somewhere in East Bump

Last weekend was my niece Kasey's graduation from High School.  Things were busy at home, soccer games, parties and the like, so just Kara and I drove over for the ceremony and reception.  We took Alex's car for a dumb reason.  The dumb reason was that I didn't want to pull up in a frumpy mini-van, and I can't help but feel like a sore thumb whenever I go to Choate.  It's an awesome school, but just so much extraordinary wealth, it's intimidating.  I am small town average Mom, not a fancy, live in a castle and have a private jet Mom.

So I took Alex's car.  The one with the annoying air conditioning problem.  Which wasn't what lead to the situation.  The situation of us getting so very lost in the middle of woodsy CT on the way home.  So very, very lost, I recognized nothing at all.  And it was raining BUCKETS.  I mean like literally, there were times when I actually couldn't see.

I have a portable navigator in my car, which I love because it makes me feel like no matter how long it takes, no matter how lost I am, I can always press HOME and it will bring me there.  So I brought it.  And I relied on it, and it lost its charge before we were in an area that I knew.  I couldn't charge it because Alex's car is dumb.  And doesn't charge things like other cars do.  But at least we looked cool when we pulled up!  Anyway, I'm no dummy (some may disagree, but lets not go there right now), and I have certainly made many a trip to visit my sister in CT -- she has lived there for over 12 years now.  I know how to get home from her house, but not from the school -- I really had no idea where I was going.  

So I tried using my blackberry, but in order to find directions we needed to know where we actually were.  Which we didn't. Pretty much all we knew was that we were in Connecticut.  In the middle of the woods, no stores, no gas stations, pretty much nothing.  A house or three scattered here and there, a babbling brook and lakes everywhere you turned,  pretty much what us small towners call "East Bump."   So we randomly drove til we saw a "Welcome to blahblahblah" sign, and input it in the blackberry. 

We thought the directions from the blackberry were dumb, so we forged on.  Finally we called my husband who tried to talk us back to a highway.  Yes, yes, eventually we made it back.  When I saw the familiar sign for the highway, I felt pretty relieved.  The rain cleared and the sky had some blue up there, and I was smiling.  I wanted to try to remember the names of some of the towns we passed through, because they were actually perfect, in an East Bump kinda way.

It was a fun, road-trippy adventure with just me and my 21-year-old kid.

And the graduation was perfect.