MEXICO – During Hazel Kennedy’s long life, she had never ridden in a limousine.

That all changed late Friday afternoon when she, her three children and their spouses, a grandson and a great-granddaughter piled into a 14-seat, white, stretch limo at her farmhouse and headed south for a tour of the Christmas lights of Lewiston and Auburn.

It was a 90th birthday present given to the tiny, white-haired woman by her children.

During her 90 years, Kennedy hasn’t let any moss grow under her feet.

She has traveled all across Canada and the United States on bus tours, served in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II. She bowls several times a week, plays bingo and cribbage, and feeds her mind by reading at least one sexy romance book every day.

“I’ve never ridden in a limousine, and I’ve always wanted to,” she said. “And the lights in Lewiston and Auburn are always so pretty.”

She said she got the idea from a fellow cribbage player who said she had a great time when she took her mother on a Christmas lights tour.

She didn’t want to see them any other way than by limousine.

“The lights are in the paper every year, but it’s such a mess of traffic,” she said.

Her daughter, Trudy Todish, who lives in Oklahoma with her husband, Jeff, was thankful for her mother’s birthday wish.

“We never know what to get her. This was her idea,” she said as the family prepared to enter the long, dark, narrow cavern of the limo.

Kennedy’s daughter-in-law, Judy Kennedy, said her mother-in-law is a sponge for information about the world.

“She has dozens of pen pals, collects stamps for designing Christmas cards, and is secretary for her bowling league,” Judy Kennedy said.

Among the scores of birthday cards she received were some from pen pals, and from people she has known from across the country. She received a telephone call from an old acquaintance she had served with in the Women’s Army Corps 65 years ago.

She also finds time to regularly attend exercise class at the Mexico Recreation Center.

“Move it or lose it,” she said.

Born in 1917 in Rangeley, she moved to Dixfield while still in school, then in 1952 to Mexico, where she and her husband, Linwood, raised their three children. She worked 21 years for a Eustis sporting camp, was a Girl Scout leader for 14 years, waited tables at a defunct restaurant in Dixfield, and worked at the long-gone Stowell MacGregor wood-turning factory in Dixfield.

Her husband died in 1987.

Judy Kennedy said her mother-in-law once told her that if she could relive just one day, it would be a day with her husband.

The family expected to return to Kennedy’s farmhouse around 7 p.m., when they would share a birthday cake and dine on pizza picked up on the trip back.

Scott Dawley, chauffeur for the Imperial Luxury Limousine Service in the Lewiston/Auburn area, said the 14-seat limo used for the Kennedy excursion is one of 14 vehicles in the company’s fleet.

His regular job is driving tractor-trailer trucks. His part-time job is his fun one, he said, because the limos are almost always used for happy occasions.

For the Kennedy family, that was surely true.

Hazel Kennedy finally got to ride in a limo.