Tin Can Travels

17th – 19th Sept: Days 162-164

Rhode Island was a short trip to the west of Cape Cod and we arrived at our campsite, about 2 miles from the swanky coastal town of Newport, at lunchtime on Sunday. It was the last afternoon of the Newport Boat Show weekend so we parked up, had a quick sandwich, leapt on the bikes and headed for the waterfront.

The next 3 hours was a delightful theatrical production of pretending we were in the market for a 38ft motor yacht. So many shiny beautiful toys. So much speaking of half truths. So many business cards collected to be thrown away at a later date.  Entirely worth the $20 entry fee. We mentally spent about $500K over and over again which was a very pleasant way to spend a sunny afternoon. There were some utterly bonkers boats there.  For example: the 53′ centre console sport fishing boat with four 627hp 6.2L V8 engines, each worth $100,000 fitted. Those folks obviously need to get fishing fast and very fancy.

The next day we cycled along Bellevue Avenue, the road along which the fabulously wealthy industrialists of the late 19thC, like Cornelius Vanderbilt, built their summer ‘cottages’. (Paff. Ostentatious mansions). Several are now museums and you can pay to go and marvel at the complete and overwhelming excess of the ‘Gilded Age’.

Loads of the houses on the street are still privately owned, demonstrating that there is still a lot of money in this neck of the woods. Also on Bellevue Avenue was a small private car museum called Audrain with a few choice specimens. Cool to see a Bugatti Veron in the flesh, but the star of the show was this quite gorgeous Ferrari Europa. A cool 6 million bucks worth.

Back in town, most of the boat show vessels had been taken away and the harbour looked pretty empty and forlorn. We did find his little collection of ships berthed at a private apartment complex. Probably not used much as they were all blocking each other in.

We managed to fritter away enough time to get to an acceptable drink o’clock and found an open air waterfront bar for a G&T and a natter with a young Texan couple. They were in town as they had tickets to take some pieces to The Antiques Roadshow USA the next day, which was a trifle obscure. We got a few top-tips for our visit to Texas next year and then set off to find a restaurant for dinner. After a few false starts we ended up at a BBQ joint and indulged some delicious ribs and various other very tasty parts of previous animals. No chance of a conversion to vegetarianism in the Hampson household, I am afraid. We cruised home in the dark, thanking Newport for their nice wide cycle lanes.

We were meant to be here 3 nights, but Hurricane José was forecast to be coming this way, and coastal Rhode Island potentially could get quite a pummelling with high winds. We hemmed and hawed, but decided to play it safe and headed off a day early to our next stop in Conneticut.  A lost night’s accommodation seemed a small price to pay for peace of mind.  The rain had started by the time it came to pack up. We got wet, changed in the car and headed off.

 

11th – 17th Sept: Days 156 – 162

To get to our next destination, Cape Cod, we had to navigate our way south to the other side of Boston. This was a bit of a white knuckle experience as we were relying on Google maps and that lady in the phone has NO idea of the most sensible route. Only the shortest or fastest. Anyway. The road surfaces were awful, the lanes were narrow, it was busy and we ended up going pretty much through the centre of Boston at high speed surrounded by crazy city drivers. There were some tense words spoken. Hunger didn’t help. I blame the lady in the phone.

So. Cape Cod. Heard of it but never quite sure where, or what, it was.

I now know that it is an easterly jutting peninsula off the lower coast of Massachusetts with an upturned hook at its eastern end and a knob pointing south on its lower westerly aspect. The islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket are off the southern coast. It seems to me that it is quite likely a normal place for 9 months of the year, with an influx of summery holiday money madness for 3 months. Our roost for the next 6 nights was to be the interestingly named Sippewisset Campground, just outside the town of Falmouth. This is about halfway down that southwesterly knob. The campground was right on the most perfect of cycle trails. 11 miles of straight, flat, smooth black-topped rail trail. This led up to a great beach, 2.5 miles one way and down to Falmouth and Woods Hole, 2.5 and 5.5 miles respectively, the other way. We stocked up on provisions before we arrived and installed ourselves at our sweet little elevated site in the woods. An afternoon of not much rolled seamlessly into a nice evening around the campfire.  That night the downside of camping under a large oak tree in autumn became noisily apparent at regular heart stopping intervals. Acorns+gravity=disturbed sleep.

Over the course of our 5 full days here we cycled about 55 miles up and down the cycle path.

Day 1: We went to Falmouth, booked haircuts, walked around in the heat, looked at some nice homes, went down to the marina, saw racks and racks of boats out on dry stacks, had a coffee, went to the library and printed out our remote voting papers for the NZ general election, came home, packed our towels and togs and cycled up to the beach. It was small but perfectly formed sheltered beach. We caught some rays, read our books, Nick had his first Atlantic swim, and a few hours later we came home for a campfire dinner.

