As you probably know via other channels, The Missus and I eventually — in late 2022 — completed our meandering back-and-forth across the country. I apologize if you’ve been hanging in suspense since the last post, now almost two years old!

It’s hard to say exactly why I stopped updating this travelogue, aside from the exhaustion of travel itself. Post-Las Vegas, we spent the month of June tooling around the Grand Canyon and California (Joshua Tree, San Diego, Santa Monica, San Luis Obispo, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Yosemite National Park, Lake Tahoe, Petaluma, Eureka and the redwoods). From there, we pretty much headed east without too much dawdling (Reno, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne WY, etc., all the way through to Nebraska, Missouri, Tennessee, and Georgia). We finally landed back in North Florida in mid-August, nominally staying with family there until the first week of October… and beyond.

(I say “nominally” because The Missus became very sick — not with COVID, thank the gods, but still — for a couple weeks, starting just a few days after we arrived in Jacksonville. And I headed off to North Carolina that first week of October to scout out the area for a place where we could comfortably spend our retired years more or less at a merciful standstill.)

Anyway, it turns out that my “johnesimpson.com” Internet domain is starting to run out of space. Because I continue to need more space for my main blog, called Running After My Hat, I am going to be shuttering this In Our Own Way section of that domain (as well as a handful of other test/experimental blogs I’ve set up in the neighborhood since 2008).

Translation: if you want to hang onto the record of the first part of our trip, you’ll need to figure out some way to do that. (I still haven’t made up my own mind about how to do it for myself — probably just save copies of the email messages which subscribers received.)

The timeline for the shutdown is fuzzy, but I expect I’ll do that sometime in May, possibly June. I’ll post one more update here in the meantime, just as a next-to-the-last-minute notice. And then In Our Own Way will — like its two principal characters — will head for the sunset!

Thanks so much for reading!

As some — many? most? — of you know, we will finally be putting Las Vegas in the rearview mirror a week from today. We’ve got reservations at various places, doing various things, and mostly in California, for the next month. Here’s the general itinerary for now:

• Grand Canyon
• Joshua Tree National Park — and, knock on wood, and meeting up with The West Coast Nephew!
• San Diego — the Zoo! and a behind-the-scenes “safari”! laundry!
• Santa Monica
• San Luis Obispo — and, after leaving, the Hearst Castle and elephant-seal viewing in San Simeon!
• Carmel-by-the-Sea
• Yosemite National Park — including a guided tour and, for me, a photography course “in the footsteps of Ansel Adams”!
• Lake Tahoe — including a guided tour!

From there, we’ll be doubling back towards the Pacific for a brief stopover with The Missus’s cousin and a drive up the rest of the way to Redwood National Park. Then eventually we’ll point the car east and north, to drive eventually aaaallllllll the way back, via some route, to someplace yet unknown. Key destinations, if all goes well:

• Yellowstone National Park
• The Badlands of South Dakota
• Mid-Wisconsin (a sort of genealogical side-quest for The Missus)
• Possibly a little jog north in order to skate between Lakes Superior and Michigan, then down the coast of the latter
• …and then, yes: ?????

I like to imagine that I’ll update you all here more often than I did during the (sometimes chaotic) first leg of the year(ish)-long road trip. But I’ve imagined — and promised! — that before. So for now let’s just say, y’know: stay tuned!

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.

[Images above: on the left, The Missus’s rolling log of places and dates we visited (and, often, places where we ate); on the right, our fitfully maintained log of the odometer readings at various locations along the way. (Note that the latter covers two time spans: one for each of the cars we’ve made the trip in so far.) The term “Grand Adventure” is entirely The Missus’s.]

We got to The Stepson’s place in Las Vegas more or less on schedule: Wednesday, December 15, 2021, at around 4:45 PM. I can’t say we were delighted that morning to pull out of the resort in Sedona, Arizona — we’d loved it there — but, again, at least we were more or less on schedule.

If you do the math, then, you’ll know that we’ve now been here for four nights. At some point in the next few hours, I am assured, we’ll be heading out to pick up a tree for the living-room corner. And then, who knows, we’ll link hands and sing a chorus or two of O Tannenbaum, or perhaps just cue up a Die Hard movie. (We have already watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, so that’s out of our system for now.)

Hope you’ve all been able to survive recent months with a minimum of anguish and heartbreak. The gods know there’s plenty of both out there — no reason at all why you should be adding to the pile.

Now getting ready to look ahead to Road Trip (excuse me — I mean Grand Adventure) 2022… because somehow, we have to get both ourselves and the car back across the country to get on with the rest of our lives! And in the meantime, I’ll try here to fill in some of the gaps as we made our way to the Nevada desert…

You may remember Andy Rooney. He was the white-haired, unruly-eyebrowed curmudgeon who offered cranky weekly commentary on “60 Minutes,” years ago. He didn’t always use this exact phrase, but in my mind, his remarks always opened — in his characteristically nasal, whining sort of voice — with, “Did you ever wonder why…?”

