Sent to mailing list April 19, 2010
Dear Fellow Adventure Junkies,
Our apologies that is has taken us so long to send you this second installment of our tale. We've been quite busy recently (and loving every moment of it!).
Part I ended with us sleeping over at my brother's house in White Plains to avoid driving home in the storm that had blacked out the entire neighborhood. The next morning was Sunday, March 14. My brother woke us up at 7:30 and reminded us that the clocks had been moved up an hour to Eastern Standard Time. There was still no electricity, but the weather was considerably calmer. No wind, and a drizzling rain. Rather than drive back to Yonkers, we decided to go directly to the Bronx where our our reserved U-Haul truck was awaiting us. Our plan was to store the remainder of our belongings in the basement of Lynne's parents house in northern Connecticut and then fly to California out of Hartford. I was to make the 2½-hour trip from Yonkers driving the 14-foot rental truck containing 40 or so boxes, and Lynne would follow in the car with Spritzie. After picking up the truck at the U-Haul, we got to practice our skills at caravan driving, as we drove up Broadway for 25 minutes from the Bronx to Yonkers. It went very smoothly.
After parking the truck in front of the purple house, I went off to get refreshments for the crew, and when I returned, there they were: Deborah, Margret, Will, Cindy and Bruce, all ready to form a bucket brigade to bring the boxes from the porch down the steps to the truck, where I carefully loaded them so they wouldn't shift or fall during the trip. What a heroic bunch these friends were! A job that would have token one person a back-breaking two hours took six people a fun 25 minutes. The rest of the afternoon was spent hurriedly getting any leftover stuff into our suitcases. At about 4:30pm, we took off.
We had to stay off parkways because I was driving a commercial vehicle, so we went north on Broadway to Tarrytown and turned east on the Cross Westchester Expressway. The first big test for the caravan came shortly after, at the split between I-87 and I-287. As the dusk darkened I watched in my rearview mirror to see if I could tell if Lynne had split off onto I-287 behind me. As if reading my mind, she flashed her headlights to assure me she was still with me. Of course, we had our cell phones with us and Lynne had the GPS she had given me for Christmas with her in the car. But the most reassuring knowledge was that, the farther along the route we got, the more familiar it got to Lynne, as we were headed to her parents' house, the house where she grew up, so she knew the route well.
As it got darker and darker, it was harder for me to see Lynne in the car behind me, but it was easy for Lynne to see me in the big U-Haul truck in front of her. After making one rest stop, and driving more slowly than we normally would have, the caravan arrived at the old homestead at around 8:30, and we carefully parked the truck and the car in the parental driveway. We were greeted by Lynne's mother, as well as Lynne's nephew and his fiancee, who promptly made us toasted cheese sandwiches. Lynne's nephew, a very strong young man, helped me unload some of the boxes from the truck and take them to the basement. It was getting late, however, and we left the rest of the cargo unloading for the next day.
As we lay in bed that night, we reflected on what we'd just accomplished. My image of it was that we had achieved “escape velocity” and muscled free of earth's gravity. Lynne's take was that we were a tree with very, very deep roots that had taken all our strength to pull up. The end result was that we were not only not living in a Morehouse anymore, we were no longer residents of Yonkers, or even New York State. And we weren't yet residents of any place new. We felt kinda homeless.
OK, kids, off to bed now. We'll tell more of the story later.
Thanks for reading!
Best Regards,
Gerry
To get what you want you're going to have to do whatever it takes, even if it means being happy.
-- Vic Baranco
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