“Hey Kim, that hill in front of us has more color than we saw on that bus trip in New England.”
It was mid-October in the high country of western North Carolina. My husband and I were taking our doodle, Boone, to a dog boarder about 25 miles north of our home. We drove on the winding back roads of the mountains, past new and dilapidated barns, country homes with wide front porches and tiny cemeteries. We marveled at the beautiful fall foliage along the way. The colors were magnificent. The mountain roads led us to the highway that would take us to our destination. That’s where my husband saw the hill in front of us and made the comment about the color.
Dreaming Of Fall In New England
Flashback to October 2017. I attended a three-day writer’s retreat in West Hartford, Connecticut. It was New England, in autumn, and one of my best friends was teaching. How could I say no?
While I had been to Boston and the New England states as a teen, my husband had never visited. We traveled to Boston a few days before the retreat for some sightseeing. We enjoyed walking all over Boston, seeing the historic sites, and even went to a baseball game at Fenway Park. We enjoyed delicious seafood and a spectacular cannoli from a famous local bakery. Then came our ill-fated decision.
What Is Missing?
New England is known for its vibrant colors in the fall. Over the years, we saw pictures of quaint villages, their streets lined with trees adorned in bright red or orange leaves. Jewel-toned hills were the backdrop. That is what I envisioned when I booked a fall foliage bus tour from Boston up into New Hampshire. I knew it was early in the month, but I reasoned that it was further north, and once we got out of the city and into the countryside, we would surely see more color.
We drove a while, but the color we saw the most was green. Occasionally, the driver would point out a single tree, back in the woods, that was yellow or red. It was almost comical. We spent a lot of time in the mountains of North Carolina in October, so we know what fall colors are supposed to look like. It didn’t take long to realize we had made a terrible mistake.
Mid-morning, we visited Brookdale Fruit Farm and saw apple trees, heavy with apples. We stopped for lunch at The Grove restaurant at Woodbound Inn on Contoocook Lake. That was as far north as we traveled. After lunch, we turned around and headed south. Again, the bus driver pointed out the occasional red or yellow-leafed tree along the road.
We spent an entire day on a bus, with some interesting characters, and never saw the New England fall foliage we expected to see. We would have been better off spending another day in Boston or touring Cape Cod. While it was a pretty drive, the lack of fall colors was a disappointment!
Unfortunately, I have a knack for getting us into some questionable situations. Our marriage is scattered with them.
Other Questionable Decisions
There was the time, early in our marriage, when I thought it would be great fun to own a Hallmark card store. Immediately after we signed all the legal paperwork with Hallmark and the shopping center, I found out I was pregnant with our first child. Two years later, we had our second child. When she was two, we sold the store.
Years later, we kept getting brochures in the mail for Great Lakes Cruises. I really wanted to go, but the people in the brochures were significantly older than me, so I told my husband that when I was sixty, I wanted to go on a Great Lakes cruise. Well, I got ahead of myself, and we went on the cruise the year I turned fifty-eight. It was fun, and we met two delightful couples, but let’s just say that while the scenery was beautiful, the cruise didn’t quite live up to the pictures. And then, to top things off, a couple of years later, my husband’s sister and her husband did a similar tour of the Great Lakes on a brand new Viking Expedition ship. Why did I have to be so impatient?
It’s All Part Of The Story
When I look back on these questionable decisions, and many others, I have made in our forty-two years of marriage, I realize that all was not lost. Thankfully, I have a patient and long-suffering husband who takes things in stride, who reminds me I don’t have to continue to beat myself up because of questionable decisions. Over the years, we have learned to laugh at ourselves, realizing that all the blunders make up the story of our lives, our family folklore. It’s most often the blunders that prompt us to say, “Remember that time when?”
How about you? Do you have a blunder that became part of your story, your family’s folklore? I’d love to hear.