I’ve thought about Andy Rooney quite a bit while we’ve been on the road. Sooo many people and situations behave in ways and for reasons completely alien to me, and often annoyingly so (milk-of-human-kindness though I try to be). Know what I mean?

Consider, for example, vending machines. Specifically, for my purposes here, the sort of vending machines with a glass front — so you can see the contents, but must actually deposit money in order to get something: a bottle of water, a can of tea, a, well, a Yoo-Hoo or whatever. (Aside: we do not drink Yoo-Hoo.) It seems fair trade, right? Make your selection, pay your money, get the product.

Until going on this trip, I never thought much about these vending machines. Since then, though, I’ve noticed them quite a bit, and not merely out of curiosity. Here’s why — and I direct your attention to the photo below:

Imagine that you yourself have stocked this vending machine. Proud of yourself, probably. It all looks so, well, so neat, eh? All the bottles and cans are leaning the same way, at about the same angle. And you’ve even been clever enough to turn the bottles of Gatorade (bottom right) upside-down, so they don’t get jammed by the coiled wire which dispenses them when their number is selected.

Now imagine that you are a consumer, with the need — at least the intention — to get a very specific sort of water out of the machine. You can see you’ve got, uh, five bottles of Saratoga and two bottles of Pellegrino to select from. Nope. You don’t want any of them. You might or might not want that oddball one, though — the one in slot #45.

The question is: what is it?

The only way to identify it is to, well, to buy the damned thing so you even know what it is you’ve just bought.

Andy Rooney would have understood.

Yes, I know, you don’t need to remind me how long it’s been since the last post. At the same time, it’s very hard for us to believe it was less than two months ago that we left the Schenectady/Scotia NY area, bound for Vermont. That’s a lot of time in the car (and a lot of time between stops, too).

We’ve been intermittently logging our mileage along the way, sometimes recording it when we get to a stop, sometimes when we leave, sometimes forgetting to do it at all. But for what it’s worth, since leaving Greenville, NC, we’ve put about 6,000 miles on the (new) car.

The map above is a bit simplistic. I created it just by pinpointing the cities and towns where we’ve spent at least one night, and leaving the software to depict “optimal” or recommended routes. But such routes bear little relationship to reality: we often have deviated, by choice or circumstances, from the “plan.” Bad weather — and loss of GPS! — has forced us to leave highways; we’ve driven around within those destinations, quite a lot. (Y’know: grocery and other shopping, sightseeing, going out for dinner — that sort of thing.)

For a more complete picture, I sometimes check out a feature of Google Maps called the Timeline. To use it, you must be a bit, um, casual about letting your cellphone identify your location. So it’s not an option you’d want to turn on all the time. But it can be interesting! For instance, here’s my Timeline for a single day of the trip — it was the first day after we got our “new” car in August:

On the map at the top of this post (Image 1 above), this appears as a single dot — and it’s the same dot for every day we spent “in” Greenville, North Carolina. Actually, though, we spent a lot of time driving (or just walking) around on that day. Which is why our actual mileage is so much higher than the straight-line distances seem to show.

(For the record, we did not actually “go to” all the labeled places in the Timeline map. They’re just points of interest, per Google Maps. We actually went on that day to Enterprise Rent-a-Car, to return the rental which our insurance company had arranged for us while we arranged to buy the new car; we drove west to the little town of Farmville, North Carolina, just to get out of town a bit; and we spent that night at the Courtyard Marriott back in Greenville. If I could zoom the Timeline map in far enough, you could even see what streets I’d walked along in Farmville, and all the wrong turns and backtracking I did on the streets of Greenville itself.)

The route-planning software I’m using lets you save its data in a form which can then be displayed in Google Maps for others to see, to zoom in on, and so forth.

Here’s what this exported Google Map looks like at the moment. (As you can see, I can customize its look a bit more; overnight stays of four nights or more are marked with green icons rather than the default blue. And Greenville, North Carolina, is marked with a “fun” auto-collision icon.)

You can see and interact with it (at a limited level — zooming, identifying cities and so on) via this link. Just remember: this is a map whose data has been exported from other software; the data doesn’t always come through 100% accurately. This will be especially noticeable when you zoom waaaaay in — the Google Map shows some very strange, in fact entirely imaginary, routes!

More coming up soon as this blog transitions to less of a day-by-day travelogue (you can see how well that’s worked out), and more of a “Here’s something we’ve noticed during the trip” record. Thanks as always for stopping by!

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.

