We drove back from the North Country along Interstate 87, which, as Carrie noted, had been designated at one point most scenic highway and while that’s true, being an acclimated city dweller and spending five hours in a car — which is approximately, what, 30 average cab rides? — is both tiring and anxiety-making, no matter how beautiful the mountains.  Especially when you feel eager to be home, though why you are not sure.

To amuse ourselves we played a version of Twenty Questions with the aid of some tawdry gossip rags we’d purchased in a gas station.  The driver would name a celebrity, and once we established there was an item about him or her in one of the tabloids, we’d construct a question and, well…you know how the game is played.  So one was about three famous people with whom Angelina Jolie was said to have had affairs. (Is one an actor?  Yes.  Has he won an Oscar?  No.) 

I had thought over the four days without internet I’d suffer a mild withdrawal but none came.  Though when we first arrived, the wireless router seemed to work, albeit briefly, so throughout the long weekend we’d occasionally wander around to various spots in the house, laptops held out like divining rods, trying to capture some signal.  Carrie had very much wanted to show us the status updates of this actor she’d befriended on Facebook, which if they’d been carefully constructed would have been mildly funny, but as this fellow was both blithely clueless and intensely self-centered, his broadcasts were works of unintentional humor.  So we devised Facebook Status Update Charades, wherein based on Carrie’s recollections we’d try to guess the few phrases she’d committed to memory.  (“Off-roading was great this weekend…except for the fatality” went one; “I got to eat at my favorite restaurant, Corn Dog on a Stick” another.)

At other points on the drive we scanned the radio stations — on the drive up, late at night, we’d heard on a college radio station in Vermont a very stoned-sounding DJ read the weather for the weekend, in a sort of detached, philosophical way, punctuated by self-conscious spurts of laughter.  “Saturday will be partly clear, which means…I guess…also partly cloudy, if you think about it!” — discussed Michel de Montaigne (the ur-blogger?) and Joe Franklin, the Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA and the wonderful awfulness of Neil Diamond in The Jazz Singer, or just stared dreamily at the scenery.

At one rest area there was a sign behind one of those glass cases and placed next to a flyer advertising something called, I think, the Museum of Game Hunting, showing in the picture a wall lined with the sad, stiff heads of fifty taxidermied deer, which extolled the virtues of acquiring a driver’s license. “It’s cheaper than a passport!” went one bullet point.  “It fits in your wallet” went another.  That it was displayed along the highway, where presumably most, if not all, were traveling by car, was ponderous to say the least.