New England Part 1

Hi, I’m Troy McClure. You may remember me from such travel blogs as “Mid-Atlanticism”, and “Everything’s Bigger in Texas, including Car Trouble”. Here’s my latest opus, featuring puffins, sasquatch poo, excessively wordy TV shows, secret societies, and so much lobster:

• We left you, dear reader, at the Delaware Water Gap, and from there we headed into Connecticut for a few days. It’s not one of the most well-known destinations in the states, and it’s capital, Hartford, home of many insurance companies, is known as the “filing cabinet of America”, which is not a winning tourism slogan in anyone’s book. But we had a nice time.

Sorry Mr Taft, you'll have to take the service elevator

• New Haven, CT, is home to the famous Ivy League university Yale. We enjoyed a wander around the lovely campus, including Hogwarts-y secret passageways and the Skull and Bones secret society, members of which include both George Bushes, and historic presidential chubster William Taft.

Bear with me

• New Haven also boasts the Peabody Museum, one of the nicest small museums I’ve ever been to. It’s famous for its dinosaur bones, but also includes some wonderful animal dioramas, and awesomely Wes Anderson-esque displays of stuffed birds. The museum closes in a few months for a major renovation: I really hope they don’t replace the fantastic old-school appeal of these impeccably curated displays with crass selfie stations and dumbed-down interactivity.

This way to Luke's Diner

• We also spent a bit of time driving around western CT, through the small towns that inspired the Gilmore Girls. Bo is a huge fan of the show, and I’m partial to a bit of its wonderfully overwritten dialogue too. The show’s creator Amy Sherman-Palladino started writing the series after staying in Washington, CT, and based the whimsical, postcard-perfect town of Stars Hollow on her time there, and locations in nearby Kent and New Milford. The architecture round here is true to the quaint promise of the show: most houses are weatherboards in autumnal colours with white trim, and every second one has flowers in a windowbox and an American flag on the porch. The Stars Hollow in the show is in a studio lot in LA, and the real towns were a bit of a disappointment for our resident superfan: they were cute enough, but real life kept getting in the way. Stars Hollow is centred around the village green and its gazebo: its inspiration in Kent was obscured by ezi-ups from a recent event, and full of local ne'er-do-wells enjoying a smoke.

• We headed towards Massachusetts, via a brief stop in Rhode Island for donuts and coffee. Don’t hate us, RI: it’s a big country, and even with six months you can’t do every state justice.

On Sunday he ate through one nice green leaf and felt much better

• Amherst, MA is home to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. Anyone who has been around kids recently will know Carle from The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, and a bunch of other fun children's books. The museum is a load of fun for the little ones, but gives an interesting insight for adults into Carle's writing process, and distinctive collage style.

• Half an hour or so down the road is Springfield, MA, home to another literary luminary: Theodore Giesel, better known as Dr. Seuss. The Dr. Seuss Museum and Sculpture Garden is a whole lot of fun for anyone who's ever enjoyed a Dr. Seuss book, and a great example of how to do a 'modern' museum that combines loads of interactive stuff and photo opps, as well as some more educational stuff. Mo and Kitty absolutely loved it.

Vincent Van Mo

• The same complex also hosts a couple of other museums on the same entry ticket. The Springfield Art Museum was hosting the awesome "Van Gogh for All" exhibition, which uses fun technology to let you literally get inside the paintings, and is another good example of a 'modern' museum that blah blah yes we get it Dave. There's also a Natural History Museum with some decent but not amazing exhibits, and a temporary Thomas the Tank Engine playroom that Mo had to be forcibly removed from. We also took in a gig by the Toejam Puppet Band, who specialised in silly voices and fart jokes, and where after much deliberation Mo made her on-stage debut to do some hula-hooping.

Led Zeppelin II side 2 track 4

• Ever since reading Moby Dick a few years ago I’ve fascinated by whaling. So I was pretty excited to go to New Bedford, MA, at one stage the busiest whaling port in the US, and where Herman Melville himself set off for the couple of years ashore that inspired the book. The main draw was the whaling museum, which was actually a bit of a bust: they have some great exhibits like a half-scale version of a whaling ship, several whale skeletons, and some amazing scrimshaw (crafts made from whale teeth and bones) but it’s hopelessly arranged, and has next to no attempt to document the history of whaling. Much more interesting was next door in the Seamen’s Bethel, the non-denominational church that whalers visited before embarking on multi-year voyages at sea. You can sit in the pew where Melville sat prior to his voyage, and the epitaphs around the church illustrate what a brutal career it was, with grisly demises including “bitten by shark”, and (spoiler alert) “pulled overboard and drowned after attaching oneself to large whale”. Plus it boasts a frankly awesome ship’s prow for an altar, only installed after complaints from visitors who expected one after seeing one in the 1950s Moby Dick movie.

