Travelling is tiring. We’re exhausted. It’s funny how vacation somehow can be more exhausting than everyday work. I guess it is because of lack of routines, it’s all new impressions. We live out of our suitcases, so we’re never as relaxed as you are when you get home, change, turn on the TV and open that carton of take-away pizza. And even though it seems like not much work, it takes some energy to plan the basics; where to go, what to eat, where to sleep. Anyhow – it’s lots of fun.
We left our Manhattan couchsurfing (www.couchsurfing.com) hosts Steve and Bill (who by the way were just the most generous, relaxed and fun imaginable), and went to get the car we bought. It’s a little smaller than we thought, and it’s green instead of black. But Ernst, the German car salesman, says it’s the same car as the picture. We decided to believe Ernst. Free as birds, we headed north for Maine – the state of lighthouses and lobsters.
We had no trouble finding 214 Bog Hill Road, where Jack and Marcia, old friends of me and my family, lives. Partly, I guess, because of the brand new GPS we bought somewhere in New Hampshire. Why did we not even think of getting one of those? Preloaded with US maps, it was ours for the facile price of $260. This is becoming such a technotrip. The front seat of our car doesn’t look very different from the cockpit of a space shuttle. We’ve got 2 laptops, 2 cell phones, an external harddrive, an mp3 player with an FM transmitter, a GPS, and an whole bunch of adapters and chords to hook this all up to the little lighter thingy of the car. It feels silly, in a way. Here we’re out to explore the world, and we have all this machinery sort of doing it for us, along with making it seemingly pointless to have left home at all. But as the old-fashioned way certainly has its charm, inventions bring new possibilities.
At Jack and Marcia’s, little has changed. The house is the same, the cows are the same (well, I guess they have replaced the cows with newer cows since I was here 15 years ago), and Jack and Marcia are the same. Still amazingly hospitable, funny and friendly.
Taking a vacation from out vacation, we’re now up in northern Maine, near the Canadian border, snowboarding. It’s a first for Anton, who sits beside me in agony. I myself am pretty tired too. So much for relaxation.
2 comments:
Do the cows there compare to the curly Irish cows? :-)
From the sounds of it the Americans are every bit as hostile as the Irish!
Tja! Härligt med Maine! Jag har varit där en gång och käkat hummer. Missa inte det.
Jag vill också surfa på soffor. Kan ni skicka mig en sån där refferalkod? Jag misstänker att jag kan klättra snabbare i anseende på det.
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