Overdue Newsletter: What we did for summer vacation
Dear Everyone,
So it’s been forever since I posted an actual newsletter, but I’m making a special effort today. This past week we had our first true family vacation (as in, just our family, instead of being with extended family), in the form of a road trip through New England. In case any of y’all haven’t heard, we’re going to be moving to Ithaca, NY in January when I start a job as a postdoc at Cornell university; we figured we’d better get all these places visited while they were still several hours closer. For planning, we just split up the states between us (I had Rhode Island and Vermont; Kogarashi Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine), and we picked places we’d like to go and printed out minor information and some maps of how to get there from the major highways. We intentionally didn’t make any hotel reservations, since much of the purpose of this trip was to be a low-stress getaway. We’d visit what we wanted to, skip what we didn’t feel like, and drive until we felt tired. Pretty much the exact opposite of daily life, where my schedule is ruled by one deadline after another from when I get up to the moment I go to bed.
And it worked beautifully. Honestly, this was the most fun vacation we’ve had in years (no offense to anyone we’ve gone with recently; it’s all a matter of comparison). So partly to get out a real newsletter, and partly to have a record for posterity, here’s a blow-by-blow account of our trip, all four days and 817 miles of it. It’ll probably be pretty lengthy; feel free to skim and get the good parts.
Day 1 - Rhode Island
We got a nice early start on Tuesday, leaving here about 9 AM (after a brief stop by the post office for Kogarashi to mail an order of painted fans to a customer).
Here’s the girls’ setup in the car, with a cooler set between them as a table/teasing deterrent. It only worked halfway well as either, but was better than nothing, and kept our snacks nice and cold.
We drove up I-95 through eastern Connecticut until we hit Rhode Island, then quickly got onto state highways and headed over to Newport. The city is a charming little town situated on the island of Rhode Island (in the state of Rhode Island-confused yet?), apparently most known for its beautiful oceanfront property and its gigantic and picturesque mansions. Our first stop was the Cliff Walk, which as you’d expect is along some cliffs and gives you a good view of a pretty ocean bay.
Further on it also gives a good view of some mansions, but that part has lots of stairs that are hard to take a stroller on, so we only saw two. (And by we, I mean me and the girls; Kogarashi stopped at the second set of stairs to take a break since 90+ degree weather, glaring sun, and 7 months pregnant don’t mix well.)
Here’s two of those mansions. Given the choice, I’d rather keep the girls. They’re better looking and probably cost less to keep up.
Aside from the heat it was a pretty walk, but we were still glad to get back to the car and our extra water bottle cache. It was also a good test of our new 2-seater stroller (pictured earlier), a secondhand sit-n-stand model that lets the older child either sit on a benchseat facing backward or stand facing forward. I think it’s the most logical design for a two-seater I’ve seen, and both we and the girls love it (to the point where they argue over who gets the back seat).
After returning from the cliff walk we rehydrated at the car and then went to the beach for an hour or two.
The girls loved playing in the sand, and Nudge even followed me into the waves until one knocked her down under the water. (It was only ~6 inches deep, but enough for her head to go under). It was a good rest after the cliff walk, and once we’d had our fill we went back to the car and headed up to Providence.
We had two goals in Providence. The first was the grave of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, one of my favorite authors and a Providence native. It took a while to find it in the cemetery, until Kogarashi spotted the “Fall of Cthulhu” comic book someone had left against the stone. (Other offerings included a penny, a guitar pick, some minor decorations, etc. Lacking flowers, I left a dime.) I’d gotten conflicting information about the ability to take photos, but I’d seen them everywhere online and so decided to follow the cemetery’s guide of just keeping things dignified while we snapped one. I’m considering making this the starting member of a photo collection of me next to famous people’s graves, since there are quite a few famous people buried here in New England.
I tried to do a nice close-lipped smile for this. I don’t think it quite worked.
After the cemetery we went to a bakery I’d learned of through a bread baking book I own. It turned out to be just a bakery, instead of the bakery-and-sandwich shop I’d expected, so we grabbed a baguette and some pastries, then got a sandwich from elsewhere down the road.
