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.
Also in greater Boston and had the fortune to do a family trip to Bermuda in that era. One more possibility not mentioned in the article is that Bermuda could have also 'lost its crown' as a popular destination for New Englanders because it was simply promoted less. I don't think the island cluster is as dependent on tourism revenue as maybe it once was in 70s.
- New Brunswick is very economically depressed and only has a few things of interest to your average tourist (primarily along/near the Bay of Fundy). It's about a 8hr drive just to get to Moncton from Boston.
- Nova Scotia - Also struggling economically in many areas outside of Halifax. Halifax is 11hrs out of Boston and what's arguably the most interesting scenery in the province (up in Cape Breton) is more like 13hrs.
It's also cold much of the year so the optimal tourism season is short and even in the warm months it's often not that warm (and the ocean water certainly never is).
Quebec:
- Quebec City is decently known and about 7hrs. The rest of the province besides that and MTL I agree are basically a mystery to most.
- That Maine is basically a remote wilderness along the Quebec border and has almost no land connections (and no good ones) makes exploring up beyond Quebec City less common than it seems like it should be. (Also no bridges over the St. Lawrence beyond Quebec City).
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.
> 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.
Exactly. Lake Winnipesaukee is a playground for the rich now. No one is selling seasonal properties on Cape Cod anymore, they've all been converted to condo developments or year-round homes starting at $500-$600k and often well over $1m.
This is exactly what I was picturing when I said McMansion. We took the family on a trip there a few years back and rented a boat. Riding around the lake was eye opening. Especially when you'd see one of the smaller old style multi-generational family homes squeezed in the middle of 2 behemoths.
That's exactly what my child did with friends a few years ago when they were 19. I know that college students in Vermont frequently go across the border for the same reason.
> I never knew anyone from my generation [1960s? 1970s?] that went [to Montreal] until we were in our 20s
Quebec was a very different place until the Quiet Revolution (starting around 1960) and especially from 1930-1960. Quebec was deeply conservative and catholic. I think it's easy to look at Quebec and Canada now and think "why didn't I go there earlier," but places change. Your parents (who would have been making choices for you as a kid) probably wouldn't have thought of Quebec as a positive place to go for a vacation because of what it was through most of their lives (and maybe partly still was depending on exactly when we're talking about).
My parents would never consider living in the US South. It was a place of huge systemic racism and sexism.
I think the perception of the US South changed a lot in the 90s and 2000s. Bill Clinton won a bunch of southern states. George W Bush was pushing "compassionate conservatism" which many people (including myself) might criticize, but it didn't have the same hatred of generations past. Barak Obama won North Carolina. Sarah Palin's take on gay rights was that they shouldn't be allowed to marry, but no one was talking about taking any benefits away. North Carolina tried to ban trans people from bathrooms in 2016 and had to backtrack after a huge boycott costing them billions (including the NCAA basketball championship). Roe v Wade was the law of the land for decades. It might not seem as good as New York or Boston to people wanting that, but it didn't seem the same as the 1960s.
Fast forward a decade and women are dying from pregnancies that aren't viable (but doctors are afraid to terminate), trans people are getting banned from public life, and racism and sexism are coming back with a vengeance. The South today is different from the place it was in the 90s or 2000s - and the South of the 90s and 2000s was different from the South of the 60s and 70s.
