Curious Souls

After Cape Cod , we continued on down the east coast. Being the conspiracy lover that I am, I insisted that we drive by the Skull and Bones Tomb at Yale. Much to my dismay, I didn't capture any past, present or future politician entering the edifice. Disheartened, we kept on to Philadelphia. The first order of business was to locate a proper cheese steak. According to Wikipedia, Pat's was the originator of said sandwich . While not as flashy as Geno's next door, we decided to go straight to the source. We opted for a half-provolone, half-cheeze whiz steak and we were not disappointed. In fact, the sandwich was so delicious that we nearly devoured the entire thing before I remembered to take a picture. And the peppers that were offered at the condiment stand were juicy, hot, fire bombs of flavor. We certainly did NOT make a "misteak" in our selection. After dinner, we hunkered down at our very first waterfront Wal-Mart . We had a lovely view of New J...

I admit that at least 70% of the motivation for this post was, indeed, the title. Eat your heart out, Luda. As you know, we recently removed everything out of  the van and separated the stuff that will stay from the stuff that will go away. Here is the pile of stuff that we actually used during the trip: Here is the pile of stuff that we did not use, but that we are still going to keep because of utility, sentimentality, or some other reason: And here is the pile that will be going off to Goodwill*: For some unknown reason, I decided that it might be fun to take a picture of every... single... item... in the van. Near the end of this exercise I questioned my sanity, but I persisted in my efforts and here are the results (10 random items chosen by flickr): www. flick r .com ---- * May or may not have been used during the trip.

Well, we didn't win the lottery , so we're guessing that the whole "fortune" bit was referring to life experiences and such.  Boooooooooooooring.... I guess we'll take it.  :) Let's catch up where we last left off on our journey down the east coast. After Boston , we drove on over to the Cape Cod area. We stayed at Nickerson State Park , which had some pretty nasty creepy-crawlies in the shower. But to make up for it, there were also beautiful wildflowers all over the place.         We headed up to Provincetown the next day and roamed around looking at boats and shops and the Pilgrim Monument .     Fish and chips seemed like an obvious choice for dinner. Delicious! (And the curried french fries were pretty tasty, too.) Perhaps the most astounding part of the visit was the fact that we found a store that we both loved!  Marine Specialties had just the right mix of vintage clothing and random international military sur...

Friends, the Curious Souls turtles are officially shell-less! We parked our van and will be relying on our wits and the vagaries of public transportation and kindness of others to get about from now on. How un-American of us! Here are the final moments... Video

We went to dinner last night with Jon's parents and two of his nephews. After dinner we opened our fortune cookies and mine said this: Woohoo!! The first part of that is right so the second must be as well, right?? Right! To help fate out a little bit, we bought a North Carolina Powerball ticket using the numbers on the back of my fortune...and all the other fortunes from our table as well just in case. Wish us luck!

We only have 13 days left until we hop on a big ol' jet airliner for Europe and so we decided to start the process of mothballing the van for storage tonight. My nephews are here in North Carolina visiting Grandma and Grandpa and they decided to have a little fun while Aunt Ellen and Uncle Jon were out sorting through the van stuff in the garage. Van Party!!! Video We're just a little bit jealous that they are both able to completely stand up inside the van.

While spending some time in North Carolina with my parents, I've been working on a little project that I've been meaning to complete for a while. You'll now find a link on the bottom of the Curious Souls website named Where Have We Been? The link will take you to a map that gives dates, times and mileage for every stop that we remembered to record along the way. Key Red = Arrival Yellow = Visit Green = Departure Hikers = Hike Auto = Auto Maintenance Knife and Fork = Lunch or Dinner Enjoy!

Boston was not all torrential rain . Let me tell you about some of our drier moments. Wow is this city difficult to navigate! Even with GPS helping us, there are so many tunnels and bridges and odd intersections throughout. Video It took us twice as long as expected to get to brunch at Scup's , but the delicious food was worth it. And even more interesting were the quirky art installations all around the Boston Harbor Shipyard where the restaurant was located. The public transportation in Boston was much easier to navigate than the roads, and so we opted to keep the car parked for the rest of the weekend. Video While roaming around the city, we traveled through the gas-lit neighborhood of Charleston . We had already been walking past many quaint historic homes when we spotted an open house. We explained to the agent that we weren't really in the market for his half-million, late 1800's home, but that we just wanted to look inside. He happily obliged...

