Tuesday - July 25, 2006

For roadtrippers, there's a certain spirituality to the time where you first clean out the car in some motel parking lot or camp site thousands of miles from home. You've traveled across endless strips of blacktop, stopping here and there for a quick meal, a local newspaper, some souvenirs, and you've generated a medium size compost heap of wrappers, packages, plastic bags, and other junk. Sure you try to clean up every day, as you say you will, but after a while you grow accustomed to your moving refuge pile. Then one day you toss a water bottle in the back seat and it bounces off a molehill of trash that you know you won't recycle today or tomorrow. That day, you realize that your car, immaculately cleaned for the big roadtrip, is now a filthy mess.

For us that day was today. The sun was already cooking the asphalt in our Bangor motel as folks along the Atlantic Coast were readying for another broiling assault of the latest heat wave. We were aiming to hit Boston by late afternoon and had reckoned that traffic related to the newest "Big Dig" woes affecting that beleaguered city would spin out frightful jams throughout that surrounding region. So we woke early and planned to depart quickly. But the car, the car... I couldn't wait one more second to clean that car. Happily we both discovered the spirit that follows a good airing out - joyfully tossing eleven days of detritus, rediscovering postcards we thought we'd lost, and realizing that our backseat has plenty of room when its not covered in garbage. We promised ourselves to keep our car cleaner from here on out, a goal that will likely last another day or so.

Figuring that the trip to Boston would be difficult, I fretted about whether we should abandon a couple side trips we'd planned for that morning. I'd already made the difficult decision to remove Roadside America in Shartlesville, Pennsylvania, from our itinerary. This is one of my top three favorite tourist traps, but we're planning a straight shot to D.C. before turning back north for Philadelphia and New York and a jaunt out to rural Pennsylvania just seems an excessive detour. Acknowledging that reality, we also agreed that a day spent visiting only one site would be just too depressing. So, taking the highway south we stopped in Lisbon.

For lovers of Moxie soda (I guess it's "pop" around here), this pleasant little town offers an essential stop, if only to visit the tiny "museum" along the main drag where aficionados chat with the local proprietor Frank Anicetti. Some people know all there is about the Civil War. Others spend their lives studying baseball trivia. This fellow focuses much of his energy on Moxie, knowing pretty much all there is to know about the stuff. To him, Moxie isn't just a drink, it's a community - maybe even a civil rights movement: "Coke drinkers are discriminating. Pepsi drinkers are discriminating. But we Moxie drinkers accept everyone as long as they have fun." After suddenly developing an urge to buy Moxie souvenirs, we returned to the road.

Our next stop was Yarmouth, home of Eartha. This is a spiritual site for a different reason. Within its three-story housing, you can see an impressive topographical map stitched together to form the world's largest globe. It had to be somewhere, I suppose. It's kind of cool and sort of humbling to see everything, or at least an awesome facsimile of it. The visitor's center also includes an ambitious array of maps, globes, and travel guidebooks. Wandering the aisles, I spotted a familiar cover. They have a stack of Motel America, the book Jenny and I labored over a couple years ago. Vienna picked up a large world map that she will mount on her ceiling. We then said goodbye to Eartha and returned to the "real world."

We reached Boston in much less time than I anticipated and discovered that the twisting maze of looping highways was no more jammed up than normal. At once I realized that we could get into the south Boston metroplex for our visit to the Adams National Park site fairly soon, freeing up a sizable chunk of day to rethink this portion of our trip. Before too long we were winding around the convoluted streets of Quincy, a town clearly platted before the need for gridded streets. With some hassle, we reached a visitor's center and grabbed tickets to tour two houses and a mansion once owned by the family of John Adams. Vienna being a student and I being a professor offers some advantage: we paid nothing for our tickets.

Since Vienna first saw the movie musical 1776, she has had a bit of a crush on William Daniels' portrayal of John Adams, the fiery patriot who helped the United States free itself from Britain through sheer stubbornness and intransigence alone. While not a beloved figure, Adams's determination to help forge nothing less than a new "American mind" was essential to our nation's founding. While the real John Adams was far less attractive and dynamic than his cinematic counterpart, we both agreed that his life was fascinating. We therefore thoroughly enjoyed our two-hour tour through his birthplace and second home built nearby. Both sites, reflective of relative wealth of the day, were surprisingly small and simple. Not so was the nearby mansion that had been bought and refurbished by Adam's wife, Abigail, to accommodate their increased standing. Vienna and I were really impressed by that site, with its centuries-old furniture, vivid paintings of historic figures, and - most pleasantly - cool library that allowed us a break from the un-air conditioned houses. We learned a lot about John Adams and son, John Quincy Adams, both of whom chose brilliance over being beloved and paid the price politically.

Departing the town of Quincy we stopped briefly at the Modern Diner in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to photograph one of the few diners worthy of placement on the National Register of Historic Places. We then drove into Providence with no particular idea for a dinner break. A couple of the diners I wanted to visit there have been lost. Luckily, we found the Federal Hill district and grabbed a pizza on a relaxing plaza for outside dining. A Frank Sinatra imitator crooned nearby while we enjoyed the splashing fountain and cooling breezes. By early evening, we'd returned to the road and realized that we could make Shartlesville that evening if we really wanted to.

Our path would take us through New York City and across New Jersey, hopefully in time to avoid the nightmare traffic that would surely erupt the next morning if we chose to wait. Our spirits were high and our car was humming; we decided to go for it. Generally, the plan worked out well - except for the nighttime construction that transformed zippy three-lane interstates into one-lane crawls. Most annoyingly, dozens of self-absorbed lunatics exacerbated the traffic by their inability to follow the logic of safe and courteous merging. Nonetheless, we made it across the George Washington Bridge and through Jersey without too much crisis.

Passing into Pennsylvania, I realized that finding a motel within our budget would be increasingly difficult. One particular Scottish Inn manager awoke to the ringing of his lobby bell and sought to charge about seventy bucks for a dingy room that we'd occupy for about six hours. Feeling Adams-like in my obstinacy, I returned to the road. After one in the morning, Vienna had drifted off to sleep and I was accompanied by my "night driving" playlist along with a line of pushy big rigs for whom local speed limits seemed to be quaint suggestions. Entering Shartlesville, I realized that we would not find a motel. Perhaps I was a bit goofy from the day's drive but I must admit, I was kind of glad. It was nice to dawdle along old US-22 searching for a quiet place to pull off - behind barns were cows slept, behind churches with their ever-lit parking lots. Eventually, I found the local elementary school and my gut said, "this is the place." I passed a nice diner a few miles back and plan for a hearty breakfast the next morning. Before too long, the Pennsylvania sun will awaken us to a new day.