England and York, both New
- CARAVAN HALEN
- Aug 22, 2019
- 11 min read
Well, well, well. Fancy seeing the likes of you here again. I suppose you’ll be wanting to know what we got up to after Maine. Alright, let’s get on with it, then:
Having eaten more lobster and spotted more puffins that anyone could ask for in Maine, we headed west into New Hampshire and the White Mountains. Observation number one was America’s most aggressive state motto: “Live free or die” (the alternate number plate blurb for the less militantly libertarian is “The Granite State”, which is not especially exciting). Observation number two, linked to number one, is that adults don’t have to wear seatbelts in New Hampshire. In 2019. Really.
The White Mountains is a densely forested area in the middle of the state, so named for the bark on a type of birch that grows in the forests. The area is scenic enough in summer, but is apparently amazing in autumn, and is one of the hotspots for “leaf peepers” on fall foliage holidays.
The mountains themselves are named after presidents, with Mt Washington the highest point, and the tallest in New England. It’s not the most spectacular mountain in summer, partly as it’s surrounded by a bunch of other, nearly-as-tall peaks. But it does boast “the world’s worst weather”, with the fastest ever recorded wind speed (372km/h, fact fans), and a reputation for rapid condition changes that catch hikers out. There's also a wonderful old hotel at its foot, the only one remaining of dozens of grand resorts from when this used to be the holiday spot for wealthy East Coasters, until better transport options opened up other options further afield and most of the old buildings fell into ruin.
We enjoyed a drive along the Kancamagus Highway, which cuts across the bottom of the White Mountains, and stopped for a short hike along the river and some stone-skipping practice. We popped into the Mt Washington Observatory Weather Discovery Centre, where Mo went in a hurricane simulator and kept shooting me with an air cannon, and Kitty enjoyed climbing up and down the steps to the replica observatory.
Having lived free and survived, we kept on going west into Vermont and the Green Mountains region. It’s aptly named, with lots of lush forest, and even the peaks are enveloped in thick greenery, like a room with carpeted walls.
First stop was the Ben & Jerry’s factory in Waterbury. The famous ice cream is tasty, and loaded with puntastic names and an obsession with the Grateful Dead and various also-ran jam bands (naming a flavour after the Dave Matthews’ Band is rather scraping the barrel). My favourite feature was the Flavour Graveyard, featuring mock headstones for every discontinued variety over the nearly 40-year life of the business.
We based ourselves in Burlington, on the edge of Lake Champlain, the largest non-Great-Lake lake in the US, running from Canada down the length of the Vermont/New York border.
The lake is allegedly inhabited by Champ, a Nessie-style lake monster who has been sighted frequently for hundreds for years, and who cryptozoologists believe may be a breeding population of zeuglodons, a long-extinct whale ancestor. We’d been telling Mo about Champ as we drove through Vermont, and when we got to the lake she was extremely disappointed to only see a plaque rather the actual monster.
Vermont is known for its farms and fresh produce, and general vibe of chilled-out bucolic loveliness. We spent a great afternoon at Shelburne Farms, just outside Burlington, a working farm open to the public as an educational centre. As well as bloody great lunches from their own meat and produce, there are tons of things to entertain the kids. Mo milked a cow, brushed a donkey, fed baby goats, and petted rabbits, while Kitty ran off in all directions, cackling.
Vermont is also home to some cracking breweries, including a couple of whose excellent beers, small scale, and bloody-minded refusal to expand at the expense of giving up tight control of where their beer goes and how it gets there has made them legendary. Driving everywhere with small children has meant we haven’t done as much as much beer tourism as we otherwise might, but I was pretty keen to try beers from The Alchemist, and Hill Farmstead.
The Alchemist is most famous for what Beer Advocate rates as the 5th best beer in the world: “Heady Topper”, an unfiltered, unpasteurised IPA that kickstarted the current mania for New England IPAs, but is hoppier and less cloudy than the current fashion. It is only made in small quantities and is notoriously hard to find, with beer geeks blogging about which stores get deliveries on which day, which invariably sell out within hours. Hill Farmstead beers are only available from the brewery, which is properly in the middle of nowhere, and on tap in a few select places. Being a nerd, I’d looked up a few places in Burlington we could have lunch that served them, but lines were long and kids were fractious. After giving up on one with a long waitlist we went to the café next door, which lo and behold had both “Heady Topper” cans and Hill Farmstead on tap. Both were excellent, and you can read more about that later. The food was good too, but beer was the winner on the day.
