Summer 2016, Part 3: New England

On Tuesday, August 23, I woke up to an emergency text from Lenzie at about noon. When I called her, she was in an Adderall-induced hysteria, talking 100mph about leaving Maine and driving to Canada and something about Boston. What I finally deciphered from all of it was that she was leaving Maine, where she’d spent the summer, and wanted me to fly to Boston and drive around New England with her on her way back to North Carolina. As the other half of the awe-inspiring East Coast Road Trip Queens, I of course had to agree. I asked off work the entire next week and Lenzie got down to planning specifics.

Fast forward to August 28: I’m all packed in one bookbag and one small knapsack for 9 days of travel (including two themed outfits, two pairs of boots and tennis shoes) and I’m leaving work and heading to a friend’s house in Raleigh. The plan was to spend the night there and uber to the airport in the morning for my 6am flight. That plan was altered a little when literally all of our friends from out of town announced their arrival in town that night. With more of our friend group together than basically ever before, there was no way I couldn’t go out.

Fast forward again to the next morning: I’m sitting at a bar in the DC airport with a $15 magazine and a $30 breakfast. As I finished the most disgusting mimosa I had ever put in my mouth, I tried to remember the night before and, you know, not only getting to RDU but also getting through security and boarding my plane. No recollection. So I ordered another mimosa.

As soon as I boarded my flight to Boston, my phone died, leaving me music-less for the entire flight, which seemed to last about six hours. I tried to focus on the article about Selena Gomez in the issue of Vogue I had just paid $15 for, but it was like I couldn’t read. I was too distracted by the child sitting behind me saying, over and over again for the entire six hour flight, “Mass-a-CHOO-setts! Mass-a-CHOO-setts!” And I was probably about to black out again. It was extremely difficult to sleep on this flight, mostly because of the aforementioned spawn of Satan, but also because of the giant hat I was wearing*.

*Did I not mention what I was wearing? When I was planning my departure the day before, I made sure to put into my things a nice, comfortable, conservative outfit to put on in the early hours of the morning and wear to the airport. My best guess is that I probably woke up 20 minutes after we were supposed to  leave for the airport and I just ran out the door in what I slept in, which was, coincidentally, what I had worn out the night before. And my wide-brimmed black hat that I just HAD to bring along, but simply couldn’t crush into my bags. I can only imagine the looks as I walked through security at RDU at 5am in a t-shirt falling sloppily off my shoulder with a picture of Britney Spears and the words “You want a piece of me?” in giant red glittery letters on it, 3-inch inseam cutoff denim shorts, combat boots and the hat. 

Anyway, I did my best to sleep through that flight, but it didn’t happen. When I got off the plane, I was searching desperately for a place to plug in my phone so I could contact Lenzie so that we could meet. I got my phone to turn back on and, not surprisingly, it was at 27% battery. Thanks, Apple. When I finally found Lenzie, she hugged me and lovingly said, after not seeing me for months, “you smell like alcohol!”

I also had one contact lens in

In the week before leaving for this trip, I had been asking my sister-in-law, who is from Boston, what we just HAD to do in the day that we would be spending there. True to form for her, she gave us a great list of restaurants, bars, historical sites, bars, malls, bars and other places to drink. I was excited to see Boston after hearing how much people loved it.

We spent 45 minutes in Boston. The cheapest parking place we could find was $21/hr, so we decided to expedite the site-seeing. We got out of the car, followed a few signs that pointed out historical places on some non-historical looking streets, then ended up at a body of water that we decided was the Boston Harbor. Was it? We’ll never know and I don’t really care to know. Boston will live on forever in my memory as a blurry mess of a city with expensive parking and a shopping mall on every historical site.

