The weekend began as we rented a Hyundai XG-350 luxury sedan from the Marriot hotel by the Charles. We hadn’t planned on getting the Hyundai but they were out of the cheap economy cars that we planned on taking. Falkoff and I were driving-up together and we would add Robert and Kilimnik throughout the day on Saturday to journey en masse on Sunday and then drive Zoe back from Montreal on Monday afternoon.

Any drive to Montreal can be accelerated with a long argument about American politics and the issues around the invasion of Iraq as well as discussions about problems with the US health care system. Falkoff and I dueled and argued about the value of the war and the means by which it is being carried out. I think the discussion began because Vermont, the state we drive through to reach Canada, had debated pull their National Guard troops out of Iraq. Falkoff has traveled the route to Montreal and back many times and gave me the sage advice that if we kept the speedometer to 80 then the police wouldn’t pull us over for speeding. I couldn’t figure out how to set the cruise control so I was doing the speed manually. We had one close call where a cop pointed at me and gave me a slow down warning and I was certain that he was going to wave me over for a ticket like the other two cars he was charging for driving too fast. My heart skipped a few beats and I went seventy for twenty miles and then figured I was through the rough speed trap zones so I picked the pace back up.

When we were near Coventry, at the rest stop where we ate breakfast while trying to go to the last ever Phish concert that we never got to last fall, we stopped to pee, look at a babbling brook at the scenic overlook, and then Falkoff figured out how to work the cruise control. I set the cruise control to 81 figuring that it was close enough and I was surprised as I was climbing a hill how good the car was at keeping it’s velocity constant. At the bottom of the hill I met officer Clark Lombardi who asked me questions including whether I knew how fast I was going (81), why I was speeding (no reason), whether I was in the military (no), and why I was going to Montreal (to celebrate my last weekend as a bachelor). Officer Lombardi was likely a distant relative of the great coach Vince Lombardi and his many team oriented concepts ingrained in Clark led him to sit in his car and look menacingly at me until I turned away whenever I looked in the rear view mirror for ten seconds to see what was taking him so long. I figured I must have had some criminal record in Vermont or was at least confused for a wanted escaped convict. So I was relieved when I was handed a $132 fine for speeding at 81 MPH and told to pay it within a week or be eaten alive by Yaks.

We pressed on to meet our critical engagement with Zoe’s parents to go out to dinner with friends of the family in the suburbs. As I went into Zoe’s apartment I was given a customary bowl of hot tofu milk to greet us from our travels that I promptly drank and realized would have been better with sugar and then read my horoscope as an Ox for this year on the calendar on the wall: It read “Prospect of the year: Your nature to push yourself to try any chances. To avoid wasting of efforts, you need to be careful and think twice before moving to the next step.” Interesting advice from the Zodiac for a man with a pregnant fiancée.