V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N
Posted by Donna on September 19, 2009
19 September 2009 – Day 1
We did it! My mother and I finally left on our road trip to Tennessee. Yeah!!
By 8 a.m. this morning I had the rented white Hyundai Sonata all packed and was just pacing between the kitchen, the den, and my bedroom… trying to remember what I’d forgotten (surely I’d forgotten something!)… and getting anxious to hit the road. Finally I told Gerry there was no sense in my hanging around and that I was going to go ahead and head south to my mother’s home in Massachusetts.
You’ll be glad to know that about 15 miles down the highway I remembered what I’d forgotten. It wasn’t toothpaste or clean underwear or anything as common as that. I had forgotten to write down our car insurance information in case I need it along the way. Easily solved though. When I got to my mother’s house two hours later I called to check in with Gerry and asked him to text that information to me.
So I arrived at my mother’s house about an hour early. She was also packed, ready and eager to get on the road. One final decision had to be made though… we had decided that we’d bring a wheel chair for my mother to use in case she got tired or winded. She had two of them so we needed to decide which to use.
Yeah… that was pretty funny. She sat in the first one that has small wheels on both the front and back. It’s a “transport” chair. I started pushing her across the lawn and we were doing okay. Then we hit a rut. Oops. Mom almost went flying! 
Tried the other chair with the big wheels in the back. It was a lot heavier and harder to push. So we decided to bring the transport chair with us. We’ll just have to buckle Mom into it and buy her a helmet. ha ha ha
Since my sister and brother-in-law weren’t home, and I had arrived so early, my mother and I decided to go to her favorite diner for lunch. We stopped back at her house to see if my sister or her husband had gotten home yet (so that we could say goodbye). They had so we chatted for a few minutes and then we were OFF ON OUR ADVENTURE!!
We’ve been planning this trip since shortly after I returned from my stint in Mississippi and Georgia last winter. For it to finally be here was amazing.
For those of you who weren’t aware of this road trip, let me give you our vision of it. We want to see part of this great country. We both love the mountains and want to see some that we haven’t seen before. So we are going to be driving down through the Shenandoah Mountains in Virgina (I think… better figure that out if we want to get there, huh?); the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee; and then off to Nashville; Memphis; hopefully Chattanooga; and then to Atlanta, Georgia to catch a plane home on October 2nd.
We didn’t make any hotel reservations and don’t have to be anywhere at a certain date/time except for a Loretta Lynn concert next Saturday, and then our flight home the following Friday. In between we are going to relax and do whatever feels good that day. No rushing to be at this place or that place. I’m sure we’ll see a lot, but we have no pressure to see and do it all.
For today, my first proposed stopover was Scranton, Pennsylvania (about 5 hours from my mother’s house… about 7 hours total driving time for me).
As I wrote on my Facebook page this morning before I turned off my computer… “Not sure if we’ll make it today [to Scranton], but that’s the goal (well, it’s not a goal exactly… more… like our loosely defined target that we may not make if we lollygag too much along the way).”
Reaching Scranton would put us out of familiar New England territory and also about 2-3 hours from Hershey, PA; Lancaster County, PA and Gettysburg, PA. Those are all places we want to stop at. So… if we could make it all the way to Scranton, we could have a nice easy drive on Sunday, then stop for a couple of nights in that area.
The drive was easy… Rte 495 south to the Mass turnpike… to Rte 84 west… to Rte 81 north…
Along the way we stopped at a “scenic view” spot to take in the view from the top of the mountain we didn’t know we’d climbed. Well, we did figure it out before we got to the top, but it was a pretty subtle mountain. Reminded me of the Hugh Grant movie called The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. Anyway… our first hint was when we saw an exit sign for Mountain Rd. I chuckled and asked my mother “Do you see a mountain?”
We hadn’t, but then we started looking around. Hmmm… maybe we were climbing… did my ears just pop? Then we saw a street sign that read, “Elevation 1254″ (which according to Wikipedia, does in fact make it a mountain!). A few minutes later we saw another sign telling us of the scenic view pull-off. So we pulled off.
All I can say is… they made a mountain out of a mole hill. The view was nothing to write home about, but then again, here I am writing home about it, so I guess it was pretty special after all. Funny how things like that happen, huh?
I won’t bore you with the details of our conversations or how many times I had to tell my mother to find a new radio station because we’d gone out of range, but suffice it to say we had a lovely time together.
We arrived at the Fairfield Inn in Dickson City, PA (just outside of Scranton) at 5:45 p.m. The cool thing about this place is that we got the room for super cheap because my mother works for the Marriott hotel chain. Cool, huh?
After we’d unloaded the car, I went for a short swim in the pool. The water was way too warm for my taste, so I didn’t swim as long I as I would have had it been more comfortable. Then I went in to the whirlpool for about 5 minutes. Although I didn’t exercise for as long as I would have liked, it felt good to move my muscles.
We settled in for bologna sandwiches and Goldfish crackers (okay… I confess… we actually bought the cheapo Whales crackers at Wal-Mart). My mother is sitting at the desk reading a new smut novel (it’s a really steamy one by Linda Lael Miller) and I’m writing this blog entry.
Once I’ve posted this entry, I’ll probably do a little Internet surfing and then a bit of reading before turning in for the night. For a long day on the road, it didn’t seem that long.
I expect tomorrow will be another great day.
Hugs,
–Donna
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