Daily Photos: Day 145

Saturday, May 24th

Going into the hotel last night was like that brain teaser where you have to get a fox, a chicken, and a sack of grain across a river and can only cross with one at a time. The fox will eat the chicken if left on the bank together, and the chicken will eat the grain. How do you get them all across? Our dilemma was how to get the three sleeping children (and our bags) into the hotel. We all had to go in at once, because we couldn't leave a child alone in the room. At this point I don't remember who or how many woke up, but it was enough to get us all in. Subsequent trips to the car were made for clothes and diapers. We all got a good nights sleep and woke up feeling much better... except for Julee who woke up and then threw up. And then drove all day.

We stopped for lunch and to let the kids run free at a rest stop in Maine.

As usual they found some sticks and rocks and were wildly happy.

The mountain in the distance is the last mountain we would have climbed had we finished our northbound hike of the Appalachian Trail.

It was really more impressive in person than it looks in this picture.

Once we got to Maine we decided we would keep on driving until we got to our destination. It was strange: after the big cities the night before we were on open stretches on highway with only trees on either side and no other cars in sight - until the State Trooper...

We had a bit of excitement when we approached some other cars which were slowing down. We suddenly realized why as the mother duck went under our wheels and emerged behind us in a flurry of feathers. She and her string of ducklings had all been crossing the highway and I'm not sure if any of them made it. Although we felt bad about killing the mother there was really nothing we could have done to avoid her. If we had swerved we might have had an accident ourselves or caused one, and at the least we would have missed her but killed some of the ducklings. Julee shared some advice she said Chris has given her on their cross-country drive after getting married: "Just line it up and hit it straight!" We also had a chuckle because our most requested song of the trip (second only to 5 Little Monkeys) was Old MacDonald... and without fail Sam always picked duck on the first verse. How appropriate, we thought, that it is in the past tense: "And on that farm he had a duck..."

The second bit of excitement came late as we were almost to our destination. We were looking for a particular exit and decided we had missed it. We backtracked and found out that we had actually not gone far enough. We didn't see any other traffic on the road we were on, and we suddenly realized we were riding on empty. (The funny thing was that we had stopped at a gas station to get our directions sorted out and Julee commented to herself that, "We don't want your gas!") As we pulled up to a toll booth we asked the operator how far it was to the nearest gas station. "Oh, about 35 kilometers," he said. "How much gas do you have?" We told him it was on the line and he said, "You just might make it - it's mostly downhill." We laughed and then looked at each other wondering if he was serious or not. The fact that he hadn't been worried about sending two women and three children off into the dark night along a barren stretch of road made us think that he was sure we would have enough gas. Either that or he was particularly uncaring. We had the smoothest ride of our life as Julee tried not to brake or accelerate, and were never happier to see the lights of Truro. $72 worth of gas later we were on our way again, and not too much later we pulled into Mom and Dad's.