Harry N. MacLean's Blog, page 8

Martha’s Vineyard

We took a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard yesterday. We biked around the island in hopes of spotting Meg Ryan, DanAcyrod, David Letterman or some other famous dog. No luck. The guy at the information booth showed us on themap where John Belushi is buried, but noted that the cemetery was a long way away and there were no markers tohis grave. As for Chappaquiddick, that too was along way away, and you needed a four-wheel drive to get there.The bridge had been rebuilt with walls that weren’t there wh...

Warm weather bound

We’ve settled into Cape Cod for a couple of weeks. We found a cottage close to the beach in what they call mid-Cape, in the town of Barnstable. In the morning, Julya walks the beach looking for shells while I write. In the afternoon, we set out for an adventure, which could be a drive to Provincetown or Chappaquiddick. The prices have dropped dramatically, and there are very few people in town. The weather is variable, ranging from high seventies to low sixties. Most places close after Columb...

Trapp Family Lodge

Our last day in Vermont was warm and sunny. The autumn colors of the maples and birches were in full bloom. The town of Stowe was crowded with “leaf peepers” from New York and Massachusetts.

We spent the day at the Trapp Family Lodge and working farm outside Stowe, learning the history of the family, talking to a family member and hiking the trails. The facts left out of or turned around in the movie, “The Sound of Music,” are compelling. The father of Agatha Whitehead, the Captain’s first wif...

RA2 meet the Queen

Yesterday we took Raggedy Ann and Andy, aka RA2, to the British Invasion in Stowe, Vermont, the small town at the base of Mount Mansfield. The show was a collection of over 200 cars of British origin, from MGs, to Triumphs and Bentleys and Morgans and Rolls Royces and Alpines and a few types I’d never heard of. The Queen was in town and she awarded trophies to winners of the various categories. She was more than delighted to meet Ann and Andy and to pose with them. In the photo, you’ll notice...

Nine Weeks Out

We’ve been on the road now for nine weeks, and I thought I’d set down a few non-profound reflections on the journey so far. Of the nine weeks, we’ve been at the water for seven of them: On the Maine Coast in Harpswell, Southwest Harbor and Lubec (the most eastern part of the U.S.); on the Moosehead River in Greenville, Maine; and currently at Rood Pond in Brookfield, Vermont, where we will be for another week. Nothing against Colorado, but the ocean beats out the mountains for relaxation and...

Paying to Pee

The kids are generally pretty good about bathroom protocol on the road. They’ll both go with one of us in the opposite gender’s bathroom if necessary. It never occurred to them, however, that they couldn’t pee for free. Old Orchard Beach, where we are staying now, has several pay bathroom stations around the center of town and no free ones. Costs are 50 cents per event. Ann, along with the rest of us, thought this was a good deal less than courteous toward visitors and kind of greedy. However...

Updating the blog in real time

As many of you might have guessed, I have fallen way behind in blogging our year on the road. We have been in Maine for almost six weeks, and on the blog we have yet to leave Nebraska. Lots of interesting things happened in that time, and rather than try to compress them into a few short blogs, I’ve decided to begin blogging in real time and pick up on those as we go along.

We are in Old Orchard Beach at the moment, a town along the southern coast of Maine with a 7-mile beach that is completel...

Freedom a Burden?

With a few exceptions, we don’t know where we’re going on this trip. Occasionally, itseems like we’re trying to disprove the line “Freedom is just another word for nothing leftto lose.” Often, we wake up in the morning, and say where shall we go today? Right orleft? South or north? Ocean or mountains? It’s both a liberating and unsettling feeling. Noagenda? No goal? No place to be tonight? Really. You must belong somewhere. Wecould get in the car and sit in the Target parking lot and it would...

Purpose of our trip

So, what is the purpose of our trip? Where are we going? We left Denver without answers to these questions. All we knew for sure was that it was time to get out of town, and not just for a week or two, but for at least a year. Simply put, life had come to seem stale, and often repetitive: same restaurants, same movie theaters; same friends; same thoughts in our heads. And one fact was inescapable: time was running out.

Late life crisis? You could put it that way. I can only speak for myself, o...

Pine Creek – Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Long Pine sits on the northern edge of the Sand Hills, where they flatten out. Next to it is “Hidden Paradise,” a resort in a small canyon cut by Pine Creek, which flows up from an underground pool. Early in the last century, families from Omaha traveled here by train to seek respite from the damp heat of the Nebraska summers. My family had a cabin here when the kids were growing up. For well over a hundred years kids have ridden inner tubes down the twisting creek, whose icy water is so pure...