vacation, pt. 1

By anders pearson 27 Dec 2002

i thought i’d be clever and took an overnight greyhound from new york back to maine on saturday night. i thought “no one else would be crazy enough to get on a greyhound at midnight so i’ll be able to stretch out and maybe get some sleep.” hah! never underestimate the insanity of holiday travellers. the bus was packed. it was a miserable 11 hour ride and there was no sleep for me.

my parents picked me up at the bus station and we headed over to my aunt’s for the big family gathering. i somehow managed to retain consciousness through most of it but i was pretty much dead by the time we got back to dexter.

spent the first part of the week just hanging out in dexter with my family, doing the christmas thing, playing with the pets, etc.

on thursday, my friend kat came and picked me up. we were close friends in junior high and at my first high school. i hadn’t seen her for about 4 years. she has two daughters now. i still have a hard time accepting that people my age are actually even capable of having children. anyway, despite the difficulties of being a young single mother, she seems to be doing ok. wednesday night it had snowed pretty heavily so the roads were nice and slippery. on the way to bangor, we managed to do a nice slow motion sideways slide off the road and into a ditch. luckily some kid coming the other way had seen us slide off and he pulled over and called a tow truck for us. the entire accident happened at about 2 miles an hour so no one was hurt and the car wasn’t damaged; the ditch was just steep enough that we couldn’t get the car out ourselves. so we sat in the car in the ditch for about 40 minutes waiting for the tow truck to come pull us out. didn’t really matter much to us; we’d just planned on getting together and talking anyway. in a ditch was about as good a place to talk as anywhere else. there was only one real downside. people in maine are very friendly and helpful. to the point of being annoying. every single car that drove by felt it necessary to pull over and ask us “is everyone ok?” “yes, we’re fine, thank you” “do you need a cellphone?” “no, we’ve already called a tow truck, and we’re just waiting for them now, thanks.” i had that exact conversation with about 30 different people.