Monthly Archives: October 2018

Take Two Takes to the Road

What follows is a series of what we call “Tanya’s famous out-the-window pictures” from our road trip in August, September, and October. I would like to thank all the wonderful folks who hosted our family, made us feel loved, and made all that driving well worth the effort!

Leaving the Florida Keys

Leaving the Florida Keys, August 12

 

Alligator Alley

Across the Everglades, August 12

 

North Carolina in the Rain

North Carolina in the Rain, September 5

 

New York to New Jersey

New York to New Jersey, September 7

 

Acadia National Park

Acadia National Park, September 27

 

 

Road Trip Self Portrait

Self-Portrait, Maine, October 2

 

Fall Colors, New England

Fall Colors, Leaving Maine, October 2

 

South of the Border

South of the Border, October 3

 

Causeway, Saint Simon's Island

Causeway to St. Simon’s Island, October 3

 

Bridge, Savannah

Leaving Georgia, October 8

 

Sunset, Florida West Coast

Sunset, Florida West Coast, October 15

 

Family Road Trip in the Burb

Family Road Trip in the Burb.                                                                      Total Miles driven: 4,325

To Everything There is a Season

In the last nine weeks, I have held my day-old niece, celebrated my mother-in-law’s 70th birthday, laughed and cried with old friends, taken in some of our country’s most beautiful scenery at Acadia National Park, and seen the first colors of fall in the northern climes.  I have hugged everyone in my extended family, driven by my childhood home, and visited the storage unit which houses the time capsule of our youth—wedding albums, baby photos, homemade quilts—and begun the process of saying goodbye to our older kids’ childhoods and welcoming them to the complicated and exciting world of adulthood. The seasons are changing, both literally and figuratively, and I am thrown a bit off-balance: I’m feeling decidedly autumnal.

Fall Colors, Maine

Solomon said that God has “set eternity in the human heart” and I’ve been contemplating what that means. It means we always want more—more life, more time, more beauty—it is never enough. I am watching my parents age, my children grow into adults, my own hair turning gray. These things are little by little, but also sudden. I am the same age as Jay’s mom was the summer we fell in love. So soon, it seems, I will be in her shoes again—looking back at a life I have lived, surrounded by adult children and grandchildren. It goes so fast.

My newborn niece who I held just a month ago is now making eye contact and smiling and cooing when you talk to her. My older nephews, who I also held as newborns (just yesterday, it seems) drive cars and have girlfriends and go to the homecoming dance. How is that possible? I remember rolling my eyes at my grandparents when they started to talk this way. I guess that means I’m old. Does that mean I’m wise, too? All this waxing nostalgic points to one conclusion. In the words of the immortal Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” The lesson in every season is to enjoy it.

Joy in this fleeting world is tied inextricably to longing. Seeing the child from the baby photos become a man induces a kind of grief-delight. C.S. Lewis defines it as “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” He says joy “must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again… I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and Pleasure often is.”

This kind of enjoying your life, stopping to look around, can cause an almost unbearable contradiction—I miss my children as babies, I wish I could see my mom as she was when I was a child, I long for my highschool sweetheart (who happens to be in the room)—but I also love them right now as they are. He has set eternity in my heart and I want all of it to last forever.

The Spanish word for enjoy is disfruta, closely related to the word for “fruit.” I say, disfruta your life—pick it, eat it, let the juice drip down your chin.  Solomon agrees with me (so I must be wise); his conclusion in Ecclesiastes 3, since life is fleeting, is to “eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all [your] toil—this is the gift of God.”

Apple-picking

Chips Ahoy

As you may (or may not) have gathered, we are no longer in Guatemala. We flew to the United States more than a month ago and have slowly been making our rounds among people we have missed on our long voyage. After hanging out with friends and family in Marathon, Naples, and Clearwater, we headed north. We worked our way up the east coast towards Maine, staying with various friends and relations along the way.

