Vermontiers

After soaking in the wonders of some of America's oldest cities, we decided to skew a little more rural and head in to Vermont, which is from the latinate for 'nothing but goddam trees'.

Also weird- that last one is what Sarah considers a mountain

Interspersed amongst the multihued foliage (I went to college!) are a fine smattering of uniformly lovely, welcoming, minuscule towns. Which all kind of look like they're different neighborhoods in the same town, a town which has somehow been dismembered and distributed evenly across the state.

Not taken in the same village

We even went to Burlington, the most populated city in Vermont, a bustling metropolis of 42,000 souls, which, distinctively enough, looks like this.

It's different because it's longer

And, of course, the state capitol of Montpelier, which I literally almost missed as we drove through.

SShhhhhiiiiiinnnnyyyyy

The Sarster and I camped out on the island of Grand Isle, in Lake Champlain, which if you ask any Vermonter is the home of Champ, the ancient seamonster with the surprisingly friendly moniker. If you ask anyone else, they'll just be confused. 

Grand Isle is home to Grand Isle State Park, which is where we resided during our time in Vermont. And goddam, is it worth residation.

Vermont, will you stop being remarkably gorgeous for like one fucking second

And that was it. Made the long drive back East to Bar Harbor, with a quick detour in Portland ME (more on that place later). Vermont is just incredible, and also incredibly quiet. There's just...just nothing going on in this state. It would be a great place to enter hermitage, but otherwise it's pretty much devoid of excitement.

Obviously there are exceptions.

Notification from the establishment: The me that is here in real time in Arizona is gonna be off in the woods for eight days, so you'll have to wait that long to hear about the me that was in Maine last week. Stay strong, I know you'll endure.

England, now New and Improved

Okay, okay, real post. Phooo. Lets do this.

Piled in the Sarahmobile and headed south on Monday. It's a six hour, three state drive between Bar Harbor and Boston, but it was on the interstate so it looked like the ass end of the car in front of us, by and large.

We did, however, make one quick stop

Once we got there we turned right around and went back up to Salem for mexican food (aside- it was much easier to find mexican up here than in New Orleans, which is on the goddam gulf of goddam Mexico) at a place called Howlin' Wolf, which, fun fact, is the same name as a bar in NOLA where I once watched Kirsten Schall get common law married during a charity womens' arm-wrestling competition.

Salem is...weird. And I don't mean the buy-a-pound-of-meth-get-an-hour-with-a-prostitute-free weird that Salem Oregon is, I mean bad weird. Anyone here see ParaNorman?  Wait, seriously? You guys, c'mon- it's the studio that did Coraline. It's just, so good. Go watch it. I'll wait.

You didn't watch it. did you. I don't even have to ask, I can see it in your duplicitous little eye holes. Fine, whatever. No, it's not important.

I'm fine.

Anyway, this is the Salem of the Salem witch trials, where a bunch of idiots murdered some people, and the reverberations are still felt to this day. Mainly through peoples' wallets.

Stay classy Salem

This shit is just all over. Witch tours, witch houses, museums of witch torture. In fairness, there is a lovely and affecting memorial to the actual humans who were actually killed.

And literally right around the corner,

Is it possible to file restraining orders on behalf of memorials?

I hope the reanimated corpses of the perpetrators come back to terrorize the populace. Seriously, go watch that movie guys.

Next day, on to Boston Proper. Took the subway into town and hoofed it from there. Boston's got a thing called the Freedom Trail, which is a really stupid name but pretty helpful for dumb lost tourists like yours truly as a way to wander around and see stuff. It's literally just a line in the sidewalk that goes past a buncha things.

Bill Keene consulted

So it turns out events happened in Boston a couple hundred years ago, and most of the places they happened are still around. The red brick road took us past a pretty significant amount of it.

My picture file from Boston seems to indicate I don't care about American history

There is actually a lot more, but whatever. I was saving my phone memory for the really worthwhile items.

Nailed it

The really cool part of Boston, at least of the part of Boston that I saw (which is therefore the important part) is the big swath of green space that runs the entire length of the downtown. Thanks to the Big Dig Boston was left with what used to be packed inner city highway, and turned it into a pretty sweet park.

All it took was decades of mind boggling corruption.

Also, Boston has a Chinatown. Well, it's called Chinatown, but it is in fact a neighbor hood representative of pretty much every Asian country.Which I think means all Bostonians are racists.

Basically all the same, right?

After traipsing the length and breadth of Beantown (as the locals call it), we hopped back on the underground across the river to Cambridge and got off at MIT. Didn't really do much on the campus except pee (take that nerds), but still worth the trip. There are many large buildings with enough things coming out of them to guarantee that Science is happening.

