long slog from there to the car rental, but Thrifty upgraded us to a nice Buick Encore from the Hertz fleet.

Lick Observatory, where we once spent a wonderful night with the 36" refractor.

The purpose and timing of this trip was threefold. Firstly, to attend our niece Jennifer's combined 30th birthday and engagement party. Hers is the wedding I will be officiating next June, so the engagement party was, in my mind, a requisite. Louise's mom also had a birthday coming up, and Louise arranged to meet up with her brother, who traveled from Canada for the occasion, to help celebrate. And, finally, we have a couple dozen friends in the area from our two decades of living there, and we made arrangements to connect with as many as possible.

San Francisco is the capital of gender egalitarianism. This couch is in the men's room at SFO.

I won't bore you with a week's worth of details here, but, to borrow an expression, two out of three ain't bad. Two things conspired to completely derail much of the trip. Louise's mom is dealing with some medical issues that arose shortly before we arrived. It's not my place to detail those here, but suffice it to say that Louise and her brother spent much of the visit assisting with that. I suppose you could say the timing was fortuitous from that standpoint.

An indulgence I allow myself only in hotels.

I spent the first couple of days driving around the old neighborhoods to see what has changed. Long-time readers may remember that when we visited these old haunts in our bus, Odyssey, we spent a lot of time parked on various city streets. With few exceptions we were alone in this endeavor, always looking over our shoulders for the constabulary to ask us to move along, and religiously observing the 72-hour limit. On this visit I was floored by the sheer number of people living in their rigs on city streets, a testament to the stratospheric cost of housing in the Bay Area. A number of our old haunts now sport restrictive signage, but the unrestricted streets are chock-a-block with rigs.

On Saturday we checked out of our Mountain View hotel, drove up to Daly City, and checked in to a hotel there, which was absolutely the closest place I could get to San Francisco using points. I would learn later that the reason was that the Deadheads had taken over the city for a giant 60th anniversary concert in Golden Gate Park. Hotels, and parking, were scarce. After checking in we drove up to the city, had a quick visit with Jennifer and her fiancé Evan in their new apartment, and then drove over to the Marina District for the party.

A few hundred feet from where we used to park "stealthily."

The party ran for three hours and we stayed for nearly the entire time. I had made it a goal to meet and chat with as many of their friends as I could, and I mostly succeeded, even in a noisy venue. The next morning I woke up with a bit of a sore throat, which I attributed to talking for nearly three hours straight. We had breakfast, checked out, and drove back to SF, where we picked up our other niece, Lauren, from the train station before a quiet lunch at Jennifer's apartment. I expressed some concerns about my sore throat, and was therefore keeping a respectful distance from everyone, but Jennifer told me she also had one from all the talking she had done.

One of our former spots, now off-limits. I'm not sure what the algorithm is.

After lunch we dropped Lauren off at the airport for her flight back home to LA on our way to San Jose, where we checked in to our third hotel of the trip. In the evening we had dinner with Louise's mom and her partner, along with her brother, before heading back to the hotel. My throat did not improve overnight, and by the morning I was pretty sure I was coming down with something, which I hoped was just routine travel crud. Nevertheless, after breakfast I dropped Louise off at her mom's place, where I also picked up her brother to give him a ride to the airport, just a stone's throw from our hotel. As a precaution, we both masked up.

A different neighborhood, near the Googleplex.

As soon as I got back to the hotel room I broke out a COVID-19 test, and of course it came up positive. I called Louise to let her know, so she could take immediate precautions with her mom, and then spent the rest of the day scrambling to cancel plans and change travel arrangements. Step one was to call the marina back in Quincy and add another week to our two-week reservation (the weekly rate is a lot better). I was relieved to learn the dock was available for the extension.

Crap.

With our return flight rapidly approaching on Wednesday morning, I had to put a stake in the sand and push it out a week, which cost a couple hundred in additional fare, notwithstanding fully changeable tickets. And I had to find lodging for the additional days. We were already committed for Tuesday night, with a nonrefundable reservation at a hotel up by SFO.

Jennifer and Evan's apartment looks out over the Golden Gate. You can see the bridge at left.

The rental car was also due back Tuesday. Louise was able to borrow her mom's car for the duration, and after saying a socially-distanced goodbye she quickly came back to meet me at the hotel. Dinner consisted of a take-out sandwich in the hotel room, picked up alongside some cold meds. Monday evening was supposed to be our big dinner with a large group of friends we'd hoped to see, but naturally that had to be waved off.

Looking towards the bay and Alcatraz.

Tuesday we asked the hotel for a late checkout, and early in the afternoon I took the rental car back to SFO and dropped it off without having any person-to-person interaction. Louise picked me up a few minutes later at the Kiss-and-Fly (really, that's what they call it) and we drove to the hotel that was supposed to be just for a few hours pre-flight. Of course, our plan had always been to return the car on the way to that hotel, so I had not bothered to find one with free parking, just an airport shuttle. Parking the car overnight was another $21.