We were staying in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, at the home of some old cruising pals from s/v Ally Cat. We were at their house for about a week, and Massachusetts is a pretty interesting state from a tourist/field-tripper point of view. Mattapoisett is only a few minutes away from New Bedford, the old whaling town where Herman Melville wrote his famous novel, Moby Dick. Mattapoisett is also only a few minutes away from Cape Cod, home of our family favorite: Cape Cod Potato Chips.

A little research revealed that the factory tour was completely free, and that small bags of potato chips (also completely free) were available at the end. This, apparently, was enough to win the support of the crew, and we set out.

Driving through New England in September was, for obvious reasons, a totally different experience than driving through the summer jungles of Central America. It was sunny and a bit chilly, a novel combination for us, and we drove the Suburban with the sun-roof open. Some of the trees were beginning to change color. We drove over the Cape Cod Canal, which connects Cape Cod Bay with Buzzard’s Bay.

We eventually reached the factory. It wasn’t as large as I was expecting, only employing about 80 people. We signed in at the visitor’s desk, and put a little pin in Guatemala on the world map hanging on the wall. Then we were free to take the tour.

Cape Cod Potato Chips

The tour consisted of a long hallway with a number of large windows along one wall looking into the factory, affording spectacular vistas of large oily machinery, much of it inactive, and the occasional plume of steam in the background. Several plaques were spaced along the walls, offering insights into the various processes of chip-making.

There are only three ingredients in your original Cape Cod chip: salt, oil, and potatoes. Because potatoes are mostly water, it takes four pounds of potatoes to make one pound of crispy goodness. First, the potatoes are divested of their skins with a brush peeler, and inspected by hand. Then they are tossed into a slicing machine with a bunch of rapidly-spinning blades that slice the potatoes into thin rounds. They are then dumped into he fry-vats. Once thoroughly cooked, the chips are put into a centrifuge and spun at high temperatures to remove fat. The higher the temperature, the more fat is spun out. Then the chips are piped to the bagging machine, and sealed in their iconic bags. The bags are then pressure-tested. It was during this phase that we saw one of the bags violently explode, sprinkling its contents across the floor. Judging by the amount of chips already on the floor, this was not an entirely uncommon occurrence.

The hallway soon terminated at the shop, where we were given our complimentary bags of chips, each stamped with the time they were made that very morning. And of course, we bought a few extra party-size bags, including a brand-new flavor: Fresh Jalapeno-Infused. So all in all, it wasn’t a bad experience, though I personally was a little underwhelmed. But the day wasn’t over yet.

Nauset Light

We drove to the National Seashore, home of the Nauset Light, which just happens to be the lighthouse featured on the Cape Cod bags. We parked in a crowded and sunny parking lot perched above the dunes, with the famous lighthouse looming nearby. We took the obligatory tourist pictures with the lighthouse in the background, and then went to look at the ocean. The waves were large Atlantic rollers breaking just off the beach, perfect for body surfing, we thought. Except that the water looked icy-cold, and the wind was none-too-warm either. This didn’t stop many people; we observed a number of children playing in the sand or water, and some half-naked adults, who didn’t seem to know better, were sitting in beach chairs like it was a warm day in the tropics.

National Seashore

We did, however, see one thing that we would never have seen in the tropics: seals. Actual, honest-to-goodness seals. Two of them were swimming in the surf just off the beach. It was very interesting. Seals are also particularly interesting to Great White Sharks, which typically follow the seals south in the fall and winter.

For lunch, we went to a seafood restaurant aptly named “The Lobster Shanty”. We ate seafood typical of the area: fried clams, lobster rolls, fish n’ chips, and fish sandwiches. A rowboat filled with water was used for the storage of live Maine lobster. They looked smooth and drab compared to the Spiny Lobster we had been hunting just a few short weeks before.

Lobster Shanty

It was a good field trip. It was a nice drive, and a very pretty day, with good food involved. And now every time I eat Cape Cod Potato Chips, I’ll have a killer boast.