Our Mystic/Boston trip started, strangely enough, at my dad’s church in Wellsville, NY.
By the way, Jeffrey and I played bass & guitar during the service, and our “newer” music was well-received. After service, we left for Mystic, Connecticut.
The drive was long and frustrating.
On this coast, you have two groups of drivers: Those who totally disregard the speed limit, and those who never get near it. I could be traveling at a nice high speed, and then with no warning, the speed would drop 20-30MPH because some slow-poke got into the fast lane and wouldn’t scoot over (pretty much all our driving today was two-lane). There were also frequent changes between 65MPH and 55MPH on the highway, yet I soon learned that no one slows down for the 55MPH zones. Good thing too because our Garmin was convinced that it was 65MPH the whole way there. Had we not gone with the crowd, it would have been a much slower trip.
We only stopped twice: McDonalds and Dunkin Doughnuts; not exactly the most healthy of choices, but it was good. I had coffee at both locals because we had to get up really early for church.
For the majority of the trip, we listened to albums on my iPod – many of which my kids had never heard. Towards the end, we switched to comedy. My kids were introduced to the Smothers Brothers last year, and now we have their greatest hits on CD. They are trying to memorize portions of this CD. We then listened to selections from Bill Engvall, the “Here’s your sign” guy. Funny, funny stuff!
Eventually, we got to the Howard Johnson and settled into our nice, cool hotel room.
Later that night, we exited the building – with the other side of each door getting hotter and more humid – and drove to Mystic Pizza (you know, from the 1988 movie). Hey, lucky us, we found a parking place right near the restaurant. The pizza was very good, and we left with boxes. We had to stop at the CVS on the way home because both our kids have long, luxurious hair and they keep running out of conditioner. Somehow some circus peanuts also wound up in the bag – a favorite of mine. My family had never had circus peanuts before, and I think they found a new favorite candy.
The pillows in our hotel were lumpy, and the mattresses “caved” in the middle. I spent the evening trying to make my pillow comfortable while climbing up to the side of the mattress, away from Barbara who had settled down below in the middle of the bed. Courtney decided to put the A/C on low without telling us when she went to bed. By 1:30AM, the place was hot, so I had to crawl over luggage to get to the controls. The evening went slightly better after that.