After Maine, we went to Boston. We really liked Boston and had a lot of fun with Simone while happily sharing her room at the Westin . Thanks again, Simone! I'll get to all the details later, but for now, I'm going to jump directly to the most exciting part of our Boston experience. On our second day, we were going to take a RIB boat tour of the islands . We reserved on-line, but when we finally got to the pier, we were told that the captain had canceled our trip due to the potential for bad weather. We walked away in disappointment and decided to go back to the hotel room instead - and grab a bottle of duty-free gin out of the van on the way. And then this happened... Video Link ...horizontal rain. Rain that moved in like a swarm of bees. Rain so hard that Ellen thought it was hail. Rain that drenched us in seconds. Rain that blew letters off of building signs. Rain that destroyed the camera in my pocket and made this video the last one I took 1 . Rain that filled ...

This is what   Random.org  +  The Bartenders Black Book  looks like: Link Yummmm!

It's true.  There were a lot of punny store names like the one above in Maine. Truth be told, this phenomenon was not unique to Maine. Vancouver even had a furniture store called "Sofa, So Good." But, I digress. On with the show... After crossing our last Canada-US border we headed to Acadia NP . We spent some time canoeing on Long Pond... Video Link ...and went on a hike before a big thunderstorm rolled in. We left Acadia in the pouring rain and headed to the capital city, Portland. Neither of us had ever eaten a whole lobster before, so we figured that this was the place to try.  Yelp led us to  J's Oyster , right on the pier. While waiting for a table, we met lots of extremely nice and gregarious Maineians and even more after we were finally seated at the bar. We learned how to properly dismantle and disect one from the nice men next to us who also offered us some lobster trivia. You might have noticed that this lobster has no claws. W...

While we've been comfortably relaxing here in Southern Maryland, we've been neglecting the blog a bit. (Translation: Jonathan is way behind in his recap posts.) So, we'll try to make sure you all get back up to speed with our travels over the next few days. After Montreal , we headed east to Quebec City.  QC looked even more European than Montreal, but felt a bit more touristy. And, none of those fantastic rental bikes to be had. And, we failed to use personal recommendations or Yelp to locate a restaurant for dinner. You'd think that it would be difficult to make bad nachos and pizza, but Le Cafe Buade succeeded. Lesson learned. One interesting bit of history about QC is that the old part of town is a walled city . Link After departing QC, we took the Route du President Kennedy on back to Maine. Other than the agent having a fantastic northeastern accent and him actually looking around inside the van, there was nothing too spectacular about our last (for th...

Before I left on this trip, I was a fast walker. By fast, I mean Driven-Has a Place to Go-Leave People Behind fast walker. I didn't walk like that all of time but certainly at least 80-90% of the time. Even in my free time. I didn't really notice this, it was just part of who I was. It certainly wasn't something I expected to change. But now?  Now I walk slow. Not all of the time - I mean I can walk fast when we are in a hurry, it's not like I physically can't walk fast now - but most of the time I just prefer to walk slowly. I didn't notice when this started to change, it just kind of happened at some point in this trip and now I'm a stroller instead of a speed walker. Last night, I watched this fantastic YouTube video last night about how we deal with time . And it was like a lightbulb went off in my head. I am moving away from being Future Oriented towards being Present Hedonistic! It reminds me of the old saying "Stop and Smell the Roses...

Have you ever believed something, believed it in that moral highground, privilege-showing kind of way? I have; that was me and Walmart. Walmart, at least among white, educated, high earning professionals is a favorite company to hate. They treat their employees poorly , don't you know? They run small businesses out of town , don't you know? They pollute the earth , don't you know? This is what I believed for most of my adult, high income earning life. My parents repeatedly told me that their prices really were cheaper and that Walmart provided an affordable shopping option for those on fixed or low incomes, including the very employees we felt we were defending and the elderly. I was unmoved. Didn't they realize that Walmart was part of the degradation of the social fabric of our country and a scourge to be eliminated? And then we quit our jobs and proceeded to drive across the country in a van. There's nothing like perspective to knock someone off of their mor...

Our final border crossing into Canada really set the mood for the next few days in the Great White North. How nice was this border agent? She seemed genuinely interested in our trip and made us feel welcome. Video We stayed just south of Montreal in a KOA that included WiFi, showers and laundry. Perfect. That evening, we drove the van into town with some recommendations in hand from a friend. We were immediately impressed by the number of people out and about on the streets and even more so by the number of people on bikes. And it's no coincidence that there were so many. Montreal really encourages biking by providing bike lanes that are physically separated from automobile traffic on many streets. As we drove around taking in the scene, we realized that we were not going to easily find a parking spot on the street. We were warned about this but sometimes we don't listen very well. Instead, we found a pay lot that was a couple miles from our first stop of the night....