Day One

The epic 2010 Summer Road Trip begins. Today's progress was somewhat unimpressive:

And:

We had originally planned to leave yesterday morning but Eric discovered a fantastic academic conference "on the way" that he had to go to. Sounds a little nuts, perhaps--hitting a conference at the outset of a long road trip--but I agreed that he should go after hearing the roster of speakers. So we left this morning instead and drove a mere five hours to Emmittsburg, MD. Eric actually interviewed for a job at the seminary here so we are familiar with the area. The town is also home of the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton shrine. Mother Seton was the first American-born saint to be canonized. The school where Eric currently teaches was founded by her nephew who named it after her so we definitely feel a connection. While Eric went to his conference the kids and I played outside at the Shrine which was, of course closed. We've been to the Shrine about six times and found it closed four of those times. The schedule is posted, we just never check it.

Emmittsburg is just a few minutes south of Gettysburg so we drove around there for awhile as well looking for cannons. Then we spent some downtime at our hotel in Thurmont which you have probably never heard of even though it is the home of Camp David. Our hotel really plays that up and we are in the "Associated Press" room though from the looks of it the Reagan Room would have been more comfortable. We haven't had any presidential sightings.

Despite my record two blog posts in one night I don't promise a daily log of our wanderings but it should be an interesting trip: Colorado to Minnesota and back to New Jersey. We are driving 4300 miles over nine days for a total trip of almost one month. We'll be hitting five states I've never been to and I hope we'll do enough sight seeing to warrant at least a few more installments here.