Labor Day Travel

Written Sep 1, 2022

In early September 2008 my good friend Alan Vaughan called from Gary, Indiana. The art dealer from Bruxelles was driving to his old hometown, Sarasota, Florida from Onekama, Michigan, where his family had maintained a cottage on Lake Michigan below the Acadia Dunes formed from the glacial melt. He had just visited the Jackson 5 home on 2300 Jackson Street. A little out of the way, but we all loved their 1979 hit ABC. We hadn’t seen each other in a good six or seven years. He knew that I had returned from Thailand to dogsit a mad Airedale rescue for two months in Palm Beach. That job was over and it was time to vacate the mansion off Worth Avenue. I informed him that I was heading north to New England.

“How you getting north?”

“I’m hitchhiking on I-95. I figure it will take 3-4 days.” I actually had a airline ticket from West Palm Beach to Boston, but preferred to mythize a drifter's northbound voyage. “I’m broke so that’s the only way I can get there.”

>“You’re kidding?” He was incredulous. “I haven’t seen a hitchhiker on the entire trip from the Upper Peninsula.”

“Not one?"

“Not one.”

“Well, I’ll be a blast from the past.”

I hung up and then called Alan the next day from the Palm Beach airport saying I was in Jacksonville. He was in Memphis. He had stopped there to see Graceland.

The next day from Brooklyn I called from Dillon, South Carolina. On Labor Day Roanoke, Virginia.

"I’m making real good time."

By the way I was already drinking voka screwdrivers made by my brother-in-law, David Rutter, on Watchic Pond in Standish, Maine. Nowhere close to South of the Border. At my family cottage with my sister and her family and my Aunt Sally and Uncle Russ. Twice the vodka. Half the ice.

The trip from West Palm Beach to Boston wasn't fun, but it han been faster than standing on I-95 waiting for a ride in the middle of the night fast.

And there was nothing like Maine at the end of summer and a cold water lobster. And of course heavy-handed Vodka-tonics from my brother-in-law David Rutter.

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Much more to come.