I’d been itching to get out of our cloistered routine in Massachusetts and Maine. We really hadn’t gone much of anywhere since the pandemic started, and I had thought that I’d be traveling a lot in my retirement. Persistent drawbacks were that COVID is still out there, that the number of people in the world can make traveling a pain in the ass, and that we didn’t want to leave our kitties.
But we lined up Dave to cat-sit for two weeks and we finally got out and on the road in May 2023, determined to visit three of the East-of-the-Mississippi National Parks we’d never visited, and to see a lot of other stuff besides that.
As expected, we hit a lot of traffic, waded through a lot of people, and had to put up with rainy days, but we had a great time and successfully completed the planned itinerary. A quick synopsis is that we drove over 3000 miles (and took a ferry for another 18), at 32.9MPG in our 2021 Subaru Forester, were in 13 states in 13 days and nights, passed several hundred “dollar” stores (Dollar Tree, Dollar General, Family Dollar) without going in, and visited 16 parks of various sorts.
Our reviews of everything will have to be mixed. No hotel we stayed at gets good marks across the board. We tried a lot of good beers and ciders but were limited to just bad ones in some places, we stumbled on some good restaurants but also were forced to select some pitiful ones, and we loved all of the parks but had to put up with painful experiences to enjoy some of them. In all, I’d have to say it was about what we expected, and I know it scratched my travel itch for a while.
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