If today is Tuesday, this must be Mount Washington! (photos 1-2)

Okay, well, actually it was Gorham, to be precise. We were up early, had a decent but crowded breakfast at the hotel, packed up and checked out, watched the low-hanging clouds near the hotel for about half a second, and then blitzed for Mount Washington (photos 3-7). We had booked our tickets for the Cog Railway up the mountain that was departing at 10:00 a.m. We planned to arrive about 15 minutes early, and left in good time.

Except the GPS had other ideas. It took what looked like a good shortcut to shave some time off the main highway, sort of a wobbly hypotenuse on a triangle that would have otherwise taken us North and West of our destination. Except the map decided about halfway along to tell me to take a turn that didn’t exist, and then when I turned around and went back to look, there WAS a road — one that was gated and clearly CLOSED. It did not look like anything a GPS should have been sending me towards though, more like a commercial quarry or something. Anyway. Frustrating, and worrisome, but I knew generally what it was TRYING to do before it did that, so I ignored the GPS for a bit, continued along its original suggestion (the hypotenuse) and then finally it caught up when we met the west side of the triangle. Very stressful and ate up valuable time.

We made it to the railway base station, got to the “station” area, and there was a line. Jacob and I went to the train while Andrea waited in line. I’d like to say we made it under the wire, but we really didn’t. They held back 3-4 minutes just for us, and for Andrea to get through the line-up. We thought we could just get right on, but she had to go back and wait. All good in the end, but not a fun start to our day. We shook it off, cuz it was ALL ABOARD!

For our ascent, our conductor’s name was Hannah who taught us that the railway runs bio-diesel engines and it is a “cog” railway as there are cogs (like on a bicycle) on a large spindle that turns and “locks” into the set of holes in the track so that it can “bite” and pull the engine along. Interestingly, the engine basically pushes the cars up and slowly lets the cars come down, but is not attached to them. It’s not the “pull” situation you normally expect with trains. There were really good views of Mount Washington and ravines, although nothing looked level due to the angle of the track and hence the railcar. Some sections are very steep. The railway has an interesting history, having been built originally in 1869. It is a 45-minute ascent, very slow, with the steepest part at the top called Jacob’s Ladder. As we went up, we saw hikers, and then nearing the top, we could see drivers on the auto-route. There is NO way I would have enjoyed that driving experience, now having seen the top, so I am VERY glad we didn’t do it. (The ascent is from photos 8-61). On the way up, they had us try “standing” twice. The first time was early in the ascent, not super steep, and it was interesting. You could definitely feel the work you had to do to maintain your standing position, but it wasn’t hard. When we reached Jacob’s Ladder, the steepest portion at 38 degrees incline, we tried to stand again — it was brutal. You COULD do it, but you couldn’t hold it comfortably for long.

At the end of the ascent, you get to spend one hour on the summit (photos 62-111). The summit is 6288 feet, the highest in New England. It was very cloudy with the clouds moving quite quickly. It was somewhat cold, but not super busy, which surprised me until I reminded myself it WAS a Tuesday, not a weekend. I guess only the real tourists are out on Tuesdays. We posed for photos, mailed some postcards, and took lots of photos. We could even see the base of the Auto-Route (where the gift shop was) from the day before, once some of the clouds cleared. It was pretty wispy for most of our hour, but in the last 5-10 minutes, the sun was out a bit more.