In terms of the Maritimes, they've always been small and kinda hard to get to. The population is under 2M today combined. How would you get to PEI? There was a ferry until 1997 and now there's a bridge, but that shows how disconnected it was. It's a 10 hour drive today. It's longer to Nova Scotia. The largest city in New Brunswick is 80,000 people. So I think there's a certain "why would you go there." That's not to say they're bad places, but I could say: why did you never go to Allentown, PA? It's a 6 hour drive and a city of 130,000. Why not go to Scranton, PA? The Maritimes are definitely farther than DC. I like Nova Scotia, but getting there involves a ferry, ferries cost money, before the modern day you'd need to exchange currency which was costly and a pain, and then what are you doing in Nova Scotia? Mostly the same stuff you could do in places more convenient. It's a nice place, but there's no spectacular draw. DC is the nation's capital with so many museums and monuments. NYC is NYC. But you didn't say "Wilmington, Delaware was a major destination for us and we could have gone to Moncton, New Brunswick instead." No. For road and train vacations, you went for convenient places (within New England) or major destinations (NYC and DC, two of the most important cities on the planet). Yes, Montreal is a major world city and reasonably close to Boston, but the Maritimes have one city over 100,000 people and it's a pain to get to by car/train. Again, nothing wrong with these places, but I can see why there'd be a much larger inclination toward larger and much more convenient cities like NYC and DC.
EDIT: oh, and I think Quebec became a bit of a destination for young adults as the US raised its drinking age to 21 and things like that can certainly reorient a generation's thinking toward a region. It was a destination used to have fun during a formative part of many people's lives and that could create long-lasting positive memories.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s. I went to Ottawa once or twice when I was a teen, but only made it to Montreal for the first time about 15 years ago.
I agree with you about the Maritimes. The bridge has made a difference but it's still a long drive and as you noted there are few famous destination cities or attractions.
Regarding Quebec: It seems that far more Quebeckers are aware of New England attractions in Boston and points north than the other way around. You see them or hear them at ski slopes, beaches, concerts in Boston, etc. Yet few New Englanders have been to Montreal, and even fewer have even heard of Quebec City, the walled European city and heritage site just a few hours downriver.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
Also in greater Boston and had the fortune to do a family trip to Bermuda in that era. One more possibility not mentioned in the article is that Bermuda could have also 'lost its crown' as a popular destination for New Englanders because it was simply promoted less. I don't think the island cluster is as dependent on tourism revenue as maybe it once was in 70s.
Maritimes:
- New Brunswick is very economically depressed and only has a few things of interest to your average tourist (primarily along/near the Bay of Fundy). It's about a 8hr drive just to get to Moncton from Boston.
- Nova Scotia - Also struggling economically in many areas outside of Halifax. Halifax is 11hrs out of Boston and what's arguably the most interesting scenery in the province (up in Cape Breton) is more like 13hrs.
It's also cold much of the year so the optimal tourism season is short and even in the warm months it's often not that warm (and the ocean water certainly never is).
Quebec:
- Quebec City is decently known and about 7hrs. The rest of the province besides that and MTL I agree are basically a mystery to most.
- That Maine is basically a remote wilderness along the Quebec border and has almost no land connections (and no good ones) makes exploring up beyond Quebec City less common than it seems like it should be. (Also no bridges over the St. Lawrence beyond Quebec City).
> Iceland (only 4 hours from Logan)
Were faster aircraft operating on this route at some point? Nowadays Icelandair says 5hr15min BOS->KEF and 5hr50min on the way back.
Speculation: The 4 hours includes the time "gained" by crossing time zones westward.
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.
> 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.
Exactly. Lake Winnipesaukee is a playground for the rich now. No one is selling seasonal properties on Cape Cod anymore, they've all been converted to condo developments or year-round homes starting at $500-$600k and often well over $1m.
> Lake Winnipesaukee
This is exactly what I was picturing when I said McMansion. We took the family on a trip there a few years back and rented a boat. Riding around the lake was eye opening. Especially when you'd see one of the smaller old style multi-generational family homes squeezed in the middle of 2 behemoths.
> Montreal is less than 5 hours away but I never knew anyone from my generation that went there until we were in our 20s.
The sweet spot would have been 18-21 years old for a first trip imo
Yes, back when Brador beer was available! That was the main draw for me and friends when we were that age :)
That's exactly what my child did with friends a few years ago when they were 19. I know that college students in Vermont frequently go across the border for the same reason.
