All of our summer vacations have lasted a week. Weekend to weekend, about 9-10 days max. This year, we tried something different: taking a two-week vacation out East.
We hit the road in late June for an epic road trip to the Atlantic Coast – first to Nova Scotia, Canada, for one week, then to Maine for the second week.
To get there, it meant driving 20 hours through Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and finally Nova Scotia to our first cabin. We split the drive in half, staying overnight in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, at a lovely hotel on the St. Lawrence Seaway.
I took six years of French in high school and college, so it’s been a while since I spoke it fairly fluently. It was pretty humbling to walk into a gas station on the edge of Trois-Rivières where the checkout team spoke nothing but French.
Petrol, s’il vous plait?
Quebec was a brief stop on the way, but it is a huge Canadian province, and most of our driving ran along the St. Lawrence until we hopped over the river in Quebec City and then on through New Brunswick.
This is the first in a series of posts outlining our big summer adventure. I brought along the Canon EOS M6 with a full kit of EF-M lenses. I also kept the Canon EOS M in the car for road photos, and the few you see above in Trois-Rivières.
An epic road trip to the East Coast sporting the Canon M line. Lots more to come.
Last week I visited the Detroit Institute of Art to check out The Open Road exhibition, a fantastic collection of photography road trips by some of the great photographers. It was right up my alley (so much so that I bought the accompanying book).
It got me thinking: What if I had been into photography, like I am now, back when I took my country-crossing road trips?
Surely I could have made some sort of project or publication out of my Route 66 trip, or my New England trip, or any of the other big road trips I took in my 20s and early 30s. I went on some pretty great adventures, and I took lots of photos, but I wasn’t into photography. I didn’t have the eye I do today.
Now, seeing what other photographers are doing with Route 66, it makes me wish I could go back in time, hand my younger self a camera and a bit of wisdom, and say, “Fire away.” But that’s not possible.
What is possible is to maybe go on another, similar trip, or somewhere totally different, and do what I do now with a camera.
People think it’s a little weird when I hit the road by myself.
“How can you do that?” they ask. “I could never do something like that,” they’ll tell me. Or their grim look of shock will give away their apprehension. “Weird-o,” they’re thinking, I’m sure.
The other one I hear a lot is, “I would love to do something like that.” And it’s hard to tell which category of people needs a solitary road trip: the scared, or the desperate.
When you’re scared and desperate, hitting the road can be the best medicine. Being stuck in the car for eight straight hours of high-powered maneuvering down back desert roads is therapeutic – but maybe therapists are supposed to say that.
No – I’ve found it’s awfully true. Sometimes alarmingly true. And it’s not easy, being stuck with yourself all that time. You get lonely.
The thing about cross-country road trips, however, is that you’re never truly alone. I met a nice guy from Seattle who was down taking pictures of the Grand Canyon and was headed to Zion after we had breakfast together at the Jacob Lake Inn. He wanted to hit the canyon by sunrise to take pictures, but he never made it. Instead, he had French Toast at 7 a.m. with me, just as I was getting ready to leave the place. He was a traveler, like me, so we shared stories of Sitgraves Pass and the wather in the Pacific Northwest.
We never traded names. I didn’t get the name of the nice couple from Winslow, Arizona either, but we talked for most of the evening after my first visit to the canyon. They were headed to Zion, too, and just drove in from Bryce Canyon. He was from Kentucky, an Air Force retiree, and she was a life-long Winslow resident. Her dad used to take her to First Mesa and pick rasberries in the canyons. Amazing, I thought, that such growth was possible in the Navajo desert.
Mrs. Winslow felt we were on the cusp of the Age of Aquarius. Didn’t I think everything was weird now? And didn’t I get the feeling that things were going to change?
“You keep doing what you’re doing, sweetie,” she told me outside our rooms at the Inn. “You’ll be ready when this awful world starts to get better. It’s due.”
There was the single dad in Springdale, Utah, raising two kids on his own. The girl was 2, the boy was 9 or 10, and the dad had salt and pepper hair. They had the boy’s friend along, too, and the four of them ate and made a bunch of ruckus in the pool room of the Bit & Spur while I watched Oregon dismantle Tennessee.
“You thought you were going to watch football in peace?” he said, grinning.
After his daughter grabbed the pool stick and started waving it around like one of the drunk locals, he had to beat it out of the bar. Life was probably going to be like that for him – for many years to come.
There was the couple from Grand Junction, Colorado, retired teachers marching all over the Southwest on a hiking tour. They were pros, too, with their walking sticks and binoculars. It took me a minute to remember where I recognized Grand Junction. Then it hit me: I slept there on my way home from the Route 66 trip, not realizing how beautiful the place was because I arrived in the middle of the night.
That started our conversation about travel, and I realized it was the one thing I had in common with all these people: we liked going places. Even though most of them were either Baby Boomers or retirement age, we could talk comfortably. It didn’t take me long to recognize that both foreigners and retirees were the ones that frequented this part of the country. There were a few young couples, yes, but they were rare compared to the man and wife in their mid-50s or 60s who said Zion or the canyon wasn’t their first stop.
