Maine Trip, Volume 01

It is now 3:27pm on Friday, June 25th. (Or it was when I wrote this.)

I'm writing this in the back of the RAV in the middle of our trip to Maine. We changed our leave time this morning to 8:30 instead of 6:30. This was due in great part to the ridiculous times Genevieve and I got out of work. Both for good reasons, though.

Last night Pauline held a party for some of her friends, doing something for herself for one of the first times since I've known her. So she asked me to help her run it (of course). The event was supposed to be 7:00-10:00 (we normally close at 9:00), but it was relatively casual, all with very chatty and friendly women, and so once the painting began after mingling, it was pretty late. It was actually very fun, just tiring. I left close to 11:30, but was satisfying and Pauline was very appreciative.

Anyway, when Michael and I got home, we packed up some last minute things, I prepared the rest of the snacks for today, and I took a shower and relaxed a bit with Michael waiting for Genevieve to get home. She was detained even longer than I; she left work around 1:00am after helping to finish up a bunch of video editing. Michael and I stayed up long enough to kiss her goodnight, and then at some point I fell into bed, waking up 15 minutes before my reset 8:00 alarm.

We actually left the apartment at around 8:50, only 20 minutes later than our leave time (this is why I _always_ want to plan for seriously early leaving; we notoriously take longer to do everything, generally make a lot of stops on a trip, and therefore always get places massively later than any of us want to). After doing all the errands we needed to (banks, post office, breakfast), we finally got onto the road at about 10:00. And we've been driving pretty much ever since. We kit a horrible wall of traffic in Connecticut that spanned about ¾ of a mile and lasted for almost an hour. It was essentially a parking lot.

I think the best part was when the woman in flowy robes walked past our car (in the middle lane of a major highway) and got ahead enough that I lost track of her. Other people were getting our of their cars, a motorcyclist and meat delivery man had a lively and friendly looking conversation across three lanes of traffic, several assholes in vans (including an on-the-clock Comcast employee) rode the shoulder shoving their way past the rest of us, and we played with Michael's new Flip cam and listened to horrible new Meatloaf music in an attempt to make the time go faster.

Other than that the ride's been pretty clear. That is to say until about ten minutes ago when we hit yet another nit of traffic. But now we're in Massachusetts, and it's more expected. And at least we're _moving_. We're just not going as quickly as we'd like.

Still our projected arrival time is before 5:30. We're hoping to stop very little before then, get all checked into the hotel, and then find some interesting spots in Freeport. So far we plan to visit the desert in the middle of Maine, L. L. Bean at midnight, and at some point (either today or tomorrow) have McLobster (at least Genevieve and I). We will also likely have some real food (hopefully local) at some point for dinner. My snacks are awesome but not a meal.

So, that's our trip thus far. Michael's making short video updates as well so this is looking to be our best-documented trip yet! I am especially fond of the gift I bought myself for the trip; the AC adapter that's allowing me to use/charge my laptop right now. It's _awesome_​. With it I can have plugged in my laptop with an AC cord, my DS with the USB cord, and Genevieve's GPS with the car port, all built into the same adapter. I think it's brilliant and wonderful.

That's all for now; I'll post this when I get to an internet connection and add more when we've made more headway.