2013-01-13 42 -71

Location

Inside the chain link perimeter of an Avis car rental lot. Probably not reachable without some sweet-talking, but there's some neat stuff nearby, such as an abandoned field and a beach.

Participants

Phyzome: planning to go with Alex

Plans

Phyzome & his partner Alex are looking at heading to the Orient Heights station of the Blue Line and walking to the location, then to the beach. We're leaving from the Davis Square area by T at around 13:15.

Expedition

Even though we knew that we were not going to reach the point, we traveled as planned by Red Line and Blue Line, arriving at Orient Heights station. The station had a split platform but allowed both ticketed and unticketed passengers to cross the tracks via a rather curious stairway and overpass that has a fence running down its length. (See gallery.)

The neighborhood had a weird vibe to it. We appeared to be in a downtown-ish area, but it consisted mainly of shitty take-out food places and convenience stores, with some establishments filling both roles. This was odd because many of the houses seemed quite nice.

As expected, the hashpoint was in a rental car lot, behind a razorwire-topped chain-link fence. I took a few pictures and then we proceeded to the far more important stage of our plan: Exploring the neighboring field. It was full of tall grasses, sumac, briars, milkweed, sparrows, animal trails, and one mildly annoyed mockingbird. We found a few artifacts that must have originated in the car lot (an optionally radio-shielded EZ-Pass, a side-view mirror), perhaps as a result of snow-clearing.

Phase 3: The beach. The Orient Heights waterfront is not a particularly inviting beach -- it faces a narrow tongue of ocean that curls around a protrusion of runway that must have been built up on top of shallow seafloor. The passenger jets landing and taking off provide a continuous low-frequency roar and the smell of jet fuel. Every 15 minutes a Blue Line train rattles past. The shells on the beach were as beautiful as anywhere else, though! There's an indoor ice-skating rink nearby which we decided to take a pass on.

Overall, a moderately interesting trip.

Photos

As close as possible
No goofy grins
Standing in the field
Not beach weather
Planes are loud and smelly
Curious divided stairway


Sun 13 Jan 2013 in 42,-71: 42.3885845, -71.0125804 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox