Category — Road Stories

Just a quick update, live from the Main Street Whole Foods Market wi-fi cafe in Providence, Rhode Island.

We DID manage to wake me up in time to check out of the hotel in West Boylston, Massachusetts this morning.  Hurray!

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Adventuring, traveling and writing have all been light lately due to inclement weather conditions.

Last Sunday (September 7), we were on the verge of signing up for a bargain-priced, charming little sublet sit out the rest of September outside Burlington, Maine, close to the Canadian border and far from just about every other reference point on earth.

And then we checked the weather report.

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We limped into Bangor, Maine on Wednesday night after walking ourselves into the ground in Montreal over Labour Day weekend with an overnight stop in Quebec City on the way in for good measure.

It is “raining strings” in Bangor tonight as they say in French (il pleut des cordes); in Japanese this would definitely qualify as “zaa zaa” rain (ame ga zaa zaa furimasu) which I’d translate with great poetic license as “the rain sings like the strings of a zither,” but which really can’t be translated into literal  English at all. Suffice to say it is raining pretty hard.
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We just wrapped up 8 days in Vermont: a week in Brattleboro plus a crazy day shuttling between Montpelier and Burlington. Vermont absolutely stole our hearts.

Here’s how Vermont compares to other places we’ve lived and traveled: [Read more →]

Sometimes I lose days.  Days slip through my fingers like quicksilver and before I know it they are gone.

Today was one of those days.

I slept well, and woke easily. Then Neil came upstairs with the mail….

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After our two-part misadventures at our last stop (see: Knackered in Nashua, and Lathered in Nashua), we have landed happily in a nice(ish) hotel in Brattleboro, Vermont.

That is not to say that the universe has changed. We are still us. You could tell which room was ours, from all the way down the hall.

It’s the only one with that number sign on it.
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After we lost our air conditioning on Saturday night, I felt like it was reasonable to ask the hotel for some kind of discount.

I wasn’t really sure how to ask or what to ask for. I checked in with our friend Jason, who worked in hotels for years and is the consummate hospitality professional; he gave us some great advice that I’ll be sharing in an upcoming post. (Stay tuned!)

And yet, I’m not an especially greedy or material person, and I felt a bit like a weasel for asking for a discount.

And that’s why the hotel did me a great favour in supplying some serious motivation, at the 11th hour, to ask for a discount after all…

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I have spent the week sitting in a hotel room, watching TNT, and feeling absolutely nostalgic.

I’ve had a rough week in Nashua battling the elements, and losing. That means I’ve been too tired to write and too tired to read. I have actually been reduced to watching television.

The challenge is to find something to watch on TV that doesn’t make me feel worse!

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We haven’t seen much of beautiful, historic Nashua, New Hampshire yet, because we’ve been fighting the weather.

After a rough start in Nashua in Friday, we spent a lovely Saturday afternoon walking around downtown, but that’s all we’ve managed to see so far.

By Saturday night the heat was unbearable, and Friday’s unseasonably high temperatures had developed into a full-out heat wave.

Every room in our hotel was booked, because of the Can-Am League baseball game in town, and so was every other hotel in Nashua.

And around 1:00 a.m. Sunday morning we realized the air conditioner had stopped working.

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We are in beautiful Nashua, New Hampshire, in the south east corner of the state, absolutely under siege from the elements.

We took the back roads in from Sturbridge, Massachusetts on Thursday, August 14, and got in late.

How late?

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