Day 2: Cycled down to Woods Hole, home of the Woods Hole Oceangraphic Institute. It has been a lifelong ambition of Nick’s to visit this place after he read about it in a National Geographic magazine when he was a kid. There was a small aquarium, a museum and an exhibition centre for the tourists, but I am sure the actual institute is where all the impressive stuff happens. We were a bit underwhelmed but it was still a lovely place and we had a good day. Woods Hole is where the ferry for Martha’s Vineyard departs from, so we bought some tickets for the next day before heading back to Falmouth where we stopped in for an early dinner.

Day 3: Back on the bikes, we whizzed back down to Woods Hole to catch the 9.30 ferry to Martha’s. We opted not to take the bikes over as it is actually quite a big place, with an excellent and cheap network of bus routes around the island. We left Woods Hole in the fog but 45 minutes later we disembarked in the sunshine at the town of Oak Bluffs.  Here there is a collection of ‘gingerbread cottages’, a collection of small ornate brightly painted wooden house all built in the late 1860s and 1870s. They are all very well preserved but form a bizarre little community with tourists like us snooping around. We forgot to take any photos, so more stock footage.

We wandered around and then hit the buses. Nick selected our spot for lunch, a fish market at the other end of the island. 1 hour and 3 buses later we arrived at Menemsha Harbor. This apparently was used as the location for the harbour scenes in the movie Jaws. It certainly looked familiar. We found the fish place and shared a crab cake, a bowl of lobster bisque and a lobster roll for lunch. We ate it perched on a small bench at the wharf in a foggy breezy atmospheric gloom. The wind blew some bisque off my spoon onto my clean trousers. I’m sure Roy Scheider didn’t have to put up with this sort of trial and tribulation whilst portraying Police Chief Brody. We explored the harbour and caught the 3 buses back to the ferry port.  This was a great way to see the island. Away from the 4 main towns it is really quite rural. The permanent population is about 16000 but this swells to 100,000 in the summer. We were glad to see it a bit quieter, but again, were underwhelmed.  Not sure what all the fuss is about really. This is not on our list of places to come back to. The trip home was sunny until just before we got back to Woods Hole, where we hit the fog bank again. Our plan to sit outside a bar and have a late afternoon beer suddenly didn’t seem so attractive, so we went home and lit the fire instead.

Day 4: We were back in Falmouth for 10am haircuts and afterwards did a few chores. We found an amazing french bakery, bought a big baguette and cycled home to make a ham and cheese sandwich. Felt like we had been transported back to La Belle France for a moment. The afternoon was a riot of laundry and laziness.  At 6pm we pocketed a few beers and scooted back to the beach to watch sunset.

A bit of a treat to be able to catch a sunset on the east coast. After dinner we finally finished the last series of Breaking Bad. We are bereft. Walter and Jesse have been fairly constant companions on this trip. We will miss them.

Day 5: Another lovely warm sunny day, so after brunch we hit the beach again. These days will be few and far between from now on, so all bikini time is time well spent. The sea was amazingly warm, calm and clear. Very eerie to have no waves at all. That evening we headed back to town for dinner and sat out at a lovely Italian restaurant. I had the most spectacular shrimp pasta. Our ride home was the first trip up the cycle trail in the complete darkness. We had lights, but a few rabbits had close shaves. Idiots.

So that, in a nutshell, was our Cape Cod sojourn. Falmouth and surrounds was a jolly nice place, entirely enhanced by an amazingly utilitarian cycle trail.  Next stop, The USA’s smallest state, Rhode Island.

 

 

 

 

4th – 9th Sept: Days 149 – 154

So Rick’s planned short 7 day visit was now curtailed to whistle-stop 5 days and was to start with an 8 hour, 350 mile drive from Burlington to the Maine coast. A 3-state day for us, but actually a 4-state day for Rick who woke up in New Jersey.  We drove across Vermont, a small sliver of New Hampshire and into Maine. We had 2 stops for fuel, 2 stops for coffee  but at lunchtime found ourselves in that rare place in America: the doldrums of fast food.  We managed to find a supermarket with an amazing self-service fresh salad/deli bar, each assembled a container of deliciousness (the boys’ containers somewhat lacking in green), then drove on to find a nice spot to pull over and eat it. We were starving, but unfortunately there were no cute little riverside picnic areas. Or even any lay-bys. Or any pull-out spots of any kind. We drove on for 40 minutes, the food warming up on Rick’s lap, all getting a bit testy. FINALLY we found a bit of dirt big enough to park on and inhaled our lunch without even getting out of Big Dave. Spirits and blood sugars boosted, we continued to head East.

We eventually rolled over the bridge onto Mount Desert Island at about 5.30pm. This was our first glimpse of the Atlantic Ocean, and so the completion of our transcontinental journey, a bit of an emotional moment. Mount Desert (pronounced ‘dessert’) Island is home to Acadia National Park and the reasonably well known town of Bar Harbor. The island is shaped a bit like a pair of testicles, although this was not promoted by the local tourism office. Acadia occupies most of the body of the right testicle (as you look at the map), Bar Harbor is in the upper right testicle, and we were staying on the tip of the lower left testicle in a small village called Bass Harbor. Bass Harbour is a very small working fishing village with only a couple of restaurants and a shop/petrol station. Our campground was equi-distant from the village one way and a light house in the other direction, so after we set camp we grabbed a beer each and walked the 0.6 miles up to the light house point to watch the sunset. We weren’t the only ones to have this ideas, as you might imagine.

