I've written before about how my dad's side of the family used to have annual family reunions; we'd gather every summer at my grandparents' home in Springfield, Illinois, to swim and waterski and eat delicious food, much of it grown right there in their garden. When my grandparents moved to Florida for good, though, we had to find somewhere else to park our clan for a week each year.
We had a few reunions at my Uncle Ken's house in Champaign-Urbana, which had an ample yard for volleyball games and a sizeable pool for our swimming fix (and, oddly, a ramshackle old shed that -- for reasons that now escape me -- we had to push from one side of the yard to another one year, I suspect as some kind of punishment for the heavy beer consumption of the night before, as most of us were college age or older by then), but the house itself couldn't contain us all, so at some point we decided to take our show, such as it was, on the road.
We tried a mountain resort in Pennsylvania, which fit the bill in some respects, but not others -- it had hiking, horseback riding and whitewater rafting nearby...but no air-conditioning in the cabins in spite of an oppressive heat wave. Then my older cousins started getting married, so we had a series of weddings in various locations including Nantucket (fantastic, but expensive), Ireland (extremely awesome, but a bit far), and a Carnival Cruise (too much neon). We were a family without a country, and some years the reunion just didn't happen at all, to everyone's disappointment.
In the fall of 2000, both my grandmother and my Uncle Ken passed away. In addition to directing the shed move (and, before that, the yearly dock renovations at my grandparents' house), Ken had orchestrated nearly every reunion; his unwavering focus on the value of family and togetherness had gotten us to be the close-knit (and only mildly dysfunctional) bunch that we are to this day. In his memory, and in honor of Grammie, we knew we had to have a reunion again the following summer.
One of my cousins took it upon himself to do the location scouting, and ultimately he settled on Bar Harbor, Maine. He'd found an inn on the water with a B&B nearby (the former for the rabble-rousing cousins, the latter for the people who wanted to sleep), both within walking distance of the quaint grey-shingled town.
We all made our travel plans for the July 2001 event with aplomb and anticipation. As the date approached, my mom made my Grammie's famous Green Cookies to distribute to everyone (they're sugar cookies with a hint of almond flavor, and they are dyed green for reasons that I could tell only if I were going to kill you moments afterward), and I stocked up on sunscreen (as I do anytime I'm going to leave the house for more than five minutes).
The day of departure, a Thursday, my brother and I and my then-boyfriend (we'll call him, uh, X) headed to LaGuardia after work. We were all law firm associates, and even a four-day weekend away was considered a great luxury -- so much a luxury, in fact, that X could only stay until Saturday afternoon, as he had to get back to New York to close a deal or...some such thing. At any rate, we arrived at the gate and found pandemonium. Flights had been delayed due to storm systems over the entire Eastern seaboard, and ours was no exception. We watched with dwindling enthusiasm as the time was pushed back further...and further...and then, around 10pm, it was canceled altogether.
Without Blackberries or iPhones or any of that newfangled technology, we were stuck using our cell phones to dial around for other options. Flights the next day? Booked. Trains? The last one departed five minutes ago. Rental cars? Not a single one left in the five boroughs of New York.
And so it was that we ended up taking a bus from New York City to Bar Harbor, Maine.
When we discovered that there was one more bus -- ONE -- leaving for Boston that night, we grabbed our bags and sprinted to the taxi line. The storm was passing over New York, and the rain ran in sheets down the windshield as our driver sped through Queens and into the Tunnel, aimed at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. As we skidded across Park Avenue South -- where X and I were living at the time -- X looked longingly out the window. My brother and I didn't even blink. This was for family. This was for Grammie and Uncle Ken. We would get there even if we had to walk.
The Port Authority is not the world's cushiest place at any time of day, but around midnight it's especially unsavory. We ignored the gathering drunks and panhandlers, got our tickets, and headed down to the "gate." We sank onto the sticky floor, already drained from the hasty change of scenery and the thought of the 18-hour journey ahead. Eventually, the bus chugged into place and we boarded.
The trip from New York to Boston was unremarkable, aside from its late hour. It was a rather motley collection of passengers, but not noticeably more so than usual. When we arrived at South Station, we had several hours to kill before the bus to Bar Harbor departed.
And so it was that we ended up sleeping on the floor of a bus station (as much as one can sleep on the floor of a bus station, anyway).
Dawn came and we rinsed our grimy faces and administered eyedrops to cement-like contact lenses, and stared blearily out into the sunlight. We boarded the second bus of our trip around 5 a.m. Whatever moxie we'd had about taking one for the team had been replaced with grim determination. We just wanted to get there.
Five minutes into this leg -- before we'd even made it past the Big Dig -- a baby a few seats ahead of us started wailing at full volume. My brother pulled out his Walkman (!), clamped his headphones on, leaned forward to press his face against the seat in front of him, and went to sleep. Every few minutes, his head would slide down the seat back and he'd jerk upright, disoriented. He'd look around, find that we'd only gone another two miles, and settle back in for another momentary rest. Occasionally I heard the click of the auto-reverse on his tape deck.
I sat in the window seat next to X and stared outside as the will to live left my body. Frigid air blew up from the window well, searing my face into a near-frostbite condition. My contacts were fogged and brittle, my hands deathly white from the manufactured cold. And the baby screamed on and on and on.
For eight and a half hours, that baby screamed. Every half-hour or so, he would hiccup and gulp, and for a moment we would all wonder if it was over. It wasn't. He screamed. And he screamed. All the way to Bangor, Maine.
We reached Bangor in the late afternoon and disembarked the bus in a state of disbelief and self-pity. We were visibly shaken. I had rented a car, but it was at the airport. We stood outside the bus station like refugees, blinking in the light and rubbing our arms in the surprisingly chilly breeze. I wished for a sweatshirt, a pillow, a BED. But we still had two hours of driving to go.
It took us over an hour to reach a local taxi company, then another for the driver to arrive to get us to the airport and to our rental car. By the time I took the wheel, I hadn't slept in 36 hours. We drove in silence to Bar Harbor.
When we finally arrived, we learned that everyone -- every single person in the family -- had run into travel disasters. Some straggled in that night; some slept in airports and wandered in, dazed, on Saturday; some didn't make it til Sunday morning, only to turn around and leave the next day. On top of that, it was freezing in Maine, and the B&B was run by snippy people who shushed us whenever a floorboard creaked. There were also some, ah, misunderstandings of varying degrees between certain family members. And some people never got their bags.
But we made it. And, somewhere, Grammie and Uncle Ken smiled.
