It’s been just about exactly two months since you — whoever you are — would have heard from us via this blog. But I didn’t want you to think it had, y’know, died on the vine… any more than the road trip itself has! (After all, we’ve still gotta somehow get the car back across the country…)

Our Las Vegas stay has been longer than planned, through no one’s “fault” and not really from inertia, either. Of course there’s still the lingering pandemic — Delta, Omicron, and whatever variants might be out there, sniffing like jackals around the margins of our peace of mind. Also, I had a cataracted lens in my right eye removed and replaced a couple weeks ago, with the possibility of having the left eye done, too, in another couple weeks. So we’ll be here into March, anyhow.

We do need to be back in Florida in the middle of April, for a handful of medical/dental appointments… but at this point, we’ve no idea if we’ll drive there, or fly. Consult your favorite Magic 8-Ball for a non-hazy answer!

What we’ve been up to in Vegas

Start by forgetting whatever you might be thinking about the city as a sybaritic destination. We’ve been to the Vegas “Strip” — where the biggest hotels, casinos, shopping, and entertainment venues are located — exactly twice: once, for a pre-Christmas dinner date; and once, to return/exchange a couple of Christmas gifts at a store whose only local outlets are on the Strip.

So once you’ve forgotten that, what’s left?

Pretty much the same as for any other household in winter 2022 (assuming the household is in the USA, and assuming its occupants are being veeeeery careful, pandemic-wise). The Stepson, alas, must continue to work at home; he does this for many hours, every day of the week (but not so much on Sundays). As for The Missus and I, well, there’s plenty of reading; plenty of TV; plenty of electronic gaming of one kind or another… We do one or two Instacart orders a week, order meals delivered about as often, go for walks around the neighborhood…

But then I started thinking about this blog, and how to kick-start it a little. And I realized there are stories about our 2021 road trip which many (most?) of you have not yet heard or read about.

So that’s what’s coming up. Watch this space! And, for a refreshing change, I’ll see if I can justify your continued attention here.

Okay, so you probably know much of what’s happened on our trip so far. Just in case, though, let’s bring the saga not quite up-to-date…

The car

The photos at the right summarize developments of the week or so following my last post here (from Greenville, NC, although it was about events in Wilmington). From top to bottom, briefly:

(1) Our car. I was so happy that was the only “real” damage. It was still driveable, after all! (Of course, I was a lot less happy when I read up some more on the cost of airbag deployment.)

(2) The other guy’s car. I doubt that he was happy at all.

(3) Our old 2016 CR-V on the left; rental car on the right (both parked outside our Airbnb). All the luggage and other roadtrip essentials had to be transferred from the former to the latter, so the former could be hauled away.

(4) Our “new” 2020 CR-V on the left; rental car on the right (both parked outside the hotel where we stayed for two nights, after acquiring the 2020 replacement car). All the luggage and roadtrip essentials had to be transferred from the latter to the former, so we could return the latter to the Enterprise rental location.

Not shown, because I couldn’t figure out how to include a photo: my beloved camera was apparently a victim of the accident: it turns on okay, but the little monitor screen is dead as a doornail. It’s also stuck in a “program mode” I never would have chosen, with other settings rendering it useless. So the post-accident photos shown in this post were all taken with my phone.

The travel north

We pretty much fled from Greenville on Saturday, Aug. 14, eight days after the accident.

We’d already discarded all the leisure stops and destinations between there and New Jersey, and then most of our planned New England route, still aiming to get to Maine to keep our Aug. 18-21 reservation in Bar Harbor. But of course now we couldn’t linger in NJ, either. So, we thought, let’s just gallop through the remainder of North Carolina and all of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, all in one go (estimated drive time: 8.5 hours or so)… to stay with The Brother and Sister-in-Law in northeast NJ for a couple nights. Thereafter, we’d make an intermediate stop in Salem, MA, and proceed on up to Maine from there.

But of course, well, nothing could be even that simple.

