berkshires rambling

So last Friday afternoon, staring at the clock on my computer at work finishing up some important stuff before the week’s end, I get a text from my sweetie: Wanna get out of town tonight?” As usual, since I am not terribly spontaneous, my panicky brain tries to figure out the answer to this very complex question – Can we afford this? Do I have clean underwear? Do we have snacks and water bottles for the car? What will traffic be like? What’s the weather like this weekend? I’ve gotten up from my desk, walk to the restroom with all this going through my mind, ask myself more questions that I don’t actually answer. Are my favorite shorts clean? Where will we have breakfast? Is my camera battery charged? is my iPad charged? is my phone charged? Where are my chargers? Did I fill that prescription for that thing on my foot? What about those bills I was gonna pay this weekend? Did I set the DVR for….. As I head back into my office thinking – I DON’T KNOW!, I CAN’T THINK! I HAVE TO FINISH THIS SPREADSHEET! Why do I have to …and there’s another text: “Yes or No, I take care of the rest.” So I stopped thinking, and typed into the phone, YES!

After an amazingly fast bike ride home, I pack, get all the batteries and chargers and undawears and water and whatever else I can shove into the backpack, we are off, in the car, and he hasn’t said where we are going. Eventually it is revealed it is not the Catskills (“they’re full up”) and I just let him drive as we drive North on the familiar Taconic Parkway, hit the end of it, and start to head East. I don’t know exactly where we are going, but it’s all somewhat familiar, and I figure Great Barrington. But then we are either going the wrong way (haven’t we gone too far North?), or a different way, as the GPS lady commands “turn left on Swamp Road; turn right on Tamarack Road; turn around on Dan Fox Drive…” and I see familiar Hwy 7, as sweetie turns right, and up ahead is Wagon Wheel Motel, where we stayed two years ago around this time, on another spur of the moment weekend. Later, at the Friendly’s in Lenox (conveniently one block away across the road) he confesses that riding through Western Massachusetts earlier in the day, seeing how beautiful it was, he was worried that by the time we took our Columbus Day weekend in Vermont, the leaves would have changed, and fallen off, and we’d miss it all. So he drove all afternoon to get to NYC, then turned around and drive all the way back up into Massachusetts, just so he could make sure we saw the fall leaves together, my sweet beautiful man!