> I never knew anyone from my generation [1960s? 1970s?] that went [to Montreal] until we were in our 20s
Quebec was a very different place until the Quiet Revolution (starting around 1960) and especially from 1930-1960. Quebec was deeply conservative and catholic. I think it's easy to look at Quebec and Canada now and think "why didn't I go there earlier," but places change. Your parents (who would have been making choices for you as a kid) probably wouldn't have thought of Quebec as a positive place to go for a vacation because of what it was through most of their lives (and maybe partly still was depending on exactly when we're talking about).
My parents would never consider living in the US South. It was a place of huge systemic racism and sexism.
I think the perception of the US South changed a lot in the 90s and 2000s. Bill Clinton won a bunch of southern states. George W Bush was pushing "compassionate conservatism" which many people (including myself) might criticize, but it didn't have the same hatred of generations past. Barak Obama won North Carolina. Sarah Palin's take on gay rights was that they shouldn't be allowed to marry, but no one was talking about taking any benefits away. North Carolina tried to ban trans people from bathrooms in 2016 and had to backtrack after a huge boycott costing them billions (including the NCAA basketball championship). Roe v Wade was the law of the land for decades. It might not seem as good as New York or Boston to people wanting that, but it didn't seem the same as the 1960s.
Fast forward a decade and women are dying from pregnancies that aren't viable (but doctors are afraid to terminate), trans people are getting banned from public life, and racism and sexism are coming back with a vengeance. The South today is different from the place it was in the 90s or 2000s - and the South of the 90s and 2000s was different from the South of the 60s and 70s.
In terms of the Maritimes, they've always been small and kinda hard to get to. The population is under 2M today combined. How would you get to PEI? There was a ferry until 1997 and now there's a bridge, but that shows how disconnected it was. It's a 10 hour drive today. It's longer to Nova Scotia. The largest city in New Brunswick is 80,000 people. So I think there's a certain "why would you go there." That's not to say they're bad places, but I could say: why did you never go to Allentown, PA? It's a 6 hour drive and a city of 130,000. Why not go to Scranton, PA? The Maritimes are definitely farther than DC. I like Nova Scotia, but getting there involves a ferry, ferries cost money, before the modern day you'd need to exchange currency which was costly and a pain, and then what are you doing in Nova Scotia? Mostly the same stuff you could do in places more convenient. It's a nice place, but there's no spectacular draw. DC is the nation's capital with so many museums and monuments. NYC is NYC. But you didn't say "Wilmington, Delaware was a major destination for us and we could have gone to Moncton, New Brunswick instead." No. For road and train vacations, you went for convenient places (within New England) or major destinations (NYC and DC, two of the most important cities on the planet). Yes, Montreal is a major world city and reasonably close to Boston, but the Maritimes have one city over 100,000 people and it's a pain to get to by car/train. Again, nothing wrong with these places, but I can see why there'd be a much larger inclination toward larger and much more convenient cities like NYC and DC.
EDIT: oh, and I think Quebec became a bit of a destination for young adults as the US raised its drinking age to 21 and things like that can certainly reorient a generation's thinking toward a region. It was a destination used to have fun during a formative part of many people's lives and that could create long-lasting positive memories.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s. I went to Ottawa once or twice when I was a teen, but only made it to Montreal for the first time about 15 years ago.
I agree with you about the Maritimes. The bridge has made a difference but it's still a long drive and as you noted there are few famous destination cities or attractions.
Regarding Quebec: It seems that far more Quebeckers are aware of New England attractions in Boston and points north than the other way around. You see them or hear them at ski slopes, beaches, concerts in Boston, etc. Yet few New Englanders have been to Montreal, and even fewer have even heard of Quebec City, the walled European city and heritage site just a few hours downriver.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAirpass
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.
> 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.
This must be Bermuda Week. Just yesterday I saw an interesting video about Bermuda from Geography by Geoff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NVb5M7m9xg
Great photo up top, of author's family members entering the "America[n]" airliner.
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).
Might be missing some details, but it feels more like remembering the past than writing a journalistic report
It has a personal memoir style that I like