Then a quick stroll up to Harvard, just because. We didn't pee on anything here, but we did walk on the grass a bunch.

True fact- the whole place is fenced in wrought iron, to keep the plebes out

After that it was just back to the house for craft beers and new episodes of The Strain. And that was that for Massachusetts- super pretty, and definitely the most urbanized part of New England I've seen. 

Sink and swim

So, after a low key day enjoying the tourist ridden wonderland that is Bar Harbor, Sarah and I decided to gtfo. We headed southward to see an old college chum of hers in Bostonish (a suburb of Boston. Look it up [don't look it up]), but not before something happened. Something...magical.

They let me drive a boat!

This boat! The whole thing!

Lemme back up a bit. Sarah works on a whale watch boat...thing. Boat goes out to whales, you get the idea, and her friend is captain of the boat. Boats need gas, and the gas guy only comes around once in a while, so we had to take the boat to the boat gas, or it would become more of a large buoy.

The sunrise that goes with the sunset from the last post.

On the way, for reasons I can only guess at- they assumed my lack of swimming ability would result in heightened investment in the boat's boatworthyness, they don't like this particular boat very much- they casually pushed me up to the boat...wheel. Handlebars. Reigns. Look, I don't, like, boat much. Anyway, turns out there's way more shit to run into in the ocean than you'd (I'd) think, but we arrived safely and they only had to wrench the boatreigns out of my hands once. 

And I drove a boat!

Old New England

Cadillac Mountain at sunset, top to bottom = left to right

Everything out here is that splendid. It's unreal.  It...actually kind of freaks me out. Like, even the shitty run down parts are run down in a way that lends itself to postcards.

Here's the really surreal thing about it though- everytime I stop to survey the vast glory of nature, I hear the soft, tender click of high end digital cameras crescendoing in the background. Out of frame of this panorama is a couple dozen middle age couples wearing new North Face fleece, looking through the veiwfinders on tripod mounted Nikons. And it's like that all over. We were driving back to the cabin a couple days ago near sundown from out in the middle of nowhere (more on that later), only to come up to a bridge populated with a literal bus load of photo hungry tourists, lined up like the world's least intimidating firing squad.

Anyway.

Portland to Portland

So if you ever think that an overnight flight is a good idea, because you can get your sleeping and flying out of the way at the same time, it's not. You can't do that and you're an idiot for trying. You just trade sleep for this weird, surreal experience in a noisy tube where time has no meaning and. since all of the windows are closed you could as easily be in the back of a moving semi as flying cross country. And when you get off everyone acts normal like there wasn't a day out of time that you spent abducted by aliens.

Anyway, I flew to Maine.

This is where I live now

Upon being picked by the inimitable Ms. Sarah, I embarked on the three hour trip from the lesser of two Portlands to the coastal fishing village/hippie college town/rich white person preserve that is known as Bar Harbor. The trip is actually quite nice.

The crappy little towns of Maine are the nicest crappy little towns anywhere

And then I went to bed. Because the first paragraph in this post.

Anyway, when I got up the next afternoon, I decided to dig out my running shoes and go see some of rural coastal Maine, because I have started to grow what appears to be a viscous layer of custard around my abdomen.

Maine is beautiful, but...different to run in than New Orleans. For one thing, there's hills. The total elevation change on my jog was probably less than a hundred feet, but that's still about ninety six feet more than my routes in NOLA.

The face of fear

Also, sometimes you just find the ocean. Like, you turn a bend and there's the edge of this continent.

Helloooooo

Also, yes, I got lost. Asshole.
I had my phone with me for pretty much this exact reason, but it turns out that GPS doesn't work here because it's Narnia. I was pretty confident that I'd get somewhere eventually, because it's a pretty small island, but that's not to say it was easy.

Maine, you are not as helpful as you think you are

 Anyway, after finally completing the loop that I had thought the trail actually did (spoiler alert- the trail wasn't actually a loop) I made my way out of the Blair Witch set and back onto the road. It was only then that I remembered that, quaint as New Englad is, it's still the actual wilderness with actual bears and cougars and I hadn't really been paying much attention. As this thought idly sauntered through my mind, I looked left off the road and spotted

Why are all wildlife warning signs I encounter clearly laserprinted in a home office?

...A sign warning of carnivorous whelk and the neurotoxins of local invertebrates. Because Lovecraft apparently had a good goddam reason to write about New England all the time.

Anyway, today is spent in town proper, far from the unexpected dangers of the country's most gentrified wildlands.

But not safe from leafpeepers