We started our 45-minute descent, but as a digression, I was a bit confused by their model — the railcar on the way up was far from full, somewhere between perhaps 40-60%, depending on how you calculated “full”, and a couple of the other railcars went up empty with some others coming back down empty. They have side spurs so they could pull off to pass so it wasn’t that if one went, they all had to go. But they seemed to run all of the cars at once, regardless of the immediate demand, and it is one car per engine. Equally, they told us to come back down with the exact car we went up in…yet others joined our group without any sort of “reconciliation” process for them to know that the person was now on this car instead of the other one, and one group even seemed to leave some friends behind to catch the next one. In short, they appeared to run it like a railway with ticket takers, counting, check-ins for each “car”, and actual assigned times, but lots of people seemed to be using it more like a subway system, catching whichever train was available. They did mention that you COULD also do the train one-way — hike up and ride down or ride up and hike down — which could throw off their numbers sometimes. The one young narrator mentioned that there had been a really cold snap back in June when a whole bunch of hikers got caught by cold nasty weather near the top — so they cancelled their hiking plans to descend and all piled into the railcar. Which was already full, and so they ended up sitting / standing in the aisles. Which NONE of the other passengers were very happy about, apparently. It just seemed like a very strange business model — why send empty cars so often and why insist on matching tickets? I wondered if maybe it was a volume thing…if it was near capacity, everyone had to treat it like a train; if it was as light as it was our day, people could treat it like a subway.

Anyway, digression aside, it is an equally slow descent (45 minutes at 5 miles per hour). This is when we learned about the railcar not actually being attached to the engine, so if the engine suddenly had a problem, our car itself needed its own brakes and steering options, WITH a conductor (named Jacob!) who looked like he was 14 being responsible for our safety in the event of a runaway. It was not very comforting. 🙂 What WAS comforting for our return was that the benches in the railcar were convertible. They start off facing uphill, and then can be flipped so they face downhill. We had padding for the downhill portion, which was much more comfortable than the ascent, and we had no need to test their safety plans. We also learned some stories about past railway staff in history using the tracks like a railway luge which didn’t go over very well with the safety boards, which banned it and made it a criminal offence. And we learned something interesting for the weather even this year — they had more snow in JUNE than they did in February. Not sorry I missed that experience. From the photos, you can also see that as we descended, we went from almost non-existent vegetation (except growing on rocks) into small shrubs and then a bit of distance to get into actual full trees. The lichen at the top is very short and reflects a lot of light — hence it appears white from a distance, and hence the name White Mountains. (The descent and base are seen in photos 112-161).

We had a blast on the train and the summit. Hence struggling to curate the gallery below 150 photos. There was a lot to see!

We knew our final destination of the day was Bangor, Maine, and if you asked the GPS to find you a route, it would have sent you back North. So we went South, of course. We headed for North Conway, past the Mount Washington Resort (hotel) which is huge and iconic — and across the road from the Bretton Woods hotels that were the site of the meetings that created the World Bank and the IMF (and why they are called the Bretton Woods institutions). We cruised along until lunch, enjoying more of New Hampshire and the White Mountains, and then ate at a Dairy Queen before continuing on to North Conway. We crossed the border into Maine and enjoyed a leisurely drive through what looked like cottage-country with lots of lakes and rivers (photos 162-170 pre-Maine and 171-175 for early Maine).

The only real downside to the drive was the dang GPS. It kept giving us really weird routes…2 km down a road, and then a turn; another 1 km and then a turn back; then go straight for 2 km and I’d be back on the same highway. It took us on perhaps the “fastest” route but with no real sense of purpose. Some of the twists and turns looked longer than if we’d just taken the main route. I eventually had to call a halt to the twists and turns as I couldn’t enjoy the trip if, every five seconds, I had to check where we were. We instead pushed straight to the major interstate and headed North.

It was a long day at that point, after being up early and three hours on the Mountain, so we were focused on getting to Bangor where we had a hotel room for the night. We had been having this on-again, off-again conversation if we were trying to definitely see every state capital or not, and if any of the three of us cared enough to push for it as opposed to all three of us thinking the same thing i.e., “sure, why not, unless there was a reason not to at the time”. As we got closer to Augusta, we found a reason.

We could see a storm coming from a long way off. Very dark, very threatening skies. About 4 interchanges before Augusta, the storm hit. It was still daytime, so the roads were well-lit, but I had no real interest in finding my way around an unfamiliar state capital in the pouring rain to maybe see a building through the downpour. We skipped it and stayed on the highway. I had good traction and visibility; the driving was all fine, so I just kept going. I didn’t see many people pulling off, but the storm lasted a good 45 minutes of very hard pounding rain, lightning bolts in the distance, and lots of thunder. It stopped for about 30 minutes and then came back again for another 15-20 minutes. I saw there had been an accident on the other side; it looked like a bad wreck, but otherwise, no sign of anything. Just a strong storm (photos 176-181).

