Nirvana.

Earl and I decided to celebrate the beautiful weather by going for a little ride. Including the nap in a Thruway service area, it was around 14 hours long.

We drove through three states.

It all started on Friday when Earl asked if I was in the mood for Chick-Fil-A for lunch. He was just being funny, because the closest Chick-Fil-A is about 200 miles from here. So that’s where we went for lunch yesterday. Chick-Fil-A at the Burlington Mall in Burlington, Mass. I haven’t been to the Burlington Mall since I was a twinkie shopping for clothes at Jordan Marsh back in the late 1980s. Much has changed.

On the way out we drove across the southern portion of Vermont on Route 9. It was a route I hadn’t taken before. We stopped at a scenic lookout, bought a couple of bear stuffed animals for our collection and the obligatory maple and chocolate fudge.

We then drove south a little bit into Massachusetts and went across the state on Route 2. Route 2 between Harvard and Concord used to be my daily commute. The road was never designed to be such a heavily traveled corridor and little has changed. It was good to drive the Concord Rotary and it was better to see that the office building I used to work in, which was closed shortly before Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was sucked up by Compaq (then HP), is back in business with a new company occupying. I could see my old cubicle walls from the street. No mardi gras beads hanging on the pole in the middle of the cubicle though.

After Burlington Mall (with a failed attempt at convincing someone of joining me at purchasing lots of stuff at their beautiful Apple store), we drove through Boston through the Big Dig project, making an unnecessary stop out to the airport and everything.

Leaving Boston at 9:00 p.m. or so, we decided that the Mass Pike was boring and jumped off at Marlborough and drove across the state on Route 20 (a local road that goes through LOTS of towns).

After taking a necessary nap in a Thruway service area once we were back in New York, we finally rolled into the driveway at 3:30 a.m.