After a fun few days in Vermont, we left for New York state, driving around the lake through myriad small towns with Champ-themed business logos and statues. First impression: man, New York drivers are terrible, with more instances of dodgy overtaking on day one than we’d had in the rest of the trip.
We stayed for a couple of nights in the Adirondacks, another picturesque woodsy part of the country. Summer here is low season, with winter sports dominating round here: Lake Placid has hosted two Winter Olympics, as well as a hopeless 90s monster movie starring Jennifer Lopez. We had a nice walk around the town of Lake Placid, which is confusingly situated on Mirror Lake, with the actual Lake Placid a few miles away.
We had an afternoon at the nearby Wild Center, with a fun treetop walk, including a giant birds’ nest, and a giant spiderweb which Mo enjoyed. It doesn't feel as high up as the Rotorua version, or the Vancouver Capilano Suspension bridge, but there's more of a focus on fun kids' education than vertiginous thrills. There’s also a small museum/zoo, with a great otter exhibit.
Next stop was the town of Herkimer, best known for its diamonds, which are actually a type of quartz. There are still some small commercial mines, but it’s now mostly turned over to touristy fun. For a small fee you can rent a rock hammer and try your luck at finding a ‘diamond’ of your own. It’s fun for a while, but an hour or so of breaking rocks in the hot sun is about all you need, with sore knuckles and a few puny specimens to show for our troubles.
Our last stop in New York was Rochester, on the shores of Lake Ontario. Our destination was the Strong Museum of Play, an absolutely brilliant children's museum. There’s a replica Sesame Street, the National Toy Hall of Fame, a Berenstains' Bears exhibit, the history of video games with a ton of classic spacies machines, an old school carousel, and best of all, a mini supermarket where kids can push trolleys, run the checkout, or work at the bakery, deli, or café. Most of the museum is a decade or two old, and is looking slightly worn, but is brilliantly designed with a focus on providing as many places as possible for kids to climb, draw, read, dress up, and generally cause chaos. It’s good old school fun: there’s the odd bit of well-deployed technology, but it’s mainly all analogue good times, and the kids love it.
After NY we headed south into Pennsylvania. The geographically-inclined will recognise this isn’t New England or New York, but I’m in the swing of this writing business, OK? It was a shocker of a driving day: a long distance, and biblical thunderstorms which made us pull off the road to wait for the deluge to end a couple of times. Halfway took us through the tough-to-spell town of Punxatawney, the setting for Groundhog Day. Apart from the bit about Bill Murray getting stuck in a timewarp, the film is pretty true to life: there really is a groundhog named Phil, and he lives in a little enclosure next to the library and predicts the weather. I parked the truck and trailer and ran through the rain to say hi: he was asleep in his burrow, which seemingly signified that it would keep hosing down all afternoon.
We had a few nights in a campground about halfway between Pittsburgh and the Laurel Highlands, home of Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece Fallingwater, which architecture critics called “the house of the [20th] century”. Wright’s passion was designing site-specific structures that were at one with their setting, and Fallingwater does this perfectly. His brief was to design a “modest cottage by the river” as a holiday home for the owners of a Pittsburgh department store; what they got was an incredibly beautiful house built literally out of the rockface above a waterfall. The interior is a lovely foreshadow of mid-century-modernism, with schisty walls, wood veneer, and in-built furniture, but the exterior’s interaction with the stream and waterfall is what is genuinely breathtaking. Plus, kids aren’t allowed on the tours, so Bo and I both got an hour of child-free time while the other chased the girls around the cafe and grounds. There’s no photography or devices allowed inside either, which made it all the more blissful.
Pittsburgh itself seems like a pretty cool town, and is probably the hilliest city I’ve ever been to, making Wellington look like Holland. It has the steepest street in America, and more public staircases than any other city in the US. Goodness only knows how you walk or drive up most of the streets when it’s wet or icy. Lots of hills mean lots of nice views, and with more bridges than you can shake a stick at, there's plenty to see.
One of Pittsburgh’s most famous sons is Andy Warhol, and there’s a Warhol museum downtown. It’s not massive, and we’ve seen a couple of travelling Warhol exhibitions, so there wasn’t too much of his 60s-80s work that was new, but there’s some fascinating exhibits of work from his school and college days, and his early career as a commercial artist in New York. There’s also a lot of his film work on display, which would have been interesting on a sans kids trip. Mo actually seemed to quite like the artwork, and definitely was a fan of the “Silver Clouds” room, and even more so the hands-on DIY art room in the basement.