The fastest route north — discounting the phobia-stirring route via the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel — was all via interstate highways, principally I-95. It took us 10 hours to get from Greenville to Aberdeen, Maryland. At that point we called it quits and just stayed at a chain hotel for one night before heading north for a single night’s stay at The Brother’s place. The morning after that, we headed off Salem for two nights, thence on up to Bar Harbor for three.

Somewhere in there we got word of Hurricane Henri barreling towards New England. So we changed plans yet again — from Bar Harbor, we scooted west to Lincoln, New Hampshire, for two nights, to a Holiday Inn in Saratoga Springs for four nights of the last week of the racing season, and as of right now are at a Comfort Inn in Scotia, New York, for the last of a three-night stay. But for now, here’s a summary of our visit to Massachusetts and Maine.

Salem, Bar Harbor, Acadia, and a bit beyond

Salem: You probably know of Salem several things. You might know of the Salem witchcraft trials and executions and so on, back in the 17th century. Or maybe you know of its nautical history: whaling, lobsters and clams, great “Northeaster” storms battering the seacoast — that sort of thing. Chances are, though, you do not associate it with Lydia E. Pinkham. I turn the floor over, temporarily, to Wikipedia:

Lydia Estes Pinkham (February 9, 1819 – May 17, 1883) was an American inventor and marketer of an herbal-alcoholic “women’s tonic” for menstrual and menopausal problems, which medical experts dismissed as a quack remedy, but which is still on sale today in a modified form.

It was the aggressive marketing of Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound that raised its profile, while also rallying the skeptics. Long, promotional copy would dramatise “women’s weakness”, “hysteria” and other themes commonly referenced at the time. Pinkham urged women to write to her personally, and she would maintain the correspondence in order to expose the customer to more persuasive claims for the remedy. Clearly the replies were not all written by Pinkham herself, as they continued after her death.

The main tourism driver in Salem, over time, has become not the waterfront, let alone patent medicines, but witchcraft-and-New-Age-themed stores and restaurants, bars and museums and — who knows? — preschools. Here’s a gallery of some of these institutions:

Driving to Maine: It was a few hours up the coast from Salem, preceded by about an hour’s detour south to Marblehead, Massachusetts, for a quick revisit of the town we’d so liked staying at during our “grand literary tour” of the state some years ago. Also, we decided to skip highway driving altogether — following US Route 1 for as long as we could. We did have to take I-95 for a little while, though, and while we didn’t get into “the Kennebunks” as much as some would have liked, we did make this brief rest stop:

In the event, instead of a mere four hours to Bar Harbor, the trip took about six (leisurely) hours. We actually arrived a little after the theoretically latest allowable check-in time at the B&B where we’d be staying. (A few of you might be surprised that we — we — would arrive late.)

Bar Harbor: Holbrook House is a very nice (and rather pricey) bed-and-breakfast close to the center of town. The owners are very careful in dealing with the pandemic: masks are required anywhere in the house, unless you’re in your room or out on the sunporch eating breakfast. (The sunporch and a couple of other rooms on the main floor are the only common areas you can get into anyway.) To check in, only one person per party can leave the car — that person must be masked, and carry on the check-in and orientation conversation with one of the owners (also masked) on the front porch.

Under the circumstances, then, The Missus handled nearly all interactions with the host, Eric (since I couldn’t hear anything through his mask). Most of these were simple and more or less obvious anyhow — “How would you like your bagel prepared?” and so on. But the first conversation went on a long time, involving exaggerated eye and brow action, hand- and arm-waving, elaborate shrugs and so on, to compensate for the missing lower half of their faces. I sat in the car, watching… and thought about silent films: actors trained on the stage to project their heart and meaning to the back of the theater, suddenly robbed of that form of expression, reduced to very agitated mannequins of profound horror, grief, manic laughter, and so on…

Anyhow, the room we’d reserved was a sort of baby suite. There was a bathroom of course (more on that in a moment), and also a bedroom. But the bedroom also included — besides end and side tables and a large dresser — a, well, a love seat. It was positioned with its back to the bed and about 3-4 feet away, facing the dresser. There was no TV on the dresser or the wall, just a painting. (A bit of an odd touch. I think we both felt a little awkward about the love seat; we never sat in it, just used it to drape clothes on, to hold luggage we needed to open temporarily, and so on. We had no reason to use it for its obvious purpose, but wanted it to feel useful.)

