The following parts of our trip were not documented, due to the phone charging cord having become lost under the seats of the car, so you will just have to imagine our uneventful drive over to French Creek State Park in Elverson, Pennsylvania, with us listening to Tress of the Emerald Sea read aloud by Rose, and K-pop of course, and the relatively mild squabbling about the distribution of snacks.

It did get a little hairy at the end there, when it was getting dark and we were driving around in the middle of nowhere, unable to navigate the erratic signage in Eastern Pennsylvania.

I should mention that we are doing all the navigation by old-fashioned paper maps. One of our technology problems we’ve been struggling with lately is that the old phone that has service can’t tolerate any kind of mobile data network. If you start turning on location and opening Google maps, it has an epileptic fit, gives up on life, and turns itself off. The new phone my mom passed along to me recently also rejects a SIM card. It doesn’t thrash around like the other phone, it just quietly acknowledges it and does nothing, and not even my brother, who is a computer genius, could make it see reason before we left.

It’s ok though – I can actually read a map, and we had raided my mom’s vintage map collection, which, by the way, works better than Google Maps in some ways. It’s true that the Connecticut map was from 1973, but it worked well enough for major highways. The problem with French Creek State Park is that it exists where our maps have blank white spaces. We did find it eventually, and even found our campsite we had reserved, and then probably annoyed people around us by setting everything up and cooking dinner on our stove late at night.

I’m sure there were some moments of satisfying karmic entertainment for them, too, like all of us tripping over the tent guy-wires multiple times, and when Clo got stuck with both legs in one pant leg of her pajamas and was thrashing around like a distressed elephant in our 4-person tent made for 4 very small people.

It wasn’t until the morning when we had our first brush with real adventure for the trip – we were very low on gas, but I assumed that once we had made it to one of the towns marked on the map, we would invariable run into a gas station at some point.

We passed the first little town without even realizing we had passed it. The second came and went. The third. The gas gauge was settling firmly over the E, and for miles it seemed there still was only hilly two lane roads, boxy little houses, and empty fields. I remembered my friend Karl having a long rant during high school lunch about how gas stations simply don’t exist in Eastern Pennsylvania, imagined being stuck on the side of the road here and having to trudge along for days searching for civilization, and started having a panic attack. Rose tried to find the Rescue Remedy, but it was hidden in the back under the giant tarp somewhere.

Luckily we came up to road construction and were able to ask the young gentleman holding the Stop/Slow sign where we could get gas. We told him the situation was desperate. He took a long drag on his cigarette before directing us with either a funny accent or a speech impediment, but we mostly understood him, and were finally able to find what passes there for a metropolis and fill the gas tank again before we were stranded.

On our way out of Pennsylvania and into Connecticut, we stopped in at Allentown and were hoping to meet up with friends we had met last adventure on our boat tour in Chincoteague. It didn’t work out scheduling-wise, but in a strange twist of fate, they ended up driving right behind us on I-78 heading towards New Jersey, and recognized our Florida plate and giant pile of pillows clogging up the back seat! We had one of those odd interstate moments where everyone starts rolling down windows and waving wildly, unsettling the ambitious New England drivers around us.