Saturday, November 29, 2008

Road Trip - Saturday

This has been a five state day -- Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. We were in West Virginia for about twenty miles and Maryland for even less but they still count. The Trip Tik provided by the triple A club has been amazing. Except that those pages and pages and pages of a couple hundred miles of road on a page gave me a pretty narrow view of this road trip. Today I opened a United States map and was astonished to see how far we've traveled. And we're not there yet. Our final destination is Brooklyn and we'll be there around noon tomorrow even though it's just a couple of hours from where we sleep tonight. Tomorrow is a sleep until at least seven travel day.
Today was to be our shortest day in miles and wound up being one of our longest days in time. Blame it on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Blame it on that clearing at the foot of Peak of Otter. Blame it on the closed for the season visitors' center where we sat watching a white tailed deer leap out of the trees and into the clearing. Blame it on the half frozen pond or on the snow along the road. Blame it on the trees and the biting cold air. Blame it on the mountains of leaves crunching under our feet as we walked along a path.
We threw away the schedule today. Instead of driving near the mountains we drove in them. Instead of looking at pictures of the Blue Ridge Mountains, we took our own. Instead of arriving at today's destination well before twilight, we got here well after dark.
No one noticed that we were late. And if we noticed, we didn't care.

1 comment:

Marnie said...

You're doing exactly what a vacation is for - relaxing and not on schedule. Good for you!