One side-effect of our four nights in Saratoga Springs: we learned how much we liked — <em>needed</em> — extended stays in general (as opposed to two- and three-night blow-in/blow-out visits). So we started looking for Airbnb sorts of places near Saratoga Springs, even if we couldn’t stay in Saratoga Springs…

Nothing really that close, of course, so we widened our search. Lo and behold, a very interesting-sounding Airbnb place: an older home in a suburb of Schenectady, called Scotia — for a very reasonable weekly price!

We immediately contacted the host.

And then waited… and waited…

Finally she got back to us, the next day. Alas, she said, she would be unable to host us — because something had come up with another reservation, and she’d had to scramble to take care of her current guests, and she’d had to move one of those parties into the house we wanted, sorry sorry so very sorry—

Well, by then, we’d invested a certain amount of time in researching things to do in and near both Scotia and Schenectady. And we had almost no time left to look for longer-term lodging anyway. So we just checked around for plain old hotels, found a Comfort Inn in Scotia, and booked it… for three nights. Not ideal, but honestly there wasn’t that much we wanted to see nearby. We just wanted at that point to regroup, and plan a real extended, put-our-feet-up interlude somewhere.

Which we did. Oh, we had a few highlights right there in Scotia(ish):

• A family member’s family had once lived — but no longer lived — in a favorite home in Schenectady, and although it wasn’t delivered as a <em”>request, exactly, I could tell they sorta-kinda wouldn’t mind if I maybe took a photo or two…?
• On the way to that address, I stopped at a mall to see if I could get my watch battery replaced. (It’d stopped the day before.) Of course the mall — like many — was on its last legs, but a jeweler there did replace the battery. Unfortunately, they also set the weekday-and-date display just slightly wrong: it was 12 hours off-schedule. So ever since, every time the watch’s time creeps towards noon, the day of the week and the date also start to roll forward. I haven’t taken the time (haha) to fix it yet. It’s very confusing, though, when The Missus asks me what day it is and I look down at my wrist and then must asked myself, “Wait — is it actually daytime outside, or is it night? And thus do I just tell her what my watch says, or do I need to subtract a day?”
• After I left the mall, I headed into the heart of Schenectady. I had my new camera with me. It was raining quite a bit, off and on, but I figured I could at least take the pictures of the house from the curb, through an open car window. But as I headed that way, I kept glimpsing, in the sky, an enormous dark tower. A church…? But what the hell kind of church…?!? I realized I just had to photograph that, too. So I drove around, glancing skywards occasionally… and just as I arrived at the foot of it, promptly got lost in a maze of streets on which I couldn’t park at all. I didn’t get the photo — the one shown here was taken by the author of this fascinating blog post, titled “Schenectady’s Grotesque Grotesques.”.
• While discussing the family member’s house project, she told me the location was very close to a residential section of Schenectady called the “GE Plot.” (You can read about the GE Plot on Wikipedia.) The Missus and I did drive around that neighborhood while we were up there… took no pictures, but the houses and properties were indeed impressive!

By the way, a shrewd observer will notice that Scotia itself doesn’t seem to have been a highlight. We’d meant to spend more time looking around there as well as Schenectady — just didn’t, as it happened, have the time to spend. Even the meals were cursory — two of the three were simple takeout or delivery at the hotel. The third was a surprise — a Japanese restaurant which probably rates among the top dozen meals we’ve had on the trip so far… But yeah, we just didn’t experience Scotia enough to do it, well, justice.

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!

Well, I’ve gotta say: Wilmington, North Carolina — based on the evidence of exactly one day — has done a respectable job convincing us of its livability.

Mind you, we haven’t yet sampled much of “the Wilmington experience.” We had to check out of our one-night hotel by 11:00, and couldn’t check into our three-night Airbnb until 4:00 PM. We filled the time by:

• Looking for a good breakfast place. First choice didn’t work out: closed. (Technically not CLOSED-closed; they just had a hand-lettered sign on the locked front door saying something like “That’s all for today.”) Second choice, though, was very, very nice. The Missus went in while I figured out how to feed the parking meter without cash, and by the time I got there she already had some kind of drink with, hmm, looked like tomato juice, and was that a stalk of celery? and was that swirls of Worcestershire sauce? and black pepper??? Good food, good atmosphere, good service. They also seem very good-music-focused — another plus! Posters on the wall (and some T-shirts for sale) featured Thelonius Monk, David Bowie, Miles Davis, and probably a half-dozen other performers from the last 75 years or so.
• Conveniently, the restaurant was located in a retail complex called The Cotton Exchange. I say “conveniently” because this was also one of the places we wanted to check out while in Wilmington. As the name suggests, back in the 19th century the building(s) in question served as a center of the local cotton industry. Rather than tear down the whole thing and replace it with something shiny but forgettable, local philanthropists chipped in to simply refurbish and convert the interior. It’s a very cunningly arranged warren of little shops, bars, ice cream parlors, more shops, with the corridors going up and down stairs as well as winding around unpredictably.

• 

  After we’d exhausted ourselves (without exhausting the places to visit) in the The Cotton Exchange, and fortified not only by our very nice brunch but also by some — yes! — ice cream, we went out onto Front Street to return to the car, making only a couple more detours into stores whose interiors seemed too inviting to pass up. It was hard to miss one obvious point: the arts have a pretty solid footing in Wilmington. (See photo at right.)
• When we left downtown, it was still a little too early to check in, so we headed for a really nice local supermarket, called Harris-Teeter. The plan was to pick up some basic supplies for the next few days, especially considering that these are “extended” stays of 3-4 days each. (The Missus wants to be able to cook a bit, for instance.)

