Following our three weeks in Indonesia and a week in Florida, we embarked on a two-week excursion of multiple engagements up the east coast from South Carolina to Boston, traveling 4,335 miles through 20 states! That included one segment of our journey in four states in a mere 20-minutes, leaving Pennsylvania and driving across narrow arms of Maryland and West Virginia before entering into Virginia. The destination and objective of the trip was a mission conference in Easton, MA and fellowship with church planters in Boston with Antioch Ministries.

Although we had a couple of days of inclement weather and adjusted to continuing winter cold, it was a beautiful trip touring the New England states, especially the snow-covered mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire. However, we hit a blizzard snowfall enroute home through New Jersey and Pennsylvania that forced a premature overnight stop, but it left a beautiful winterscape for the sunny next day’s drive.

The trip begin with a William Carey University board meeting in Hattiesburg, MS then a long, overnight drive to Columbia, SC where I presented a paper the next morning on “The Family and Missions” at a meeting of the Evangelical Missiological Society. A delightful mission emphasis over the weekend in Forest City, NC and overnight with friends in Raleigh completed our southern sojourn before heading north.

We enjoyed the leisure drive along the Maryland and Delaware coast after lunch in Virginia Beach, and crossing the 22-mile bridge and tunnels across the Chesapeake Bay. After negotiating through convoys of trucks and ubiquitous construction sites along the New Jersey turnpike, we by-passed New York City and enjoyed the drive up the Palisades Parkway and western side of the Hudson River to Albany, stopping along the way for a tour of West Point Military Academy.

For the next two days leisurely wound our way through the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire, including a stop at the iconic Vermont Country Store in Weston and a night at the historic Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton, NH. A delightful overnight visit with former IMB staff colleagues Randy and Nancy Sprinkle in Worcester, MA included lunch at the Wayside Inn, established in 1716 and memorialized in a Longfellow poem.

I finally checked off a visit to all 50 states with a foray into Maine, the one state to which I had never traveled. We had a wonderful excursion to the seaside village of Ogunquit in which I was able to choose and eat a Maine lobster on my birthday. Following our weekend ministries our route took us to Providence, RI to see the site of the first Baptist church in America started by Roger Williams in 1633, the cliff walk around the bay in Newport and a final seafood lunch at the Mystic, Connecticut seaport.