Our final leg of the Journey should be properly referred to as the Suicide Run to New England. This put any Kenai fishing one-night run to shame. We left Regina the Monday after the wedding at about 1pm, only 7 hours later than we planned on leaving… not bad by our standards. We can honestly say that the car did not stop for anything besides food/fuel until we hit central Vermont. That’s 2,000+ miles! Lindsay and I traded driving duties back and forth, taking anywhere between a 4hr shift and an 8hr shift. These shifts were relatively uneventful until Lindsay’s 430am turn somewhere between Minneapolis and Chicago… in her own defense, she had just awakened from sleeping, it was dark and the “raccoon” that she ran over was on the far side of a little roller on the interstate. With that being said, I had just fallen asleep when the car hit something, hard, and I sat straight up convinced we had just gotten blown up. As my adrenaline and heart rate came down she tried to convince me that we had hit a raccoon but after a little bit of disbelief and realizing that it would’ve been the world’s biggest raccoon she admitted that we smoked a road killed deer’s rib cage section. Yep, this stuff really happens.

After a brief visit in Chicago with Mr Reeses, Dustin Gray, we headed into our second night of driving taking us from the Michigan-Canadian border to Montreal. We made it to Montreal when the sun came up and after some bickering over fuel stops and aggressive bickering over driving through Montreal we made it to our final border crossing. Hooray! Our first actual stop was at a truck stop in northern Vermont for a quick shower and then a morning in Burlington for breakfast/lunch/people watching. We spent that night with my adopted Vermont family from college in Rutland and then headed south to Rhode Island the next day. Couch surfing our way through New England we spent the following day eating pears off the tree and watching Hunter try to fight a pair of Scottish Highland Cows (it didn’t turn out well for him… now he has TBI too) at my senior project advisor and friend’s house.

One badass boat crew!

The final stop on our travels brought us to beautiful Whitefield, Maine and my cousins’ to have a weekend of drinking, rafting and drinking. After a partially hung over drive to the Kennebec River we had one of the best days of our trip, hitting big water and drinking 99 cent Natty Ice tall boys on the float out with a decent boat crew. I mean, they weren’t the worst at least… not sure about the guide though.

The best paddlers on the river… after a couple Natty Ice’s.

After watching the Patriots beat Atlanta and going down the YouTube Rathole too many times we seperated Hunter from his girlfriend and finally headed north to Maine, home sweet home in Andover. We arrived at my parents’ house to find boxes in the garage, guest bedroom and the basement… looks like that “relaxing break from driving” would be spent moving boxes and putting all our “stuff” we forgot about into storage.