We arrived at the Comfort Inn at Bangor and found out that we should be considered “lucky” to have a room as tourists, as there was a big concert in town that night. Godsmack and Staind. Of course, I could obviously see the desire and why there would be such high demand (I have no idea who either band are or how that would fill every hotel in Bangor, but apparently the storm had closed a bunch of airports on the East Coast so some people were stranded too). Anyway, we checked in and settled for a little bit before heading out for dinner. I had mentioned Andrea’s excitement earlier at seeing an Olive Garden in Vermont? Well, we didn’t go there. But we did go to a functioning Pizza Hut. Jacob really likes Pizza Hut, but the one closest to us shut down as an in-person eatery; it’s just take-out now. So, we found the Pizza Hut and went for dinner with a whopping two other tables active. Admittedly we were a bit later than the Pizza Hut crowd would normally eat, closer to 8:00 p.m. than 5:00 p.m., but the waitress mentioned that lots of people coming in tell her the same thing about Pizza Huts in their hometowns all along the Eastern coast, down to Virginia and Florida. This is a trend running probably 15-20 years at this point, since their long-ago heyday, but we were happy to do it for the night.

Afterwards, Andrea wanted to go to Stephen King’s house. I’m pretty sure we didn’t have an invitation, but his address is publicly listed, sooooo off we went. It felt very stalkerish, particularly with no obvious security. Almost like a Stephen King novel. He didn’t appear to be home, or if he was, he was hiding from us. The house does have a very interesting gate though. The disturbing part for me? We weren’t the only ones there doing it. There was another car with 4 people out wandering the neighbourhood. I made Andrea go by herself to the gate, and take the pictures. It felt too skeezy to me (photos 182-187). If it had been Warren Murphy (long passed, alas), I would have been out there building a shrine.

We wound up the excursion, got almost lost in the dark going back to the hotel, as some roads just DO not lead to where you want them to go. And called it a night.

Overall, as I said earlier, it was a long day of driving with 384 km in total. We were total shutterbugs on the mountain, racking up 402 photos and videos for the day and I could only curate it down to about 187. It was fascinating going through some of the photos where all three of us took an almost identical photo of the same thing — Jacob with his iPhone, Andrea with her iPhone, and me with my DLSR (Canon T5i Rebel) — and yet on an almost random basis, one of us managed a composition that the other two didn’t. Jacob was at the window for the ascent and descent on the railcar, so he had the best views from the train. And some of them are spectacular. However, up on the summit, we did a few of a very similar view with perhaps only a slightly different angle, and one photo was stellar and the other two were just “ho hum”. Sometimes the angle, sometimes the composition. It’s really fun to sort through some of them and see the choices. And that it isn’t like, “all the best were the DSLR” or “Jacob got all the best shots”. The resulting gallery represents a true mix of photos from all three of us.

2023-07b July – Day 04 Mount Washington to Maine

187 photos

Day 3 was moving day! We were finishing Vermont and heading onward to New Hampshire (photos 1-2).

We had breakfast at the hotel, again, and then packed up, playing the second game of Car Tetris to pack the car back the way I did when we first left Ottawa. We took some photos around the hotel before we left (photos 03-08).

We drove up past the Gondola SkyRide again and onward to Smuggler’s Notch. The road had some nice canopy as we got closer and then it got jiggy pretty quick (photos 9-16, with 3 short videos). There were lots of signs about not doing the route in the winter in big trucks, but honestly, the actual “notch” is about one and a half car widths wide, and a tight turn. I had lots of room in our cross-over SUV, and I still felt like it was tight, there’s no way I would want to do it in anything big. It’s basically two giant rocks, with a small diagonal path between them. Beautiful area though, with some small waterfalls beside the road.