• The cartographically-astute amongst you may have noticed that we’ve gone close to, but not visited two of America’s most iconic cities: New York and Boston. Bo and I have been to both of them before (and I worked in Boston for a few months a million years ago), and with kids and a large trailer we’re generally avoiding big cities, so they didn’t make the cut in the final itinerary. We felt a good amount of FOMO though as we got closer to them, but decided not to do major surgery to the itinerary.

Mo is unconvinced by the thrift store bargain swim goggles we found

• We spent a couple of days in New Hampshire on our way up from Massachusetts, and we’ll be back through the northern part of the state again in a week or so. This time we stuck to the coast and went to the Odiorne Point State Park near Portsmouth to visit the Seacoast Science Centre, a fun aquarium for kids with touch pools, tanks with local species, and a miniature fishing boat playhouse that Kitty was very fond of.

• The lower part of New England (CT, RI, MA) felt closer to the Mid-Atlantic in terms of friendliness, ie not especially. Everyone was in a bit of a rush, and faces looked hard and mean. As soon as we got to Maine it felt very different: everything was a lot more laid-back, and people smiled and said hello in the street. There’s a similar vibe to the South, and I had an interesting discussion with a shopkeeper in Portland who’d lived in Louisiana about the shared ancestry, with the Frenchy Acadians from this part of the world heading south to become the Cajuns down there.

• I clearly have an affinity for places called Portland. Dumb anti-vaxxers scuppered our trip to the hipster mecca in Oregon, but Portland, ME seems equally, completely differently, great.

Whoopee pies are awesome

• We found the best bakery of the trip so far in Portland: average coffee, but who cares when you can get a whoopee pie (a regional delicacy that is roughly a craft Mallowpuff) and a slice of oozy blueberry pie, plus a freebie chocolate chip cookie from the baker who liked the fact that Momo was wearing her pioneer woman’s bonnet, as one does.

• Maine is known for its lighthouses, and the Portland Head Light is one of the most iconic. Even for a complete landlubber, there's something very soothing about a nice lighthouse: it makes you feel strangely safe and sound.

Yay! Newzuld!

• Being so nice must bring out the quirks in people, as Maine seems to have more than its fair share of weird roadside America. The nearby town of Freeport is home to mapping software company Garmin, and their HQ hosts the world’s largest globe in their lobby, which is a guaranteed child-pleaser.

• Portland is also home to the world’s only museum of cryptozoology (the study of “hidden animals” eg sasquatch, yeti, Nessie etc). It’s light on scientific credibility, but is fun to wander though if you’re into this kind of thing, which I most certainly am. David Farrier used to have a show on bFM about crytpids, and I find it somewhat comforting to believe that there’s still some crazy stuff out there that we haven’t yet catalogued and exploited towards extinction. Plus they have a display case full of “cryptoscatology”: specimens of poo from various mythical beasts, and who doesn’t want to see that?

Kitty camera-shy again

• From Portland we headed to what Mainers call “Downeast”, the coastline that leads towards Canada, with Acadia National Park at its heart. Acadia is a lovely part of the country, with nice woods, beaches, and mountains, and unsurprisingly a whole lot of other people wanted to visit it at the same time as we did. It felt a bit like Yosemite, with traffic and hordes of people at every popular attraction, but it was a good time nonetheless.

• There are some cracking accents in this part of the country. Massachusetts has the oft-parodied hard vowels (“got in a caaaahr, went to a baaahr”), and New Hampshire a softer, rural spin on that.

Lobster, clams, and shrimp about to get scoffed

• Maine is famous for lobster, and we’ve had a couple of bloody good meals at the many rustic “lobster pounds” that are dotted along the coast. US$22 is about the going rate for a lobster dinner – a whole lobster boiled to order, with slaw, fries, and butter for dipping, or a few dollars less gets you a roll filled with lobster meat. It’s a messy and delicious business, and it pays not to think about how they get cooked. We also had amazing fried clams, another less-heralded local specialty which almost pipped the lobster for first place in yum.

