I can’t believe it! I’m up at 2:30 am. I set the alarm clock for 3:30. I’m too excited to sleep. John my boyfriend is awake too! Ok, this gives us time to have a normal morning and not a rushed one even if it is the middle of the night. Feed and walk the dog, fill up on coffee, grab the GPS and we’re off, on the road again.
The traffic signals are all on flash. There is no traffic, just the newspaper delivery trucks and us. We slide onto the highway without a hitch. This journey will be an estimated 5 hours to Newcastle Maine. That’s just this side of no-where and the far side of too damn far. This trip was mostly on interstates but portions of it included old route one which is one of Americas first Maine to Miami highways. In the dawn light you can still see the architectural skeletons of old motels, diners and gas stations.
As we neared Newcastle the towns became villages and the stores became markets or produce stands on the edge of the roads. And the views became vistas. The morning was cool; the sky was a true blue and the grass greener than in Massachusetts. Up ahead on the left was our destination.
The first thing to do was to find the bathroom. The second thing on the list was to scout the inventory at this sale. We found many wonderful items from the 19th century but they are not what we are interested in. However, perched up on a plastic table was a beautiful “rare” Heywood Wakefield drop leaf table from the late 1930’s and right next to it was a stream lined desk also from the same decade. We purchased them then carried them out to the truck, strapped them down, got the GPS out and started our trip back home.
Traffic was insane, way out in the middle of nowhere, the vacationers where leaving at the same time that we were. There were license plates from Maine, Florida, Texas, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. We moved slowly for the first 6 miles and then it went smoothly and uneventfully. On one of the towns we passed through; we saw long lines of people waiting to order lobster in the little restaurants near the water. Then we found out it was “lobster festival”. We thought about finding a place not so crowded to have our lobster plate but the long lines and heavy traffic dictated otherwise.
We were tired, I was falling asleep in the truck and John had a headache, we needed food. So we stopped, grabbed a bite at a fast food joint and kept on going. We had entered Massachusetts already when we got spitting rain and decided to stop to tarp our load. We then drove until we got home, unloaded the truck and concluded our trip with our winding down routine; walked and fed the dog, took a shower and fell sound sleep on the couch in front of the TV.
