There are many reasons to travel. One of the main reasons is that I feel the need to move around a lot when I have time off is because I do a lot of sitting at my job. A second reason is that my job isn’t intellectually challenging so. I can feel my brain turning to concrete and I need to aerate it; to turn this gray and dull thing into something that is alive and pulsating. Not that I am complaining; I have a great life and I know it. Still, every once in a while I need something to knock me out of my complacency and a road trip is just what the doctor ordered. My final reason for travelling is "why not?” I have the time and money and what better way to spend the both of them than by hitting the open road.
Our first stop on my fall break was Boston. I had ordered tickets for the hop on and hop off tour bus but since out tour didn’t start until10:00, Grant and I had some time to kill. We walked around Quincy Market and took some cheesy selfies in front of the Sam Adams statue before making our way down to the waterfront. ‘Coach’ was our tour guide and he was really good at his job, which was fortunate for us since we took the same tour with him two and a half times. On the second time around, we got off at the stop for the USS Constitution and, since it was closed, we walked up to the Bunker Hill monument. It was such a nice day with no rain, a full sun, and seventy-degree temperatures, that I laid back on the grass and took a little nap in front of the obelisk. It was one of the many small moments that I experienced that made the trip worthwhile.
We took the tour a third time in the afternoon to kill an hour before we met up with JT, Grant's best friend from his school days, at the Hard Rock Cafe. It was a huge restaurant but, because of the virus, we had the place to ourselves. A second moment that I will treasure is when JT sheepishly told us that it was his birthday. Clearly, he hadn’t made any plans, and was excited to spend his big day with his friend from Louisville.
On Friday, I took a side excursion to Martha's Vineyard while Grant spent the day with JT in Boston. The bus took two and a half hours to get to the island, then there was a forty-five minute ferry ride, and then I took a three-hour tour of the island. It was an endurance race and I think that is what attract people to Martha's Vineyard; it is very difficult to get to, expensive (the ferry ride alone is $120 for a car), and the residents are ensured a lot of privacy. There are no streetlights, no industry, and very little commerce. I imagine that the people who buy a house on Martha’s Vineyard need a break from the hustle and bustle of Boston or Providence and need a place to do nothing for a couple of weeks out of the year. The island is packed during the peak season of June through August but it is dead for the rest of the year because it is cold and wind.
Tom was our driver and he liked to drop a lot of names about who lives on Martha’s Vineyard. Past residents include Walter Cronkite, James Cagney, Billy Joel and Christy Brinkley. People who currently own a place on the island are Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, Carly Simon, James Taylor, and Dan Ackroyd. Seth Meyer and Amy Schumer have been broadcasting their shows from their houses on the island since they cannot have a live studio audience during the time of the plague. John Belushi is buried there. Finally, Barack Obama bought a fourteen million dollar house from the owner of the Celtics and has had Michael Jordon stay with him. The two luminaries play golf on the course that abuts the former president’s property.
Martha’s Vineyard is where "Jaws" was filmed and Tom tirelessly pointed out the spots where the movie was filmed; Quint’s shop, Chief Brody’s house, and the bridge where the shark swam under to feed on the people in the tidal pool. He had been a tour guide for a long time and got to know Bill Clinton when he visited the island during his presidency. With a little prodding, Tom showed us some pictures of himself with the Clintons and let it be known that he was at Chelsea’s wedding. I knew that the Clintons often came to the island, which is why I thought that it would have one mansion after another, but really there were just a couple of cottage towns spread out over the island, and that added to its charm for me.
On Saturday, we took Amtrak from Boston to D.C. just to see the fall colors. It was a seven-hour train ride and we had to travel light, with just the backpacks and nothing else, because we would not get to the hotel until late in the evening. It felt like we were in an episode of “The Amazing Race” because we were constantly in motion and carried all of our possessions with us as we rode the rails through the most populous cities on the eastern seaboard. At one point I turned to Grant and said, “I am proud of us” because this was our fourth day of hard travel and we endured without getting sick or turning on each other.
Once we arrived in D.C., we left Union Station and then walked to L’Enfant Plaza to meet up with our Segway tour. Emily was our guide and the two young women who joined us, Mikayla and Kaitlyn, were clearly nervous about getting on the Segway. Mikayla was so afraid that her hands were visibly shaking as she grabbed the handlebars for the first time. Kaitlyn apologized at every intersection because she was too scared to power her Segway up the ramp to reach the sidewalk. We heard “I’m sorry” at each traffic light. When we turned around, we saw Kaitlyn at the bottom of the ramp, looking up at us sheepishly, because her machine had stopped half way up and she had to get off and walk. Meanwhile, Grant was clearly enjoying himself, chatting up our tour guide while riding the Segway, because they had found common ground. Emily was a self-proclaimed science fiction nerd and they talked about the Comic Cons that they had been to.
D.C. looks a lot different at night and, although I have been there several times in the past, it was a very different experience in the dark. The highlight was stopping in front of the Lincoln Memorial and walking to the statues of the Korean War soldiers. By the end of the tour, however, I was visibly tired and ready to go back to the hotel. We had reservations on an early flight back to Louisville on Sunday. Still, I had accomplished what I had set out to do and that was to travel as much as possible over the course of a five-day weekend to see as much as I could see. Given the chance, I would do it all over again.
