½ Tank #25

Hannah and I said our goodbyes to Christina and Remy, and, before heading out of town, stopped at a cute little general store for breakfast.

Just before crossing into Connecticut, we came across a little town called “Sleepy Hollow.” You may have heard of it before. We drove around trying to find scary places from the movie, but found none. Eventually we stopped at the entrance to a cemetery where a kind couple gave us a map of where various characters from the story were buried. We located Washington Irving’s grave and called it good. Hannah also found an area marked out for “Knapps” on our way out.

We hit the road again and booked it to New Haven, CT. Scratch that. We tried to book it, but rush hour was against us. The reason New Haven was so important is that the non-profit Love146 is located there. What is Love146 you ask? It’s an organization that is focused on end child sex slavery and freeing as many victims as possible and helping them get their lives back together. And it’s Hannah’s dream. She’s very passionate about that issue, and would love nothing more than to work for/with Love146. She had also raised money for them this summer via a car wash, and we thought it’d be cool to hand deliver it while also giving Hannah the opportunity to chat with people who work there (i.e., schmooze for a job...haha). Well, unfortunately it was Friday and they closed at 4 p.m. so we didn’t make it in time and had to plan another time to stop by.

So instead we just headed straight through to Mystic, CT and Mystic Pizza, the setting of the movie with Julia Roberts that I’ve never seen. The pizza was delicious, though. While there we asked out waitress about places that might have free internet in the area since we wanted to look up hostels in Rhode Island. Adam & Christina had a family friend (Greena) in Boston who was going to let us stay with her, but we weren’t going to make it there early enough. A coffeeshop right near where we parked ended up being recommended, so we stopped in after pizza. We ended up not being able to connect to the internet for some reason, but while we tried we struck up a conversation with the two girls (Chelsea and Sherry) who were working. I believe Chelsea was from Cali originally, and Sherry had been in Mystic her whole life. They were super nice and very fun to talk to, and even looked up hostels for us when we couldn’t. I turned out that it was okay for us to show up at Greena’s late, though, since her husband, Ian, wouldn’t be home until around 11 p.m. or midnight anyways. So we said our goodbyes and hopped back in the car.

God bless, over and out.
~M