Travelling On Down – BeeStrong

So, the adventure begins. We picked up a rental car in Peterborough and started our trip heading south east. TOH was happy with the Cadillac ATS. Thankfully before we left New Zealand, we had talked about how we would handle “discussions” while we are on the road. Well thank goodness we had. As the introduction of a GPS to our twosome certainly stretched our tolerance to each other and that was within the first 10 minutes of leaving Peterborough.

Half an hour after leaving Walmart (yup, of course I had to have a wee shop before leaving), we finally found Route 401 and headed North to Cornwall. Travelling along the 401 we were green with envy for the road and wished a few times that the main highway between Cape Reinga and Wellington was as good and easy to travel on.

Travelling through the countryside and seeing it awakening from hibernation again reminded me how different it is from home. The sun was shining, the snow had all but melted and green was starting to show.

I got to thinking after stopping at a roadside services area for a late lunch and while driving along these roads along with the multitude of Trucks (huge trucks) that passed us (going both ways). I wondered if New Zealand could perhaps consider sending not only their road makers to learn how to make great roads, but also service industry staff to learn how customers should be treated.

When you hear people talk about how nice the Canadians are, believe them.

We sadly said good bye to Canada and crossed into the United States at Cornwall and entered what felt like the land of BIG bridges. Welcome to the USA.

We travelled across the top of New York State (through a Wind Turbine site that seems to go forever, at least half an hours driving.). Through the beautiful mountainous Vermont, where the snow was still hanging around. Then in the dark across New Hampshire.

The darkness and our wonderful GPS brought new issues that caused the tolerance levels to be stressed to the max. The interchanges that seemed to do nothing but send us around and around and around and around and around in circles. Then on entering a freeway the @#$#@ GPS telling us we needed to be in the left lane within 100 meters while the traffic (who all obviously knew where they were going) whizzed past at high speeds. On the second attempt to enter the freeway we did safely manage to get to the correct lane after going around and around in circles again.

Believe me whoever writes the programmes for those Goddam GPS’s must have one sick sense of humour. Just for the fun of it, it seemed that the GPS then felt it best to take us across New Hampshire, to Maine in the middle of the night on a beautiful scenic route, through every small town it could find. Not that we could see much in the dark apart form lots and lots of trees and the odd “Watch for Moose” signs, which we had been warned to look out for. But how the…. am I supposed to spot Moose in the dark! My hope was that the moose really didn’t travel this far south or like all sensible beings were tucked up in bed by that time.

Finally, after 11.5 hours after leaving Peterborough, crossing through 5 states we arrived safely, though tired, in Portland Maine.

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