The Road Trip to Maine

We are road warriors: Bob loves to drive and he’s happy to listen to Sirius XM Radio all day. Over ten years of driving to and from the Rio Grande Valley, Texas each fall and spring, we’ve made an art of long road trips. We pack an electric cooler with breakfast cereal, bread for lunch time sandwiches, soft drinks, beer and snacks. We have breakfast in the hotel room, I make our lunches, and we are usually on the road by 8 am each morning. Since we can’t take much food into the USA, we always stop at the first grocery store we find to buy fruits, cold veggies, snacks, lunch meats for me and sometimes something sweet and decadent for future lunches. This time I also wanted to hit the Duty Free at Cornwall to buy wine and beer to take to Pat and Howard.

Just before 8 am on a Monday in July, we left home and started down the 401 for Cornwall. One of the first safety features I noticed was the icon of a car in the passenger side rear view mirror. It popped up whenever we passed a car and disappeared when it was safe to return to the non-passing lane. Bob experimented with his Lane Change Alert and found that every time he drifted over the centre or outside painted lines, his driver’s seat vibrated. I accused him of doing it repeatedly because he liked the feel of it. If he got close (as in tailgating) to the car in front of him, the seat vibrated as well. Bob spent many miles giggling like a little child as he drove.

The following morning, Bob went to the Breakfast Room to get me a coffee, and we had our cereal in the room. I made his lunch sandwich but since I hate peanut butter and jam, I had to wait to buy my lunch food in the US. I was sorry to leave bananas and oranges behind in the Breakfast Room, but couldn’t take them over the border. The car was packed up and we were on the road by 8 am. Next stop, Maine. The ETA on our dashboard screen said 4 pm.

We approached this leg of the journey with a sigh of resolve. Bob describes driving to Maine as a “you can’t get there from here” experience. The state is filled with a series of two lane highways running south and north, east and west. Driving south to pick up an eastward bound highway is no guarantee that you won’t have to go somewhat out of your way west or south in order to get to the highway you need. We’ve been lost in Maine many times during previous trips and this time we were leaving it to Lola, the voice of our Nav System, to get us there as painlessly as possible.