Northeastern Lament
There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
His daughter named Nan
Ran away with a man,
And, as for the bucket, Nantucket.
Pa followed the pair to Pawtucket
(The man and the girl with the bucket),
And he said to the man,
“You’re welcome to Nan,”
But as for the bucket, Pawtucket.
Then the pair followed Pa to Manhasset
Where he still held the cash as an asset,
And Nan and the man
Stole the money and ran,
And, as for the bucket, Manhasset.
An Unsolicited Testimonial (from an impartial observer)
Dear Bill,
Loved the tour guide from Mass. to Maine. Even being a life-long New Englander, I couldn’t have done it better. I agree about Woodman’s, best clams I’ve ever had. It’s a good thing we don’t live closer or we’d be there more often.
Kathy
And you thought we were making this stuff up! Verification from a dyed-in-the-wool official New Englander. Not to mention, a very nice sister.
Further Recommendations From The Blog Crew
Barbara: Ogunquit, Maine. And York Beach.
Bruce: Lubec, Maine.
Sharon: Stockbridge, Mass.
Alice: (1) Cape Cod. (2) Smuggler’s Notch, Vermont. (3) White Mountains.
Kathy: Boston, especially the historical sites. Also, great restaurants.
Jack: Boston, notably Fenway Park and the great Italian restaurants in the North End.
The ‘Marginal Way’ in Ogunquit is a 1 ¼ mile long winding footpath along the rocky Maine coastline that joins the village to the harbor. Picturesque Perkins Cove is home to a working waterfront where you can find real honest-to-God fishing boats, as well as charters for scenic cruises. Perkins Cove has one of the few remaining draw-footbridges in the country, if draw-footbridges are your kind of thing.
Lubec, which calls itself the “Easternmost town in the USA” likes to emphasize what isn’t there as much as what is. No movie theaters, no stoplights, no madding crowd. This is a back-to-nature heavy locale emphasizing eco-tours, birding, biking, etc. Lubec is having its bicentennial festival this year (not many other places are, right?) from June 21 to July 4 (the big zippity-doo-dah parade is on the 3rd). Be there or be square. Or both.
Stockbridge is located in the hills of the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts. If you go to see the Boston Pops next door in Lenox, you may wind up staying in Stockbridge, which also features the Norman Rockwell Museum and the Berkshire Theater Festival, not to mention their Botanical Gardens. The annual Arts & Crafts Show is August 20 and 21. A word of caution: bring your wallet, Stockbridge is not cheap.
Smuggler’s Notch, in Northern Vermont, is a spectacular pass at the foot of Mount Mansfield, Vermont’s highest peak. And the road through the Notch, Route 108, is one of two designated scenic highways in Vermont, so it must be pretty good because half the roads in Vermont could be designated scenic highways.
And let’s not forget Mount Washington, while we’re at it. This is a great place for all you hikers and mountain-climbers out there (Hello—do we have any hikers and mountain-climbers out there?). It’s a good idea to climb Mount Washington in July or August so you don’t freeze to death during one of the mountain’s notorious sudden weather changes. Lots of people seem to die climbing Mount Washington when the thermometer drops forty degrees in an hour and a horrible storm sweeps in from nowhere. This is sure to spoil your little vacation every time, so watch it.
Las Vegas, Cenegenics and the Grand Canyon
Everybody says they want to go to the Grand Canyon but most of them never do. Why not? It’s easy. You just fly into Las Vegas, rent a car, drive East for about five hours and there it is. You can’t miss it. Our neighbor, Tim, went to the Grand Canyon once and came back and told us it was a “life-changing experience.” Lots of people say this, for some reason. Then they go back to their same old lives. I don’t get it. There’s no doubt, however, that for some people, it really is a life-changing experience. Those are the people who back up too far while having their pictures taken and careen down into the abyss. Siobhan bought a little book which featured the many ways people meet their doom in the Grand Canyon (does this tell you something about Siobhan’s intrinsic makeup?) and falling over cliffs while posing for photographs was the Number One cause of demise. It was way ahead of all the other causes. Siobhan read her book for awhile, chuckling more often than a nice person would, and determined that she would be the primary picture-taker on the trip. “I don’t photograph well in canyons,” she alleged.
First, we went to Las Vegas. You can get anywhere from there, and they have lots of flights from everywhere. And they never run out of rental cars, like Orlando does. On our first trip to Las Vegas we wanted to experience the whole enchilada, so we stayed at Caesar’s Palace. This is a very, very large place, full of casinos, restaurants, bars and even a gigantic shopping mall, full of upscale shops. The mall even had its own sky, which gradually changed, just like the real sky. Wow! When we left our room, we had to leave a trail of bread crumbs to find our way back. We had a package deal at Caesar’s, which provided breakfast. For some reason, we did not know this and a couple of days we ate at other places. When it came time to leave, we had lots of breakfast credits left over. We couldn’t get our money back so we had to take our credit in food. Food doesn’t last so very long so we took our credit in bottled water. Lots and lots of bottled water. We had to wheel it to our car on a dolly. We got into the healthy habit of water drinking. It was a life-changing experience.
Cenegenics
What the hell is Cenegenics, you may ask. Well, it is a semi-medical facility in the ‘burbs of Las Vegas where you can go for an all-inclusive physical (and, to some degree, mental) health evaluation, after which they will evaluate your “actual” age as opposed to your chronological age and advise you how to proceed. The assessment begins with a session with a nutritionist, who provides you with a card on which you write down everything you eat. I knew I wasn’t doing too good on this one when I noticed the nutritionist was checking off an awful lot of things in the same column. Too many carbs, she said. This was about ten years ago in the early years of the Atkins diet, with which I was only vaguely familiar. Cenegenics didn’t advocate the entire Adkins diet, but they frowned on too many carbs. I promised to make the adjustments. Next came an expansive physical, followed by a bone-density test (I was “slightly” better than the requisite), and a battery of assays testing hand-to-eye coordination, quick-response reflexes, etc. After which they told me my “actual age” was ten years younger than my chronological age (60, at the time). I looked disappointed. The doctor, who thought I did great, asked me what was wrong.