Before checking into the hotel we drove to urgent care. Louise needed meds -- she only brought enough of her scripts for the planned week and a one-day buffer for flight issues, and only a doctor could fix that. And I wanted to see if I could get a course of Paxlovid. The clinic fixed us both up, and after we checked in to the hotel I ordered take-out from Chico's Pizza in dowtown South San Francisco. It was pre-paid so I spent only 30 seconds masked in the store to pick it up. For reasons unclear to me, they would not deliver to the hotel.

What constitutes happiness during quarantine.

With absolutely nothing we could do except quarantine in a hotel room and get dinner delivered, I scoured the entire bay area for decent rates at an acceptable place, and I ended up booking a few nights in my old stomping grounds of Fremont. No free breakfast, which really we could not partake in good conscience anyway, but they had room service, which was a lifesaver. Wednesday morning, after our originally scheduled flight had departed, we checked out of our airport hotel and drove to Fremont, by way of the pharmacy where my Paxlovid and Louise's meds were waiting.

San Jose, capital of Silicon Valley, and more than half the USB power ports in our room looked like this.

My jaw dropped when the pharmacy told me my co-payment for the Paxlovid would be $1,400. The pharmacist helpfully told me there was an online discount available and handed me the form. We checked into our hotel and I drove back to the pharmacy with the discount code provided by Pfizer, which reduced the co-payment all the way to zero. For the life of me, I will never understand the US pharmaceutical industry.

Kincaids on the bay, where I enjoyed many a meal when my office was across the street.

By this time, I was already on the rebound, but Louise, who of course also contracted it, was just entering the worst of it. We had a couple of miserable nights in the hotel, but then we both felt fine and were just stir-crazy. We were able to walk around the neighborhood and go for drives, but otherwise just stayed cooped up in the room.

I was already well past stir-crazy when Louise finally felt well enough to be bored. I had been throwing darts at the calendar to make hotel and travel arrangements, but she was the one, once she was up and about, to figure the quarantine recommendations down to the minute and determine, late Saturday morning, that we were clear to fly on Sunday. I was able to switch our seats to the Sunday flight, at yet again another fare increase.

I snapped this looking NW from the bay trail. SFO is at right, and the fog is starting to spill over the hills of SSF.

We had booked this hotel through Sunday morning, so it was also a mad scramble to check out a day early without penalty, booking another airport hotel with a shuttle for the night. We drove directly back to her mom's place, dropped off the car, and Ubered to the hotel in Burlingame, which fortunately also served a light dinner at their bar. I had a long walk around the neighborhood, passing a building where I worked in the mid-90s.

We got on the 4:30am shuttle for our 7:20 flight, and spent the free time in the Alaska lounge, where we had a nice breakfast. We masked for the whole flight, apart from when we were actually eating or drinking, and we were back at Vector just ahead of dinnertime. We walked over to the Bay Pointe Restaurant, with its expansive outdoor patio, for another dose of prime rib.

No waffles, but the Alaska lounge had this "pancake printer." I did not partake.

Monday morning our original two-week reservation was up. There was no way we were going to make it out of the marina Monday, but we contemplated asking to change our one-week extension down to just one day, for a Tuesday departure. In the end, we decided to stick with the one-week extension, largely because we needed another couple of days to recover from both the trip and the COVID, and our original plan had an extra four days at the marina to run errands and the like, and we still needed to do that stuff.

Quincy City Hall, built in 1844 and still in use, the longest continuously serving city hall in the US.

One of those planned activities was to rent a car and drive out to New Hampshire to see my cousins. When I tested positive I had waved that off, but now we could just move it back a week. We rented the car mid-day Friday, drove up to spend the evening with them, and drove back Saturday after breakfast. It was a great visit, but we missed seeing our nephew (really my first cousin once removed), who had driven out from New York the week before, when we were originally scheduled to visit.

The stacks have mostly been moved to a newer, adjacent building, but the old library is still open.

The extra time in Quincy also gave me a few days to wrap up and clean up projects. I remediated rust stains on both sides of the boat, and touched up a few bare spots with paint. We turned the boat around Tuesday after I did the rust stains on the starboard side so we could offload the scooters for the rest of our stay (we had come in starboard-side-to for the insurance adjuster, but the scooters load on the port side).

The scooters, in addition to running errands, let us get a bit further afield for dinner, and in the course of our stay we enjoyed Evviva Trattoria in Kilroy Square ("Kilroy was here" is said to have originated from an inspector at the Fore River Shipyard named James Kilroy, and the reference can be found all over town), True North in Hingham, just over the Fore River Lift Bridge from the marina, and Drifters across from the Hancock Adams Common. We also made it back to Bravo one more time, before we landed the scooters.

Sarcophagus of President John Adams. Three other sarcophagi in the crypt, which is deeded property of the Adams family, contain the remains of President John Quincy Adams and first ladies Abigail and Louisa Catherine Adams.

