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.

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!

[The setting: Wilmington, NC. The couple has already done grocery shopping for the day’s relocation to an Airbnb, from this hotel: they’ve picked up milk and creamer, and kept it in the refrigerator overnight; ditto bottles of water and soda, a small bottle of vinegar to be used for mysterious laundry purposes (Hers), and so on. He has already filled His insulated water bottle, the previous night, and as they prepare to move their luggage down to the lobby He takes a first generous swig from it.]

He: Gaaaaaah! What the living hell did I just drink a mouthful of?!?

[He opens the water bottle, takes a whiff, gags and sputters. He checks the refrigerated plastic bottle from which He filled His own metal one.]

He: Jeezus Chr—! Why the hell was the bottle of vinegar in the refrigerator?!?

[He rushes to the bathroom sink, metal water bottle in hand. He dumps its remaining contents into the sink, continues coughing and retching, washing His mouth out with tap water.]

She (from other room): What are you doing?!?

He (spitting and coughing): I’m dumping the rest of this sh!t into the sink!

She: You’re dumping out all that vinegar? I need that vinegar for washing my clothes!

[He stares at His reflection in the bathroom mirror. His eyes are tearing and bloodshot. His tongue feels corrugated. His throat burns like that time when He was a kid and clumsily tried siphoning gasoline from a canister for use in a go-cart, and the fuel ran down His esophagus.]

He: I just drank vinegar, and laundry is what you’re worried about?!?

She (calling out his name): You don’t understand! I needed that vinegar for my clothes! And that little bottle was the perfect size for a trip — I’ve never seen vinegar in such a small bottle! Now we have to go back to that store for more!

[He fumbles about for a breath strip, for a second and a third breath strip. He swallows, downs a fourth breath strip. His forehead is beaded with sweat. His eyebrows will probably return to their normal altitude by evening. His throat will burn for a couple days, and He will be awash for that long in inescapable olfactory memories of dyeing Easter eggs.]

He (weakly): Okay, okay… Let me go down to the lobby for a luggage cart. Then I’ll get the car, and then we can go the store for more vinegar and then we can do whatever until it’s time to check in at the Airbnb.

She: I just really can’t believe you drank my vinegar! Jeezus!