Our next stop was Harvard, where I wanted to stomp my last-season Rack Room shoes at every person I saw standing at a water fountain. I was still very drunk at this point so I was no help navigating, which is not much of a change from sober me. After a lot of searching and seeing a lot of very modern buildings, we finally found Harvard Law. Like, it was hard. Still in the same outfit I boarded two planes in just hours before, I got a lot of judgmental looks, but I just shook them off. I already have a degree from an elite school and I didn’t even have to stay awake during class to get it. So suck on that, you frigid bitches!

Unfortunately there was not enough time to change into my Playboy bunny costume; we had made the pilgrimage to the mecca of Elle Woods and we had to make our way to pay our respects to the original All-American bad bitches: our witchy ancestors who lived and died in Salem, MA.

As we drove into Salem city limits, we changed our music from Nicki Minaj to Fleetwood Mac and started to get in the mood. The mood was hindered a little by the fact that it was a beautiful sunny day and not a gloomy foggy one, but everything else seemed promising. Once we got past the urban outskirts of the town and started seeing signs for the witch museum and several cemeteries, we found a parking spot (approximately $21 cheaper per hour than in Boston) and got ready to head out. I was still a little bit drunk – almost enough to forget change into my first themed outfit of the trip. After a lot of fidgeting in the front seat of Lenzie’s car, we emerged looking slightly ridiculous but wholly our real selves: Lenzie in a black lace shawl with plenty of fringe and me in a black mesh shirt, black skinny jeans with holes in the knees; both of us in thick black eyeliner and wide-brimmed black hats. I was just drunk enough to convince myself to put on black suede ankle boots with a four-inch heel; I knew we would be walking around for at least six hours, but in that state of mind, the #look was worth it.

The first site we found was a cemetery where the headstones were dated in the 16^th century, yet perfectly preserved. It looked like the front yard of that one neighbor you have growing up in the suburbs that overdoes it on Halloween. We ran into a man coming out of a nearby building that housed a tour company and asked if he had any information about the cemetery, or at least the name so we could google it. He told us it was the oldest cemetery in the country and that at least one judge from the witch trials was buried there. We spent a while in that cemetery, inspecting the dates and names on the headstones and trying to relate them back to our limited memory of reading The Crucible in high school. We spent most of that day walking around the town, dipping in and out of little stores: some more gimmicky than others, but all witch-focused – and feeling our looks. Early into our walk, I moved on from drunk to full-on hungover.  I finally got a break from the headache when we found the witch museum. I got a bottle of water and fell asleep as soon as the theater portion of the show commenced. I do hate I missed out on what turned out to be the only reliable witch information we learned that day, but this was one exhausted witch. After the witch museum, we ventured in a few more shops, then made our way to the “ghost tour” we had booked for the evening. Lenzie and I had seen some amazing ghost tours that summer and we were sure there was no way we were going to be disappointed by a Salem ghost tour. This was my only job for the whole trip: find a promising ghost tour. The one we booked had five stars on Trip Advisor and promised all kinds of interesting stories as well as history lessons. It was then that we learned once and for all that I should not be in charge of planning anything.

The first stop on the tour was the very cemetery where we had started our Salem exploration. Our tour guide proceeded to tell us that she “thinks” that it “may be” the third oldest cemetery in Massachusetts and that she heard of some people seeing some things there that may have been ghosts. That’s how the whole tour went. No background information on any of the “haunted” sites and absolutely no mention of the witch trials. At this point, I had been walking around in heels for over six hours, so I’m sure you can imagine my frustration. Eventually it just turned into a joke between me and Lenzie and we made it through it, mostly talking to each other and tuning out the tour guide.  

Immediately after the “ghost” tour, we headed back to Lenzie’s uncle’s terrifying 17^th century, 16-bedroom house in Brunswick, Maine. It was the darkest night I had ever seen and I was sure I was going to bump into at least three ghost nuns by the time we got to the fourth floor to Lenzie’s bedroom. After the longest and most uncomfortable hangover of my life, even the ghost headmistress of that nunnery couldn’t keep me awake.

