Friday, October 24

For the first time in the 39 years that Mark and Diane have lived in Maine, we divided the 10-hour trip in half. Due to the pain in Cerwin’s hip – from arthritis – he thought 5 hours was a long enough drive, so we had motel reservations in Vernon, Connecticut.

Because of the coloring of the leaves, we figured it would be a pretty drive. This is what it looked like in Pennsylvania, shortly after leaving our house.

Before long – in northern Pennsylvania – there were more colors, and it stayed like this for the entire trip.

Sometimes the leaves were pretty in muted yellow, green, and orange – which I also found beautiful.

We were using our cell phone GPS (instead of our Garmin) for the first time on a long trip and were surprised at all the details it gave us – like: debris on the road ahead, policeman ahead, etc. We expected things like accident ahead or construction ahead.

So, when traffic suddenly slowed down significantly and we didn’t receive a warning, I said, the GPS must have missed this one. We traveled only a short distance when we saw this – an accident that just happened and had not yet been reported. We were in New Jersey at this point.

The two people who are standing had stopped to assist. I blurred faces on purpose. We were able to get by in the left lane and were kind of thankful that traffic had not yet been stopped, because it would have been a long wait. We prayed for everyone involved and kept traveling north.

We thoroughly enjoyed the beautiful colors along the way.

We were approaching Hartford, Connecticut, when we saw a bit of a rainbow. We didn’t travel in rain, but it apparently it had rained ahead of us because the road was wet.

It was a slow drive through Hartford because of late afternoon traffic, so we got to see the rainbow for a fairly long time.

It was even double for a short time.

I thought this cell phone picture was pretty.

We arrived at our motel shortly after this, got settled in our room, then went to a Longhorn Steakhouse for a delicious supper. Our room was fairly “barebones” (because we chose to keep the cost down), but it was sufficient and clean and we had a good bed.