Then began the saga of looking for a souvenir. Our family tradition-begun on our honeymoon-is to get a Christmas ornament from everyplace we take a family vacation. Sometimes we get them already made; sometimes we buy bits and put them together into a complete ornament later. For this trip we wanted to do the latter, getting one small item from each state and stringing them into a single ornament. Except that Providence apparently has exactly zero souvenir shops, and after nearly an hour of fruitless searching we finally stopped at a Family Dollar and-after combing their racks for potential items-bought a bag of marbles. Specifically, we wanted the large aquamarine “shooter” marble, as both a memory of the ocean and an homage to Lovecraft (whose characters tend to go insane and thus lose their marbles).
After that we headed north into Massachusetts to find a hotel for the night. Unfortunately we ran into 4-5 ones that were booked solid or nearly so thanks to a concert the next day in Boston. We finally got a room at a Residence Inn that was more than I wanted to pay, but still within budget (at least, after the very very nice people at the front desk gave us a steep discount). Both girls got baths to try to rid them of ocean smell and sand, and then it was off to bed.
Aren’t they just adorable?
Day 2 - Massachusetts
We got up and out on the road by about 9 again, after a nice continental breakfast at the hotel. Our first (and major) stop was Boston, but rather than brave Boston traffic ourselves, we parked at a subway stop near the Boston temple and took the train in.
Our goal was to walk the Freedom Trail, which is a 2.5-mile path through Boston that hits a lot of important historical sites (Boston Commons, the Old North Church [where the lanterns signaling Paul Revere were hung], Bunker Hill, and several graveyards with important people buried in them).
This is the Old North Church; with some effort, you can make out the words on the plaque talking about the lanterns that signaled Paul Revere.
We started at Boston Commons and followed the trail-conveniently marked with either red paint or red brick along its entire length-through a good chunk of Boston, stopping for lunch and souvenir shopping in Quincy Market. (I had “Boston Clam Chowdah” for lunch, of course, made even better by the remains of the baguette from the night before.) We weren’t sure if we’d make it to the end of the trail, since it’s a long way to go in 90+ degree heat, but we managed to walk the entire thing from start to finish. Last on the stop was Bunker Hill, marked by an obelisk with 294 interior steps up to the top. (Yes, I climbed every one of them. I suspect my taking the stairs to work on the 5th floor every day with occasional trips up to the 12th helped.)
Wiggles at the end of the trail. Not a graveyard, so she’s happy.
The last step up the inside of the monument, and the view from the top. On the righthand sidewalk you can see the actual Freedom Trail (painted red line) leading up from the street.
Wiggles will probably always remember this trip for its graveyards and how much she hates them “because we spend too much time in them!” (I was adding to my nascent photos-with-famous-graves collection, and managed to get Sam Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, Cotton Mather, and a few others).
From Bunker Hill we walked a few blocks over to the nearest subway stop to get back to our car, and from there it was up to Salem. We’d planned several potential stops in Salem, but it was getting later so we just stopped by the witch hunt memorial (an open courtyard with a stone bench for each of the victims, inscribed with their name and the method and date of death). Afterward we let the girls run around to burn off some energy, then hit the road to look for lodging.
The memorial itself; fairly minimalist and somber, but I liked the design.
Can you tell the girls were excited to get out of the car?
Maine was our first stop the next day, so we wanted to get most of the way there before calling it quits. We were planning on stopping in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (just shy of the Maine border), except that the leg of I-95 that goes through New Hampshire is a lot shorter than we expected. By the time I realized we’d missed the Portsmouth exit, we were in Maine. There we began another saga of hotel-hunting, this time stymied by rates that were too high for our budget. After another hour or so of searching, we found this wonderful little mom-and-pop motel in York, Maine, called the Faircrest Motel. It was absolutely perfect, apparently run by a guy and his wife, with cozy but clean rooms and a beautiful rustic ambiance. They only had double beds, which we thought would be a problem (Kogarashi and I are used to a queen and tend to kick each other a lot in smaller beds), but the Freedom trail must have exhausted us both because we slept like bricks.
Day 3 - Maine and New Hampshire
Arising nice and early on Thursday, we packed up and headed out to the York beach to see a lovely scenic lighthouse recommended by Kogarashi’s college roommate Anki. It sits on an island a hundred or so yards from shore, and is just lovely.
Cute lighthouse; cuter girls.
The girls loved clambering over the rocks on shore, and once Nudge discovered she could climb we couldn’t stop her. I swear she climbed this same four-foot stretch of tumbled stone six or seven times, each time gleefully repeating “I climb! I climb!” to advertise this newfound wonder.