• Maine’s most famous son is Stephen King, who lives in Bangor, close to Acadia NP. As a card-carrying fanboy I was kinda tempted to visit his house, even though you can’t do anything except admire the awesome spiderweb gates. We didn’t, but look how cool these are.

Huffin and puffin

• We had a great day in the super-cute town of Boothbay Harbor, and enjoyed a cruise out into the bay in search of puffins. We saw plenty of the charming little birds on their breeding ground of Eastern Egg Island, flapping madly to lift their chubby bodies and colourful beaks above the water. We also spied a load of guillemots, terns, eiderducks and various gulls, plus a harbour seal and a sunfish.

• Most of the motorways from Virginia north seem to have a toll of some sort, which is somewhat of a pain in the arse. In Pennsylvania and Jersey the tolls were quite pricey – our worst day of driving cost us US$39 in tolls – but in New England it’s a buck or two a pop. In hindsight we should have tried to get an EZ-Pass, as stopping at toll plazas to pay a dollar several times a day is getting annoying. But the toll attendants in Maine are charmingly cheery, which makes fumbling for change less of a drag.

• Overall, Maine has been one of our fave states so far. At the end of the trip we’ll have a hotly contested podium ceremony, but rest assured that you’re in the running, ME. Nice work!

BEERWATCH: There’s a lot of beer stuff to write about this round, so we’re introducing a new award for 4th, sponsored by the NZ Olympic team.

It’s odd how reverentially American breweries treat most European beer styles, given that modern American craft brewing resulted from taking rather indecent liberties with the British pale ale and IPA nearly 40 years ago. There are tons of slavishly correct witbiers, hefes, bocks, saisons, golden ales, dubbels and tripels, that would probably be a bit more interesting if they were bastardised a little. Most breweries’ treatment of the pilsener is caught between the two stools: almost everyone uses the proper German and Czech hops, but they can’t resist turning the hopping up a little.

I had heard good things about Connecticut’s Two Roads Brewing, and their beers were decent but not life-changing. They can have 4th for their "Ol’Factory" pilsener, which is a good an example of the US craft pilsener style described above.

Bronze goes to Baxter Brewing and their rather scrummy "Dolce Mio", an imperial brown ale with cannoli, chocolate, vanilla, and lemon. While that sounds like a pastry stout nightmare, it’s actually just a very moreish and boozy brown ale, a style that I really like but is rarely spotted in NZ: The Fermentist do a very good one (plug), but like the equally tasty red ale, it would be good to see more of them at home to bridge the gap between hoppy pale ales and porters and stouts. They also get bonus points for a lovely orange and brown can design.

Silver goes to Portland, MA’s Bissell Brothers’ "The Substance" IPA: I’ve complained previously about not needing every IPA to be hazy and juicy, but when in Rome etc etc. This New England IPA was one of the best I’ve had, and tasted particularly good on tap at the little outdoor food truck festival where we tried it. They also have a very nice logo, which matters a lot to me.

• Gold goes to Portland’s Allagash Brewing, who couldn’t be more in love with Belgium if they wore a Tintin t-shirt, only ate mussels and fries, and kept failing to win football tournaments despite having the best players. We visited their brewery, and they have a lot of great beer, including some tasty-sounding but caravan-budget-prohibitive barrel-aged sours (US$16 for a 375ml bottle is a bit steep for this beer nerd). They are best known for their "White", a very good Belgian wit, and "Black" (they don’t bother so much with fancy names), a Belgian-style stout which is rich, funky, and boozy, but the medal goes to the posh beer of theirs that I did splash out on. "Curieux", a bourbon-barrel aged version of their Tripel, is an exercise in subtlety for a >10% beer, with hints of vanilla, oak, bourbon, and a little bit of sourness, and is the kind of grown-up beer that easily trumps any wine in a sophistication contest.

Fisherbaby

• MOMO’S PLAYGROUND REVIEWS: Mo and Kitty have both voted for the Seacoast aquarium’s fishing boat play station, and the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s similar whaling ship playground, which let you trim sails, and hoist a barrel of whale oil via a pulley.