On the Road Again

It sure feels good to get Odysseus back on the road again.  We are headed for Maine.  Why Maine?  Well, my excuses are rather flimsy and a bit selfish.  First, I want to see the New England fall foliage.  Second, I want to eat a lobster and have a bowl of clam chowder (as only Maine can provide).  Third, I want to stand again on the rocks near Portland Head and watch the waves of the Atlantic crash in.  Now all of these things I’ve done before.  They have been crossed off my bucket list—but  just because they have been crossed off doesn’t mean I can’t do them again, for a long as I can.

Today we drove north into Pennsylvania and traveled through the Pocono Mountains.  The fall foliage is at its peak there. We turned east and entered New York, passing very near my boyhood home in northwestern New Jersey (where we will stop for a visit on our way home).  We passed by Poughkeepsie, crossed the Hudson River, and then Connecticut, through Danbury, New Town (which I never drive by without tears and a prayer) Waterbury and on into Hartford.  Years ago I had an offer to serve as pastor at a church in Hartford.  I turned down the invitation, but each time I drive through the city, I wonder what might have been.  From Hartford we took I-91 north into Springfield, Massachusetts and  are now settled for the night at the Westover AFB FamCamp.  Tomorrow we will drive on to Old Orchard Beach, Maine.

“All my life,” wrote Kazantzakis, “one of my greatest desires has been to travel—to see and touch unknown countries, to swim unknown seas, to circle the globe, observing new lands, seas, peoples, and ideas with an insatiable appetite…”   I am kin to Kazantzakis.  Each person has an individual soul full of closed buds, he went on.  When will they flower?  When will they bear fruit?  Kazantzakis implored God to let him live long enough to see which of his own buds would flower and to see what kind of fruit they might form.  His buds opened in and through his many travels—so I’m traveling, whenever and wherever I can in order to see my own buds flower.

Where there is a Road...the Buffalo and I Roam