The drive home.

The long drive home starts with a good breakfast, yogurt and granola and fruit juice from the nearby Walmart which we kept in our fridge in our room. It usually starts with cups of coffee too, plus dragging the last bags from the room to the car, and checking out of the hotel.

The drive home is punctuated by all the rain that we magically avoided during our three days of wandering through the city. It comes down hard and fast, drenching the highways and landscapes we drive by. Lightning crossed the sky once or twice, and the weather network we were watching this morning may have mentioned flash flooding. I will gladly take all the rain now, as we sit comfortably in the car, mostly immune to its effects.

The drive involves checking the route once or twice, especially since this time, we don't have the ease of wifi, so the course needs to be laid in before we leave, and we have a few stops to make. First at the Westfield Mall for the allbirds store and new pairs of shoes, and then at the outlet mall in Harriman for our go-to Shake Shack burgers. We HAVE to stop there once every trip. It's become a tradition of our NYC trips.

The drive home involves a lot of hours, so we don't linger too long anywhere. The allbirds stop is a surgical strike. The lunch break lasts 20 minutes, but you don't need longer than that to devour a small burger, even if it does contain a cheese-stuffed breaded mushroom. We also stop in New Baltimore to empty and fill our tanks, and find out the coffee is just okay. We are two DAYS too early for the opening of the new service centre that has been under construction since last year.

The drive also involves a couple more chapters of that excellent Hobbit audiobook, a TON of blogging, and a lot of talking about all manners of things, because what else do you do when driving for a long time? Sit in silence? We laugh a lot, especially when I drop popcorn in Mario's lap instead of his mouth, or accidentally stick a cube of that delicious mango on his cheek when we hit a bump. The perils of feeding someone while driving, right? 

The drive home involves a smooth border crossing, and very few questions before we are waved through and are back in our country, driving the last half hour to home. Travel is always a wonderful thing - so much to see and do, places to go, things to taste and experience. We pack as much as we can in to really benefit from our time, but whoa, does it feel good to pull into our own driveway again, and truly relax. 

At least until we do it all again.


Until next time.