Across Northern New England

That’s a bit ambitious of a title. It was a four-state day on Sunday July 2, and it could have been five states. If we had gone three miles the wrong way at the start, we would have been in New York state. But we started out going to the Mass MoCA. The big gallery there had a show called “Amusement Park”, but it didn’t seem to me to be much more than a collection of old amusement park rides. Maybe the artist thoughtfully selected the lighting, but I wasn’t impressed. A lot of the other work was more conceptual, which is OK if you spend a lot of time reading all about how it was done. I was less impressed than many of the times we’ve been to the MoCA.

We left North Adams a little after noon and went east on the Mohawk Trail to Florida, where we turned off to the north, trying to work our way up to Vermont route 100 and route 9. I’ve never looked at the side roads off that section of the Mohawk Trail, but I had bicycled up route 100 to route 9 and west to Bennington at the end of my freshman year in college. After several miles (of lovely countryside!) there was a town line sign and the road turned from pavement to (very well-maintained) gravel and we were pretty sure we were in Vermont. A few more unmarked intersections brought us to a parking area by a lake. I parked, got out, and said to some people who were fishing with their kids, “Hi, where the heck am I? I’m not even sure what state I’m in.” It was still Vermont, Sherman Reservoir, former source of cooling water for the long-gone Yankee Electric nuclear power plant in Rowe MA. A left turn off the road we had come down was the way to Readsboro. One of the kids, maybe 7 years old, wanted to be sure I saw where his dad had caught his bobber on the tree across the way from the overlook they were on. I said, “aw, I’ve lost so many bobbers in trees…” So will that kid, when he’s big enough to cast by himself. From Readsboro we were on state highway 100 to 9 into Brattleboro.

We didn’t go out of our way to look for Brigham Young’s birthplace but it’s there in southern Vermont. Bet you didn’t know that! I remembered something like that from when I bicycled that way, but I might have told you Joseph Smith instead.

If you hadn’t known, you would have figured out just along route 9 that they do a lot of maple sugaring in Vermont. We even saw some trees that still had the sap pipelines running between them. One roadside business was advertising that the family had been Vermont sugar makers for six generations.

At Brattleboro we got on I-91 for one stop and continued on route 9 into New Hampshire. We had been on some of those roads a couple of times last summer, on our way to a wedding just about a year ago and then to a family reunion a little later. This time we kept going — New Hampshire has lots of excellent secondary roads, and we mostly zoomed — until we got to Concord at about 3 PM.I parked downtown (it must have been exactly at the center of town, because South Main Street was on one side of the intersection and North Main was on the other) because Arlene had spotted something like Natural Foods Co-op Grocery and Cafe back a block. We walked back, got a cup of coffee, a very rich brownie, and a slice of chocolate walnut banana bread, and got back on the road. Note: we did not take the time to track down The Elegant Ewe in Concord. I was a little sorry about that, but after not getting any yarn in Pittsfield, and thinking of how much I had from the Maine Fiber Frolic, I figured I could stand it. We were back on interstates, 93 and 393, for a little while, then on old US 202 to Rochester NH and to Sanford ME. We stopped at a gas station – general store in Sanford, got a couple of Dove ice cream bars, and asked how far it was to the rotary in Windham. The woman at the counter said it would be an hour and a half, and that the best way would be to get on the Turnpike at Biddeford. At this point it was late enough, and we had been seeing enough of the countryside on two-lane roads, that we decided to do that instead of following 202 the rest of the way.

So we crossed all of New Hampshire, more or less at its widest part, and half of Vermont, at its narrowest part, and a little of Maine, nowhere near its widest part, and none of them at the northernmost part.

When we got to Casco, Anne and Matt were fixing a lobster dinner. They had already mixed up a blender of margaritas, working with a cup of tequila. I could feel the effects of one margarita. Two and one-third pretty much knocked me on my ass. However, they had brought along a DVD of Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which we stayed up to watch. I’m not positive how much of it I really paid attention to.