We had a campfire that evening, and the boys did the predicted brotherly catch-up over ‘a few beers’.

The first night sharing our space was quite tolerable. The dinette became Rick’s bed, and no-one snored too badly.

The next day we off-loaded TC from BD, and took the bikes over to Acadia.  We had bought Rick a cheap bike from Walmart, as this was going to be much more convenient and not much more expensive than renting a bike each time he needed one. We had also bought him some accessories.

Acadia has a great network of bike trails, based on the original old carriage trails, and we cycled about 12 miles through the woods and around some lakes.

We found a lakeside perch to eat our packed lunch and despite the clouds-a-gathering, the rain stayed away. On the way home we stopped in at Bar Harbor. This is a pretty spot, but the town has been taken over by tourist ‘tat’ shops. So we bailed and drove up to the top of the tallest point on the island, Mount Cadillac. Unfortunately the peak was in the clouds so not much of a view, but apparently this spot is the first in the USA to see the sunrise. There was no risk of us experiencing this. After getting back to Tin Can we had a wash and brush-up and risked the rain by cycling to the village and had a seafood dinner at a charming restaurant on the front.

We managed a few drinks outside before it got too cool and then ate far too much inside.  The rain stayed away and we groaned all the way home with full stomachs.

The next day we headed back to Acadia with walking shoes on and a few planned hikes. The first destination was a blow-hole called ‘Thunder Hole’. It was a picturesque 2 mile coastal walk from the carpark to get there but it was singularly unimpressive as there was no swell and we got there a bit too close to high tide. We grabbed a sandwich lunch and then embarked on a second walk in the afternoon. Unfortunately the forecast rain eventually arrived and we were soaking after 5 minutes.

The committee voted to turn around and go and find the car museum instead. Good decision, and the car museum (located mid left testicle) was fantastic with an amazing collection.

That evening the committee decided to go back to the same local restaurant, (and to eat a bit less). We went by foot rather than by bike as the rain continued and umbrellas are a bit more effective at low speed.

The next day we moved down the coast to our next stop, New Harbor, about 150 miles away. Lunch was a highlight of the day: a lobster roll at a waterfront lobster shack.

A local delicacy of basically the meat of half a lobster, mixed with mayonnaise, served in a buttery toasted roll. Expensive, but worth every cent.  It was delicious. Our campsite was a wooded site aptly, but slightly oddly, named Sherwood Forest. We hastily set up then took advantage of the beautiful late afternoon sunshine by cycling the 3 miles down to the Permaquid lighthouse.

This lighthouse features on the Maine quarter, the design winning a vote by the Maine residents.

Back at camp we set in for another evening of campfires and booze, introducing Rick to the fine game of  Weasel Bag. He was a natural.

We had an early start in the morning as we had booked a boat over to Monhegan Island from New Harbor.

We had to be at the wharf by 8.15am, which was a 15 min cycle away. It was a lovely sunny day, but breezy with a good running swell. Luckily I had some seasickness tablets because the next hour was ‘challenging’ and my eyes did not leave the horizon for the whole trip. Even Nick was a bit green by the time we arrived on the island.  Monhegan Island is about 12 by 1.5 miles and has about 40 full time residents.

It is criss-crossed by hiking trails with a rugged coastal loop trail around its perimeter. We had 5 hours on the island before the return boat. We started with coffee and then did a 2.5 hour hike around the lower perimeter loop.

The coast was amazing and rugged and stunningly beautiful. As we returned to the village there was a small ‘oasis-in-the-desert’ moment as we stubbled across the Monhegan Brewing Company. The boys had a couple of pints of the beer and I had some of the finest ginger beer I have ever had.

Lunch was more delicious seafood offerings from a small shack on the beach (Lobster BLTs: or LBLT, and haddock chowder) and after another coffee and a mooch around a couple of small galleries and shops we were back on the boat. The trip home was much calmer and we had another lovely evening by the campfire.  Dinner was breakfast sandwiches. Crazy.

Sadly Rick had to leave us the next day. We packed up and headed towards Portland airport. We deposited him at departures, and reassured the parking official that we wouldn’t be cluttering up the drop-off lane too long. He looked worried enough to make me think that he was half expecting us to start the generator and put the awning out. We didn’t need a big emotional goodbye as we will be in the UK next month and be cluttering up his spare room for at least a week.

