The Great Adventure - Day 1 - August 5, 2009

The epic journey is heavily woven into the fabric of human culture. Think Odysseus. Think Lewis and Clark. Think Christopher Columbus, Jack Kerouac and Sir Edmund Hillary. Heck - think Bilbo Baggins for a slightly non-human side example. Great journeys equal great adventures; they press against the boundaries of our bubbles, growing and shaping our world, even perhaps threatening to pop it. They transform our culture and forever alter our history. OK, so maybe sometimes, on rare occasions, an epic voyage may run a little light on the whole cultural transformation aspect, but, hey! At least they're always an adventure!

Our journey started a little over two weeks ago and was a little historically retrograde. Rather than beating the bush in a push for the Pacific, we were striking out for the Atlantic. Rather that hunting down glorious Cities of Gold, we sought acres of pines and potatoes. We were seeking a Brave Old World, the Northeast Passage! On Wednesday, August 5th we set out on our long, rambling road trip to the North Maine Woods.

I grew up doing extended family road trips. We lived in the Deep South (Mississippi and Alabama) and every year we took our annual drive to visit family in Maine. It would take three to five days to get there and another three to five to get back, depending on how liberal or fanatical my folks were to get it done, and we couldn't have had much more than a week in Maine itself, so the road trip was as much of a part of the vacation as the destination itself. I remember loving every minute of it and totally geeking out up in the co-pilot seat with my atlas and notepad where I'd scribble until nauseated copious notes on routes taken, mileage accrued, and state boundaries traversed. I blithely suffered through the oh-so-rare rest stops, the ubiquitous "he's on my side of the line" battles with my brother and two sisters, and the grisly side-of-the-road lunches consisting of butter and baloney sandwiches, Vienna sausages and cans of generic-brand soda. At the end of the day in whatever dismal motel my Dad would put us up in (motels were the Achilles’ tendon of the vacation and the one thing Dad wouldn't spend the bucks on - some were pretty scary), I would calculate and correlate my numbers, computing important metrics on mileage and m.p.g. and hours per stop. It was nerd nirvana, and I wanted it for my children.

Our particular adventure begins in the wee hours of the morning on Wednesday, August 5th with a 6:30am departure from LAX to Philadelphia. (I believe they call the Los Angeles airport "LAX" because it best describes the security there.) A bleary-eyes Pastor Greg was kind enough to show up at our house at 4:30am to ferry us and our copious luggage to our concourse. We are not particularly light packers; I believed our luggage alone could have adequately outfitted most, if not all, of the denizens of the Mayflower and spared them that rather severe first winter. It was particularly painful when we had to pay the $15 per bag tax at check-in. (Thank you, US Air, may I have another?)

The flight itself was blessedly uneventful. We didn't even get enough turbulence to give Stacy the vapors! Whenever we did hit a minor patch the kids would throw their arms up over their heads and say "Whoa!" as though they were on Thunder Mountain at Disneyland. As we banked over Catalina Island on our take-off L expressed one fleeting anxiety, "I hope we don't land in the ocean, cause then we'd see all the whales." We had a crystal clear view of the Chicago skyline and Lake Michigan about two-thirds of the way there; it looked so small and squashable. Our arrival and luggage collection in Philly was equally bland and unexciting; our rental car was a Hyundai Sonata which turned out to be a sweet little car. We loaded up and fled the airport hassles and soon were on the open road with only the stars and our hearts' desires to guide us - oh, yeah, that and the ancient Rand McNally atlas I brought along that evidently predated the founding of Boston.

Knowing our drive the next day wasn't going to be a stressing one, we felt no need to clock any further mileage that day, so we merely escaped the Philly metro area and looked to wind down for the day. We got off in the little town of Yardley, Pennsylvania in Bucks County, just across the Delaware from New Jersey. It was clear we weren't in California any more. It was a pure Martha-Stewartville with every upscale house spit-shined and polished, and every yard pristinely landscaped. Every little business had a gold-trimmed wood-carved sign hanging in front. It oozed cute. Even Stacy's incessant and not-so-subtle plans to convince me to sell our house and move to Palos Verdes were momentarily shifted in the direction of the hamlet. We took up residence only long enough to grab a pizza at a local wood-carved signed establishment and hit the road again, but I think Stacy left a piece of her heart in Yardley.

I was able to recreate the ominous motel overtones from my childhood the very first night on the road. We crossed the river from Yardley and skirted around the north of Trenton, ending up in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, a stone's throw or two away from Princeton. Remembering how much I liked them as a kid (compared to the other scarier fare) and rarely seeing them around, at least not out west, we stopped at a Howard Johnsons (a.k.a. HoJo!) for the night. Howard has seen better days. But they had a room. They had a pool. And they had a customer who wasn't too picky. We bedded down having gotten most of the ugly travel overhead behind us, at least the front bookend's worth. I lamented that I'd already burned through one of fifteen days of vacation, (the wrapping up of each day off is particularly painful for me), but with fourteen left before me I couldn't get too depressed. The adventure was underway and thus far was going swimmingly!