Ordered thematically rather than chronologically, below are some thoughts and observations during my recent travels with my wife:
Music: Bourbon and Beyond, Louder than Life, and Explosions in the Sky
One thing I missed most while living abroad during Covid was access to live music—at least live music that went beyond local cover bands, so I committed us to a massive dose of it early on in our trip in the form of a few festivals. I learned several things while doing so:
1) Prices in America for events like this are insane—not so much the entry tickets themselves (which are high but reasonably so given the number of bands you get to see at these festivals), but rather food, drink, and hotel stays. Even budget hotels cease to be too budget-friendly if a major event is going on.
2) People can and will wear almost anything at a music festival; the people watching was almost as fun as the concerts themselves. A few examples of the attire (or lack thereof) included women with varied exposed body parts, a crowd-surfer in a full unicorn costume, multiple cape-wearing individuals, a man wearing an electronic sign on his head with a ticker running across it that said “Fuck Limp Bizkit,” and all sorts of varyingly comical and vulgar slogans such as a hat that read “Mama tried” and a whole fundraising line of merchandise proclaiming “Fuck cancer.”
3) Live music all day is still really fun in my mid-30’s.
4) I get tired much more easily than in my mid-20’s.
5) Folksy bands often have the best performances; in this case I’m thinking of Old Crow Medicine Show and Flogging Molly. Each was filled with so much liveliness and crowd interaction, and you could just tell they loved doing what they were doing.
6) Most people, even metal-heads in mosh pits wearing death-themed attire, are actually pretty nice and easy to get along with individually.
I also already knew that several bands were good, and they lived up to that perception. These included amongst others Green Day, Foo Fighters, Tool, AWOL Nation, The Black Keys, and Explosions in the Sky, the latter of which we saw individually outside of the festivals.
Friends and Reunions
We had the good fortune to be able to spend time with Mandy’s college friends in Murray, KY from when she studied abroad as well as some of my college friends living up in Boston and Salem. It was so nice in that time to…
A) be able to still connect on the same level with everyone even after much time had passed;
B) meet the friends of my spouse and be welcomed like family. I felt right at home in my first visit to Murray, KY so much so that I started to think small town life might even be for me despite having lived in big cities for the last 10 years. The people are super friendly, with many of them actually being friends and many more behaving that way even when meeting someone for the first time. Prices are cheaper than elsewhere. Ethnic food is present to a surprising degree and quality. When I was told I could make myself at home, I actually believed it and felt comfortable doing so. And I went to a high school soccer game that was much more exciting and contentious than many pro games I’ve watched;
C) and see old friends thriving in new ways. My Boston pal, for instance, is fully and embracing his nerdy side which I knew about and cultivating a more artistic side that I didn’t know existed. My Salem friend and former roommate is now raising a family while still pursuing work that’s in line with her humanitarian ideals.
In short, it feels both good and worthwhile for the soul to make an effort to maintain connections from the past as well as to form new ones for the future. As an old friend that I have sadly fallen out of touch with once told me, “There is no such thing as having too many positive relationships.”
Nature
We’ve spent much more time in nature than we usually do, and in the following places/ways:
1) Niagara Falls is both a waterfall and the city it’s adjacent to, and it’s worth the visit for a day or two. The falls are powerful as well as beautiful, and it’s a lot of fun to stand at the front of a boat being surrounded, blasted, drenched. Everyone told me beforehand to go to the Canada side, and they were right. You can take a boat from either side, but the view is much better from Canada. There are multiple hotels that have rooms with a view of the falls, including ours which was called Four Points by Sheraton, and the rate there was quite reasonable compared to other things we’ve seen. We paid about the same for a large falls-view room there as we did for an attic with a shared bathroom in Boston or a budget room in Louisville. The town is very much a tourist town, so lots of entertainment and restaurant options. Those can be quite pricy, but our hotel did give us a whole bunch of discount vouchers when we checked in. Not sure if that’s common practice or if it’s because we went during a slow season.
2) We went whale-watching out of the Boston harbor, and it was a lot like watching baseball: mostly nothing happens, but it’s very exciting when something does. We saw two humpback whales, which is fewer than desired, but the company did offer us vouchers to come back again for free. I think as long as you like being on boats, it’s a pleasant experience even if you don’t see many whales. However, if you’re prone to seasickness or you’re not sure if you are, be wary: there was a lot of vomiting on our journey.
3) Camping was a new experience for us both. We’d each done it a little, but always with someone more experienced, so really this was our first time taking full responsibility for finding the campsites, bringing the right supplies, setting up the tent, building the fire, etc. There were some setbacks; we didn’t for example, bring a lid for our cookware and so we didn’t know how to make food on a fire without getting ash in the food. As a result, we mostly ate food requiring little preparation, and we occasionally went to restaurants. Mandy also didn’t realize how loop roads worked, so when I wasn’t with her, she took an excessively long time to walk out of our campsite by walking around ALL of the other campsites instead of straight to the main road. Otherwise, the experience was great. In particular, it’s amazing how long you can just sit around watching a fire and be completely content.