We headed down to our stop for the next two nights, York Beach, on the southern Maine coast. Our hostess was a very chatty affable chainsmoker called Diane who had a tiny dog which looked more like an animated fluffy slipper. Both were lovely. The town was a cute little seaside affair with a cool beach, lots of eateries, ice-cream shops, a small arcade (We converted $25 of cash into 30 minutes of fun and 2 very plastic LED yo-yos) and, you guessed it, another light house.  We cycled around, admired some large summer homes, visited the next little village (with lots of other sunday afternoon day-trippers) and did a small coastal walk (none of the advertised seals, lots of people looking for seals) and generally blithered about.

Tomorrow off to Massachusetts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

30th Aug – 3rd Sept: Days 144 – 148

The Adirondacks are a mountain range in Upstate New York and our journey across them started with an overnight stop in a riverside camp in a town called Poland. We underestimated the ability to buy fresh groceries in the town and ended up at the petrol station buying a salami and a tin of sliced mushrooms.  Sara’s ‘invention test’ for dinner it was to be! It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, the camp had a lovely clean swimming pool and that was where we spent a couple of hours while the laundry was in progress. Multitasking extraordinaire. The main excitement of this stop was what we found to buy in the camp shop. Check out ‘Teeny Dave’. It was meant to be….

 

We had a lovely peaceful night and set off across the (small) mountains in the morning. The drive through the Adirondacks was very beautiful. Lovely wide smooth roads, swooping ups and downs rather than hard climbs, lots of handsome NY towns including Ithaca, home of Cornell University. (One of only 8 Ivy League Universities, the others being: Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, Uni of Pennsylvania, Princeton & Yale.) It was cool and there was suddenly a vague tinge of brown and yellow on some of the trees, as if autumn had suddenly hit today, on the 31st August. C’mon. Summer didn’t really start til the middle of July.

Our next stop was the bizarrely named ‘Ausable Chasm’.  This is another deep steep sided narrow river gorge also known as the Grand Canyon of the Adirondacks. This is a bit of a leap of imagination, but it was cool.  We had 2 nights here. The first was very quiet and we had our area of the campsite to ourselves. The second night was the Friday of a 3 day holiday weekend (Labor Weekend) and the camp was suddenly chock-a-block with folk getting away for the last weekend of summer.  The chasm is privately owned, and there is a not-inconsiderable fee to walk through through it, and around the rim trails. You can also float down the river on a raft, or in a tube when the the weather is warm.  We didn’t do any floating, but did a good enough walk to earn our dinner. It was quite impressive, but again, we lost these photos.

The highlight of this place was our evening at the Ausable Brewing Company. This was a nano-brewery a couple of miles cycle ride from camp. It is located down country lane in a red shed, surrounded by fields and flowers. It is run by two brothers and is only open 3 days a week (because they don’t make very much beer). On each of those evenings a different local food truck rolls up to feed the customers and there are tables and chairs dotted around the garden and in the adjoining open-sided barn. The sun was shining, there was a happy buzz of locals and holiday-makers, a tolerable smattering of kids, not enough dogs, the beer was excellent, the food truck was a was selling amazing BBQ ribs and there was some half decent live music from a man with a guitar.  A bliss evening.

We managed to get home before darkness fully set in. Luckily the road home was quiet and our merry weaving didn’t leave us in a ditch.

The next day our plan had been to get up early and get the nearby ferry across Lake Champlain (I was previously convinced this was called Lake Champagne…) into the town of Burlington, Vermont, to spend the day mooching around, then pick up Nick’s brother Rick from Burlington airport at 4.30pm. We awoke to a message from Rick that his flight out of the UK had been cancelled and he was going to be delayed by 24 hours. This was a shame, as he was only coming for a week anyway. We had planned this week as mainly a Maine coastal trip, with 2 stops across country to get us there.  The delay turned this into a one stop drive.

We got a later ferry, decided to bypass Burlington that day and headed off to our next stop in a village called Stowe. This was luckily only about 30 miles from Burlington, so we could easily go back to pick up Rick the next day, and then do a 3 hour drive to our next stop. On the way to Stowe we called in at the Ben & Jerry’s Factory Tour and Ice Cream Shop. Here they have a ‘Flavour Graveyard’ where all the past incarnations of their products are preserved. The original shop was opened in Burlington itself and interestingly Ben (Cohen) learned to make ice-cream by taking a correspondence course when he failed to get into medical school, and because he has no sense of smell or taste he put lumps and chunks in the ice-cream to give it mouth feel. Something that is very important for his own enjoyment of food. Oh, the facts just keep flowing’.  Anyway. We called in with full bladders and low blood sugars, took one look at the crowds, saw that the only food on offer was ice-cream, had a wee, and got the hell out of dodge to find a proper lunch. This is to prove we were there.

Once installed in camp and on the other side of a sandwich we felt much more human and jumped on the bikes to explore Stowe. It was very pretty and gentile with a nice cycle path that we took a ride up as far as a mini-golf course. Here, in the baking sun, stuck behind a family with seemingly 17 kids and no sense of urgency, we had our second USA Mini Golf Challenge. Nick evened the score to one all.