Next, we headed to the Moss Glen Waterfalls. If you feel a sense of déjà vu, it’s because we went to a waterfall with the same name the day before. This one is located just outside Stowe and was on the way to New Hampshire anyway. It was interesting to drive out the North-East side of Stowe as we also found another grocery store, and a few more businesses. We had wondered where the locals shopped, as there wasn’t anything really grocery-like in the main part of Stowe.

The waterfall area is a strange combination of formal infrastructure with an untouched ravine. There is a small path made of dirt, wire-mesh and/or boardwalk through vegetation and a bit of forest. There was one open area of tall bushes about head height that reminded me of the scene in Jurassic Park: The Lost World where they’re all walking through a large field and the raptors are making beelines for them through the tall grass undetected. We got to see a bit of river, and some rapids, before getting to the big waterfall. At this point, there is almost NO infrastructure at all, other than a small area of fencing to stop you from an area that looked like it might be prone to erosion and collapse. You scramble up an embankment of about 30-40 feet in height comprised mostly of slippery rocks and tree roots and a series of “ledges” that resemble stairs of sorts. Or at least, that’s what you use them for, even if they’re more sloped, slippery, and a really good way to twist an ankle or to fall and break a femur. But hey, what can go wrong on a trip to Vermont? (Small aside — we have a friend who took a trip to Vermont and literally fell and broke her femur while on an easy hiking trail).

It was a great waterfall (photos 17-54), well worth the visit, but getting back down was even harder than getting up. And since it was only supposed to be a very short walk from the parking lot, which was true, we didn’t anticipate it being super hot climbing up and down the hill. By the time we got back to the car, we all needed hydration pretty soon.

We drove through northern Vermont, with lush mountains and some rivers, lots of beautiful old houses, many done up as BNBs. We saw two covered bridges, and visited Hardwick, a cute town with a big grass square. We had lunch in St. Johnsbury. Lots of places were not open for lunch, so we opted for a café called Yummies at the Star, a cross between a snack bar and a diner attached to a movie theatre. It wasn’t exactly a gourmet menu but at least they had really good milkshakes, and a young girl running the place by herself and doing a fairly credible job of it. We crossed over into New Hampshire by bridge and could see the White Mountains for quite some time before we got to them. They were less green and bigger than the mountains in Vermont, more rugged, more pointy…more imposing and close together (photos 55-74). We arrived in Gorham, with lots of restaurants on the main street.

Since our hotel room wasn’t ready yet, we drove to the base of Mount Washington and the “autoroute” if you were to drive up it. I seriously thought about it, I admit. I wanted to do it. But I wasn’t sure what it would be like, would I “enjoy” it or feel like I “survived” it? We had other plans for the mountain for the next day, so we settled for viewing the Presidential Mountains. We had good clear views, and in fact, had had beautiful weather most of the day. We saw the Google Car and the parking lot had a pretty good selection of license plates (NY, VT, NH, ME, MA, PA, OH, FL, NC, UT, CO, QC, NS). We visited the gift shop and then headed farther south towards Jackson, to the end of the White Mountain National Forest (photos 75-97).

Then we retreated back to Gorham to our hotel (the Quality Inn) with dinner at J’s Corner restaurant near the hotel. And Andrea had her first lobster roll of the trip.

Overall, the driving wasn’t too bad for the day, 246 km, although there weren’t as many stops in the middle section. For photos, we took 271 which has been curated down to 97 for the gallery.

2023-07b July – Day 03 Vermont to New Hampshire

97 photos

Day 02 of the trip, a Sunday, was to be a “roam around Vermont” day (photo 1-2). We wanted to see a large lookout, go to Montpelier, and maybe see some waterfalls and/or covered bridges down towards the middle of the state. We managed to do all of the things we wanted, but not quite the way we expected.

We had breakfast at the hotel (one of the few perks, although they also had a pool), and headed off to Mount Mansfield for the Gondola SkyRide. It is the tallest mountain in Vermont and of course a major ski hill in the winter, with a summer gondola ride for lookout views of other mountains and valleys. It had amazing views, we saw lots of mountains in the distance, with great weather for our visit. There was an option to walk up or down, but we’re not crazy — it’s 3600 feet, although that isn’t including the full summit up behind the chalet. We bought a t-shirt for Jacob as a souvenir and took lots of photos (photos 3-60).

