Woodstock through New Hampshire to Augusta, Maine

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Odometer: 34802km

I have strange weather chasing me. Minot will be 107F today, so I am glad I went through there last week. Over on this side, there are nasty storms moving in behind me. I just hope I can keep on the leading edge of them until I get to the coast. The real problem for me is the +90F temperatures forecast. With the high humidity, I will beel like the 'mad dogs and Englishmen'. Such temperatures do not invite me to stop when I'm wearing my motorcyclehear, so the tnedancy is to keep the wind blowing by moving. The consequence, I miss learning aobut places where I would normally stop.

I have noticed in Vermont the "please", "thank you", "your are welcome" routine is more common, similar to home. It is a pleasnat change from,
"Thank you."
"Uh huh."

I did stop to see the railway museum and the present day railway junction at White River. I wasn't disappointed.

I was greeted by Barabara. Her job was to tend the place and show people around. She was probably about 65, sociable, and energetic. A perfect host.

"Do you know what Baraba means?"
"No, I don't," I said.
"Well, it means stranger, but it doesn't mean I'm strange," she replied with a twinkle in her eye. "I get along well with people. Everybody says so."

I would say so, as well. She was a treat to talk with. Although Barbar's home is in Conneticut, she live most of the summer in the old baggage room at the station.
"I joined the National Railway Historical Society because I like trains so much. That is how I got this job. Even though I like trains, I really don't know much about them. Maybe I'll learn something from you." And, she said, she did.

They had some old cars and engines around the place, so I went for a walk around them before leaving. When I got back to my bike, I found a pamphlet stuck into my carrier. It had a highlighted section on it titled "Open Letter to the Prime Minister of Canada." I didn't see who put it there, but I guess my Alberta plates attracted attention. In summary, the letter to the Prime Minister was making it clear that the people of Vermont have similar values to us in Canada. "Vermont is not Texas," it said. Fine - now, where is the waste barrel.

I crossed the Conneticut River into a new state for me, New Hampshire.

Here is something for your trivia collection. The New Hampshire license plate logo is "Live Free or Die." Good grief, are those the only options? It sort of makes our "Wildrose Country" Alberta plates seem a bit non-commital. I can live with that.

I stopped in Woodstock, NH to see if there was any similarity to Woodstock, VT. There wasn't. The guy in the coffee shop spoke with a Massachusetts dialect and talked very quickly. I just nodded a lot, because I could hardly understand a word he was saying. And I thought French was going to be my only language problem on this trip.

SAVE ME. I'm trapped in North Conway, NH, with most of the North Eastern people of the USA with me. I came to see the trains and they came for the outlet stores. Almost every retail store in existance has an outlet store here. What a zoo.

I had a look at the trains, caught a picture of one at a station pulled by a GP7, had a Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream (it is NOT gelato), and found a back route out of there. Whew.

By the way, the GP9 and GP7 thing are understood by some of you and don't really need any elaboration. For the rest, they are a type of train engine. Let's leave it at that.

I got off thge main roads and into some back lanes. It could have turned into another one of Jack's shortcut adventures, but I kept asking people where to go and avoided getting lost. The people I asked really strubgled with the fact that I only hada gernal plan and didn't have a specific place I wanted to end up at for the day. I usually had to pull out the map and point in the general direction of my travel. I needed to stop often, because most of the people I talked to couldn't give me much help past the next village but one.

I think today I realized another one of my dreams, albeit a bit virtual. That is to ride a motorcycle through the English lanes and countryside. That looks like winding roads, trees, and farms. I felt almost removed from this American location as I thought of it.

There were some difference: there was hardly any traffic here and there was a significant threat of a brick wall appearing in the middle of the road spelled M-O-O-S-E. Oh, here is a similarity, the folks in New Hampshire seem to of inherited from the UK the ability, or lack of, for making directions on their road signs on their back roads or back lanes as they are called in Britain. There are lots of references to places, but limited signs with the actual highway number. You can go astray following signs to one place when they change the reference to another place before you get to the first one. Junctions are a challenge, and there are a lot of them. Mind you, once you get on a road, about a mile down, they start telling you with regular postings what road you are on. Thank you very bloody much.

New Hampshire seems to have more soccer fields than baseball fields. In fact, these were the first soccer fields I had seen since I left Swift Current, Sask.

I made it to Augusta, Maine, their state capital, and into a motel for the night just as the rain started to fall.

Odometer at the end of the day: 35146km

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Photos

White River Junction
Trains galore

Sort of UK Countryside
Riding a motorcycle in the UK must be something like this, but less traffic here.

Trains at Conway
I have no shots of the outlet stores, because I didn't go.