In the morning it was hosing with rain, and was forecast to do the same all day. This makes packing up a bit miserable, but we were brave and soldiered on. We drove back to Burlington and considering it was Sunday the place was jumping. Tons of traffic, people everywhere and queues forming at all the restaurants for lunch. Crazy. We found somewhere to park, somewhere to eat, did a bit of shopping and then headed out to a supermarket near the airport for a proper stock up for the impending arrival.  As we were negotiating our way through town Rick rang with more bad news. His flight into Newark had been delayed and despite a 3 hour connection, he had not managed to make his flight to Burlington. The next flight wasn’t until the next morning. Blood and Sand. We quickly discussed some other options, but in the end, waiting until the morning was going to be the best of a bad bunch. Now we were going to have to do a planned 2 night trip across country in one epic day. The man wanted a bit of a USA road trip, that’s what he was going to get, by crikey.

Our next dilemma? Where to stay that cold rainy night? A hotel, that’s where! Some hasty research was done, and we were soon booked into the nearby Best Western which had an attached bar/restaurant and a room with 2 beds and a bath. Every cloud has a silver lining.  We did our shopping, started the generator so we could open up TinCan, put the shopping away and pack our overnight bags (aka the shopping bags) and within half an hour I was luxuriating in the tub. We had a nice dinner sat at the bar, a terrible night’s sleep (unfair) and were at the airport by 9am to finally greet our visitor.

28th – 30th Aug: Days 142 – 144

We continued our journey across NY state and put in a 2 night stop in Watkins Glen. This little known corner of America is best known for a couple of things:

1. The Glen: a smallish but beautiful steep sided gorge with some amazing rock formations and waterfalls, and a very lovely 1.5 mile walk up it.
2. The Glen: a very well known motor racing track, if you know about these things. This was the first place to host a major car race following WW2 giving the petrol heads of this land somewhere to burn some gasoline and tyre rubber. In 1948 this started as a street race around the small town and graduated to a purpose built track 5 yrs later. It hosted Formula 1 Grand Prix 1961-1980 and remains an important NASCAR and INDYCAR venue as the premiere road racing venue in the USA. I, of course knew none of this.

We travelled from Niagara to Watkins Glen though the back roads of Up State New York. This area was a bit less polished than I had expected. More homes that needed repainting, more lawns un-mowed and a bit more junk in the gardens. Still very pretty though and we saw our first Amish horse and buggy on the road. We did a very small detour about 30 miles from our destination in order to visit the Corning Museum of Glass.  This was established by the Corning Glass Works in 1951 in recognition of 100 years of manufacturing glass.  The museum is now housed in a monumental purpose built building and has 45000 pieces of glass, some over 3500 years old. It was fantastic. The gallery areas were in huge minimalist spaces and the museum areas showed that those olden day folks knew some stuff too. There were even some science areas and demonstrations explaining fibre optics and such.  The highlight was watching a live worship where a glassblower knocked up an amazingly ornate bowel in 20 minutes. Quite a talent.

After we had absorbed all the culture that we could accomodate, we headed off to Watkins Glen. The town is in an area called Finger Lakes, and sits at the lower end of Seneca Lake. This is one of a group of long thin glacial lakes and is 38 miles long. We got to our camp at about 5pm, on a lovely sunny evening. We set up and then wandered down to the park area on the lake edge to watch the sunset with a bottle of fizz and a bag of cheesy crisps; last event in the anniversary celebrations. I know, we are all class.

The next day, after a hearty brunch, we donned our walking shoes and set off to walk up the gorge path. The entrance was only about a mile from camp on the edge of town and on the way there we had a coffee sat on a bench on the main street and watched the world go by. There are a lot of trucks that go through this town, so this was not peaceful pastime.  The pavements have plaques sunk into them, each commemorating a different race car driver that had won an event at The Glen. We came across this familiar name.

We found out that a few days after we leave here The Glen is hosting the Indycar Grand Prix. Nick was gutted to be missing it, but I reckon that finding accomodation would have been a little trickier. Anyhow, we have a date to pick up Rick in Burlington, so we must roll onwards!

The racetrack itself is not in town, and unfortunately we didn’t manage to get up to it.  Wonder if we could have given Big Dave a bit of a thrash, Tin Can and all…?

The walk up into the Glen was lovely. There was a well formed stone path built into the side wall of the gorge and lots of great photo opportunities. Unfortunately we also lost these photos in the great memory-card disaster, but here is a stock photo.

That evening we walked back to town and had dinner and a drink sat up at the bar in the local craft brewery, Roosterfish. We got chatting to an interesting chap called Dries and spent a few hours swapping stories and anecdotes.

 

26th – 28th Aug: Days 140-142

I’d not ever had a burning desire to visit Niagara Falls but we were going to be so close that it seemed silly not to swing by. Nick had been before with his Dad in March 1990. He remembers it being so cold that the Falls were half frozen and there were hardly any other tourists.