🔊 Listen to this

Let’s get a little administrative detail out of the way, shall we? I’m speaking of course of the obvious fact: there’s been nothing new added here in two freaking weeks. And this bloggish background silence has taken place behind a foreground that included (as of today) stops not only in New York State, but in Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. So there’s a lot of catching up to do… and this means, I think, that I’m going to accelerate the schedule a bit: I’ll just post brief narratives of each of those missing places, until the catching-up is accomplished.

(Remember: if you’re after a more up-to-date sense of where we are, the best place to look is probably my Instagram account. That, too, isn’t 100% current, because I’m posting only one photo a day. But it will at least reassure you that We Are (as the saying goes) Still Here.

Let’s get started!

Putting Henri Behind Us

Despite our worst fears about Hurricane Henri, the storm really didn’t bother us until shortly after we left the Indian Head Resort…

Once we’d decided to flee further inland, we pulled up the maps of what lay to the west. To head to Vermont felt like too small a baby step, given Henri’s forecast cone, so we jumped right over there and looked at northern New York State (i.e., “anywhere north of Albany”). Part of my motivation, I think, was that it would put us on the way to our western New York State destinations, Niagara Falls and Jamestown, which might simplify the next-state planning. (I was very disappointed that Vermont appeared to be out of the question, but, well, as we’d already learned: the road trip taketh away as well as giveth.)

But then we noticed something we simply couldn’t ignore: the route would take us verrrrry close to Enfield, NH, where one of The Missus’s favorite nieces had just bought her first home (with her husband and daughter). So as I drove, The Missus burned up the (wireless) phone lines with The Enfield Niecelet, making plans for our stop along the way.

We got a tour of the house, of course, and visited The Niecelet’s Husband at his workplace, and then we The Niecelet, and the Grand-Niecelet headed out for lunch. It was a nice meal in nearby Lebanon, but by the time we paid the check there were already raindrops falling on our heads.

Off we headed, westward… into the worst of Henri we experienced.

Was it a good thing or a bad thing that we’d opted not to take any major highways? Well, it depends on the kind of route you’d find more suited to your personality, given a whiteout-level rainfall:

• On a highway, even the straightest, you not only are moving faster, but also are just incapable of seeing the other vehicles around you until it’s (almost) too late.
• On back roads, at least in New Hampshire/Vermont, probably won’t be sharing the trip with many other vehicles at all. On the other hand, such vehicles as you do encounter are likely operated by locals who well know the sinuous twists and turns, the spots most likely to be shallowly flooded, the surprise stop signs and bear-crossing signs and so on, and so those vehicles will be riding your tail the whole way. And, of course, you still can’t see anything further than about a car’s-length in any direction.

So it was pretty white-knuckle driving, all the way…

…all the way until we crossed into Vermont. Suddenly the clouds parted, the rain stopped, and we could just enjoy the rest of the drive to Saratoga Springs.

Last Week of the Saratoga Springs Racing Season

Somehow — I certainly don’t know how — we’d managed to secure two nights’ last-minute lodging at a very nice Holiday Inn in Saratoga Springs. Even more remarkably, this was during the last week of the biggest tourist event in the town, during the craziest tourist season in anyone’s recent memory: the final week of horse-racing season. The town, in other words, was mobbed. Even more surprisingly, we were able to extend our stay for a couple more nights.

(We wanted to extend the stay for a number of reasons: Saratoga is such a nice town, with such a nice downtown, and neither of us had ever been there before; we felt like we really needed a break — we were tired of thinking we had to run away from something, or to run somewhere, like Bar Harbor, which became this hard, fixed external thing which controlled our schedule; and we really needed to do laundry (heh) — this Holiday Inn offered free laundry facilities for guests.)

Highlights of the Saratoga Springs visit:

• Laundry. (No, really: this was important by now!)
• I’d bought a replacement (used) camera, making up for the one which had gone belly-up way back in Greenville NC. I’d had it shipped it to my brother’s, thinking we could pick it up the next time we were in NJ… but since we were now staying in Saratoga Springs for a whole week, I could arrange for him to overnight it to me at the hotel. (Hurrah!)
• I had a couple hearing-aid-related near-disasters — which seemed disastrous enough that I was in genuine despair about them for about 24 hours. (Neither truly was a disaster, thank God. But it was a near thing.)
• We bought gear for what we imagined to be some upcoming trail adventures: “trekking poles”; compasses; binoculars.
• Fabulous meals, with drinks to match (here, here, and here — in addition to the nice food and cocktails offered by the hotel itself), served by almost frighteningly competent and cheerful waitstaff.

In fact, we enjoyed our stay there so much that we tried to extend it again… but no such luck: not just the Holiday Inn, but everywhere else in Saratoga Spring was booked solid for the very last couple of days of the season. So: last-minute emergency strategizing occurred. Stay tuned!

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!

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!