We had a good run, Amanda and I. When I dropped her off today at her brother’s house, just a few miles from my Dad’s, we both felt bittersweet: it’s been a fun trip together, but we both were ready to get off the road and to have some quiet time alone. Of course, when I drove away from her, my excitement at the alone time I’d been lacking quickly faded away, and I felt a little bit lonely.
One of the things about traveling is that it’s not easy. Vacations are sometimes easy, but this really isn’t a vacation. It’s travel, it’s work of sorts, it’s a practice, it’s an inner journey as well as an outer one. Driving across this big wide land of ours, with silent hours to contemplate the shit that just doesn’t get mucked through at home, with all of home’s distractions, is no small task.
For me, possibly the most difficult element of this eastward odyssey has been really feeling, in a temporal and visual and tactile manner, how very far I am from New England. As we drove, I felt homesick, but it was a strange sort of homesickness because I wasn’t sure exactly where it was I was homesick for. This is a big, wide, lovely land, folks, and it took us nine days to drive across it. I feel settled in Portland, and happy, and rooted, and comfortable there. I feel at home there. But when the land begins to change in New York State, when the hills start rounding soft and small and blue, looking all fat this time of year, when we get out of the car and smell the grass and it is familiar in some old place deep inside of us, when we cross into Vermont and pass Killington on Route 4, and come down the mountain into Woodstock and see the barns we saw when we were small, I feel at home here, too.
It’s a little confusing, to be honest.
Anyway, Chicago was cool. Huge. We walked around and got kicked out of a public park because Vesta was with us. Then Vesta took a poo on the park, and I didn’t have a baggie, only a tiny piece of cellophane wrapper in my purse. So I picked up the poo all careful-like, but the cellophane was so small it would have appeared to any passing pedestrian that Miss Emily was carrying a log of shit in her bare hands! Unfortunately, this was quite a busy sidewalk, and the nearest trash receptacle was quite a distance away, so many Chicagoans are under the impression that I am a bare-handed shit-carrier.
We found, thanks to Roadfood, a spectacular drive-in lunch place called Superdawg, where we ate red-hots with relish and mustard, fries, and vanilla milkshakes, served to us while we sat in our car. I felt very American as I enjoyed this rite, if a bit of a lardass. After our Superdawgs, we drove onward through the rest of Chicago (did I mention Chicago is a BIG city?), and into Indiana.
Indiana was mostly a blur, because at this point we were on the get-back-to-VT mission. But one noteworthy interlude, with a noteworthy character, demands mention. With no imminent rest areas and full bladders, we got off the highway and found a KFC at which to relieve ourselves. While leaving the single-stalled bathroom –together, I should add, but only due to extenuating circumstances—we must have caught the attention of the aforementioned "noteworthy character." Naïve to this, we returned to our vehicle and were puttering around, getting a soda out of the cooler, whatever.
"Holy Shit!" the noteworthy character screams as he walks toward our car, "Hooooly SHIT!" He is talking to his wife, who is sitting in their older, boatlike Cadillac, smoking a cigarette, with curlers in her hair. "These people are from Ore-gone."
Then the noteworthy character engaged us in some chatter about holyshithowlongdidittakeyoutodrivehere, and so forth. Then the noteworthy character got into his boat and began to leave, as I put Vesta on her leash and began walking her in KFC’s greenery.
"If my wife weren’t here," he yelled out the window, "I’d ask you to put me on a leash!"
I feigned a smile.
"But don’t worry," he added, "That’s just a fantasy!"
Indeed.
So that was Indiana.
We camped that night in a town called Milan, doesn’t that sound swanky? It’s in Ohio. We stayed at the Milan Travel Center. The very sweet boy at the counter said dogs aren’t usually allowed in the tent area (see pic), because people don’t pick up after their dogs’ "mess." I told him about the cellophane incident in Chicago and said that if that doesn’t prove I clean up after my dog, I don’t know what will. We got the site, of course.
While at the Milan Travel Center, we met an old man and his dog. The dog had purple barrettes in her hair. The dog’s name is Jolie Le Fille. And if you speak french, you’ll know why this is funny.
The rest of our trip was pretty uneventful. We talked a lot, and last night camped at the Glimmer Glass Lake in Cooperstown, NY. We made one of those delicious, only-think-of-this-if-you’re-camping meals, and drank the second bottle of champagne from Becca and Eric, and then we went to bed early.
On homeward, we stopped quickly at the VT border before busting out the rest of the trip back to the Upper Valley.
My Dad's house is a great pitstop, chance to get laundry done, car cleaned up, rested, and fed. I met Amanda and her brother Marcus for a drink at Jesse's after work, and met his fiance Erin! I haven't seen Marcus in years and he is all grown up now, with a lovely wife-to-be. So nice to see them.
Then it was home to a delicious dinner with my pops, and some hard talks about aging and the future. Still simmering on that stuff, more on that later. I love you all! 
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