We booked 2 nights just north of the Falls in a village called Lewiston. Driving here took us from Pennsylvania into New York State. We navigated around the suburbs of Buffalo and had our first ‘low bridge’ experience. Luckily that only involved a hasty stop and me running around in the road to halt traffic so we could execute a 5 point turn, rather than top-slicing the roof off Tin Can. Sometimes the lady in Google Maps gets it wrong…

The first night was our anniversary so we booked a nice restaurant in Lewiston itself. I broke out a dress, Nick donned shirt and slacks and as the best dressed folks in the whole darn campsite we got an Uber to the village. As a happy surprise there happened to be a rather large jazz festival afoot. The main street was closed to traffic, had a stage at each end, was lined with numerous vendors of beer and food and was filled with a happy crowd. The sun was shining and we had a very cool hour of apperitifs listening to the music and soaking up the buzz. Our meal was excellent and we managed to get our return Uber just ahead of the going-home crowds after the last band.

 

The next day I might have felt a little shabby, and might not have had an appetitive for breakfast sandwiches. I know. Unfair.

After a period of time and some appropriate drugs (I healed myself) I was feeling better and we called another Uber to take us down to the Falls. Following recommendations from multiple sources we took our passports and walked over the Friendship Bridge to the Canadian side, with only a mild and completely unfounded anxiety that they might not let us back into the USA on our return.

I have some observations, and some corrected personal misconceptions regarding Niagara Falls:

1. American side shabby, Canadian side smart.
2. In my mind, the river ran the other way and the American and Canadian sides were switched.
3. It is actually 2 falls. American Falls and Horseshoe Falls. I really didn’t know this. Horseshoe falls is the Niagara I had imagined.
4. The view is so much better from the Canadian side.
5. There is a lot of water coming over those darn waterfalls.
6. There are a lot of people who come to look at those big darn waterfalls and only about 5% have any spatial awareness or manners.
7. Whoever is in the business of manufacturing disposable ponchos is making a good living out of the Niagara Falls tourist industry.

Once on the busy but nicely manicured Canadian side we wound our way slowly through the crowds down to Horseshoe Falls. Nick remembered doing a tour though tunnels behind the falls, just him and his Dad, and it being weird as the cascading water was frozen solid. We opted to do the same tour and joined the queue to get the lift down. Nick doesn’t deal with heights well. My Bête Noir is a touch of claustrophobia. Oh. They packed us into those tunnels. Hoards of yellow poncho wearing folks, rustling and shuffling along, each waiting for a turn to stand at the end of a tunnel mouth to watch a wall of white water cascading down in front of them. Not my thing at all. I felt much more relaxed once we got to the open air area at the base of the Falls. It really was epic being so close to it. Very wet, very noisy and a perfect photo opportunity given the backdrop of the cascading water, the Maid of the Mist boat and the rainbow. I cannot share a picture of this with you, however, as the memory card of the camera decided to error.

Here is a stock photo for your reference.

America and American Falls

Horseshoe Falls and Canada

 

With weary bodies after so much walking and excitement we shuffled back across to the USA, were re-admittted without drama, got an Uber home and had a nice cup of tea.

 

25th – 26th Aug: Days 139 – 140

Having spent 8 weeks in Michigan, Pennsylvania only had the honour of our presence for one night. We were just passing through on our way to Niagara Falls, and found a stop just west of Erie, on Lake Erie. We really can’t be bothered to do long driving days as it makes us both grumpy, so we generally only do a maximum of 150 miles, or 3 hours a day.  Never manage to get on the road before 11am, need a stop for lunch and very important for camp to be well and truely set up by beer o’clock.

Our camp for the night was a wooded place, inhabited by long term seasonal campers and there were definitely some twitchy curtains as we made our way to our back-blocks site at the rear of the park. Also amazing that such an out of the way campsite can be so close to a railway line…those horns…

We did very little except watch a few more episodes of Breaking Bad after dinner and I got stung by a wasp. Exciting times.

In the morning as we were leaving Erie we found ourselves in our favourite place, Walmart!  A fabulous start to our 17th wedding anniversary 🙂

Had to get a few supplies for our impending camper-guest, Nick’s brother Rick, who is joining us for a week soon. Going to be cozy with the 3 of us, but he is fully house trained and a bone fide camper so it should be all good!

 

22nd -25th Aug: Days 136 – 139

We left Detroit (and Michigan finally) under a dark cloud of a threatened storm that we never materialised. We were a bit sorry to leave this fine state, but not sorry to leave the terrible roads of Detroit. Ironic that a city built on the back of the motoring industry and which boasts that it had the world’s first section of paved road (1 mile of the aforementioned Woodward Ave in 1909) Should have such awful, awful, awful awful road surfaces. Big Dave’s suspension was challenged by the ridges and potholes and it was a sweet moment when we passed over the state line into Ohio and the tarmac was instantly smooth as.

