After driving a couple of hours or so, we stopped at a rest area in upstate New York. A local farm had set up a table outside the rest area, and a young woman sold us locally-grown fruit: raspberries, cherries, and apricots. Carol said she liked the New York apricots better than the California apricots we had gotten on the first day of our trip. I contented myself with eating a generous half-pint of raspberries; to my way of thinking, there is no fruit quite so satisfying as freshly-picked raspberries.

We continued to listen to the audio recording of Anthony Trollope’s The Belton Estate. At about the time the old squire dies, the story loses energy. Carol said she guessed Trollope must have gotten paid by the word. Yet we kept on listening, even though the book grew almost dull in places, because we wanted to find out what happens to the characters.

We passed through the tail ends of the Adirondack Mountains, then dropped down to wind along the Mohawk River and the course of the old Erie Canal. We skirted around the horrible traffic jam headed north on Interstate 87, presumably people heading north to spend the long weekend in the Adirondacks, and kept going until we reached the Berkshires. We passed under the Appalachian Trail, and past a sign that told us we were at the highest point on Interstate 90 since South Dakota, at an elevation of 1,724 feet above sea level.

The woman who checked us into our motel here in Greenfield told us that there would be fireworks tonight at 9:30, and she told us how to get there. We had decided not to go. But we went out at 9:30, and walked up the hill from the motel to a nearby mall. There were half a dozen cars parked in the otherwise empty parking lot, with people sitting in them. We turned around, and there were the first fireworks shooting up into the night sky. A family got out of one of the cars to watch: two parents, and two children dressed in pajamas. It was a good vantage point from which to watch the fireworks.