”I climb! I climb!” (repeat 7-8 times)
Next on the itinerary was Portland, Maine, home of the International Cryptozoology Museum. We got there before it opened, and so killed some time window-shopping and looking for a good souvenir until 11:00.
Now, I should say that the museum’s title is a bit misleading. I suspect it is the International Cryptozoology Museum simply because there aren’t any others. (“Cryptozoology” literally means “study of hidden life,” and refers to things like bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, chupacabra, and the like). Basically, this one man has made this his life’s work/hobby, and rents a back room from a used bookstore as his museum. It’s really just his personal collection, and I suspect the admission charges are what he uses to support his work. (And hey, if you can make a living off of doing what you love, more power to you.) He had some genuinely interesting items in there-casts of Bigfoot tracks, possible hair samples of a mythic chimp from Sumatra, and even a replica of the (known fake) Fiji mermaid-but also just a bunch of figurines and memorabilia that depict the “cryptids” without actually providing evidence for/against them. I suppose it gives a view of how cryptids are seen in popular culture, though I would have preferred more evidential samples.
A replica of the Fiji Mermaid, a known hoax perpetuated by P.T. Barnum. (And yes, it says that in the museum. The owner seemed to have a fairly level head on his shoulders and was definitely not blindly advocating things without regard to evidence.)
That done, we headed for New Hampshire because there really isn’t much to do in Maine unless you’re willing to devote several days to the natural beauties up north, and we just didn’t have the time. So instead we headed west for New Hampshire’s natural beauties, with our first stop Mt. Washington.
Now, if you’re not from the Northeast there’s a good chance you haven’t heard of Mt. Washington, but it’s locally famous for (a) being the highest point in the Northeast, and (b) having some of the worst weather in the world. We got personal experience with (b) when we arrived at the trail start and found that the road was closed to private vehicles due to 85 mph winds at the summit. After a little deliberation, we decided to pay the higher price for the guided tour, given in a company van. (Apparently while the mountain is all state park, the road itself is actually privately owned and operated, and has been for 150 years.) I think it was the best 100% markup I’ve ever paid. Not only does the trip consist of 8 miles of guardrail-less switchbacks up a very narrow road, but once we entered the cloudbank visibility dropped to only about twenty feet. Once at the top we were in a sea of fog with winds whipping by at 60-70 miles per hour.
Welcome to scenic Mt. Washington!
Kogarashi and the girls did the sensible thing of taking refuge in the museum, while I proved my machismo (and questionable sanity) by climbing to the actual summit. It was only ~20 feet more up some large rocks, but the wind was blowing so hard I had to make most of it on all fours, with my feet braced downwind to keep it from blowing me over (and, presumably, off the mountain, though I couldn’t see far enough to be sure). I actually made the trip twice, first to photograph the summit itself, second to find the geological marker represented in the souvenir we’d gotten. Possibly crazy, but it was my favorite part of the whole trip.
The lovely view from the summit. I was actually happier than I look; squinting into 80 mpg winds just tends to distort your expression.
I have great respect for the scientists who stay there during the winter, when the wind and cold are so bad they build horizontal icicles, and (as one video showed) turning a gallon of milk upside down results in just a fine white spray being blown up from the spout.
That little adventure concluded, we headed to the nearby Franconia Notch state park to camp with a tent borrowed from a friend. The campground was recommended by Anki again (she’s from New Hampshire), and it was great. We suffered a bit from being novice campers and lacking some supplies-piles of blankets just don’t substitute for a good camping pad-so sleep was fitful at best. Still, it was a good experience, and we learned a lot for next time.
Our little slice of the woods.
Day 4 - New Hampshire (cont) and Vermont
After packing up our campsite, we hit the road again and headed for Vermont, with a quick stop at the former site of the Old Man of the Mountain. This is a (formerly) famous rock formation on the side of a cliff that looked like a man’s face in profile. It stood there for ~12,000 years, apparently, until entropy and erosion finally took their toll and it collapsed back in 2003. (When Wiggles asked why we were stopping, I told her “We’re going to go see something that used to be here.”) The state of New Hampshire is still in mourning, and is in the middle of making a memorial plaza for him. I have no emotional connection to it, and so am not particularly moved-though I do wonder if they will continue to use his image on the state highway system.
Now you see him (thanks to the memorial) . . .
. . . now you don’t.
