Our road trip — disrupted at the outset by Hurricane Elsa, in Florida — faced yet another disruption in the form of oncoming Hurricane Henri, in Maine. Luckily, our reservation at Holbrook House in Bar Harbor was up on September 21, a day or two before the new storm’s anticipated arrival. Unluckily, our (modified) plan at that point had been to head south, to Cape Code and so on — also well within the cone of Henri’s path. With this new weather evidence in hand, we chose instead to run to the west, starting with New Hampshire. We figured we’d stay there a couple nights, then head even further west into New York State. (We really didn’t want to deal with a big storm by then.)

It took a bit of legwork, especially by The Missus, to come up with someplace in New Hampshire which actually had space for a couple for two nights. (Remember, this was still the height of 2021’s tourist season in New England.) She finally located such a place, though — Indian Head Resort, in Lincoln.

The drive to Lincoln

I should at this point mention the “new” car’s idiosyncratic GPS…

The car we had until August 6 or so, in North Carolina, had no built-in GPS at all. Of course, we did have GPS apps on our phones, and this led to various “interesting” conversations about the driver’s instinctive desire to glance down at his phone to see the route in advance — how many tenths of a mile until the next turn, and so on — and the passenger’s instinctive desire to remain alive. (These conversations were made even more colorful thanks to the driver’s hearing, and his knee-jerk instinct to look towards the passenger when she was, uh, conversing.)

But the new car has built-in GPS. So the driver can sneak little down-and-to-the-right, status-checking glances without actually looking away from the road. On the other hand, the built-in GPS does not appear to be anywhere near as flexible as, say, Google Maps: it shows you the route in progress, but doesn’t (as far as we know) let you zoom out for an overview, or let you avoid highways by choice. All the way up from NC, in fact, it seemed adamantly to insist that we stick to highways…

…except that if you intentionally ignore it, it will eventually give up and accept that you don’t like its preselected routeing. (You’re following this, right?!?) At that point, it sort of sighs and adjusts its own thinking to accommodate yours.

Soooo anyhow, we set out from Bar Harbor. We knew we wanted to go to New Hampshire through Bangor, for our requisite photo-op stop at Stephen King’s old house, and then on to Lincoln — and because we weren’t in that much of a hurry, we wanted to avoid highways. If you look at a map, though, you’ll see there’s not really an east-west major-highway route to get you there; you’ll have to follow I-95 south for a ways, and then get off onto US 301, and then et cetera. Boring highways.

Surprise, surprise: the GPS dumped us off of I-95 fairly quickly, eventually leading us to NH Route 112, also known as the mouth-wateringly-crunchy Kancamagus Highway. (The name rhymes with, well, “bank in August,” and comes from the name of a 17th-century Native American chief who lived in the area. It means, roughly, “fearless one,” or more specifically, “fearless hunter of animals.)

The Kancamagus winds through White Mountain National Forest — or maybe writhes through the forest would be more precise. Definitely not the kind of drive you’d want to do “under the influence,” or in heavy weather! (Aside: driving “through” White Mountain National Forest is misleading: you’re also driving UUUUUUUPPP and DOOOOWWWN the whole time, as well as turning left and right constantly. One of those trips that passengers in the car may generally enjoy more than the white-knuckled driver. )

The Indian Head Resort

As you can see from the resort’s Web site, the place is, well, uh… not new, by most measures. Knotty-pine paneling, old exposed pipes in the bathroom ceiling, well-worn carpeting on the floor… On the other hand, it was well-maintained (e.g., those pipes seemed to have been repainted within the last couple months) and clean — very important these days, of course.

Also important for our purposes: the resort has (besides the classic tacky-touristy gift shop) a restaurant and bar.

An entry in the Interesting Conversations category: When we ate dinner, we talked a little with our waiter, whose name tag identified him as “Rovshan.” The Missus asked what country he was from; he told her twice, I think, but all she could get was that the name ended in “-stan”… and that it’s apparently a country adjacent to Turkey, a country which, well, no longer exists. (I can’t imagine being from a country I couldn’t point to on a current map. If the USA ceased to exist, would I still be “American”???) He expected to be here for only a couple more weeks until he returned, under whatever unimaginable passport he was traveling on.

[Aside: I’ve since looked up the name “Rovshan” on Wikipedia. All the Rovshans listed there are Azerbaijanis, i.e., “a Turkic ethnic group, living mainly in the sovereign Republic of Azerbaijan and the Azerbaijan region of Iran, with a mixed cultural heritage, including Turkic, Caucasian and Iranian elements.” Reading further about Azerbaijan didn’t reveal any “-stan” names, but I probably just misheard the “-jan.”]

