The Scenic Route

 

   For the Roman, all roads lead to Rome. For me, all roads lead to Boston, my natal home, and now the home of our three sons. The Roman could travel by foot or horse or by boat on the sea road. I have more choices. My civilization has built tools to carry me swiftly over smooth roads or through the air. I can still walk if I want. Another tool quickly calculates it would take 24 days to walk from our home in Wannaska to our son Ned's home in Marshfield, Massachusetts. We'll probably never take the walking route, nor the bike option even though a bike would cut our travel time to six days.

   The tool making these calculators seems to harness the very spirits in the air. It provides pictures and maps of where we're going, tells where we can find food and lodging, and lets us communicate instantly with our hosts along the way. The internet has only become useful for travel in the last twenty years. We somehow made our around the country without it, but I wouldn't want to go back, despite its complications. 

   There are three main routes from home to Marshfield. The shortest route, at 1,655 miles, passes through Duluth, drops south through Michigan, crosses southern Ontario to Niagara Falls and across New York State into Massachusetts. The route we take most often, is slightly longer at 1750 miles and passes through the Twin Cities and Chicago. There's lots of tolls along this route's nonscenic roads. Then there's the northernmost route which passes north of Lake Superior in Canada. It looks much longer on the map but it's only 1,660 miles.

   A laughable feature of the map is the estimated travel time. The map says we can cover all three routes in about one day and three hours. That's driving the speed limit and not stopping. We've attempted that. Our record is one day, ten hours. Three days is the more humane travel time, and since retirement, we take four days with lots of stops. This most recent trip, we couldn't decide which of the two northern routes to take, so we drove through Duluth and across northern Wisconsin and Michigan, stopping for the night in Iron Mountain, MI.

   The weather was beautiful. There was a bunch of middle aged motorcyclists staying at our motel.  One of them wore a biker jacket that said he was a member of the Sons of Arthritis, Ibuprofen Chapter. In the morning they donned walkie-talkie helmets and weatherproof gear. They were trying to stay ahead of the rain. 

   We were taking a hybrid route this trip, skipping Lake Superior and driving along the beautiful northern shore of Lake Michigan. We came within view of the mighty Mackinac Bridge, but turned north to Sault Ste. Marie, crossing the bridge into Ontario. We had been warned about high gas prices in Canada so we filled up in the US. We had five hundred miles ahead of us which meant a night's stay in Canada. We didn't want to pay roaming charges, so we stopped at a Tim Horton's doughnut shop to use their wifi. We would have bought something as recompense but the line was too long. 

   Thanks to Tim Horton, we found a motel in the old mining town of Sudbury a couple of hours down the road. The Day's Inn Conference Centre had good rates, good reviews and a free breakfast. The reception area had two big portraits of the Buddha - always a good sign. We also received a welcome bag of water bottles, candy, and microwave popcorn. We checked the surrounding area for supper and decided to eat at the motel restaurant. After passing through the plush bar, we discovered the dining area was also the industrial style breakfast nook, complete with blaring techno music. We almost walked out, but we were tired and persevered. At breakfast meditative piano music was playing. 

   We pressed on along the Trans-Canada Highway, passing numerous mom and pop marijuana shacks, some offering free delivery. We saw billboard ads for the Marijuana One Dollar Club. I theorized that as a member you could go into one of these shops and get a puff for one dollar. 

  We returned to the US at Ogdensburg, NY. It was so quiet at the border that the customs agent chatted with us for several minutes before another vehicle came up behind us. We were now confronted with the looming mass of the Adirondack Mountains. The mountains are beautiful but the roads through them are narrow and winding and all the lodgings are at resorts. We pulled into a Dairy Queen and after purchasing a treat, searched the iPad for a resort in the general direction of Marshfield. The Adirondack Spruce Lodge fit the bill. 

  Much of the next day involved more winding roads to get out of the Adirondacks and into the winding roads of Vermont and New Hampshire. It's beautiful country but it's also road construction season. Waiting for a flagman to turn his or her sign from "Stop" to "Slow" played havoc with our ETA. Fortunately the New England states are small and we were soon in Massachusetts and rolling up to Ned's door three days and nine hours after leaving our own door.

Green Mountains of Vermont