Charley, Nicole, and Emma are up in Maine this weekend with us. Charley and Nicole were thinking of going to the Fryeburg Fair last weekend, but decided against it in the end. They had talked it up to Emma, who was really psyched for it.
We set out for it after a long slow morning here. Traffic was backed up around Bridgton and opened up again on the road between there and Fryeburg. I expected a traffic backup near the fair, but not like what we found. Around 1:45, after we had gone two miles in half an hour, I said, “If we don’t get there by three, I’m going to turn around.” At 2:43, and I checked my watch so as to know how much time was left on my time limit, we pulled into the parking lot of the Jockey Cap store and motel to step out of the car, buy a snack, and use their port-a-potty. Arlene spotted a Chinese restaurant across the street. We pulled the car into that parking lot, had lunch, and felt a lot better. When we were done, Arlene went into a food store in the same strip mall for a jug of water and Charley went into the drug store at the other end of the strip mall for cough drops. As we were checking out of the food store, we were talking about the traffic. The people ahead of us were saying they had NEVER seen it so bad, but that if we were going to the fair there was a short cut up a dirt road along the power line a couple of hundred yards past where we were. They invited us to follow their car, but we had a kid to get into a car seat and didn’t want to ask them to wait for us. They went over the directions again for me. About that point a man on a motor scooter came over and said, “I overheard you talking. I’m going that way, too, and you can follow me.” He waited until we had everyone loaded in the car, and led the way up a very rough dirt road, almost more of a 4-wheeler trail, along a power line that we recognized from a couple of years ago when we hiked up Jockey Cap. Sure enough, after a quarter mile of bouncing through ruts and potholes we ended up on a residential street where everyone was operating their front yard as a parking lot for the fair. We were happy to pay five dollars to park there (why insist on paying the same money to the fair?). We were positive that it had taken less than a quarter as long to get there as it would have if we had stayed on the highway.