After that brief stop it was straight to the Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream factory in Waterbury, Vermont. Read Wikipedia if you want the history of the company; suffice it to say that it tries to be very fun, and the factory is a strong tourist destination. There’s an outdoor playground for kids, a “Flavor Graveyard” eulogizing retired flavors (yes, I got a photo), a patio area that had live music and several kiosks selling food, and pretty much the cheapest admission tours on our entire trip. For $3 per adult we got a 30-minute tour of the factory, including a good-sized sample scoop of the flavor of the day. (Ours was Late Night Snack, a vanilla-caramel swirl with clusters of chocolate-covered potato chips. Yes, sounds disgusting, but was actually quite tasty.)
This one’s probably not going into the collection, but you never know . . .
After lunch and dessert (and a little more dessert; we were on vacation, after all), we then hit the road again for Sharon, Vermont, and the Joseph Smith birthplace memorial. It was a nice location, and being the only ones there at the time we got a golf cart tour of several close locales on the premises.
We didn’t get to see the video-both girls were antsy, and there’s no way they would have sat through the entire hour-but we did get to see several important sites. There was also an exhibition of Hubble telescope images paired with scriptures about creation, including my favorite image, the Hubble Deep Field. (It’s not the prettiest, but I love what it represents: they basically pointed the telescope at the emptiest, darkest spot of sky they could find and let it expose for a month and a half. Compile the data and you get thousands upon thousands of galaxies. If I ever teach a class on the Creation, that’s going to be my visual aid for “worlds without number.”)
Again, can you tell the girls were happy to get out of the car?
And then it was to home. We had originally planned one more stop for Vermont, but based on schedules decided to just skip it-one of the advantages of intentionally planning a flexible vacation. We did make one brief stop in Holyoke, Massachusetts, for Kogarashi to get a photo near the welcome sign (her maiden name, Holyoak, was often misspelled thanks to that town), but otherwise took a straight course and got home a little after 8 PM.
Kogarashi wanted to take a red pen to the sign, but I wouldn’t let her.
All in all, a great trip. We ended up under budget (though it definitely was still a significant expense), and most importantly we had a ton of fun. Nudge probably won’t remember anything, but Wiggles might, and if nothing else we have the photos.
So that’s our little travelogue. I hope you enjoyed the pictures if nothing else. Y’all take care, and we’ll try to keep in touch.
So it’s been forever since I posted an actual newsletter, but I’m making a special effort today. This past week we had our first true family vacation (as in, just our family, instead of being with extended family), in the form of a road trip through New England. In case any of y’all haven’t heard, we’re going to be moving to Ithaca, NY in January when I start a job as a postdoc at Cornell university; we figured we’d better get all these places visited while they were still several hours closer. For planning, we just split up the states between us (I had Rhode Island and Vermont; Kogarashi Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine), and we picked places we’d like to go and printed out minor information and some maps of how to get there from the major highways. We intentionally didn’t make any hotel reservations, since much of the purpose of this trip was to be a low-stress getaway. We’d visit what we wanted to, skip what we didn’t feel like, and drive until we felt tired. Pretty much the exact opposite of daily life, where my schedule is ruled by one deadline after another from when I get up to the moment I go to bed.
And it worked beautifully. Honestly, this was the most fun vacation we’ve had in years (no offense to anyone we’ve gone with recently; it’s all a matter of comparison). So partly to get out a real newsletter, and partly to have a record for posterity, here’s a blow-by-blow account of our trip, all four days and 817 miles of it. It’ll probably be pretty lengthy; feel free to skim and get the good parts.
Day 1 - Rhode Island
We got a nice early start on Tuesday, leaving here about 9 AM (after a brief stop by the post office for Kogarashi to mail an order of painted fans to a customer).
Here’s the girls’ setup in the car, with a cooler set between them as a table/teasing deterrent. It only worked halfway well as either, but was better than nothing, and kept our snacks nice and cold.
We drove up I-95 through eastern Connecticut until we hit Rhode Island, then quickly got onto state highways and headed over to Newport. The city is a charming little town situated on the island of Rhode Island (in the state of Rhode Island-confused yet?), apparently most known for its beautiful oceanfront property and its gigantic and picturesque mansions. Our first stop was the Cliff Walk, which as you’d expect is along some cliffs and gives you a good view of a pretty ocean bay.
Further on it also gives a good view of some mansions, but that part has lots of stairs that are hard to take a stroller on, so we only saw two. (And by we, I mean me and the girls; Kogarashi stopped at the second set of stairs to take a break since 90+ degree weather, glaring sun, and 7 months pregnant don’t mix well.)
