The East

 

   The best thing about the World Cup being in North America is that fans from overseas have realized the US is not as bad as its press. Americans can be as nice as anyone else if you're nice to them. The fans have spent a lot of money to get here and their efforts to have a good time have been rewarded. Americans are nowhere near as passionate about soccer as fans from elsewhere so there's no hostility towards fans when their country plays the US Men's team.

   Teresa and I just completed a tour across the Eastern half of the US. The whole counrty was bedecked in US flags. It's our 250th birthday. Our national sour mood has abated for a season. The only discordant note I heard was in a small-town Pennsylvania gas station. A woman was complaining that gas price would be going up because the president had ended the cease fire in Iran.

  We had various goals for this trip. We planned to see our three sons south of Boston, then drive to Delaware to pick up Teresa's sister Cindy and take her to Minnesota for a visit. We had a new car, a hybrid, and we had to get used to the weirdness of that. 

   We could have driven to Boston in three days (or 34 hours if we were crazy) but there was no need for haste so we took four days. In the old days we found our lodging by driving up to places, checking the vacancy sign, and then going inside to check the price. We had to start looking around five pm especially on weekends to make sure we got a place. Now we can search ahead on our phone, read the reviews and line up a place with a complimentary "breakfast," genrally consisting of a banana and a pice of toast.

   We took the trans-Canadian route on the way out. The route through Canada is about the same distance for us as staying in the US. It avoids running the Chicago gauntlet and the toll roads. We took the upper Canada route from Sault Ste. Marie to Ottawa, 570 miles in Canada. We'd only taken this route twice in the past, the last time being thirty years ago. We had pleasant memories of a restaurant we had stopped at overlooking the Ottawa River. I couldn't remember the name of the town the restaurant was in and wondered if it would even be open. But we kept our eyes open and recognized it right away. The waitress said she had moved to the town from southern Ontario because of the view. The food was still excellent.

Valois Restaurant, Mattawa, Ontario, since 1903

   We arrived in Marshfield, Massachusetts in time for our son Ned's 40th surprise birthday party. I wrote about this event in my post last Friday. Ned's wife Victoria's family has a cottage on the beach so we spent some time there enjoying the cooling breezes. There's a cornhole fanatic in the family and we were induced to join several games. I was still recovering from our long drive and my bags rarely landed on the cornhole board. It was humiliating but I gradually got better as my cognition returned.

   Over the next few days we also saw out oldest son Matt and his family culminating in a pizza party at Ned's house. Ned and Matt then returned to their respective tugboats in New York for their two week hitches. At the same time our middle son Joe returned to Marshfield from his tugboat for his two weeks off. For many years Joe has been describing the fantastic fireworks display in Marshfield. So on the evening of July 3, we joined Joe and his two kids and a bunch of cousins on the ten minute walk to the beach. 

   We were part of a mass migration to the shore. The tide was out and people were already setting off fireworks. We walked out on the wide expanse hard packed sand amidst people igniting their professional grade rockets and whiz-bangs. So this was a totally do-it-yourself display. We were amazed to see rockets exploding right overhead and all up and down the shoreline. "It's only going to get better," Joe said.

   The display was already the equivalent of what most towns do for the five or ten minutes at the end of a display. As it got darker the number of rockets exploding doubled then doubled again. Groups of men and boys would pull a loaded wagon onto the beach and begin setting off rockets. This would go on for several minutes. When they were done another group would replace them. Joe said a typical wagonload of fireworks cost about $5,000. And this went on for almost two hours! I had always watched fireworks for a distance. This was a totally immersive experience. After a while I got rocket neck from looking up. As the evening wore on Teresa and I sat in beach chairs and watched as the display gradually wore down. Someone's radio nearby softly played the national anthem and when it was over we walked home.

Happy Birthday America (photo by Teresa)

   Next day, the Fourth, we went to my sister's house in the adjacent town of Scituate. My sister is a party giver par excellence. She has parties on St Patrick's Day, Christmas Eve, and The Fourth of July and as needed. This one started about 2:00 pm and went late, with various family, friends and neighbors coming and going. There was a bare chested and excellent guitarist by the pool singing the oldies and expecting everyone to sing along whether we knew the words or not.

   A few years ago my brother Mark sold his house and bought a 60' sailboat. It's as spacious afloat as a small house and very nice, but it had a couple of flaws that Mark's been working on. Luckily he's a handy guy. The boat is fully operational this season and we were invited out for a sail on Sunday. There were fourteen of us aboard as we dropped the mooring and headed out Hull Gut and northeast towards Boston. We sailed around the history-soaked islands, recalling their legends and returned to the mooring so the kids could swim off the boat.

   The next day we packed, visited teapoetry and Jim at their cottage down towards the Cape, and the following day we headed for Middletown, Delaware to pick up Teresa's sister Cindy to take her for a long visit back in Roseau. I like driving, but this long drive around NYC is not my favorite. To make decent time we have to stay on freeways and the GPS insists we drive through New York and Philadelphia so I had to cobble together a series of interstates skirting the worst of the megalopolis. It rained hard all morning and we were delayed as a wrecker removed an overturned semi from our route.

   We spent a night with Cindy's daughter Abigail's family. Son Roman has learned how to make impressively good Neapolitan style pizza. Next morning we packed up and headed for Minnesota. We decided to give ourselves four easy days on as many secondary roads as possible. Delaware is small and flat and it didn't take long to leave the state. We cut across the northeast corner of Maryland and into Pennsylvania's quintessential Amish country. We would be in Pennsylvania the rest of the day. 

   Pennsylvania is not flat at all. We traversed gradually steepening hills passing through towns that have been in place since colonial days. The town of Red Lion is built along the ridge of a hill. Main Street is lined with connected brick homes with well furnished front porches. It took twenty minutes to pass through the mile-long Main St. due to the many traffic lights. The porch of any of these houses would be the perfect place to watch the world go by. After Red Lion we climbed into the higher foothills which were turning into 2,000' mountains. By one pm we had only gone 150 miles since Delaware. This was a little too scenic, so after a late lunch out of the cooler and gas station ice cream (Cindy loves ice cream) we hit the turnpike. Thanks to tunnels cut through the mountains we arrived in Grove City north of Pittsburg at quitting time. 

   Next day we were able to return to secondary roads in Ohio and Indiana farm country. Corn is the crop of choice there. We passed through several attractive town. Towns with colleges seemed the most vibrant. We stopped for the night in Bourbonville, Illinois, sixty miles south of Chicago. Next day we passed lots more corn on the way to Rochester, MN. For some reason the GPS sent us through a region of steep Pennsylvania-like hills around Dubuque. One stretch was called Swiss Valley with good reason. After lunch in an old cemetary, we found a non-chain ice cream shop for dessert. If a town can't have a college, it had better have a good ice cream shop to remain vibrant. Colesburg, Iowa is vibrant.

  After a night in Rochester and a long drive on familiar roads, we arrived home to find the lawn mowed the garden growing (thanks Jack) and everything as we had left it. We have the Roseau County Fair to look forward to. Cindy loves the Fair. There were mosquitoes at home too, but they'll clear off in due time. It's time now to recuperate from our travels. Maybe play a game of cornhole should one offer.