Hello, it’s Saturday morning, and we’re in Rutland VT. Had a good day yesterday, rode with the roof down most of the day. We stayed late at the Red River Inn utilizing the good Internet connection and cell service to secure reservations for Friday and Saturday night. We don’t normally worry about reservations, but we’ve found Friday and Saturday nights in popular areas can be difficult with out a reservation. We found this to be true as many of the few motels available in New England were down to their last rooms. Last night, Friday, we ended up in Rutland Vt., which worked out perfectly. We didn’t set too aggressive a distance target for yesterday cause we got a late start, and we were driving the Rt. 7 trip we came up here to see. The trip up Rt. 7 lived up to its expectations. The scenery was beautiful and the drive was entertaining. The further North we get, the more the leaves are beginning to show color. I can’t imagine what it must be like at the height of the season. Alm ost every road here is like driving on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Also, often you are driving through long valleys with mountains on both sides of you. Many of the small New England towns resembled tourist traps, but I guess that’s what they do here. Along the way, we stopped at Kent Falls, a couple of covered bridges, and various other points of interest. The navigator had an easy day, as the route followed 7 the whole way. Last night we easily found the Comfort Inn in Rutland, and landed with no problems. It was interesting though because the whole place was full of older folks on bus trips. They were all wearing tags around their neck, and loaded up on the busses about 6:00 PM headed for somewhere. (dinner probably) We hung around for a while, and I wrote a review of the Red River Inn from last night for Trip Advisor. If you’ve never used it, Trip Advisor.com is a very useful web site. My friend Jerry hooked me up with it, and I now use it a lot and am starting to contribute review s. It is a community of over 17 million travelers that write independent reviews of various places they visit. It can be very useful when considering a visit to a resort, hotel or other establishment. Reading reviews yesterday morning saved us from booking an over priced room at a 3rd rate rundown motel. After hanging for a while, we went to dinner at the Sirloin Saloon just down the road. It was an interesting place with a creative menu. They had something called "Bison Bread" that if you could eat 2 slices of I’d buy you dinner. It was baked in huge loaves about 2 feet in diameter, and weighed about a pound per slice. It was very tasty, but way filling—texture like eating crushed grain. They had a nice salad bar with the dinners, and on it we found an interesting new treat. They are called Wasabi Peas. They look like little yogurt covered mints, but don’t taste that way. They are sort of like way hot little crunchy poppers you can sprinkle on top of salads. They really go good with salad or just by themselves. We looked them up on the Internet, and they are available for purchase from various on-line places. After the cool salad discovery, I had a nice piece of broiled Cod probably my first of many seafood dishes in the next week.
Today we are also going to stay in Vermont. We were headed into Maine, but in order to make it to anywhere we could find a place to stay, we would have had to drive way farther than was comfortable with the speed we can manage on these New England back roads. I commented to Vickie yesterday, the speed limits here are like musical chairs. 30-40-45-30-25-45-50-55-40-55-40-25-etc.etc. and that is all in about 5 miles. Then you never know when there is a local law waiting to get you for 35 in a 25. (have seen many speed traps in little towns) Needless to say our average speed is nothing to write home about. (pardon the pun). So tonight we’ll land in St. Johnsbury VT at another Comfort Inn. Oh and by the way one of the attractions at St. Johnsbury is a 1916 portrait of Abe Lincoln made out of 6,399 dried insects--we'll be looking for that one. Got to get going, we better get to the "Deluxe Continental Breakfast" ahead of the bus crowd or it will probably be like following a heard of locusts. Oops went to get Vickie some coffee and the breakfast room was overflowing with "bus people". The lady who took care of the breakfast was harried beyond belief. She was pouring OJ concentrate into the machine on a stool while the lady in front of me whined at her because there was no decaf coffee. She said, somewhat sharply, "I didn’t know 2 bus loads would all be coming at the same time". I grabbed Vickie a coffee, me a yogurt and we’ll hang in the room a while till the locusts are done. More Later
Wes
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