Here’s two of those mansions. Given the choice, I’d rather keep the girls. They’re better looking and probably cost less to keep up.
Aside from the heat it was a pretty walk, but we were still glad to get back to the car and our extra water bottle cache. It was also a good test of our new 2-seater stroller (pictured earlier), a secondhand sit-n-stand model that lets the older child either sit on a benchseat facing backward or stand facing forward. I think it’s the most logical design for a two-seater I’ve seen, and both we and the girls love it (to the point where they argue over who gets the back seat).
After returning from the cliff walk we rehydrated at the car and then went to the beach for an hour or two.
The girls loved playing in the sand, and Nudge even followed me into the waves until one knocked her down under the water. (It was only ~6 inches deep, but enough for her head to go under). It was a good rest after the cliff walk, and once we’d had our fill we went back to the car and headed up to Providence.
We had two goals in Providence. The first was the grave of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, one of my favorite authors and a Providence native. It took a while to find it in the cemetery, until Kogarashi spotted the “Fall of Cthulhu” comic book someone had left against the stone. (Other offerings included a penny, a guitar pick, some minor decorations, etc. Lacking flowers, I left a dime.) I’d gotten conflicting information about the ability to take photos, but I’d seen them everywhere online and so decided to follow the cemetery’s guide of just keeping things dignified while we snapped one. I’m considering making this the starting member of a photo collection of me next to famous people’s graves, since there are quite a few famous people buried here in New England.
I tried to do a nice close-lipped smile for this. I don’t think it quite worked.
After the cemetery we went to a bakery I’d learned of through a bread baking book I own. It turned out to be just a bakery, instead of the bakery-and-sandwich shop I’d expected, so we grabbed a baguette and some pastries, then got a sandwich from elsewhere down the road.
Then began the saga of looking for a souvenir. Our family tradition-begun on our honeymoon-is to get a Christmas ornament from everyplace we take a family vacation. Sometimes we get them already made; sometimes we buy bits and put them together into a complete ornament later. For this trip we wanted to do the latter, getting one small item from each state and stringing them into a single ornament. Except that Providence apparently has exactly zero souvenir shops, and after nearly an hour of fruitless searching we finally stopped at a Family Dollar and-after combing their racks for potential items-bought a bag of marbles. Specifically, we wanted the large aquamarine “shooter” marble, as both a memory of the ocean and an homage to Lovecraft (whose characters tend to go insane and thus lose their marbles).
After that we headed north into Massachusetts to find a hotel for the night. Unfortunately we ran into 4-5 ones that were booked solid or nearly so thanks to a concert the next day in Boston. We finally got a room at a Residence Inn that was more than I wanted to pay, but still within budget (at least, after the very very nice people at the front desk gave us a steep discount). Both girls got baths to try to rid them of ocean smell and sand, and then it was off to bed.
Aren’t they just adorable?
Day 2 - Massachusetts
We got up and out on the road by about 9 again, after a nice continental breakfast at the hotel. Our first (and major) stop was Boston, but rather than brave Boston traffic ourselves, we parked at a subway stop near the Boston temple and took the train in.
Our goal was to walk the Freedom Trail, which is a 2.5-mile path through Boston that hits a lot of important historical sites (Boston Commons, the Old North Church [where the lanterns signaling Paul Revere were hung], Bunker Hill, and several graveyards with important people buried in them).
This is the Old North Church; with some effort, you can make out the words on the plaque talking about the lanterns that signaled Paul Revere.
We started at Boston Commons and followed the trail-conveniently marked with either red paint or red brick along its entire length-through a good chunk of Boston, stopping for lunch and souvenir shopping in Quincy Market. (I had “Boston Clam Chowdah” for lunch, of course, made even better by the remains of the baguette from the night before.) We weren’t sure if we’d make it to the end of the trail, since it’s a long way to go in 90+ degree heat, but we managed to walk the entire thing from start to finish. Last on the stop was Bunker Hill, marked by an obelisk with 294 interior steps up to the top. (Yes, I climbed every one of them. I suspect my taking the stairs to work on the 5th floor every day with occasional trips up to the 12th helped.)
Wiggles at the end of the trail. Not a graveyard, so she’s happy.
The last step up the inside of the monument, and the view from the top. On the righthand sidewalk you can see the actual Freedom Trail (painted red line) leading up from the street.
