SECOND HONEYMOON

Second Honeymoon


When we got married we went to Chicago for our honeymoon. We were going to take a longer trip later because Sid was going to go to school in Quebec and we were going to take him there. Our Chicago trip was fun but nothing compared to the Quebec trip.

The time came for our Quebec trip and we packed the car. Oh yes, the car we were taking was our Triumph TR 250 that I had just purchased that year. Of course this was a 2 passenger car and there were 3 of us. Not only that, we had all of Sid’s stuff for his stay at school. And we were taking his bicycle. And we decided we were going to camp along the way. I am thinking that Mary probably wondered what she had gotten herself into. But she was newly married and she wanted to impress her new hubby by showing how tough she was; that she was not afraid of any bugs or anything that camping could throw at her.

We took off and we sat 3 in the car. Sid sat half on Mary’s lap. We drove into Canada the first day and drove and drove. We were going to find a place to camp but it was raining and we just kept driving thinking it would stop at some point. It did not. Finally we had to stop because we were all at each other’s throats.

Did I tell you about our tent? We had a 2 man mountain tent. It fit inside a 1 pound Quaker oats box. It is designed to be very light and very efficient. It is sloped toward the feet so that it will with stand the winds that might be encountered on a mountain hike. The head end is less than 3 feet tall. So now we have 3 people in a 2 man tent that is very efficient. OK. So we are in out tent and it is raining.

A funny thing happens if you touch the sides of a tent when it is raining…the water starts bleeding through the fabric. We have 3 people in a 2 man tent trying not to touch the sides but you know this is impossible. We fight this for a while but finally we pack up and leave. We continue to drive.

We drive through the night and we finally drive out of the rain. We are all so tired that we stop along the side of the road and sleep in the grass.

Our trip on to Quebec is relatively uneventful. We drive through some very beautiful country and towns. We stop in a little café to get something to eat and they only spoke French. Sid and Mary tried to order but this was useless. We got something completely different from what we ordered. We also thought that we were short changed but we had no idea if that was true or not.

We left Sid off and Mary and I continued on having considerably more room. We were heading toward Maine. We stopped in a grocery store and got some food and then stopped at a roadside park to eat. We had a wonderful meal (probably bologna and cheese) and looked at the picturesque countryside. There was large barn nearby. We finished our meal and took off.

As we were driving down the road, Mary suddenly said ‘Oh my God!’ I asked her what was wrong. She said she had lost her purse. We reconstructed what happened and decided that she had put her purse on the top of the car when we left the park after eating. We turned around and headed back to the park. No purse. We looked all over and nothing. We drove up the road again looking along the side but still nothing.

This purse had our emergency money in it. Money that we might need if we had an emergency. Now we had an emergency but no way for resolution. The emergency was in the form of travelers checks so we could trace it. Of course Mary’s wallet and her cash, ID and other things you would carry were in that purse. The thing we were worried about most was birth control pills. They were all in the purse. We had to do something about that.

When we figured out that we were not going to find the purse, we went into the nearest town and found a doctor. We told him the story, that we were newly married and how we had brought my brother to Canada for school, that our first night we were in a 2 man mountain tent and it rained all night and now we lost her purse.

The doctor liked the story so much that he said he would give us enough to get back home. He didn’t even charge for the pills.

Now we were on our way. By now it was late and we needed to find a place to stay. Camp I mean. We found a beautiful place on a lake. It was not a commercial camping ground but there were some other campers there. It was a beautiful setting and we had a beautiful night. We got up the next morning and cooked our breakfast. Of course we brought along the Coleman stove. Bacon and eggs.

We drove on toward Maine. When we reached the border we just drove across. When we got into the US the road was just dirt. Actually mud. It looked like a lumber road through the woods…and a bad one at that. I thought we must be in the wrong place. My car was not designed for this type of road. We continued on and it finally started to get better. We were headed for Arcadia National Park.

Arcadia National Park was a very scenic and dangerous place. On the ocean. Cliffs at the ocean edge. We set up our tent and decided to walk over to see the ocean. I had my camera with me. It was a Pentax Spotmatic SLR that I had just purchased that summer. I had sandals on my feet and my camera around my neck. We got near the edge and started to walk over to the edge. We were walking on those huge rocks which were at a slope toward the ocean. As I started down the rocks I lost my footing. It was wet and the sandals gave me little traction. I went down and the slope was steep enough that I just slide toward the edge. Over the edge was a 50 foot drop onto the rocks below and the waves were crashing against those rocks. As I was sliding down the rock I was trying to guard my camera from being damaged and trying to gain some traction so as not to go over the cliff. I continued to slide down not being able to grab hold of anything. It seemed like forever as I slide and my life passed before my eyes. Finally I got to the edge and there was a lip of rock sticking up and I was able to hit that lip with my feet and stop. I received no injury but I did bang up my camera but it didn’t seem to be damaged.

We went back to the tent and fixed something to eat. It was getting quite cold so we tried to build a fire but it was too wet. We decided to go to bed. We had our sleeping bags but had not used them yet. We got them out and zipped them together. As we were zipping them together a pair of panties fell out of a sleeping bag. This is not a good thing with a new wife. I explained that we had loaned the sleeping bags to a friend and she bought that. We slept very well that night.

We stayed at Arcadia a day or two and then left traveling down the coast. We went to Lexington-Concord, saw Walden Pond, and went to Nathanial Hawthorn’s house of seven gables and some other attractions. I don’t remember where we stayed but I am thinking we probably camped out because we were being very careful with our money since we had lost our emergency money.

On we went. We arrived in New York City early in the morning. We just wanted to get through there and on toward home. We were driving along on a newly constructed road and suddenly it ended. There was a great deal of road construction going on at that time and it appeared that they stopped here waiting for a bridge to be constructed. You could see that cars had been driving down the embankment to the road below. So that’s what we did. This put us into an area in New York City that I did not want to be in. I don’t know how we got out of there but we did.

Finally we got home in one piece. When we got there a package was waiting. It was Mary’s purse. Someone had found it along the road and sent it to us. They had taken the cash from the wallet but everything else was there.