road trip to the Atlantic ocean

East Coast Family Road Trip: Day 5

Woodstock, VT to York, Maine through Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, to West Point, NY.
Every trip has to have a pooch screw day. Today was that day. On the plus side, we clap each time we cross a state border. We cheered six times today. That’s a lot of clapping. That feat is both awesome and not necessarily recommended. One curiosity is why New Hampshire is so excited to tell weary travelers the second they enter the state and right before they leave that NEW HAMPSHIRE’S LIQUOR STORES ARE OPEN! Like on the state highway signs. Dunno what that is all about but it made me thirsty.
We made our way easily enough to York Beach in Maine. It was frigid but you knew that already. The screw part came outside Boston. Nothing says Welcome to Vacation quite like hideous traffic and pouring rain. It can always be worse, so ours was just delay. There is such a heavy collective feeling of dejection with fellow drivers stuck in traffic. You all just look at each other out of your foggy windows with expressions that scream that you are all resigned to the idea that you are all in the seventh level of hell together. For two hours. This delay came on the heels of a 20 min autistic tirade at the gas station with Devlin. Unrelated to that, the award for worst restaurant chain name goes to…Friendly’s. The Fuck?
Several friends have been genuinely curious why I keep making these trips with the kids. Masochism? Paternal need to teach early traffic coping skills? Like when I muttered, apparently pretty audibly, about how the guy driving ahead of everyone in two lanes of traffic on the shoulder was a TOTAL JACKASS. How to carb load for days on end while eating crap food on the road? Helpful NASCAR pit crew skills by practicing getting in and out of travel centers as quickly as possible? How to breeze past state borders like a fleeing fugitive? How to elude law enforcement? How to gage how much togetherness is TOO MUCH?
Pardon any grammar issues. It was a long day. I got pulled over by an M.P. within two miles of entering West Point. It was pitch dark, I’d been in the car for 13 hours and all the roads looked the same!
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