Ever since I was a child I loved to wander wild

[austin_dern]

And now in a rare departure for me, a multi-day epic of things I've been up to in the recent past, in this case, the Maine Gathering with bunny_hugger and a collection of other strange people from the Internet.

Our plan was to drive up to wherever it was in Maine that we were supposed to go; I was vague on this point because I supposed bunny_hugger would have directions. I was reluctant to take the car, since it's a long drive and I don't much care for driving, but the cost of flying into Maine is slightly greater than the cost of actually buying a house in Portland, and the cost of railroad tickets would be not that much less, and besides, we both knew any attempt to ride a passenger railroad for more than about three hours means encountering some catastrophe involving infinite delays and possible great sickness. For a while I considered borrowing my parents' Toyota Something, noticeably more comfortable than my Scion, but they were planning to go to the Newport (Rhode Island) Jazz Festival that same weekend so they had rather some claim to their own car.

Besides, this would give us a bit of a practice run in long-distance driving. We needed this as we have plans to drive Route 66, and even though we planned to mostly take Interstates up to Maine the roads would roughly parallel that of the historic Boston Post Road (well, one of the Post Roads, anyway). So that we'd get a sense of whether we can be tucked into the same car for arbitrarily many hours and not run out of things to talk about even when there aren't specific roadside attractions.

All this would begin with bunny_hugger flying in to Newark Airport, though, and so after the end of work that Wednesday I went to pick her up from there. The timing of available flights meant I had to leave work early, but at the same hour I usually leave early Wednesdays for yoga, so that nobody really noticed any difference at work. In fact, one of the mainframe-room women wished me a good yoga class, and I felt it would be too complicated to explain what I was actually up to.

I got to the airport almost exactly the same time bunny_hugger did, albeit from opposite ends, so that I had just about enough time to get to the baggage carousel before she came down the escalator and we started walking dazedly and smilingly at each other while ignoring the rest of the world. And while she'd been worried she couldn't bring everything she wanted in her alloted carry-on space, she had managed it, making my comments about which carousel to watch for her luggage irrelevant, although I didn't understand at first why she was looking to leave the airport so swiftly.

Although we were driving back from Newark during rush hour the traffic wasn't unreasonable, by my standards anyway, and in not too long we were back at the diner where we'd had our first meal together enjoying such luxuries as checking whether they had French onion soup for the day (they didn't) or grilled cheese sandwiches (they did). And we certainly could have stayed all night, given our choice, but we did have to get to bed at some point, and I had to finish packing.

Still we had time to watch a few Carson's Comedy Classics, and for a fresh Floyd R Turbo American segment to give bunny_hugger a temporary favorite catchphrase to baffle online friends (``This raises the question: stick it up your nose''). And we got to eating a bag of flavored pretzel chips which had been in the house for roughly seven years but didn't show appreciable signs of ageing, possibly because of the strong spice flavor agents in them. It was looking like a good trip's eve.

Trivia: In 1891 shipping magnate Hermann Oelrichs offered in The New York Sun a reward of $500 for ``such proof as a court would accept that in temperate waters even one man, woman, or child, while alive, was ever attacked by a shark''. Source: Close To Home: The Terrifying Shark Attacks Of 1916, Michael Capuzzo.

Currently Reading: The Seven Cardinal Virtues Of Science Fiction, Editors Isaac Asimov, Charles G Waugh, Martin H Greenberg.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

It's really the delivery that made the "stick it up your nose" thing so incredibly funny to me.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I know. So much of his performance is in the body language. A transcript just doesn't do it justice.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I know several of the Boston Post Roads well. I'm going to be rather curious how close you drove to where I live, and thus, how much guilt I can give you for not planning at least a brief connection so I can finally meet Bunny. I'll try to keep it to moderate amounts, because I know her presence must have been wonderfully distracting.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

We really didn't have time to do anything but go to the party and back. In fact we didn't get to stay as long at the "gathering" as I would have liked.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Awww. Then guilt shall be kept minimal, on the "I should have filed my taxes last week" levels.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I suspect that we did get awfully close together without meeting, though, unfortunately. If we hadn't spent so much time trying to get through New York City we might have been in a tolerable position to meet for lunch --- at least a late lunch --- although given the traffic delays what Google Maps claimed was a roughly eight-hour drive took us closer to eleven as it was. Add to that someone we'd want to spend time with and we might well not have gotten to Maine yet.

[moxie_man]

There are reasons I call it the Maine Wilderness. We *ARE* the end of the line state-side in the Northeast.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's impressively out there. My whole sense of topography is set by living in New Jersey, where you can sometimes get dozens of feet out into the wilderness.

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

Go to Vegas sometime (it's relatively cheap, as long-distance travel and lodging goes), and take a ride out to Red Rock Canyon. You might need to crop the tour road from your perception, but after that it's all rocks. And low-rise arid vegetation. And other rocks. Probably not at all like Maine, (except for that fog and drizzle we had) but impressive enough to someone who hasn't wandered into a boreal forest lately.

Bryce Canyon or the Grand Canyon or Zion National Park are probably even more impressively rock-no-road-ish, but you'd have to ask my friend Matt (amateur landscape photographer) about those.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I have been told of the vast space that can be seen on such trips, and one of my long-term plans is driving Route 66. (I'm also a bit interested in driving the Lincoln Highway, which manages even more opportunities for stopping and seeing how many weird little corners of the continent there are.) But I think my instincts are very strongly set by life; the most rural place I've ever lived is Troy, New York, and I only rarely got outside the Capital District complex there, so even its existence as an island of city life in an ocean of deserted farmland didn't affect me much.