The Vacation Slide

You can't fill a Thermos of coffee on the Mass Pike

Driving west on I-90, OH/PA border, Tuesday morning.

I’m back home from a weekend away I didn’t really know I needed. 

I picked up a collection of over 1,600 CDs in upstate New York, toward the end of an epic drive from Toledo to Boston that left me wiped out.  I got to hang with dear friends there for the night, then made my way to Maine to see more cool people and have some adventures.

I checked out some of the natural scenery in Yarmouth, a fantastic bookstore in downtown Portland, some great Mexican food and local pizza, and then Sunday we headed up to Rockland.  We didn’t end up visiting their famous lobster festival at all, but we rode the trial run of a new train service resurrecting some rail lines between Rockland and Brunswick, which was a neat trip through some idyllic Maine woods.

Midcoast Rail Service’s new self-propelled passenger line from Rockland to Brunswick, Maine.

The railfan in our group thus satiated, we headed to a dockside restaurant in nearby Thomaston, The Slipway, for fried clams and blackened haddock sandwiches under a shady umbrella on the water.  It was an idyllic day out, the likes of which I haven’t enjoyed in a long time, with great company in a beautiful part of the world.

And I found Moxie Cola on the way back to Portland!  My official verdict: it’s like root beer for grown-ups.  The vaunted “bitter aftertaste” only really hit me when I ate something right after drinking it.  It’s pop without the sicky sweetness and I’m kind of a fan, I think.  It’s probably good that they only sell it way out there.

I’m so midwestern, I was like “these clam strips are really big” till I realized they were, you know, actual fresh clams.

I headed back west as far as Buffalo on Monday, running into some of the worst rain I’ve ever encountered on the road.  It looked like I was in a car wash for about thirty minutes – most people were pulling off the road, everyone had their flashers on, and we were doing 25 or 30 on the interstate.  Just about the point where I thought the roadbed might start flooding, we drove out of it, and five minutes later the sun was shining overhead, with a wall of blackness in the rearview mirror.

I saw more good friends from my comedy days, got a little sleep on a couch, and headed back to Toledo Tuesday, after a stop for breakfast with my mother-in-law in Ashtabula.  I made sure I got back in time to add my voice to the resounding defeat of Issue 1 in Ohio, a rare victory for common sense in an increasingly stupid and frustrating state, and to restock the house with coffee and beer in preparation for the CD listing marathon to come.

There’s been a lot written recently about the loneliness epidemic, and about how middle-aged dudes especially have a hard time forming and maintaining friendships.  After a life of being Very Online and doing several incarnations as a traveling clown, many of the people I’ve connected with live far from me, and now that I now clown locally, I don’t have a built-in excuse to see them.

The Green Hand Bookstore in downtown Portland ME is absolutely worth an afternoon, it’s a welcoming sort of chaos.

I dunno if it’s aging, the pandemic, prolonged absence, or just my own weirdness, but every stop I made on this trip was an exercise in self-doubt and bad internal monologuing.  What if they’re mad at me for imposing?  What if they’re annoyed that I got stuck in traffic?  What if we run out of stuff to talk about five minutes after I get there?

And then everyone I saw and spent time with was delightful, and gracious, and happy to see me, and we wrung a lot of joy out of a short visit.  I’m sure next time I go, I’ll do the same thing, but I can at least jot this observation down in the moment while I regroup, even though I won’t take it to heart when I should.