Wiggles will probably always remember this trip for its graveyards and how much she hates them “because we spend too much time in them!” (I was adding to my nascent photos-with-famous-graves collection, and managed to get Sam Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, Cotton Mather, and a few others).
From Bunker Hill we walked a few blocks over to the nearest subway stop to get back to our car, and from there it was up to Salem. We’d planned several potential stops in Salem, but it was getting later so we just stopped by the witch hunt memorial (an open courtyard with a stone bench for each of the victims, inscribed with their name and the method and date of death). Afterward we let the girls run around to burn off some energy, then hit the road to look for lodging.
The memorial itself; fairly minimalist and somber, but I liked the design.
Can you tell the girls were excited to get out of the car?
Maine was our first stop the next day, so we wanted to get most of the way there before calling it quits. We were planning on stopping in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (just shy of the Maine border), except that the leg of I-95 that goes through New Hampshire is a lot shorter than we expected. By the time I realized we’d missed the Portsmouth exit, we were in Maine. There we began another saga of hotel-hunting, this time stymied by rates that were too high for our budget. After another hour or so of searching, we found this wonderful little mom-and-pop motel in York, Maine, called the Faircrest Motel. It was absolutely perfect, apparently run by a guy and his wife, with cozy but clean rooms and a beautiful rustic ambiance. They only had double beds, which we thought would be a problem (Kogarashi and I are used to a queen and tend to kick each other a lot in smaller beds), but the Freedom trail must have exhausted us both because we slept like bricks.
Day 3 - Maine and New Hampshire
Arising nice and early on Thursday, we packed up and headed out to the York beach to see a lovely scenic lighthouse recommended by Kogarashi’s college roommate Anki. It sits on an island a hundred or so yards from shore, and is just lovely.
Cute lighthouse; cuter girls.
The girls loved clambering over the rocks on shore, and once Nudge discovered she could climb we couldn’t stop her. I swear she climbed this same four-foot stretch of tumbled stone six or seven times, each time gleefully repeating “I climb! I climb!” to advertise this newfound wonder.
”I climb! I climb!” (repeat 7-8 times)
Next on the itinerary was Portland, Maine, home of the International Cryptozoology Museum. We got there before it opened, and so killed some time window-shopping and looking for a good souvenir until 11:00.
Now, I should say that the museum’s title is a bit misleading. I suspect it is the International Cryptozoology Museum simply because there aren’t any others. (“Cryptozoology” literally means “study of hidden life,” and refers to things like bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, chupacabra, and the like). Basically, this one man has made this his life’s work/hobby, and rents a back room from a used bookstore as his museum. It’s really just his personal collection, and I suspect the admission charges are what he uses to support his work. (And hey, if you can make a living off of doing what you love, more power to you.) He had some genuinely interesting items in there-casts of Bigfoot tracks, possible hair samples of a mythic chimp from Sumatra, and even a replica of the (known fake) Fiji mermaid-but also just a bunch of figurines and memorabilia that depict the “cryptids” without actually providing evidence for/against them. I suppose it gives a view of how cryptids are seen in popular culture, though I would have preferred more evidential samples.
A replica of the Fiji Mermaid, a known hoax perpetuated by P.T. Barnum. (And yes, it says that in the museum. The owner seemed to have a fairly level head on his shoulders and was definitely not blindly advocating things without regard to evidence.)
That done, we headed for New Hampshire because there really isn’t much to do in Maine unless you’re willing to devote several days to the natural beauties up north, and we just didn’t have the time. So instead we headed west for New Hampshire’s natural beauties, with our first stop Mt. Washington.
Now, if you’re not from the Northeast there’s a good chance you haven’t heard of Mt. Washington, but it’s locally famous for (a) being the highest point in the Northeast, and (b) having some of the worst weather in the world. We got personal experience with (b) when we arrived at the trail start and found that the road was closed to private vehicles due to 85 mph winds at the summit. After a little deliberation, we decided to pay the higher price for the guided tour, given in a company van. (Apparently while the mountain is all state park, the road itself is actually privately owned and operated, and has been for 150 years.) I think it was the best 100% markup I’ve ever paid. Not only does the trip consist of 8 miles of guardrail-less switchbacks up a very narrow road, but once we entered the cloudbank visibility dropped to only about twenty feet. Once at the top we were in a sea of fog with winds whipping by at 60-70 miles per hour.