Aside from the bath- and bedrooms, there was also a small space just inside the front door which served as a sitting-and-TV room. The TV here — flat panel, mounted about six feet up on the wall — wasn’t enormous, and didn’t need to be (given the size of the room); the room also included two armchairs and a low side table.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to experience as much of downtown Bar Harbor: it was mobbed. Eric told us later that the record tourism season for Bar Harbor was 1976 — the US Bicentennial year — with 3.2 million visitors to a town which (as of the 2010 Census) housed a mere 6,000 residents. Our 2021 visit, in contrast, occurred during the height of a season where the numbers were on track to hit four million tourists. We did have a very, very nice dinner the first night, at a restaurant called Galyn’s… seated in a nice quiet room, served exquisite food and drink by a very earnest staff. A lucky stroke, considering that we had no reservation and the pavements outside were a wall-to-wall tsunami of human bodies.

(I have no photos from that meal, probably an indication of how desperate we were to be eating at all.)

Acadia National Park: The main draw to the area in general, of course, is this park occupying much of the island — Mt. Desert Island — on which Bar Harbor itself sits. But like the town, Acadia this year was a magnet for millions of people tired of staying home or otherwise confined — which robbed our intended leisurely visit of its charm. We thought we might at least get to eat lunch in the park restaurant… but no, as it happened. (The line to get into the little gift shop practically wrapped around the building — and then there was the line to get into the restaurant proper, both lines sharing the same space, side-by-side.)

That said, we did make the winding and a bit scarifying climb in the car to the top of Cadillac Mountain (whose panorama — showing half of the 360-degree view — tops this post). We’ll have to hope for a return visit someday, to Bar Harbor and the park. We understand there’s a brief two-week window of time between Labor Day and the onset of autumn’s leaf-watching season when visiting is optimal — so at least we have that target to keep in mind.

Leaving Maine: About a day into our Bar Harbor adventure, we got word of Hurricane Henri — necessitating yet another change of plans. So we decided to switch all the other eastern Massachusetts and Long Island stops we’d intended, yet again, and flee west, out of the storm’s projected path. (Our optimistic reasoning: we can hit the Atlantic coastal areas after doing western and upper New York state and maybe Vermont. When done in MA and Long Island, perhaps then is when we’ll finally make our way south to NJ. Of course, this depends in large part on the progress of the Fall 2021 storm season, even more than it does on our hopes!)

We did make one more stop in Maine, though: in Bangor, to the home of author Stephen King. Actually, he no longer lives there; he’s got another home elsewhere in Maine, as well as a couple other places around the country. But his old home in Bangor now houses the Stephen and [wife] Tabitha King Foundation, and we were going through Bangor anyhow, so why not jump on the photo-op wagon. Each of us took photos of the other before the large iron gate, but alas, the ones of The Missus did not meet her approval. So I’ll close for now with this one of me:

Are you thinking this was kind of tacky of us? We had some thoughts along those lines, too. But it turns out that the house draws tourists and King admirers all the time. In fact, while I was crossing the street to strike a pose, another car drove up and parked between the camera-wielding Missus and me. Just as I got to the gate and turned around, the two people in the car got out and began to set up their own selfies-and-ussies… until they suddenly realized (as in the photo shown above) I was standing stockstill, a grim smile frozen in place, looking across the street behind them. Then they skedaddled out of the way so The Missus could concentrate on the real subject of the shot.

Next time, we’ll pick up the tale from New Hampshire… where (among other things) we really had to scamper out of Henri’s way!