The next day, we took our burrito lunches to an island at the end of the earth, specifically an area aptly named Land’s End. We shared a serene lunch experience on a cliff with a giant seagull, watching fishing boats coming in from weeks at sea (we assumed). We spent the next hour probably on the edge of death or at least severe injury, climbing around on cliffs and jumping over giant pools of crashing waves. After walking away from the cliffs unscathed, we made our way back to Portland, where we visited a beach straight out of a New England romantic comedy and had dinner in the window of a small pub where we watched boys walk by. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Maine was the abundance of attractive men with good haircuts.

Not pictured: bird friend

The next day was our first of many mountain experiences. Luckily we were able to drive up Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park and look down on the harbor from what seemed like miles up in the air. After making it back down the mountain, we went into the small town adjacent to the park where we were to set out on a whale watching tour. We boarded the boat, along with hundreds of other people including annoying children and equally annoying adults and we both immediately fell asleep. We woke up just as we made it far enough out in the ocean to be close to where whales tend to hang out. When they announced that the boat was going to come to a stop, we made our way out onto the deck, where we were hit with the strongest gust of arctic wind that I had ever felt in my life. We had been warned that this excursion would be cold, but I was skeptical. It WAS August, after all. Once the boat stopped, the cold was worth it: there, only a hundred feet away from where we were standing, were two humpback whales, just doing their thing (nothing) on the surface of the water. Just seeing them was astonishing enough for us and all the old white people and Asian families on that boat, but these whales had a lot more in mind for this day. Spoon, a young male, was trying to impress Sword, an older female, right before mating season. This was probably their third date, because it seemed like they really liked each other, but were still working hard to impress each other. We saw a lot of tail action and flippers in the air for about 30 minutes, then they disappeared. We were all starting to feel a little disappointed that they were gone, although very grateful for what we had seen, when it happened: Sword came flying out of the water like an Olympic hurdler and hit the surface of the water with a bang that I can’t compare to any sounds I’ve ever heard before. Shortly after, Spoon followed suit. They did this several times, disappearing into the deep for a few minutes in between each show. At one point they breeched at the same time, which led me to believe that they were just practicing for synchronized swimming rather than courting. It was definitely gold medal worthy.

Cadillac Mountain

This is Spoon. Video on Instagram.

Driving home that night I realized something that makes me never want to live in Maine or even really want to go to New England ever again: it is DARK, y’all. No street lights. No bright signs. Nothing. It’s like your headlights are a dying candle deep inside a cave. It’s terrifying. Keep that in mind as I tell you about the next day’s shenanigans.

We set out the next morning to do what Lenzie could not resist no matter where she was visiting: see some waterfalls. After we found the first one with very little trouble. Then everything started to go downhill. We were so far up in the mountains that we had no cell service. And I don’t mean just very very bad service – I mean none. Our phones simply said “No service.” I will remind you that we are very far away from anything familiar. Luckily we found someone who worked for some parks service and happened to be having lunch at our first waterfall. He gave us some quick directions to our next destination and we set off, assuming we would find some service along the way. We probably drove for two hours, wondering mile after mile if we had missed all the turns our friend had told us about. We hadn’t. Each turn in the directions that took him thirty seconds to ramble off to us was actually close to 50 miles from the one before. But sure enough, we ended up where we needed to be. Another small victory in what was soon to become a day full of failures.

The waterfall we found after all that blind driving was magnificent, but there was one more thing we wanted to see: Table Rock. We had no idea what it was or where it was, but it was something people did in Maine. We still had no service for GPS, but we weren’t too worried. We knew we were in the park where Table Rock was located, so all we had to do was drive until we saw signs for it. After a little bit of driving, we were out of Grafton State Park and into an area that I can only describe as the inspiration for the fil, Jeeper’s Creepers. We stopped at a small cluster of little houses that claimed to be a town hall and a library. This was the middle of the day on a Wednesday, but there wasn’t a soul in sight. We kept driving in the same direction, hoping we would see some semblance of a soul. Nothing. We passed several houses and farms and cars parked on the side of the road, but did not see a single person. Then we were in New Hampshire. So we turned around.

