Road Trip

Nothing beats a road trip in the summer.  Yes, it’s hot and traffic is awful and gas costs a bazillion dollars, but still, without a doubt, my favorite memories of vacations are those spent largely in the car.  There’s just something special about the way things happen on a road trip.  Sometimes you find a random radio station that plays excellent music for miles and miles, and it seems like a miracle.  Other times you scroll through the dial again and again and you find nothing you would ever listen to, even at gunpoint.  In any other context, that would be annoying, but on a road trip, it jumpstarts a rousing metaphysical conversation.  (Why, for example, would there need to be a different Rush song playing on every available station at the same time?  Even in 1982 that would have been excessive!  Who lives in this region that the airwaves are catering to?)  At different times on a road trip, everyone is awake and goofy and laughing and the time passes quickly.  At other times, you’re the only one awake and you get to enjoy some peace and solitude while driving and listening to Rush.   My favorite thing about a road trip is studying the map and deciding at the last minute to get off the highway and take a different route.  Yes, it’ll take you longer to get where you’re going, but who cares? 

So, this past weekend Tom and Lila and I took our first family road trip, and it was great.  Our destination:  Fredericksburg, VA, where my family was meeting on Saturday at my cousin’s house for a reunion.  Here are some highlights:

We left Worcester on Thursday, headed for Philadelphia, where we planned to stop for the night.  Our first pit stop:  New Haven, CT, my hometown and, more importantly, the home of Pepe’s Pizza, the absolute best pizza in the country.  It’s a major family tradtion, so we stopped for lunch and Lila had her first Pepe’s pizza:

We got back on the road and arrived in Philly to spend the night with our dear friends Linda and Jim and their sweet son Elliot.  Lila and Elliot hit it off immediately:

Friday, we got back on the road and arrived in Fredericksburg, VA in the early afternoon.  We went straight over to visit my grandmother.  Now, this was actually the whole point of the trip.  My grandmother is hugely important in my life, and she needed to meet Lila.  This was bittersweet: my grandmother is sharp as a tack and otherwise healthy, yet her eyesight has failed to the point where she is almost completely blind.  For a lifelong knitter and reader, this must be unbearably difficult.  It’s hard to know how to help her, but sweet little Lila certainly brightened her world for a little while:

Saturday was the actual reunion.  It was a blast.  They live on a lake, so we swam, boated, ate and drank all day.  It was great to catch up with family members I haven’t seen in years.  Lila got lots of attention, and she got to “swim” in the lake:

Sunday, we got back in the car and headed for home.  We planned to stop for the night in Spring Lake, NJ to visit with Tom’s aunt and uncle, and after looking at the map, we decided to take a different rout and take the ferry across from Delaware to Cape May, New Jersey.  This was a nice diversion from the car, and Lila got to have her first ferry ride:

She also got to have her first thunder and lightning storm on a ferry ride!  That was exciting!  We got drenched.  In the morning, Tom gave Lila and me a tour of Spring Lake, where his family lived until he was 9 years old.  Lila had her first experience on the beach:

See how much she loved it?  Tom showed us the house he grew up in – or, he would have shown us the house, except it was torn down years ago and replaced with this massive thing:

We got back in the car and finally headed for home.  It’s nice to be back, but we’re already looking forward to the next vacation.  I just hope it’s a road trip.