The Road

Last month we were joined on our biennial East Coast road trip by Irene, who seems to have survived two weeks as a member of our family with only minor emotional scarring (and whose cheerful, easygoing attitude may well have prevented more severe damage to the psyches of the rest of us!). We'll share some highlights of the trip -- centered on Jason and Sarah's wedding, with stints in different lakeside cabins flanking the nuptial weekend -- but we'd like to start with a few stories from The Road.

This year our route took us from Boston to Bantam CT via Sturbridge Village, where Simon was nearly booted for anachronistic conduct unbecoming a gentleman:

 

From Bantam to Franconia NH via Brattleboro VT, where we correctly deduced the availability of decent coffee, based on the presence of this amiably revolutionary retail establishment:

From Franconia to Mount Desert Island, a journey requiring more or less constant cost-benefit calculations, such as the weighting of the (one) driver's musical preferences relative to those of the (three) children in the back, the factoring of leg length and temperment into seating assignments, and the delicate question of whether to tell your traveling companion that his sunglasses are doing something extremely amusing to his hair before you all head into the roadside diner for lunch.



Our ace-in-the-hole plan to stop for ice cream somewhere along Route 2 was very nearly derailed by the following exchange, which occurred somewhere outside of Norridgewock:

SIMON [chanting, for the sixty-seventh time, his variation on an already grating Ting Tings song]: They call me fart! That's not my name! They call me ass! That's not my name!

MIKALA [finally snapping]: Simon, if you say "ass" one more time, I'm going to buy Josie and Irene both triple ice cream cones, and not you!

SIMON [not missing a beat]: If you buy Josie a triple ice cream I'm going to scream "ASS!" at the top of my lungs, right at the ice cream man!

MIKALA [definitely missing a beat]: Um... You win.

Fortunately or unfortunately, by the time we came across an ice cream place, nobody's record was clean enough to warrant more than a single scoop.



And finally, Mount Desert to Boston. This leg of the journey began promisingly enough -- with Simon's new compass guiding us through the intricacies of Maine's rural roads -- but devolved inevitably into a harrowing battle between frayed nerves and grumbling stomachs, on the one hand, and the thought of Grandad's delicious lasagne awaiting us, on the other.



Shortly after these photos were taken, Andrew pulled abruptly into an abandoned weigh station, and we all jumped out of the car and ran around shrieking like banshees, in a mysterious game that combined elements of capoiera, ballet, and touch football. Fortunately the State Patrol didn't happen by until we were all back in the vehicle with our seatbelts securely fastened.

Shortly after that, we pulled into Grandad's driveway.

And shortly after that, we were all sitting around the dinner table, digging into that yummy lasagne, giddily grateful to find ourselves, as Jessamyn West once put it, "All here... right side up, and forked end down."