A Tale of Two Chemists: Our Second … or Third Honeymoon

Our Second … or Third Honeymoon

27-28 March 2023

Gloria and I got married on the 1st August 1987 in the Brown University chapel. The following day we took our bikes onto a ferry over to Martha’s Vineyard and spent our honeymoon camping. We then spent a week on vacation with my parents up on Long Lake in the Adirondacks before we went back to finish our post-doc positions in the chemistry departments at Brown and Columbia Universities. We secured jobs at ICI Pharmaceuticals (which would later become Zeneca and then AstraZeneca), but they didn’t start until January of 1988. So in the middle of September, having shipped the bulk of our worldly possessions over to the UK, we set out on a ten week camping trip around the USA. We took a counter-clockwise route covering 14,000 miles and visited several of the countries exceptional National Parks. Some of our family think of this as our honeymoon, but technically speaking it was our second honeymoon. We had an outstanding trip, but perhaps didn’t appreciate how rare and how fortunate we were to spend that length of time on an adventure. I think we thought this would be something we would do regularly. Move on 35 years and you realize that all sorts of other things take up your time and commitment. Obviously we have enjoyed extended sailing adventures over the past decade, but we have never come close to repeating a camping trip of this magnitude.

Yesterday we set out on what we hope will be another 10-week round the country car camping adventure. This time, because it is still only early spring, we plan to take a clockwise route, heading south to start with so that we get into some warmer weather as soon as possible. We have planned our “third honeymoon” well. We have a new tent (which is big enough to stand up in), lightweight cots and super-thick camping mats to make sleeping as comfortable as possible, and a two burner stove powered with propane from an aluminum 10 pound tank that we have borrowed off the boat. All of this gear, along with two coolers, spare clothes and, of course, a small amount of photographic gear is jammed into the Toyota Rav4. Did I mention we also have our bike ?! Tasha advised us that the quality of the experience would be enhanced by having less stuff … I think she’s right, but we struggled to trim it down as much as we would have liked.

We left home around 7.30am yesterday and drove 420 miles to Trap Pond State Park in Delaware. We only stopped twice to fill up with gas and use the loos, and other than that drove solidly, arriving shortly after 3pm. We were lucky that the rain showers that were forecast held off and we got the tent up in a matter of minutes. A short walk was followed by a fine evening meal of what we call “cabbage dinner” (ground beef, cabbage, tomatoes, onions, caraway seeds, served over rice). All our equipment seemed to work well and we snuggled up in bed before 9pm.

I slept really well … Gloria not so much! The temperatures dropped down a lot overnight and it must have been close to freezing when we got up this morning. After coffee and bagels, we headed out on a 5 mile walk around Trap Pond. It really is a beautiful place with bald cypress trees in and around the water and pine forests inland. We saw lots of birds, including wood ducks, winter wrens and purple finches. We are working to see how many species of birds we can see in one year. We may take a bike ride later to a subsidiary area called Trussum Pond and then tomorrow we move on to Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland.

Mike