It’s Ma and Pa Holliday’s 50th wedding anniversary this year, and to celebrate five wonderful years together, as well as forty-five additional arduous years having to deal with my brother and me, they decided to do a week-long family trip in New England; Aaron and I were born here and called the place home until we moved to Cleveland in 1984. Audrey and I decided to extend the trip, so in addition to a week with the family, we’ll be spending a total of three weeks on a glorious, work-free adventure through New England, across Southern Ontario, and ending finally in one of the world’s most popular travel destinations, Cleveland, Ohio.
The trip started with a 5:30AM wakeup in Los Angeles yesterday, and we arrived in Boston by late afternoon through the magic of chairs that travel through the sky at 600 mph; airplanes are truly wondrous machines, and the folks causing current increases in air rage incidents really need to go back to using conestoga wagons for a while to regain some perspective.
Shortly after landing in Boston we made the short trek to Manchester, New Hampshire, where we met a high school friend at her family’s home for dinner. After much laughing and some incredible home-cooked food (thanks Erin & John!) we finally returned to the hotel and headed to bed.
We met up with the rest of the Holliday clan early this morning and set off on a trip to the coast and the town of Portsmouth. Audrey and I took the scenic route, revisiting Nashua where I spent the first nine years of my time on this planet. From there we played the “find a Dunkin'” game through rural New Hampshire on our way to the coast (spoiler alert: Dunkin’ Donuts has a location approximately every 250 feet throughout New England). We ate lunch next to several docked tugboats in Portsmouth, roamed across the state border to Maine for a quick stop in Kittery, then enjoyed more of rural New Hampshire by continuing to avoid highways on our 90-minute return trip to Manchester.
The lobster roll count after today stands at two (one for lunch, one for dinner), the moose count is currently at zero, and we’re hoping to increase both of those counts significantly as we start up the coast of Maine tomorrow.