Marne, my wife, and I have established a tradition of taking a few days off every fall to drive around New England/Cape Cod or to visit Nantucket. We didn’t get around to it as early this year as usual but thought that we had lucked out because the weather forecast showed the week of November 1st through 7th to be perfect “Indian summer” (or is that now Native American summer?) with high 50’s to low 60’s and sunny days. So we took off on the morning after Halloween to visit my cousins Frank in Olde Lyme Connecticut and Peter in Harwich Massachusetts and to just drive around to see the foliage, shop a bit, eat some great seafood and just kick back and relax. (This might not seem relaxing to everyone but driving is very relaxing for us.) We took our very good friends, Susie and Jack McAlister of Erie with us for great company and some laughs.
The trip started out very well with a relaxing evening at the Bee & Thistle Inn in Olde Lyme Connecticut and a reunion with cousin Frank and wife Nancy Roche. From there we proceeded up I-95 with the thought of getting onto Cape Cod by early afternoon and driving out to Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod so we could spend the next two days working our way back at a leisurely pace. Our morning stop at Essex Connecticut made us a little late but a violent tank truck accident on I-95 turned the entire interstate into a parking lot. Thanks to my new Garmin GPS navigator, I was able to go cross country in ever-widening circles until we finally drove around the mess, but it cost us most of the afternoon and got us to Cape Cod late.
Strangely, since it hadn’t been predicted on weather.com, the sunny days turned into some pretty strong rainstorms! Little did we know that Hurricane Noel had taken a sudden turn from the Tropics and was working its way up the Atlantic coast with its target lower Massachusetts and Cape Cod. Over the next few days we got to experience a full-blown hurricane in an unexpected location; Harwich Massachusetts where my other cousin Peter and his wife Joan live. We did have a great room there, watched another (typical these days) lousy Notre Dame game, including Navy’s first win over Notre Dame in 44 years. The shopping and the touring were curtailed by 40-50 mile per hour winds, 70 or 80 mile per hour gusts, large amounts of rain and including cottages being washed into the ocean. Ironically, Harwich/Chatham, where we were, was also the eye of the storm.
Even more strangely, the next day as we toured Provincetown the weather was gorgeous and I was back to wearing shorts – go figure. As we worked our way back home over Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, we got the Indian summer that we had been hoping for and had a wonderful time with the stopovers in Provincetown, Harwich and Worcester Massachusetts (near our Massachusetts plant location).
The final blow was an early winter storm as we approached Buffalo with multiple cars in the ditch on both sides of the highway, emergency vehicles, heavy slush, lousy traction and big fat snowflakes blowing sideways. After the GPS system, detoured us down to Ellicottville, NY, we got into Corry late Tuesday night barely in time to vote, which we did.
I don’t think there’s a moral to this story……….but if there were one it would be; when you live where we do don’t ever count on the weather doing what you expect it to do.