After an equally creepy drive back through Upton (where Jeepers Creepers lives), we ended up back in the park and managed to find Table Rock trail. When we got out of our car in the parking lot, we came across several groups of hikers who looked at us like they couldn’t believe we were here. We brushed them off and set out in to the woods, where we almost immediately came to a fork in the trail. There was a sign that said “Upper Table Rock trail” pointing to the left and “Table Rock trail” to the right. We assumed “upper” meant, like, higher up on the mountain or just something more difficult in general, so we chose the path on the right. 

We have never made a more incorrect assumption. After about a hundred yards of walking, the trail changed from dirt to 100% rock and immediately rose to a very steep incline. We spent the next hour literally climbing on all fours. Every time I thought about turning around and going back down, I thought “maybe we’re ALMOST there. I don’t want to have come this far for nothing.” What we didn’t realize was that Table Rock is at the top of this mountain. Not on the side, not near the top, but AT the top. We made it there eventually, after several slips and scrapes and a lot of Lenzie nagging about how the sun was going to go behind the mountains soon and we’d be stranded there in the dark forever. She brought this up EVERY time I took five more seconds to take a step than she did. We finally made it to the top with the help of a rope left by other brave hikers. That’s how steep it got – you could not finish the hike without literally pulling yourself up with a rope. The view at the top was amazing but terrifying.

View from Table Rock. Yes, that's a road down there. 

Was it worth it? No. I had spent 1.5 hours miserable and unprepared as the climb only got worse with every minute, only to get to the top and be terrified for my life for the entire five minutes that Lenzie allowed us to stay up there. The hike down was easier, but not by much. When we got to the bottom, we saw those groups of hikers again. They were right to judge us; we were not cut out for this. When we got back to the parking lot, we checked out the information signs; we had just completed a trail that was labeled “extremely difficult” for the actual Appalachian Trail hikers. It probably should be labeled “near impossible” for inexperienced people like us, but there probably was never a need to classify it for inexperienced hikers because we were probably the first idiots to do it on accident.

We never regained cell service that day. We headed back in what we thought was the same direction that we came from and just kind of made guesses on which turns we should make based on the familiarity of the names of towns on the signs. We stopped at a gas station to ask for directions and the guy working there, probably in his early 30s, was no help because he “doesn’t drive,” meaning he had probably never left that town in his sad life. So there we are, crouched down on the floor of this convenience store in this deserted town, looking at an atlas like we had any clue how to read a road map. We ultimately just decided to keep driving and ask someone else.

We managed to find the one other store that was actually still open past 6pm – a Home Depot. We got a long slew of directions spit out at us from two people talking over each other; we only understood about half of what each was saying because of their ridiculous accents. Again, we set off, just as lost as we were before we asked. Maybe more.

We stopped one more time and got some better guidance from a less accented woman. By the time we left that last gas station, the sun had set and we were in complete darkness once again. Even though we felt a little more secure with the last set of directions we were given, we were still driving in the dark, both literally and figuratively. We sort of followed this woman’s directions, but it appeared that whoever stole all of Maine’s streetlights ALSO stole of their directional signs. We made it back to Brunswick five hours later. Once we had cell service again, we looked up the route we should have taken. It was a two-hour drive. I was more than ready to be get out of Maine.

We had one last stop in Maine as we made our way to Vermont the next day. We were determined to see a moose. All the mountain roads we had spent the last few days on had countless signs warning of us the frequency of moose-automobile accents, but we didn’t see a single one. So we stopped at a wildlife refuge that had three moose in a cage. They weren’t very interesting.

While on the way to Vermont, we stopped at yet another waterfall in New Hampshire. It was a long hike, but at least it wasn’t a completely vertical climb. Still, I chose to sit at the bottom of the waterfall while Lenzie spent an hour gallivanting at the top. Thank God that was our last hike for the trip. I had had enough.

