What did Della wear? She wore big, fat moneybags!

 

 

Like I said before, we had scrod in Boston, but we got scrod in Delaware. To get there for that thrill we had to get out of New York and traverse the Jersey turnpike.

 

A couple of unrelated observations I made along the way. There were very few college alumni license plate holders on passing cars, but we did see two UCLA ones. Not as many personalized plates as you see in the west either.  WAWA is a brand of gas and the name tickled my funny bone. New Jersey, though nicknamed the Garden State, has a lot of areas that smell like the proverbial Old Fogey’s Stogie.

 

 Now remember, I have paid for the right to dislike a couple of Mid-Atlantic and southern border states, as well a couple kinda-sorta Mid-West states – especially Delaware! 

 

We paid $27.95 for the right to drive the New Jersey Turnpike. After NJ we drove a few short miles in Delaware and crossed a bridge over the Delaware River. It cost us $16 to cross the flipping bridge, while a  car would have been only $3! The toll taker admitted that if we unhitched the HHR it would have been $3 a piece. But somehow the two didn’t add up to $6 but $16. 

 

Then! Less than 10 miles further down the road at the Maryland border we were charged another $9! What a bargain… The toll taker there told us if we driving north instead of south our toll there would have been $23!  Get me out of here! Now you know where the term “highway robbery” comes from.

 

We knew we must be in the south as we passed a shrine to Stonewall Jackson.  A shrine? Was he a god? Haven’t seen any confederate flags yet. Just pirate ones…

 

It’s PDF (pretty darn flat) here too. I still could smile a little at the names of the “Ni” river and the “Po” river and the Chickahominy. Chortles, chuckles and laughs not yet. I’m still getting over the tolls. 

 

There are few RV’s on the roads. Fuel is affordable, but I guess the tolls eat you alive. The dealers we see have very small inventories. There are lots of waffle houses though.  We saw the Toddler University and Childcare Center.

 

Traffic around DC went on for hours and extended way south, past Fredericksburg.  Between the traffic and Maggie’s directions (our GPS gizmo) we were late getting to Tom’s cousin’s in Mechanicsville, VA.

 

 Tom’s father had three brothers and one sister. He, his sister and youngest brother stayed on Long Island, and the other two brothers moved to Pennsylvania. They all worked for the same company at one time, and I guess they helped expand the business.  Anyway, Tom saw them often and visited with the PA cousins during his childhood, but as an adult he had only seen some of them – at funerals or his parents’ 50th anniversary party 23 years ago. All of his father’s generation is gone, except for his youngest brother’s wife who was at the party for Georgie. 

 

Somehow, in the last couple years Tom made contact with one PA cousin Barney, who also came to Georgie’s party, and Rene (pronounced Reenee & short for Maureen – a good Irish name). She was a daughter of the other PA brother. 

 

We were going to Mechanicsville, VA to visit Rene, her husband Den and Rene’s brother John and his wife Amy (who live in Fredericksburg).  Rene and Den live out in the country and John and Amy were driving down for our visit. 

 

My only memory of meeting any of them was at Tom’s paternal grandfather’s funeral. It was Amy I remembered. Both of us were pregnant and she was the lucky one. She could eat anything she wanted. After I ate my two heads of lettuce every day I could have too, but somehow I never made it that far. 

 

Anyway, keeping true to my small comfort zone persona, I wasn’t too upset that we were running late. Less time to have to be with strangers.

 

That didn’t last long. We were greeted with hugs and kisses and John’s famous and delicious Cosmopolitans. All right! We sat outside on their deck that overlooked a woodland and caught up on the last 2/3’s of our lives and then retired to the dining room for a delicious lasagna dinner Rene had prepared.

 

Rene is an excellent cook, a master gardener and ran an interior furnishing, gift and decorating business with one of her sisters. Den is a mostly retired chemical engineer. He works two days a month, but is more than happy to travel world-wide for the company and make presentations. Rene has accompanied him and they have had some fabulous trips and even lived in Shanghai for awhile. 

 

Their three children are grown and they delight in their grandchildren. They share their huge and beautifully appointed home with a cute but elusive cat.

 

John and Amy probably have a cat or two, but they also have 10 dogs, two horses and two pigs. They would like to have chickens too, but there are foxes in their vicinity. Obviously, they live in the country  too.

 

John owns an importing company that imports one of my favorite things – towel warmers. Unless you hang you towel over the window of your RVas you travel through the hot flat places this country of ours seems to abound with, I don’t know how you could possibly think of not having a towel warmer. I cringe at the thought of using a damp towel. If you don’t have a towel warmer you must have maid service twice a day to replace towels.

 

 Amy designs and makes street signs for their town. As I mentioned, the last time I saw her she was pregnant. That baby is now all grown up, married and pregnant with her 12th child. He oldest is 19 and attending UVA. They also have three sons.

 

Rene and John also have three other living sisters and one who died.

 

Every year their entire branch of the family tree gets together for a reunion. Everyone attends – the siblings, all of their children and the grandchildren. I was so jealous to hear that. I have cousins whose names I don’t know, much less where they live.

 

We all laughed and reminisced about old times…. well, they did. I remembered their parents and shared my fond memories of them. The biggest laugh of the evening came when Tom told us what he’d say when Georgie asked him about what we’d talked about. Tom said we spent the evening talking about colonoscopies and pot-bellied pigs. 

 

They were all so gracious, fun and welcoming. I felt at ease immediately and the evening went too fast. Bedtime came too soon and we were shocked to discover it was pouring down rain, when we opened the door to return to Jabba.

 

The next morning Den gave us directions on how to get back to the Interstate. There were no more tolls to curse, but Maggie, in directing us to their home, had taken us on every little country dirt road in the county and over a bridge designed to handle loads far less than Jabba weighed. 

 

The next leg of our odyssey would land us in Dallas. We had hoped to take our time, actually see some of the sites along the way, and visit Dave and Cindy Marshall, dear friends from California who now lived in Nashville, pronounced “nashvul.” But we need to pick up the pace, as Tom had a job interview in Dallas on Friday. 

 

He has been pursuing this lead/opportunity for a couple months and since he hasn’t worked in a year, we thought it wise to get there. So, like long haul truckers, we hit the road again.