The Fourth of July

It started on the Fourth of July 2006. The day after our father's funeral. It had been a long couple of weeks. I was driving to my sister Janet's house, along the winding back roads of Southern Maine, my daughter sleeping in her booster seat, my wife dozing in the seat next to me. We were hoping to salvage some sort of pro forma Fourth of July celebration. I was doing some thinking – about what I'd accomplished in 33 years, where I thought I'd be, and where I thought I was heading. I guess that's the typical stuff you'd expect to think about given the circumstances.

I don't know why, but it seemed that summer that there were a lot of RVs for sale. As we went along, it looked like every few houses there was one with an RV parked in front of it, and more often than not, the RV was for sale. It made me wonder what people were thinking when they bought one of these things. I mean, did hey really expect to spend more than a few weekends a year in one of these?

Somehow, this line of thought crossed over with another. I had recently read Sarah Vowell's book Âssasination Vacationˆ, which is all about presidents who had been assasinated. The thought came to me that the only reason for getting an RV would be to see the country by visiting the gravesites of all the presidents.

Suddenly, it all came together, and I asked my sister Barbara, "Hey, how many presidents are buried in New England?"

"Well," she said, "Franklin Pierce is right in Concord, although most people in New Hampshire try not to think about him too much."

"And Coolidge is in New Hampshire," said Mom, " sort of in the middle of nowhere. And I think the Adamses must be somewhere in Boston."

"That sounds like a long weekend," I said, and we started planning our first trip.