A Series of Unfortunate Roads

Greetings from Danvers, Massachusetts! I'll explain my title later. :-)

We got up this morning and departed Moncton. If we're perfectly honest, we were starting to like it. Minus, of course, the just slightly too cold temperatures and the rabid mosquitoes. Even the road signs in both English and French were starting not to scare us so much. On our way out, we went to Tim Hortons, which is a Dunkin-Donuts-esque store that has locations all over the place in Canada and northern Maine. We were told that the locals are as addicted to Tim Horton's coffee the same way Philly folks are hooked on Wawa. So we had to try it.

The sandwiches were good, as was the coffee, but...but...they didn't take Visa. Oh, they accepted credit cards, as long as it was MasterCard. We only had $1.63 in Canadian cash, so...what to do? I was forced to use my MasterCard, which I don't like using. Come on, now...how can a place not take Visa? Needless to say, we will never be visiting Tim Horton's again.

After the long drive through the Canadian countryside, we made it to the US border. The customs guy was a little stricter than the guy on the way in...he asked more questions and wanted to see our passports, but after a few minutes, we were on our way.

We continued driving all the way to Massachusetts. Shelsy was hoping to see another moose or two, but alas, all we saw were "Watch out for Moose" signs. So she looked up Moose trivia and was educating me for most of the ride. :-)

Finally, Danvers was in sight and we got off the highway. Well. Let me tell you...I am never visiting Danvers again, either. The town sits on both sides of Route 1, which is a divided highway. So, when you want to go somewhere that's on the other side, you have to drive until you see an exit, get off, loop around, go under Route 1, get back on going the other way, and hope you don't miss the turn because if you do, you have to repeat the entire process. (Here's a satellite shot...that's what you have to go through every time you want to get to the other side.)

So, we knew the name of the restaurant we wanted to visit, but didn't know much else. We passed it and had to loop back, then passed it again because there was no sign, so we had to loop back. We finally got there only to find it was too expensive. So we looped back again to find somewhere else. All this time, we're looping back at the same place. There was a minor accident under the bridge, so the cops sitting there are seeing us pass by six or seven times. Excellent.

We saw a Friday's on the other side so I took an exit, planning on doing another loop back...but of course, this exit didn't loop back, it dumped me right back on I-95! I had to find an exit on 95, which took me to another highway. So I had to loop back on that highway, go back on 95, take it back to Route 1, and pray that I didn't miss the parking lot.

Quite literally, from when we left the hotel to when we were eating, a good 40 minutes passed and the restaurant is less than a mile away. I was very stressed and ready to eat. Gah! Never visit Danvers unless you love turning around.

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