Our time in Ohio was to be a short but very focused 3 nights and 2 days at the Mecca for all that is fun, fast, high and upside down. Cedar Point Amusement Park. It sits at the end of a spit of land that juts out into Lake Erie at a place called Sandusky and it bills itself as the ‘Roller Coaster Capital Of The World’. And you know, I think it is probably right. It has 17 roller coasters, 5 of which are taller than 200ft, (one is 420ft and another is 310ft), one of the fastest accelerating coasters in the world, the tallest and fastest ‘dive’ coaster in the world and they are building another one which is going to be the biggest and fastest and longest in the whole damn universe. Yes.

Anyhow, a long time ago, Nick, the self confessed ‘Coaster Coward’ decided that we needed to visit this place of hedonism and adrenaline to ‘cure himself’ of his fear of heights. So he had booked us into the on-site RV park for 3 nights and bought us 2-day passes to the amusement park.  Our site was close enough that we could hear the screams…and easily walk to the entrance gate.

We had an amazing 2 days. We walked miles up and down searching the shortest queues. We rode all the big ones bar one (which was unfortunately closed) and some of the smaller ones. We really didn’t have to spend along time waiting for any of the rides, which was cool. We (ok, mainly I) screamed my head off. Repeatedly. We wasted money in the arcades. We ate ice cream. We people watched, a lot. Main observation: there sure is a whole heap of ‘active wear’ being worn by minimally active people. Apparently wearing close fitting stretchy clothing is essential to sit in a chair and travel at speed.

The favourite ride? Top Thrill Dragster.  A 0-120mph in 3.9 s acceleration then straight up, and then straight down. 17s of adrenaline The only one we did twice.

Here is us ‘enjoying’ it!

I spent much of the time having fun through a haze of mild vestibular labrynthitis, (hoorah for stemetil), and Nick now considers himself cured of his fear of heights (a bit).

 

 

19th – 22nd Aug: Days 133 – 136

This trip so far has mainly been about small towns, open roads, parks and lakes. Since we left Seattle the biggest urban area we had visited was probably Boise, Idaho but Nick had a hankering to visit Detroit. He loves a bit of industrial chic and urban decay, and of course it is a pilgrimage destination for the car nut.

As point of interest the Detroit Metro area has only slightly fewer inhabitants than the whole of NZ. You might not be surprised to hear that there are no RV parks in downtown or metro Detroit, so a visit was potentially going to be a little difficult. Happily, however, we had met Todd and Keta in Copper Harbour last month and they were kind enough to invite us to stay, offering us a very exclusive and upscale RV parking spot on their driveway in Shelby Township, a suburb about 20 miles from the centre of Detroit. The closer we got to the city the faster and more aggressive the driving became. Obviously our earlier observations of courteous American drivers was not applicable to all freeway drivers in cities. We white-knuckled-it, google-mapped-it and arrived in one piece mid afternoon on Saturday. The one thing that we had planned for our visit was for the four of us to go and watch a baseball game the next day, the Detroit Tigers were playing the LA Dodgers. Unbeknown to us however, there was a Detroit annual highlight afoot: The Woodward Dream Cruise. This is a week-long classic car event which culminates in an evening of all-comers street cruising in classic and notable cars and trucks. Folks with cool cars, fast cars, rare cars, old cars, new cars, loud cars, modified cars all come out and cruise the city, based around the long 4 lane Woodward road which divides Detroit into East and West. More than a million people come out to watch, either sitting on the road sides in camping chairs with coolers loaded with food and beer, parked up with their own old classics for others to admire up close, or like us, cruising with Family Thelan in their truck in the most tolerable traffic jam ever, surrounded by automotive eye and ear candy. A real treat and about as Detroit an experience as you can get.

We forgot to take any photos, so here is a stock photo, and a link for the fellow car-aholics.

http://www.detroitnews.com/autos/woodward-dream-cruise

The next day we had another truely Detroit-ian experience. BBQ for brunch at ‘Slows’, another Man Vs Food food joint. Slightly heavier than our usual 11am fayre, but the kilos of meat would see us through the baseball game which started at 1pm.

We had accessorised for our baseball experience with Detroit baseball hats, but on arrival at the ballpark I felt I needed a big orange foam Tiger Claw/Paw. It was a brilliantly sunny day and hotter than Hades. We got a handle on the rules of the game and sat through 5 innings with no score whilst we slowly cooked in the baking heat. We decided to take a break from the sun and decamped to an air-conditioned bar for a drink. This half an hour coincided almost exactly with pretty much all the scores in the game. Typical. But the good news was that the Tigers won and the crowd was happy.  We had a great afternoon, but like cricket, baseball can be a little dull.

We headed home via the sights of Detroit. It is a city that has been on it’s knees, but there is a lot of regeneration and it definitely has a buzz about it again.

That evening we were assimilated into a family birthday gathering. Keta’s family all live nearby and have a Sunday evening meal together 3 out of 4 weeks. This week it was at Todd and Keta’s place and we were celebrating Todd and his brother-in law’s birthdays which were the next day. There was a huge amount of food, and I hadn’t really digested my BBQ brunch yet. Luckily we only had a short distance to roll home and I have come to the conclusion that camping in a fully self contained camper on your hosts’ driveway is a perfect way to be a houseguest.