Finally, we got to the Airbnb where we’d spend the next three nights: a little bungalow called “the Perry Cottage” (named after the street it’s located on). If I get a chance, I’ll post some more photos of it later.

For now, I’ll say that we’re looking forward to our plans for today — i.e., doing absolutely nothing.

🔊 Listen to this

We arrived in Savannah, Georgia, around 7:45 pm on Thursday. (If you can imagine such a thing, we left the House o’ Canines later than planned. Indeed, The Stepdaughter and Stepson-in-Law had themselves already left the premises on separate errands of their own. So there was no trumpet fanfare or weepy hanky-waving to see us out the gate — just a few “Have a nice trip!” farewells from the staff.)

The drive — pretty much all I-95 — was mostly uneventful, with some fierce but brief rain and ominous clouds to see us off at the Florida-Georgia border. one stop, for gas and snacks. En route, The Missus was busily researching one thing and another — about Savannah (places to eat *cough*), Charleston (things to do, or not do), the road ahead (gas stations? speed traps? weather conditions?). Gotta love an iPad which doesn’t depend on WiFi, right?

After checking in, we changed clothes and prepared to head out for dinner. By now it was 8:45-9:00 and, The Missus feared, we would not be able to get seated at The Olde Pink House — her first choice for the evening’s meal. (It was just 2-3 blocks from the inn, so the convenience was hard to argue with.) In the event, though, we were able to get a small table in a corner of the basement tavern. (The Missus may have melodramatized our desperation and longing a bit.)

The basement was certainly, er, basement-like. In the photo at left, you can get a sense of the dim lighting — but it was actually even darker than it appears here. The only illumination on our side of the area came from a small candle — one per table — which made it almost impossible to read the menus, to read each other’s lips, and so on.

But it was so late, and we were so tired, and the service so sluggish (personally, I think we were almost literally invisible to the staff). We each had just a drink or two, a bowl of she-crab soup, and an appetizer. And then we called it a night.

Around noon Friday, we checked out, had a very light breakfast snack, and then got on our way to Charleston, South Carolina. For this trip of less than 3 hours, we were able to stay on a plain old US highway — US Route 17 — for nearly the entire distance. I’d already checked out Rte 17 as a likely way of following the East Coast on up to at least Maryland, so I had some sense of what to expect: some areas it was almost like a limited-access highway, with a couple lanes in each direction, and in some “built-up” areas it had stoplights every here and there. The road surface never quite became primitive, exactly, but you could tell that the various areas got varying degrees of attention from whoever was responsible for highway funding.

On arrival in Charleston, we drove (intentionally) a short distance past the motel, headed straight for the BBQ restaurant The Missus had targeted: the Swig & Swine on Savannah Highway (i.e., Rte. 17). The food had received many positive reviews, and she had also reckoned — rightly — that I’d be very interested in the “swig” portion of the menu: heavily weighted towards beer and whiskey, with a good healthy chunk of creative cocktails — and a sort of “oh, by the way” assortment of non-alcoholic beverages.

And then, finally, we doubled back and checked in at the Sleep Inn. It was only around 3:30-4:00 in mid-afternoon at that point, but it was so damned hot and humid, y’know? We pulled in our overnight luggage and a few other things. And then we spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in the room: refiguring our itinerary and catching up on a little TV and reading.

Tomorrow, August 1: on to Wilmington, North Carolina!

A couple days ago, I decided the hell with it — I was tired of just hanging out here, tired of taking photos of palm trees and such. I mean, that’s all very well and good per se, I just needed a little variety. The Missus and The Stepdaughter were out getting dolled up (well, their nails were), so I just decided to head out somewhere.

My initial destination was a site commonly referred to as just “Jupiter Lighthouse.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to climb to the top — among other things, the weather was a bit dicey (I kept seeing lightning flashes from that direction). But as you can see if you followed that link, it’s still picturesque as hell. (In fact, I got a shot of it from the far side of the inlet, during our previous visit down here a couple months ago. Obviously the thing has a way of attracting “interesting” weather!)

Again, though, the weather was determined to put obstacles in my way: I had no GPS signal at all, hence no Google Maps to guide me. Luckily, I’d already looked at the route a day before, so I had a general sense of how to get to the Jupiter area. I just used that as a starting point, and headed out…

Well, between one thing and another, I opted not to visit the lighthouse that day. Instead, on the way, I came across a state park. Jonathan Dickinson led a Quaker mission to this general area in the late 17th century; as you can see from the photo on the left, things didn’t work out for him quite as he’d hoped, but at least he got this park named for him. (Maybe we’ll have one named for us someday.)

It’s a fairly small park, with a campground for RVs and such and a handful of “points of interest.” Scenic? Well, sort of… The Florida peninsula doesn’t spring naturally to mind when you think “scenery” — it’s so flat. But here at Dickinson State Park, there’s at least a little relief… a whole blooming mountain, at that. All 86 feet of it!

I did not, in the event, go all the way to the top of the tower (although I did get about halfway up into it). I thought you might appreciate a glimpse of the trek. The photo below is actually about a 180-degree panorama, squeezed to fit here; the boardwalk/path extended a little bit behind me from this vantage point.

I’ll be posting other photos of my visit to the park at my Instagram account for the next few days. In the meantime, here’s one more shot taken that night. It was the night of the full moon known as the “Buck Moon,” so-called (says one source) “because the antlers of male deer (bucks) are in full-growth mode at this time.”

We’ll almost certainly be leaving the area sometime in the next few days. I may be posting an update before then… but no promises!