Maine and back in one weekend!
My sister is attending a ceramics camp out on an island in Maine for a couple weeks. My mom, her, and I decided to drive out nonstop to the coast over the weekend to drop her off.
The roadtrip begins with our departure from Madison around 5:30am, heading towards Chicago. As the sun rose, we could see blankets of fog in the low-lying fields surrounding us. Sometimes it would even drift across the road with reaching fingers.
We must have hit just the right gap in traffic through Illinois, because I have never had such a smooth, seamless journey through Chicago. The buildings of downtown emerged from the morning haze, and continued to appear quite ghostly until we were nearly on top of them.
I took a lot of pictures of the skyline, and just as it seemed I was going to get the best of them, we drove under a bridge or tunnel (it seemed to be a bit of both), and when we emerged, suddenly it had changed from being in front of us to surrounding us.
Many of my pictures are taken from inside the car as we cross bridges. Since this was not strictly a vacation, we stopped as little as possible along the way. Indiana and Ohio were ten different kinds of flat, which incidentally all looked the same.
New York was when I saw the landscape start to shift. The woods became hilly, then gradually mountainous. We opted for the southern route which took us by Olean, where my dad's grandparents lived. It is a beautiful area of the country.
The sun set at our backs, and the wispy clouds made it look like a painting.
I laughed at the name of this gas station. That mustache and bowler hat just make it.
At this point in our trip, I took over driving around midnight while my mom got some rest. I was supposed to find highway 9 that connected with hwy 7 which cuts across the southern part of Vermont.
Somehow, I never left highway 7, which turned north. I didn't realize anything was wrong until three hours later, when I had traversed most of Vermont...vertically. Let's just say I was more than three quarters through the state and well on my way to the Canadian border.
My mom took over the driving again, and we cut through the Hogback mountains to get back on track. I'm glad Vermont isn't a big state...
Next installment: photos from Maine!