Betty and Barney Hill

One element of our visit to the Indian Resort which most fascinated me, anyhow: out front of the place, on the shoulder alongside US Route 3, stands the New Hampshire state historic marker shown at the right.

Like any good aficionado of the old X-Files TV series and other UFO stories, I knew of Betty and Barney Hill, all right — but I didn’t know the details of the whole thing. (And I certainly didn’t expect to encounter them on our road trip!)

You can read about the Hills’ “interrupted journey” at Wikipedia, naturally. I found a couple other good sources of information:

• This history.com article, from January 2020, does a good job of covering all the important points.
• Much more recently — on August 29, just a week ago as I write this — the Showtime TV network ran an episode of their UFO series devoted to the Betty & Barney Hill case. The SyFyWire Web site reviewed the episode. (We do get Showtime but haven’t yet seen this program.)

Inside the resort’s gift shop are lots of souvenirs related to the Hills and to UFOs in general — T-shirts, commemorative mugs, bobble-headed little-green-man figurines, that sort of thing. And just up Route 3, you’ll come to the Notch Express convenience store/gas station where you can take a selfie with an alien:

We’re not sure what can possibly top this excitement, but we’ve got plenty of time to find out… Coming up next: Saratoga Springs, Schenectady, and Lake George, New York!

I’m kidding, of course: at a certain level, The Missus and I both feel we could probably hang out here for a few weeks more. But aside from the (surely considerable) inconvenience which our presence offers to The Stepdaughter and The Stepson-in-Law we ourselves are chomping at the bit to be in motion — for our separate as well as shared reasons.

I at least have been lucky enough to get out and about a bit: nearly daily shopping forays (“I can’t believe I forgot to get the milk for my tea when I went shopping yesterday!” etc.); walking to the end of the block and back…

On one of the latter excursions around the neighborhood, I took along my “good” camera. Most of what there is to see (and photograph) here is a uniform green-and-tan: palm trees, sago palms, bamboo, numerous tall pines, the sudden shock of a riot of tropical flowers… The individual plots of land are large enough (maybe 5-10 acres?), and so well shielded by vegetation, that a lot of the houses are completely invisible from the street. What you can see tells you there’s probably no neighborhood “design code” or anything; the architecture is all over the map — Spanish-style haciendas, traditional Colonial, ranch-style, etc. (Haven’t seen any doublewides but, like I say, who knows?)

Anyway, I’d taken my camera out for a neighborhood walk. Lots of plant-and-flower photos, a handful of “wildlife” shots: couple turtles, a short-and-skinny black snake, that sort of thing. Mostly, I was just walking. And sweating like a sonofagun after 45 minutes or so in the heat and humidity, in a branch of the network of streets I’d never driven on…

And that’s when a couple — probably in their 60s, so a young couple (LOL) — pulled up in a Jeep beside me.

Now, in case I haven’t told you before: I am determined on this road trip that I’ll be better than I ever have been before about talking with people: not ducking my head and looking away, practicing a guileless smile, etc. So maybe I was on a bit of a hair trigger, too eager to talk… and also a bit nervous about the fact (as I imagined it) of being accosted in rural Florida while walking the streets of a neighborhood with a camera — and clearly otherwise Not Fitting In. I started, in short, to babble:

“Hi, I don’t live here. We’re just staying with my stepdaughter over on the other side” — *waving vaguely towards the other side* — “just admiring the lovely foliage, it’s all so photogenic…!”

I’m not even sure they’d rolled down a window yet, let along gotten a word in edgewise. (You can probably imagine The Missus’s eyerolls at this part of the narrative.) But they just smiled, waved, said something reassuring and drove on.

Five minutes later, there they were again: still in the Jeep, headed in the other direction. As they drew up alongside, the guy rolled down his window and handed me a can of “Pibb Xtra,” an “artificially flavored spicy cherry soda” that I didn’t even know existed. (Plain old Mr. Pibb, sure: I knew that one okay. Just not this tarted-up variety.) “You looked like you could use this,” he said, “but I’m sorry, it’s not very cold!”

“It’s colder than I am!” I said, laughing.

The guy kind of saluted me, and they drove on.

It’s not a kind of soda I’d select for myself. But, y’know, even after I’d gotten back to the house and gotten nice and comfortable, I couldn’t bring myself to just discard it…

…and as of this afternoon, I can report: it goes well with cheddar-filled-pretzel Combos.

__________________

P.S. For what it’s worth, we will probably — probably — be on our way to the next destination sometime this week.