Welcome to scenic Mt. Washington!
Kogarashi and the girls did the sensible thing of taking refuge in the museum, while I proved my machismo (and questionable sanity) by climbing to the actual summit. It was only ~20 feet more up some large rocks, but the wind was blowing so hard I had to make most of it on all fours, with my feet braced downwind to keep it from blowing me over (and, presumably, off the mountain, though I couldn’t see far enough to be sure). I actually made the trip twice, first to photograph the summit itself, second to find the geological marker represented in the souvenir we’d gotten. Possibly crazy, but it was my favorite part of the whole trip.
The lovely view from the summit. I was actually happier than I look; squinting into 80 mpg winds just tends to distort your expression.
I have great respect for the scientists who stay there during the winter, when the wind and cold are so bad they build horizontal icicles, and (as one video showed) turning a gallon of milk upside down results in just a fine white spray being blown up from the spout.
That little adventure concluded, we headed to the nearby Franconia Notch state park to camp with a tent borrowed from a friend. The campground was recommended by Anki again (she’s from New Hampshire), and it was great. We suffered a bit from being novice campers and lacking some supplies-piles of blankets just don’t substitute for a good camping pad-so sleep was fitful at best. Still, it was a good experience, and we learned a lot for next time.
Our little slice of the woods.
Day 4 - New Hampshire (cont) and Vermont
After packing up our campsite, we hit the road again and headed for Vermont, with a quick stop at the former site of the Old Man of the Mountain. This is a (formerly) famous rock formation on the side of a cliff that looked like a man’s face in profile. It stood there for ~12,000 years, apparently, until entropy and erosion finally took their toll and it collapsed back in 2003. (When Wiggles asked why we were stopping, I told her “We’re going to go see something that used to be here.”) The state of New Hampshire is still in mourning, and is in the middle of making a memorial plaza for him. I have no emotional connection to it, and so am not particularly moved-though I do wonder if they will continue to use his image on the state highway system.
Now you see him (thanks to the memorial) . . .
. . . now you don’t.
After that brief stop it was straight to the Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream factory in Waterbury, Vermont. Read Wikipedia if you want the history of the company; suffice it to say that it tries to be very fun, and the factory is a strong tourist destination. There’s an outdoor playground for kids, a “Flavor Graveyard” eulogizing retired flavors (yes, I got a photo), a patio area that had live music and several kiosks selling food, and pretty much the cheapest admission tours on our entire trip. For $3 per adult we got a 30-minute tour of the factory, including a good-sized sample scoop of the flavor of the day. (Ours was Late Night Snack, a vanilla-caramel swirl with clusters of chocolate-covered potato chips. Yes, sounds disgusting, but was actually quite tasty.)
This one’s probably not going into the collection, but you never know . . .
After lunch and dessert (and a little more dessert; we were on vacation, after all), we then hit the road again for Sharon, Vermont, and the Joseph Smith birthplace memorial. It was a nice location, and being the only ones there at the time we got a golf cart tour of several close locales on the premises.
We didn’t get to see the video-both girls were antsy, and there’s no way they would have sat through the entire hour-but we did get to see several important sites. There was also an exhibition of Hubble telescope images paired with scriptures about creation, including my favorite image, the Hubble Deep Field. (It’s not the prettiest, but I love what it represents: they basically pointed the telescope at the emptiest, darkest spot of sky they could find and let it expose for a month and a half. Compile the data and you get thousands upon thousands of galaxies. If I ever teach a class on the Creation, that’s going to be my visual aid for “worlds without number.”)
Again, can you tell the girls were happy to get out of the car?
And then it was to home. We had originally planned one more stop for Vermont, but based on schedules decided to just skip it-one of the advantages of intentionally planning a flexible vacation. We did make one brief stop in Holyoke, Massachusetts, for Kogarashi to get a photo near the welcome sign (her maiden name, Holyoak, was often misspelled thanks to that town), but otherwise took a straight course and got home a little after 8 PM.
Kogarashi wanted to take a red pen to the sign, but I wouldn’t let her.
All in all, a great trip. We ended up under budget (though it definitely was still a significant expense), and most importantly we had a ton of fun. Nudge probably won’t remember anything, but Wiggles might, and if nothing else we have the photos.
So that’s our little travelogue. I hope you enjoyed the pictures if nothing else. Y’all take care, and we’ll try to keep in touch.