Brants, Doylestown, PA

The beautiful & talented Brant girls, Susie and Katie

Our Tuesday drive from Plymouth to Doylestown, PA, to visit our friends the Brants made us rethink a few of our well-laid plans. We’d originally planned to “blue highway” much of the trip because we thought it would be easier on the truck’s transmission, but driving from Plymouth to Doylestown made us change our minds. It wasn’t too bad through MA, RI, and most of CT, but when we got to the Palisades area of downstate NY, we decided that interstates aren’t such a bad thing. By this point we’d been on the road for about seven hours, and we’d been through a lot of little New England towns – very quaint, but they do get a little repetitive after you’ve crawled through, say, ten or twelve of them. When we crossed into NY and crept and braked through an awful American shopping area which fried our brakes, and then climbed a long windy hill, which we then had to go down, we pulled over, opened the truck windows, and sniffed. We could smell burning brakes, and the heat gauge for the engine and transmission was up, so we sat for a while until things seemed to cool down. Who knew we even knew what burning brakes and transmissions smelled like? It may have been worth it if we could have seen the view from the top of the hill, but since it was dark at this point and we’d been driving all day, our appreciation of the blue highways had worn a little thin. We decided to go the rest of the way to Doylestown via the interstates.

Despite the mechanical difficulties, we made it to Brant’s by about 8:30 pm, and Sue had dinner ready and the wine bottle was opened. We had a great dinner, catching up and again being amazed by how quickly kids grow up as we talked to Susie and Katie, who are now both in high school and quite accomplished. Jim and the girls were off to school first thing in the morning, so we took the dogs for a walk with Sue and their dog Ruby before Sue left for work, and then again hit the road.