southern before south

After delaying the start of this travel blog while working on a lengthy first post I realized the first part of my trip has started. I failed to write anything on the first day as I loaded my new, blue, Vaude (german-made climbing pack given to me by my older brother dan and his girlfriend kim for christmas) backpack into my fathers blue kia minivan and left Islesboro for a long while. For the last decade or so my mother and father and two brothers and I have travelled to Mississippi to my dad's grandparents house in Meridian for Christmas. Some years we fly, a few trips on the train, but mostly we have driven. This year we left Islesboro on the three-thirty ferry, picking my dad up from his last math class to teach before school holidays. There were seven of us in the car, all adults really, considering my younger brother Jesse is now seventeen and looking at colleges. Sue and Tommy, Dan and Kim, Amy and I, and Jesse. Not quite the little family roadtrip/vacation of my childhood but somehow we still make it work.

Anyway, we spend the first night in a hotel in Andover, Massachusetts that I booked on hotwire.com using a kindle (international 3G with no monthly fee, don't know if anything else can do that) from the backseat, I think it will prove itself useful many times on this trip. La Quinta Inn turned out to be the name, after some family Spanish lessons on the drive from Amy and our further destinations, I thought it to be a good sign. Still trying to work out what is significant about the fifth though...So today we drove out of new england, stopping for Jesse to visit Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT and dropping Amy off in Bridgeport for the ferry to Long island to make her own families Christmas in New York. Now we are well fed and mostly asleep at a family friends in Dover, Delaware. Starting today I hope to write at least one sentence everyday on this trip. Perhaps one picture, one gps point, and one sentence minimum...