Bitch loves waterfalls

We arrived at our Air BnB outside of Burlington, VT that night with a pizza in hand and lots of sleeping to do. The next morning brought on our second theme outfits for the trip. For the Ben and Jerry’s factory, Lenzie wore all tie-dye and I wore bellbottom jeans and sandals. Again, we felt ridiculous but looked cute. Story of my life, really.

The tour of the factory was pretty boring and I couldn’t really pay attention because I had to keep reminding myself not to kick the children who were allowed to run free all around us during the whole tour.

After Ben and Jerrys, we went to a winery where the tasting consisted of so many wines that just the one sip of each got us both feeling a little tipsy. We spent the rest of the evening in downtown Burlington, which was very cute and college-y, but nothing special. It was weird to see so many things with Burlington in the name because we were not in my hometown; at one point we overheard a man say “he’s a Burlington guy, through and through!” and it almost made me sick before I realized he wasn’t talking about Burlington, NC.

Burlington, VT. Mountains everywhere in NE

We tried desperately the next day to find a breakfast spot where we could get pancakes with maple syrup, but it was Saturday and every restaurant was packed. We were setting out on our longest stretch of driving for the whole trip that day, so we didn’t want to waste any time. We ended up having breakfast at a Taco Bell.

We arrived in Brooklyn later that evening and went to dinner with our friends at a bougie-hipster-Brooklyn pizza place. The pizza was OK, but the place’s main redeeming quality was the drink I got from the bar: a frozen drink made with rose’ and vodka. I was in heaven. We went out with come college friends that night and I ended up at a warehouse dance club full of drag queens and gay men. One of the most beautiful men I’ve ever seen, wearing a fishnet shirt, dragged me out on the dance floor and I thought I had seen the last of my friends. I wasn’t worried though because I was with my new husband. Eventually he said something that I thought was annoying, as they all do, and I left him on the dance floor and somehow ended up finding my friends again. As we were about to leave the club, I realized the flannel shirt that I had been wearing around my waist was no longer there. “Oh well,” I thought. Who knows how long it had been gone at that point and it could’ve been anywhere in that place. Was I even wearing it when we came in? After about five seconds of being OK with losing it, I remembered how much I loved it. So I took off running away from my friends once again and made my way back to the stage where we had been dancing most of the night. I found it crumpled up against the back wall, soaked in alcohol and sweat. I almost didn’t take it because it was so disgusting. But I love that shirt, goddammit, and I wasn’t going to leave it behind.

We watched the sun rise that morning on the roof of my friend’s apartment. We went back inside where I probably slept for 20 minutes before I was woken up by a phone call from my other friends who were expecting me for brunch. I ran out of the apartment and called an uber, which was a mistake. I spent the next thirty minutes walking around whatever Brooklyn neighborhood I had ended up in looking for this uber. I was sleep deprived, still drunk, wearing heels and all black in the scorching sun. I made it back to where we were staying about an hour later (it would have been a 20-minute walk) and I had no time to rest, just change clothes and get back out the door.

I put on the same outfit that I wore on the plane to Boston and we went into Manhattan for brunch, the sex museum and a handbag in Chinatown for my mom. The hangover that day was comparable to Salem. Nothing could keep me awake by the time we got back that night.

Jello shots from the Museum of Sex. I needed alcohol to keep me going. 

Lenzie woke me up at 5am the next morning to start heading home. We spent that afternoon by the pool at our friend’s estate in Virginia, then made it home the next day in time for me to go into work for an overnight shift.

Virginia. More mountains. 

Those eight days were some of the most eventful ones I’ve had in many years, with a lot of small inconveniences that are way more than outweighed by the positive experiences I got to take in with my best friend. If there’s one thing I got out of this trip, it’s this: It’s a damn good thing I’m moving to California next week because I have had enough of the East Coast.