The older couple from Houston shared similar destinations: Zion, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Monument Valley. Tourists didn’t stop at just one; they made a point of seeing them all.
So it was with me, all by myself, but again – not really. There were long stretches (in the car, in my room, hiking) when I had plenty of time to myself. The solitude was what I was out here for, but gosh, it’s not like I’m totally alone.
Really, it’s a sort of confidence booster. Fellow travelers seem proud that I’m out here, in the middle of nowhere, seeing the world while I’m “still able.” You can almost sense a whiff of envy, like they wish they could’ve made similar trips when they were younger. Old or young, it doesn’t matter – as long as you get out and see the world sometime, right?
It’s always been that way, for as far back as I can remember. When I feel pressed down, or stressed, or worried, I hit the road and I’m made whole. Maybe it’s the self-induced isolation, or maybe it’s giving myself time to think and unwind and enjoy the scenery. I don’t know enough to explain it, but I know that it works.
So it was this weekend, when I left town to see my good college friends Andrea and Keith. On the way to see Andrea in Harrisburg, PA, I took a small section of the old Lincoln Highway – what is now US-30. I’ve been to Pennsylvania twice, and driven through it twice, and have never seen much of the state because it was always dark when I drove through. It’s a beautiful Commonwealth, full of hills and trees and old American farms, and traveling down an old highway reminded me of the Route 66 trip, if only briefly.
My visit to Keith’s was an exploration in the truly unknown. Nobody thinks of Columbus, OH when they think of big American cities, but I do now. It’s a fine town, complete with a fully-operational Apple Store and a (ahem) major American university. Keith made an excellent host and tour guide, and gave me a whole-day’s respite from the road. I like driving, but I also like not moving for a while.
Monday, my birthday, had me hitting the road once again, knowing that when I got back home things would go back to normal. Sure, it’s nice to return home from a long trip, but I dread the part of me that feels like I never left in the first place. The road’s romance is short-lived, it seems, and I only get the benefit in the doing. And maybe the remembering, days and weeks and years later.
I drive to escape, mostly. To get out of town, to Go Somewhere, and leave the everyday behind. I surely can’t drink and eat like I do when I’m on vacation. And I can’t suspend life’s rules like I do when I’m on the road. All I can do is take a little piece of the road home with me. See this big, beautiful country we live in. Perhaps take some pictures, too.
You start throwing around phrases like “economic downturn” and “…not since the Depression,” and it makes one question the sanity of cutting out of town on another cross-country trip – where even the Hamptons are facing declining real estate values.
Gas. Wheat and milk. The price of everything, except houses, is going up, and here I sit on the edge of discovery, ready to journey into the heart of Old America and look into our revolutionary past. What shaped us as a country? Where did the Founding Fathers come from? Is fresh-off-the-boat crab meat really that tasty?
The answers to these questions, and more, I hope to find when I set out on May 16 to the original colonies. I’ll land on my own version of Plymouth Rock, I’ll walk down the streets of Philadelphia, bread in hand, and I’ll swim in the same pond that taught Thoreau to abandon his fellow citizens and embrace the wilderness as the last respite of a sanity-seeking intelligence. If he could spend time in prison to protest his country’s war-mongering, then surely I can sit on the banks of the Delaware and find out if Washington’s late-night crossing was worth the trouble.
Jefferson taught that a government should keep its powers within the confines of the Constitution, except while he was president, and so I don’t feel so bad taking my government money and putting it into my gas tank to run wild all over New England. If Route 66 was a quest to discover the world and my place in it, this trip is a journey to the roots of our country. What makes us tick? Where do we come from? Why can you talk about the weather with anyone, anywhere, anytime and not sound like a raving lunatic?
I’ve decided that I renting a car for this trip would be a waste. The states are so small, and the driving so non-perilous, that my little Suzuki should do just fine. It would have croaked on the side of some Colorado mountainside, but I believe the rolling hills of Vermont will not be such a chore.
I’ve also decided that, since the states are so close together, the back roads and state highways will be more than adequate to see everything I want to see in a reasonable amount of time.
The trip begins where our Declaration of Independance did: in Philadelphia, a logical starting point to a trek so historical. I’ll lay eyes on the Liberty Bell, and Mr. Franklin’s printing shop, and the building where demigods, as Jefferson called them, met and decided to try out a nation-sized experiment. From there it’s down to Maryland, up to Delaware and New Jersey, and straight through for a night (or two) in Boston and on to Maine, where I’ll stream through Route 1 and 3 on back to New Hampshire. Vermont is a resting stop before tackling Saratoga and upstate New York, with a finish through wherever I think the Adams Family (presidential, not kooky) would want to see last.
These trips are the travel equivalent to a Greatest Hits album: not a full picture, but a quick browse-through of the catalog. I may not get to a Red Socks game, but I’ll be sure to grab a picture of Fenway if I’m in the neighborhood.
The vacation time is set, the money is in the bank – what I need now are a few B&B ideas and a map of rest stops for those nights I feel like braving the New England spring nights in my spacious backseat. Nothing beats an economic downturn like a trip out of town and a few adventures along the way. Clinton and Obama can fight for the few remaining states until they’re blue-er in the face; I’ll be finding out about the prize they so greedily seek.