For our next jaunt of the day, we headed for Montpelier. We had been thinking that in every state, we would visit the state capitol building, look around a bit and move on. But Montpelier had an added reason to visit. They had been experiencing huge flooding issues in previous weeks, but they were supposedly into full recovery mode and we thought we could throw some tourism dollars their way, give them some business, even if only mild. News of their recovery efforts were greatly exaggerated. Montpelier is the smallest of state capitals by population, and the downtown area is about 4-5 blocks long plus 2-3 for the government buildings. All of it was closed off, with almost no easy access to any of it, and almost all of the businesses with huge piles of debris stacked outside of their doors. Note that to get to the area, the river had to rise a good 8-10 feet to flood it. All of the businesses were still closed, so we ended up stopping at a gas station across the river, and ate at a Dominos for lunch. The State House itself was impressive (photos 61-68), and there were lots of huge old houses above them on the hill.

We reversed course from Montpelier on the big highway, past the turn for Stowe, and on to Waitsfield which has a covered bridge (photos 69-84, with one video of the river, showing how clear it was which was NOT the case for much of the river elsewhere in the state). It is the oldest covered bridge still in use, and the second oldest in the state. It goes over Mud River, with people floating down on tubes, swimming, jumping off the edge. We enjoyed creemees (soft ice cream) in an old barbershop building that was destroyed by water levels from Hurricane Irene — up the bank, over the ground, and up another 8 feet. Almost to the level of the bridge itself, if not over. Yet no apparent damage from the recent flooding.

We then headed towards Moss Glen Falls. There are two falls in Vermont with that name, one down by Granville (where we were headed) and one near Stowe that we would visit on Day 03. We took a lot of back roads down to Granville, and our GPS took us WAY out of our way at one point instead of doing a simple turn-around back to the highway. We drove by it on the way down and there was almost no signage, so we had missed it. After our loop through a backwoods area on rugged dirt roads, we got back on the highway and found it relatively easily. Just really a pull-off area on the road, followed by a small boardwalk to the falls. I confess, I wasn’t expecting much given the lack of signage and infrastructure, even though it was on the list of the best 15 falls in Vermont. But I was too pessimistic — it was very peaceful, with a wide waterfall and definitely worth the stop (photos 85-102).

We could have just taken the same route back to Stowe, but that seemed uneventful, so we decided on an alternate route to the West. It was nice, and went over a steep mountain that I would ABSOLUTELY NOT want to do in the winter, with switchbacks and steep grades with turns at the bottom. Reminded me a bit of some of the roads in Cape Breton, actually. Overall, it was a long relatively boring drive back. We stopped for one fall and lookout, but the rain started and we mostly just drove up to Richmond. Only to find out that you can’t get ON the highway to Stowe at Richmond but have to go really far West to get on again. I’m sure there was probably another road to the East that would have done the same thing, but well, you rely on Google Maps to your detriment (photos 103-107).

We stopped at a grocery store outside Stowe on the way back, near the main highway, and then back to the hotel. Andrea and Jacob went for a swim while I had a nap.

And then it was time for dinner. One of the things that Stowe is known for is the that the real family from the Sound of Music, the von Trapps, settled in Stowe after the war and opened a hotel and restaurant. It has grown over the years, and while we thought of staying at the hotel, it was a bit more expensive than we wanted to pay. So we settled for dinner at their beerhouse. Really good Austrian food, with a laid back atmosphere. Afterwards, we drove by the hotel just to see it, and could see just how much property they own! In the winter, they push cross-country skiing too, and some of that is just on their own property. The beerhall is shown at photos 108-111.

Oh, and for stats — about 230km driven, 276 photos taken curated down to 111 (including 1 video).

2023-07b July – Day 02 Around Vermont

111 photos