This is pretty nice. I'm sitting on an antique sofa in the main sitting room of our B&B, Inn on the Lake in Naples, Maine. This is the most expensive nights accomodation on the whole trip and you can see where the money goes. It's an amazing house, four stories tall, years old and beautifully restored and decorated. Jo and I have a huge four poster bed, the little guy is in the ajoined sitting room on the couch and the girls have their own room with two single beds. Anyway we left Boston around 9am on Monday morning and set off on the short 30k journey to Salem. I'm sure you know the story, 1692, a hard winter and young girls driven perhaps by boredom or jealously or maybe even fermented wheat flour induced LSD halicinations.
Despite the tribute to Samantha Stephens/Elizabeth Montgomery, of Bewitched (above), most of the witchery in Salem is a serious business. The Salem witch trials lasted 13 months and left 14 women and 5 men hanged for witchcraft. Today Salem is still a fairly small town only a short drive north of Boston and naturally it relies on it's colourful past to support it's fairly mundane present. The number of witch museums, shows, displays, t-shirts etc, is staggering. Sadly most of these are variations of 'piss-weak world' and really not worth the hard-earned. We went into the Witch Dungeon thinking it was a different show (one we had heard was good) and were pretty disapointed, it was pretty crappy. Luckily later in the day we found the show we were after, where we took part in a pre-trial hearing and could actually question the actors who would impro the answers.
The cast was excellent and Abbie asked a few questions, in the end we acquited the accused, an outcome that surprisingly only happens in about half the performances even in these modern, and apparently enlightened, times. I think the highlight for the kids was 'Samanthas' shop, stacked to the rafters with awesome Halloween costumes, masks, toys and heaps of spooky stuff. We bought the girls new costumes, Jazz is to be a Night Fairy, Abs a witch crossed with Clueless, sort of a junior high wica. I even got something for myself, you'll have to wait for the Halloween pictures to find out what. In all it was a long day and we hit our motel around 6 pretty zonked. Chinese take out was the go and it was pretty good, the rooms were pretty average and the AC didn't work which was not great given that the day was a warm 26 or so and the evening no much cooler. After a fairly rough nights sleep, Jo's sore throat not improving, we packed up the Dodge and shleped across the road to the resturant that provided the continental breakfast included in our room rate (the motel had no food at all). The breakfast ended up being coffee, juice and some donuts and danishes, no toast or cereal for the kids and I was pretty annoyed that this was advertised as a continental breakfast, the motel will get a nasty phone call from me shortly (and perhaps a bad write up on TripAdvisor). Whatever, Salem didn't leave me with good vibes, glad we visited but happier that we were leaving.
From Salem we headed north this morning through a sliver of New Hampshire (not much coastline for NH) and quickly into Maine. 200k's later we were in Naples, our destination for the night, but before that I had a driving tour planned. Stocked up with sandwiches and cherry pies we headed off into the mountains of south western Maine. The fall colours are at their peak and honestly it's an amazing sight. There's nothing like it in Australia, perhaps you get a tiny taste of it in Kallista or Sassafras where there's a few introduced trees but here it's just forests of them as far as the eye can see, all blazing in yellow, orange and fiery reds.
I'd hoped to get us a decent view from atop a ski resort chair lift but they weren't operating them despite us hearing that they were open, maybe only on the weekends... So we drove down the road a little and trespassed onto a lake shore property. There were three weekender-style lake shore houses at the end of a driveway, a nice sandy beach and fantastic long, large lake. I could just imagine how much fun the skating would be in winter, assuming you could move the likely 5 feet of snow of course. We headed north to Grafton Notch State Park and the kids had some fun at a few waterfalls, jumping over the rocks and generally glad to be out of the car. On the way back though the whole family had started to fade, Jo feeling pretty crappy with a possible cold on the way and so the amazing scenery through White Mountain was a little lost on my crew and we didn't stop. I got a bit of video of the road through White Mountain and I hope it comes out okay, of course it wont do it justice, frankly it's one of the most picturesque roads I've ever driven. Dinner was in the local Naples pub, they brew their own beer there and the dark Porter was sensational. Tomorrow it's on to Ellsworth and a more coastal journey as we plan to head further north through Maine before punching back into Canada into New Brunwich and Prince Edward Island by the end of the week.
Andy, out.
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