We headed off the next morning, next stop being the Henry Fort Museum in Dearborn about 30 miles away on the other side of the city. It is not just a car museum, but also a homage to American Innovation in general. It needs more than a day to get around all the different areas and due to the continuing lack of RV parks we booked a night in a Comfort Inn just up the road with a free shuttle to the museum. We abandoned TC and Big Dave in a corner of the carpark with our overnight stuff packed into into reusable shopping bags and headed off in the shuttle to the museum.  It really is epic. A huge collection of all that is American style, commercial and domestic invention and, of course, the history of the automobile industry. Henry Ford built an empire in Dearborn and you don’t just see this here, you feel it.  Monday 21st August was also eclipse day and this area had an 85% eclipse. We were armed with the natty specs, and interrupted our museum tour for half an hour to sit on the lawn and experience the slight twilight, happy to be far away from the madness of the ‘totality zone’.

The next day we did a tour visiting ‘The Rouge’, the original Ford plant that is still well and truely in business. The area that the tour visits assembles the bodywork of the F150 truck. This is the automotive workhorse of the American people and at its height was selling one unit PER SECOND in the USA. It was really interesting to watch the assembly line in action, matching up the right cabs, doors and beds. Poetry in motion and surprisingly quiet and clean.

The 3rd part of the complex that we visited was Greenfield Village. A fake historic village with a collection of relocated historic houses and buildings, a steam railway and a craft area. Not particularly interesting to us after all the previous stuff we had seen, so we left town before the forecast storm hit.

 

 

12th – 19th Aug: Days 126 – 133

Yup. Still in Michigan.

Back, back, back in the midsts of time (April), when we were staying with Dean and Lori in Seattle, kitting out the Tin Can and starting to formulate our route, they expressed an interest in coming and finding us somewhere along the way.  They weren’t fussy when or where, but we agreed it should be a summery spot somewhere that they hadn’t been before.  This was a fairly broad remit on the location front as they are ‘coasters’, have done a lot of flying over the States but not so many touch-downs. We settled on a small town called Saugatuck, on the lower west coast of the lower Michigan peninsula.

 

Reasons for this:

• We were vaguely heading this way.
• Oval Beach, Saugatuck’s beach on the shores of Lake Michigan has been voted in the top 25 beaches in the world by Conde Nast, and the 2nd best freshwater beach in the USA by Nat Geo Traveller.
• It is a very cool, lakeside town full of galleries, eateries, safe cycling and water sportsy things to do.
• It was reasonably easy for Dean and Lori to get to from Seattle (Just a 4 hour flight and a 3 hour train ride…I did say reasonably)
• Sarah McWilliams recommended it. (Good call, McWilly)

Although they are good friends, sharing the Tin Can for a week was not a realistic option, so we splurged and rented a holiday home. A week in a real house which didn’t sway in the wind, with proper sewers, cupboards and showers. Bliss.

We arrived on Saturday, but the Seattle contingent didn’t get in til Monday evening. This gave us a couple of days to ourselves to get the lie of the land, do some shopping for provisions and generally veg out. We deposited the Tin Can onto the driveway, pulled out the slides and ‘Voila!‘, the biggest suitcase known to humanity. We hadn’t specifically requested permission to park the camper on the property and during the week we had an email from our landlord saying that he had been informed of its presence by a neighbour and he wanted to check that it wasn’t drawing too much power if it was plugged in. Reassuringly, small towns and twitching curtains are the same all over the world.

The house was about 100m from the lake and cycling the lakeshore road was an amazing opportunity to oogle some fairly impressive homes. The road cut between the houses on one side and the cliff top lawns with sunset watching spots on the lake side. Most of them had steps leading down to private beaches. Very nice.

We had a great week, cycling into and around Saugatuck, stopping in at galleries, shops and craft breweries. We rode the chain ferry across the river, (this is hand cranked by high school seniors as a holiday job), had a day sitting on the famous beach*, swam in the lake (which was beautifully warm and clear) and walked in the nearby Saugatuck Dunes State Park.

We did this on a windy day and the resulting waves limited the width of the beach quite considerably- occasionally to zero ft and wet up to the knees.

We had an evening out at a diner which had its own bowling alley (I only fell over once-boy, those shoes are slippy) and had a great few evenings at home (We now have serious BBQ envy). We even had a team outing to the laundromat. (The good times roll in all sorts of places). We saw lots of deer wandering through the neighbourhood (one was just chilling out in our front garden one day) and more magical fireflies at dusk.

So after much food, a reasonable amount of gin and tonic, plenty of good cheer and hours of marauding around on bikes like a gang of neighbourhood kids, it was time for our holiday-within-a-holiday to come to an end. We loaded TC up, packed, (by packed, I mean carry armfuls of possessions back into Tin Can.), jammed Dean and Lori and their bags into the back seats, and set off to Grand Rapids to drop them at the airport for their trip back West.

Next stop Detroit.