April Road Trip

I will be putting this blog on vacation for awhile next week because we are once again embarking on a road trip, one which we have been planning for a long time.  In fact, we had the route pretty well fine-tuned last April when we realized that "Mini Takes the States" would not be held again until 2018, so we took the month of July instead and went to California and back.  It is an opportunity we will never regret, as even novice travelers like ourselves come to understand.

This trip will be taken not in our Mini Cooper but in our more sensible (and 4X4) Honda CRV.  We will be going up north where the weather will not be conducive to putting the top down on a convertible!  In fact, I checked out the webcams at one of our stops, Stowe Mountain Resort in Vermont, and it looked like we might need the four-wheel-drive.

But we plan to travel in the same way as we did last summer:  pack light, keep moving, and see and experience as much as we can along the way.  I will take notes in a journal and then catch this blog up to date after we return, as I did last July, for the benefit of any of my followers.

Our route will take us up the Blue Ridge Parkway to Peaks of Otter; northward to Hershey Farms Inn and Restaurant in Amish country, where Martha's Mom and Dad enjoyed many wonderful times when he was still with us; on to Niagara Falls and the Maid of the Mist; across the Canadian border and along the north shore of Lake Ontario (Note to Self:  be sure we have our Passports, and refrain from making jokes at the border about being refugees from Trump); eastward across the northern portions of Lake Champlain to Stowe (where snow may well await us); eastward again to Bar Harbor, and then rambling down the coast of Maine over a period of three days to Rockland, Kennebunkport, and eventually through Boston to Plymouth Rock, Rhode Island, and Mystic Seaport in Connecticut; through the insane traffic of New York as quickly as possible, and south to New Castle, Delaware; down the peninsula and across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel to Virginia Beach; and then finally arriving in familiar Duck for a week before returning home.

So we will once again be on the road, as two great poets have sung so memorably:

"Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me . . ."

- Walt Whitman

"On the road again

Like a band of gypsies we go down the highway
We're the best of friends
Insisting that the world keep turning our way
And our way is on the road again
Just can't wait to get on the road again."

- Willie Nelson