4) Acadia National Park was beautiful; we went at the beginning of leaf-peeping season, so the red and yellow leaves were starting to emerge from the green. The whole park is on an island also, so you get this great combination of landscapes: seaside, mountain, forest, and even some marshland. I was surprised at how spread out the park is also with pockets of parkland interspersed with pockets of civilization. The main in-park campground is called Blackwoods, but it was fully booked up, so we stayed at the Seawall campground and had to drive over to where most of the hiking was. There’s a quaint town called Bar Harbor between the two that’s worth a visit; I imagine people not inclined to camp might just stay at an inn there also.
5) White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire was our last major nature stop; here we went on a 7-hour hike up and down Mount Washington, which is notorious for its fast-changing weather. Sure enough, by the time we were reaching the summit, a thick fog had descended, and during our descent, we got hit by some increasingly steady rainfall. It was a fairly challenging climb, in a mostly fun and occasionally scary way—scary because of the weather and fun because it actually involved climbing, which is to say rather than walking up a series of switchbacks you actually have to scramble over and pull yourself up rocks of all sizes and shapes.
Food
We often just cooked for ourselves or munched on fruits and nuts, but when we did go out, we had some good stuff. In particular I want to give a shout-out to the state of Maine, where I went 3 for 3 on delicious food. The best by far was a full lobster dinner acquired behind a gas station near Acadia at a little place called Island Take Out. It included the entire animal cooked to perfection alongside a bunch of potatoes, sausage, and corn—and all of it in a kind of jerk-butter sauce, with extra sauce on the side. Also good were some lobster tacos at a place called Testa in Bar Harbor and giant sandwiches at Big G’s Deli in Winslow, which we stopped at on our way between Acadia National Park and White Mountain Forest.
Accommodation
I’ve talked about this a little already, but I want to mention some of the more unique places we stayed that weren’t quite hotels or hostels or traditional campsites. The USA doesn’t really seem to do hostels the way many other countries do; however, there are several hostel-like options we are discovering. One, which we did in Boston and Hartford, occurs when someone takes a normal house and then divides it up into separate rooms with shared bathrooms and/or kitchen spaces and then calls it an inn. These are a decent way to save some money, but they’re a gamble that really depends on the neighbors you get. Our Hartford neighbors were great… Boston not so much. Another option good for novice campers like us occurs when farm-owners lease out their land for camping purposes. It’s not free, but it’s much cheaper than a hotel and you can have some amenities like a shower or potable drinking water that you won’t get with a more on-the-trail sort of camp.
Discoveries
We aren’t always the greatest planners, preferring as often as not to live in the moment, and sometimes as a result we discover some cool and unexpected experiences:
1) While on the road through Vermont, a rest stop advertised a place called Artisans Park in Windsor. We went there and had two cool experiences. One was a jam shop where you are encouraged to sample pretty much everything. They had a variety of unique jams that ranged from traditional berry flavors to more unique options like ginger, French onion, and jalapeño. The other experience was “the path of life,” a sort of thematic sculpture garden that included a hedge maze representing the navigation of one’s adolescent adventures and a labyrinth representing a quest for enlightenment in one’s later years.
2) In Hartford, CT, the Parkville Market which we happened to be staying near offers a series of food vendors offering food from a range of cultures. They were having an Octoberfest celebration on the weekend of our stay, and as a result we ended up taking part in a stein-hoisting competition where you had to hold a full one-liter beer stein straight out in front of you for as long as you could. Mandy made it about a minute, out-lasting a couple of the other women, and I made it about three and half minutes, putting me in the middle of the pack amongst the men.
3) I’ve been surprised about just how many Spanish speakers we have come across all over the place, having visited several businesses such as grocery stores where the entire staff seems to be communicating primarily in Spanish. It is refreshing to be reminded of how diverse a place America is.
4) We did plan to go to Salem, MA, but it was still fun to discover while there just how much they have leaned into the part of their identity associated with the notorious witch trials of 1692. For the entire month of October, we learned, the city becomes a massive tourist destination with all sorts of witch-related museums, haunted houses, and crafts markets. We aren’t super into the occult ourselves, so we were also pleased to be able to take a break from all of that at a pretty solid museum there called the Peabody-Essex Museum or P.E.M. for short.
If you’ve read this far, I’m glad you are interested. I’ll stop there for now, but you can expect further posts every few weeks to a month. The next leg will take us through the cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh where I’ll be visiting old friends, going to some shows, and getting nostalgic about my college experiences.