“I was hoping for 35,” I said.
The bottom line for Cenegencis is Human Growth Hormone. They wanted me (and, I suspect, everyone else) to take it, regarding it a virtual Fountain of Youth. Or a virtual Fountain of Profit, anyway, since I would be buying it from them. Much as I appreciated their advice on other matters and the quality of their testing, I didn’t want to compromise my chances of ever making the Baseball Hall of Fame, so I demurred. Good thing, too. I noticed in the newspaper a couple of years ago that the founder of Cenegenics had died prematurely of cancer. A life-changing experience if ever there was one.
The Circus Beckons: A Second Chance
Since I had missed an earlier chance in Santa Monica, I couldn’t pass up another opportunity to see the Cirque du Soleil. At the time, they had one show in Las Vegas, Mystere at Treasure Island. Like almost everyone else, we loved it. I say 'almost’ because, during the pre-show, a troublesome costumed elf roamed the audience shocking people by stealing their popcorn and such. Most people were good sports, but a couple of guys got pissed. You know how much popcorn costs in Las Vegas?
Anyway, when I got home I called Steve Solomon and told him I had availed myself of a second opportunity to see the Circus we had so foolishly shunned years ago in California.
“Do they have animals yet?” he asked.
“No, Steve, they still don’t have animals.”
“I just don’t understand it!” he said.
The Big Ditch
Fortified with thousands of gallons of water, we were off to the Grand Canyon. We stopped a short distance out of Las Vegas to see Hoover Dam, which is very impressive, and rolled into Williams, Arizona in the late afternoon. We had decided to stay in Williams, an hour’s drive from the canyon, because it offered more to do at night than staying inside the canyon did. Once it hit 7 p.m. in the canyon, it was DARK and the opportunities were few. Williams was a small town, but there were several hotels, restaurants and shops to meander through. There was also a nightly musical march by The New Ashmolian Marching Society And Students’ Conservatory Band (or somesuch), a motley crew of about eight, which tootled through the streets of Williams beckoning everyone to the nightly gunfight extravaganza, performed by actors who also travelled the daily train ride from the center of town to the Grand Canyon. Who says Culture is Dead?
Another good thing about Williams was the price of motels as compared to those closer to the South Rim. Ours was $69 and overlooked the beautiful McDonald’s across the street where we got our morning coffee. It was light at 5:30 a.m. (July) and we got off to an early start each day. During this time of year, showers were prone to arrive between one and two in the afternoon and we wanted to wrap up the hiking by then. We had been good little students of hiking the Canyon, dutifully reading all our guidebooks about the dangers of too ambitious hiking and insufficient food and water, not that water was likely to be a problem. When we began our descent down the busily-travelled Bright Angel Trail, a park ranger was there to warn us of the pitfalls of overreaching. She helpfully advised us that it cost $2000 to be helicoptered out, though not nearly so much to be muled out. We obeyed our conservative guidebooks and stopped to drink every fifteen minutes and eat a myoplex bar or trail mix every half hour, though this was more often than necessary. The Grand Canyon hikes are opposite of most in that you are descending first, then climbing when you are hotter and more tired. The guidebooks tell you to allow twice as much time to ascend than to descend, but we were in pretty good shape so it didn’t take much longer to climb back out than it did to enter. We eventually descended to a flat area with a red stop sign advising the inexperienced hiker to consider turning around at that point. It took us two hours and fifteen minutes to get there. It took two-and-a-half hours to climb back out.
If any of you have ever walked around San Francisco much, you know how our legs felt after this episode. Our motel room was on the second floor and our shins were so painful we had to skitter along like little old men, holding the handrails for support. The more we walked, however, the better we felt. I mean, we weren’t about to miss that gunfight.
The South Kaibab Trail
The Grand Canyon management doesn’t want you driving all over Hell’s Half-Acre so they provide you with little shuttle-buses to the various trailheads. We took one next day to the South Kaibab trail, which, we were warned, was steeper than the Bright Angel. It was also much prettier, but this fact was lost on Siobhan, who was much more concerned with the fact that it also was somewhat narrower. Remembering the dire fates of hikers lost over the precipice in her scary book, Siobhan hewed to the safer side of the trail, often backing along the high side as if she were on a scanty ledge. Do not be intimidated by this information. The South Kaibab is too good a trail to pass up and not nearly so narrow as Siobhan will recount should you ever mistakenly broach the subject to her. I descended this trail about a mile further than Siobhan, hoping to see some tiny vista of the Colorado below. All for naught. If I ever go back, I would like to get to the river on the bottom, but this would require an overnight stay and that would require actually camping out, never an appetizing prospect for bed-lovers like us. I camped out a bunch at YMCA camp when I was a kid and all I can remember is very hard ground and mosquitoes. And Siobhan is even more reticent than I. They do have a spartan resort down there called Phantom Ranch, where, if you reserved a room a decade ahead, you could stay for $400 a night. And that was ten years ago. Now, they would probably want the Hope Diamond.
I neglected to mention that if you are a sissy or a physically compromised individual (slightly less of a sissy), they have mules that will take you down into the canyon. You descend in a group with a ranger/guide as an escort, stopping at various points of interest while the ranger describes to you the strata, the flora and the fauna, or, perhaps, points to the bony remains of old Mrs. Flipperflopper, who, indeed, had a life-changing experience.
That’s all, folks. Make your travel plans now.