I found some time to walk the historic downtown, including the aforementioned commons, and visit the Church of the Presidents, which just happens to be UU, where John Adams and John Quincy Adams  were members and later interred, along with their wives. Quincy, which by the way is pronounced kwin-zee and not kwin-see, is celebrating its 400th anniversary this year, and much of that history is connected to this church, where John Hancock — not of signature fame, but his father — was pastor.

I strolled through the August Moon festival, for which part of downtown was closed off, and one evening in town we stumbled upon a free music festival in the Commons featuring none other than Tavares, who people of our age cohort might remember from some of their hits like Heaven Must be Missing an Angel and It Only Takes a Minute. Several of the Tavares brothers are still alive and the music sounded great.

Best shot I could get of Tavares without going through the dance floor. Lots of happy people.

Monday was our new check-out day, but as luck would have it, our mail was delayed en-route, and what was supposed to be a morning delivery morphed into afternoon. We lingered at the dock as long as we could, then shoved off and headed over to the fuel dock for a pump-out. The UPS truck rolled up just as we were getting ready to cast off, saving us from having to drop a lunch hook and come back in the tender. We cast off and headed directly back to Boston Harbor, where we dropped the hook in our usual spot (map).

The August Moon festival, which stretched as far down the road as I could see.

Our local friend Chris and Erin, meanwhile, had a little California trip of their own, but Chris was back in time to receive the FlopStopper we had shipped to their address. He left it in the lobby for us, and Monday evening we landed ashore, had a nice dinner at the Sail Loft, and picked up the package on our way back to the tender. We spent about 20 minutes assembling it and deploying it off a midships cleat to see if it would help at all with this sometimes miserable harbor.

Main entrance to Quincy Shipyard. Yes, that's a real, though small, tug.

By morning the verdict was in: even just hanging from the cleat, the FlopStopper helped quite a bit. In the morning we transferred it to the davit crane, to see if moving it further out would be better. Chris was available for lunch, and we headed right back to the Sail Loft with him. After we returned home we spent some time fiddling with getting the contraption back on board and stowed on the boat deck before we could deck the tender.

Our new FlopStopper hanging from our crane.

Our plan had been to move here to the river yesterday afternoon, but by the time we finally got both the FlopStopper and the tender stowed, we missed the window to make it to the Craigie drawbridge before their 3:15 lockdown. We reversed all the steps, re-deploying both the tender and the FlopStopper for another night in the harbor, where having it out on the crane helped quite a bit. I did manage to jam the hoist line in the sheave in the process, necessitating some crane surgery. We tendered over to East Boston for dinner at Democracy Brewing, which has been open just a month and is still getting in the groove. We remembered the space from when it had been Mavericks Tavern.

FlopStopper submerged under the crane arrangement. The guy lines on the crane are to keep it from swinging fore and aft.

Today it has been raining most of the day. This morning we got everything ready to go, but we needed to wait until 1pm to weigh anchor so we could squeeze under the Bill Russel Charles River Bridge, which we need to do at 1/3 tide or lower. We left the FlopStopper, and thus the tender, in the water until the last minute.

USS Salem museum ship, permanently moored at Quincy Shipyard. I did not go aboard.

Getting here from the harbor is something of a gantlet of obstacles. After squeezing under the bridge we immediately had to enter the Gridley Lock. They put us in chamber 1, which is just 23' wide, giving me just 3' on either side to maneuver. We learned only at the last instant that there are floats on either side of the chamber, so we had to lower the fenders to the waterline.

Germand midget submarine Seehund, located with the Salem as part of the same museum.

Once out of the lock it is a tight turn to starboard to clear the Bunker Hill Memorial (I-93) bridge and then call "Tower A" to open the MBTA rail bridge. Between the lock and the bridge, while station-keeping for the rail bridge, we heard the unmistakable sound of the thruster drive leg failing, and that is the end of our thruster now until we can get a replacement leg and a haul-out. I will have to make the return trip without it.

One of the projects I tackled in Quincy was to try to clean these stains off our relatively new fender. Nothing worked, and I broke one of the soap dispensers on our sink in the process, thus creating another project.

After the rail bridge comes the Craigie drawbridge, part of the old dam upon which sits the Boston Museum of Science. The bridge marks the entrance to a 550' long canal, just 45' wide, that was the old lock, and I had to make a radio call to ensure no oncoming vessels would enter the canal before we could make it through. We had the hook down here by 2pm, an hour after we started, in light rain.

Last night's sunset in Boston Harbor.

We ruminated about going ashore in the rain, but there is a dock just a hundred yards off our stern, and we decided we could make a standing tender ride and a five-minute walk to the Locke Bar, which was quite good. By the time we got back home the only things wet, really, were our shoes.

Dinner at the Locke Bar.

We'll be hunkered down right here until Erin (the storm, not our friend) has passed, the weekend is over, and low tide on the harbor side falls between the 9:30 am and 3:15 pm lockdowns for the bridges. I'm looking forward to exploring a little bit of Cambridge and more of this side of Boston.