I forgot to write about this in the last edition, but right across northern New England and upper New York state you’re very close to Canada, and noticeably so. Highway signs and state slogans are translated into French, and distances are written in miles and kilometers, and there’s even a few Tim Horton’s about. We couldn’t resist popping into one for old times sake: never fear, their coffee is still objectively terrible.
Kitty’s vocabulary currently consists of “Mama”, “Dada”, and “Momo”, which each get about 1% of the airtime, with the balance split between “No!” and “Now!”. We are eagerly awaiting the addition of a few new words to help us all out.
We expected to spend lots of pleasant evenings sitting in deckchairs outside the van, drinking beer and enjoying pleasant adult conversation after the kids went to sleep at a reasonable hour. It hasn't quite panned out that way, on account of it being too cold / too hot / too mosquitoey to be comfortable outside, or bloody kids not bloody going to sleep, or just generally being knackered by the end of the day. But there have been a few nice evenings like that, and al fresco Disney movie night with Momo is one of my faves.
BEERWATCH: There are some bloody great beers in Vermont. The state is known for birthing the New England IPA style, a simplified version of which became the currently wildly popular ‘hazy’ style; while there are tons of hazies in VT, some the best IPAs we tried were ‘normal’. Caveat: if that sentence was a bit nerdy and boring, you may want to skip to the playground reviews, as it gets nerdier and more boring from here on in.
Bronze goes to Burlington’s Magic Hat Brewery, who have by far the furthest reaching distribution, so we’d tried quite a few of their beers before we got to VT. The best of the bunch is their dad-jokey “Taken For Granite”, a very West Coast style IPA that is a nice counterpoint to the gazillion hazy beers everyone else makes.
Silver goes to one of the hazy horde, but a very good one: Hill Farmstead’s “Edward”. The thing that bugs me about the hazy trend, as well as being generally curmudgeonly about social-media-driven anything, is that some brewers seem to care more about making it look like a milkshake than they do about making it tasty; it’s technically impressive to make a 7% beer than looks like a glass of OJ, and smells hoppy but doesn’t taste it, but the end product is good to Instagram and less so to drink. “Edward” is what I think a NEIPA should be: cloudy as anything, and super aromatic, but it tastes bloody fantastic, with a wonderful hoppy bite piercing the thick mouthfeel. I’ll be honest, I really wanted to like their beer, having tried so hard to find it, but it lived up to the hype.
Gold goes to the other unicorn: “Heady Topper” was super yum, but it has to share the crown with its little brother, the only marginally less hard to find “Focal Banger”, another big flavour bomb of an IPA. They’re both less NEIPA-y than “Edward”, partly because there’s a shouty message on the can strongly recommending you to drink it from the can rather than pouring into a glass (allegedly to not let the aroma escape, which is counter to everything I’ve ever learned about beer presentation), so you tend not to focus on the appearance (I bought a 4-pack of Focal and cheated by pouring one into a glass: it’s a bit cloudy, but only from the lack of filtering, not from adding wheat, oats, or lactose like many other NEIPAs). The overriding impression is the lovely hoppy nose, and the clarity of the sharp and intense hop flavour. Beer styles are not an absolute science, and while both Heady and Focal are usually described as NEIPAs, to me they beers are just outstanding American IPAs that happen to be from New England, and they definitely don’t have any of the excessive style over substance foibles that bug me about the hazy style. The thrill of the chase has undoubtedly helped build their legend, but these are definitely some of the best beers we’ve had on the trip.
MOMO’S PLAYGROUND REVIEWS: There was a lot of woodsiness in this part of the trip, and the two best playgrounds were definitely in this theme: our campsite in the Adirondacks had a great play area with some brilliant hand-made wooden equipment, and gets bonus points for a games room with two skeeball machines. The nearby Wild Center had an even better forest clearing with a load of logs and tree stumps left for kids to make their own fun with: Mo had a lot of fun trying to make a lean-to out of branches.
TUNEWATCH: As anyone who spends a large amount of time in the car with kids will know, as much as you intend to make them devotees of Exile on Main Street before primary school, you end up getting pestered into playing whatever they want. Luckily with Mo we’ve managed to steer her towards kids’ songs and stories that aren’t super annoying. As the trip has gone on she’s gone through a few phases: a whole lot of The Magic Faraway Tree and Brer Rabbit audiobooks, and now we’re in a big Beatrix Potter stories, Disney showtunes, and Anika Moa’s Songs for Bubbas jag. I prefer the stories: the songs are too darn catchy, and I spend all day walking round in public singing “Cecily Parsley” and “I Just Can’t Wait to be King”, which is doing nothing for my tough guy image.
Comments