Every girl needs a forklift

Last night we had planned to drive from Portland Me right onto Philly PA by the time we realized the two were 8 hours away it was getting dark. Only hoping to go about half that, we immediately found a Starbucks and proceeded to drink coffee and work on finding a place to stay. Campgrounds are hard to come by in the winter and hostels in the surrounding area were all over our $25 personal price limit. It was at about this time I started thinking back onto a list I had made before we started the trip of people I knew on our planned rout.
A friend of the family Judy, lives near Hartford CT right in the middle of our rout to Philly. Perfect. I called her out of the blue and she was more than happy to oblige, we were given an awesome guest bedroom in her basement art studio in exchange for white wine and good conversation. We spent most of the morning milling about her fantastic house, drinking coffee and looking at all of her neat tchotchkes. We took a mid-morning bike ride on a path Judy had told us about, returned briefly to help unload groceries then we took off for Philly.
Parking was a disaster, but we found hummus and ying ling. We'll sleep tonight and explore tomorrow.