After a week in Maine, I was itching to make some tracks and put some miles behind. After the night at the drive-in, I struck camp, packed up, and drove down to the Maine Turnpike, heading for the New Hampshire border. I stopped at the way at Kennebunkport, where I'd visited before four years ago, but this time I made sure to get some good photographs of a church I was interested in, for the creative writing project I'm pursuing.
At Portsmouth, New Hampshire, I visited the historic site of Fort Constitution State Park, which is where the actual first battle of the American Revolution may have taken place, in late 1774 (Go New Hampshire!). With the "dark" historical places I've been visiting, I have to intersperse them with the "light" ones that remind me of the kind of courage and honor that people once had, and the true uniqueness of the American Experiment.
Then I attempted to swing around Boston one last farewell time. Unfortunately it was the mid afternoon and I got stuck on stop and go traffic on Route 128 (grrrrr) which I swore would never happen again (should have taken the outer beltway on 495 instead). It took over two hours and sweating in crawling traffic to finally get to Milton, on the south side of Boston, in the early evening, where I took more snapshots of another "dark" historical site for my project.
There was just enough light to let me get to Myles Standish State Forest near Plymouth, where I set up camp for the night. It was a very nice and peaceful night. The forest is huge, and almost a bit of wildnerness for that part of Massachusetts.
The next day by objective for my project was Newport, Rhode Island, where I wanted to photograph the grounds of a boarding school there. On my way, I got waylaid by entertaining vists to the Melville sites in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and then by the Lizzie Borden house tour in Falls River. The later is highly recommended for anyone interested in grissly historical events. It was very entertaining. Falls River is one of those down-and-out cities, where the only industry seems to be law enforcement (and the Lizzie Border tour).
My visit to Newport was successful, and I kicked off the day by a long walking tour of downtown Providence. The capitol is awesome, and the college girl at the Roger Williams Historical site provided me a wonderful impromptu map of the sites in the old section of the city. New England cities are sometimes run down (New Bedford, Falls River, Worcester), but Providence is beautiful and thriving.
In the evening I camped at a Rhode Island state park in the northwest corner of the state. For such a small state, I'd been able to enjoy myself a lot during my time there.
The next day was a big day for me---a trip to New Haven, Connecticut, which was a must-see for my project. On the way, I toured the backroads of Connecticut and saw the grave of the famous patriotic general Israel Putnam.
In New Haven, I parked and spent a couple hours touring the Yale campus. My success was completed by finding a ten dollar bill on the sidewalk as I got back to my car. In the hot afternoon, I headed out of town to camp at a state park near Danville. that night the humidity was so thick that it rained inside my tent from the condensation. Yikes.
The following day would be my last in New England, and it was somewhat of a climax of the recent research I'd been doing. My objective was a cemetery in the town of Greenwich, Connecticut, which I located with a little help from Google Maps. I located the grave I was looking for with the help of the woman at the cemetery office. She had to drag out her big registry book to find it, which I found humorous, since I thought it woudl be a well-known grave. It was not at all conspicuous from the road, which is exactly what I expected, given the person I was looking for.
I stayed long enough to scribble messages on the postcards I already had, and to take a humorous and irreverent picture to send them. Sometime it all just seems like a game, if it weren't so damn serious.
No comments:
Post a Comment