Holiday Adventures

Happy New Year! I hope that the holidays treated everyone well this year. I had a pretty busy past couple of weeks, logging about 1,000 miles on my odometer and hopping around from state to state. I decided to keep my camera handy to document any interesting sights from my trip, so here's what I have to share.

I had the week off from work (actually the university shut down, so I had a week off work without having to take any vacation, which was great). I took off the Saturday before Christmas, had breakfast with my family in Williamsport then headed off on the drive to CT. The drive from here to Williamsport and from there to Wilkes-Barre is mainly on country roads, which are very pretty and usually pretty isolated. I saw a couple of interesting signs:



I had Daisy in the car with me, and she does NOT like to travel. I let her out to wander around, and she did a full exploration of the car. Eventually, she got carsick so I put her back in her carrier and she was fine after that. For about half of the drive the roads were pretty empty, which was great because it was peak holiday traffic time:



(I'm not sure what's more dangerous: taking a picture of myself while driving or having a cat on my shoulder while driving. Probably not a good idea either way.)

I saw some nice Christmas lights (nothing like the Somerville/Medford lights, but some were nice nonetheless). Taking photos from the car never quite works the way you want it to, but despite its blurriness--or because of it--I like the squiggles in this one:



I went up to MA for a quick trip and had New Year's Eve with Meredith and some of her friends, which was fun. The day before, I headed to Portsmouth, NH (which I love more and more every time I go there) for a quick visit with my friends Kathrine and Tom, in from England for the holidays. We drove up to Wells, ME for a walk through the snow on the coast. It was a beautiful scene: the tide was out, the snow was falling steadily and the beach was almost deserted. The snowfall on the rocks was beautiful:



(I also found this sign interesting)


I was happy to return to the land of Dunkin' Donuts over this break. State College has three Starbucks and several independent coffee shops, but the nearest Dunkin' Donuts is in Williamsport, an hour away (insert collective gasp of shock from New England readership). On the way home, I stopped in Port Jervis at the NY/NJ/PA border, which my mom assures me is the cheapest place in the world to buy gas, and stopped at DD to get a bagel and coffee. Unfortunately, I didn't try the coffee until I got back on the highway, and discovered it was bad, with a strong burned taste. No problem, I thought, I'd just pull over at the next one and get a new one. What I didn't realize is that the next one was 60 miles away! They should have warned me!