travel dates: July, 2024
After a tour of all the biggest cities in Ontario and Quebec, we were ready to start heading home. Which started with a border crossing. I had dutifully made sure we didn’t have any meat or produce to complicate things for our return to the US (some meat and produce is fine, but the list of things you can and can’t bring gets complicated enough that it usually seems easiest to just not have any). But I completely forgot that these are the days of bird flu.
The border crossing agent included eggs on the list of things he asked specifically about. I’m in the honest to a fault category under most circumstances and especially when talking to border guards, so I fessed up immediately. I suspect the border guy might have preferred that I tell a small lie, because what happened next was this: he told us we needed to take a U-turn and go back to Canada, leave our eggs somewhere and come back to try again. So we did this. The Canadian border lady seemed to be expecting us and directed us to pull over at the bathrooms right by the border and leave the eggs there. “If you put them in the bathroom, someone usually takes them,” she said. “Who’s going to take bathroom eggs?!” we wondered. But they were very nice organic, free-range eggs, so who knows?. At any rate, Dave deposited the eggs in the bathroom, and we have no idea what happened to them next. We made another U-turn and crossed the border without incident this time. And that’s the story about how we crossed the US/Canadian border 3 times in 15 minutes.
But then we spent a few days staying near Dave’s parents in New Hampshire. To be precise, we stayed in Vermont (in Quechee), but they lived just across the border in New Hampshire (in West Lebanon) (they’ve since moved. I have a post up already about visiting them in Boston much later than when THIS post is taking place! So confusing!)
We stayed at Quechee Pine Valley Campground, which was a KOA at the time (same owners, but they’re not longer affiliated with KOA–by their own choice, not because KOA didn’t want them!) We’d stayed there before, and you can read that review here. We had another good stay, this time in a fancy site with a private deck, which worked well for having Dave’s parents over for dinner one evening.
We already knew that Nana and Grandpa were likely moving soon, so we focused on seeing some things in the area we’d never done before, since it might be a long time before we were back. First up was the Vermont Institute of Natural Science, which I was a little surprised we’d never made it to before, despite several visits to the area with young kids. I was a little surprised at how high admission prices are here compared to a lot of nature centers (it’s $20 for adults, $17 for kids up to 17), but I’m guessing it probably has a lot to do with the very cool (and expensive) Forest Canopy Walk that opened a few years ago.
I could, in fact, feel the platform moving, which was very scary because so high….so it’s nice that there was this sign to reassure me:
I should mention that we still had Ari along for the Vermont/NH part of the trip, but then he left us to go to Boston to meet up with his girlfriend Abby before we got to the western Mass part.
Aside from the canopy walk, we checked out a couple of live animal programs: one with a turtle and one with raptors:
I’m going to vote for the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site as a New England hidden gem. This is New Hampshire’s only dedicated NPS site, and it’s not an especially flashy one. The name Augustus Saint-Gaudens probably doesn’t ring bells for most people, but back in the day he was a well-known and successful sculptor and this site preserves his home and studio and gives a fascinating look into his life and work (if I’m remembering correctly, this is the only NPS site that honors a sculptor).
While I wouldn’t have been able to tell you the name, I was familiar with Saint-Gaudens thanks to his impressive and moving Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial in Boston, on the edge of the Boston Common. I know it from our many Freedom Trail treks (and from Robert Lowell’s poem, “For the Union Dead”) . He’s also known for (we found out) for a number of other public sculptures (including ones of Abraham Lincoln and Sherman) and for the coins he designed at the request of Theodore Roosevelt.
The NPS site is in Cornish, NH, within half an hour of towns like White River Junction, VT or Lebanon, NH, and it’s definitely worth spending a few hours at if you find yourself in the area. The grounds are lovely (and there are hiking trails to explore, although we didn’t get to any of them) and contain the house and studio as well as some of Saint-Gaudens original art and reproductions.
We watched the film in the visitor center and then went on an excellent ranger-led tour before ending with the self-guided tour of the house.
And then we said goodbye to Ari and headed to our second New England stop in western Massachusetts. This was a reroute from our original itinerary to check out Amherst College, where August would be starting school in the fall. He’d flown up to visit on his own in the spring, but I though it would be nice for all of us to swing by since we’d be so close (I had seen Amherst one other time when Ari toured a few years ago, but the rest of the family hadn’t seen it). Nana and Grandpa joined us for this leg as well, staying in a hotel in Northampton. We didn’t find a lot of great options for campgrounds particularly close to Amherst, so we ended up at the Northampton/Springfield KOA, which was…a fine KOA but about 35 minutes on windy backroads from Amherst. We didn’t really get to enjoy the campground much anyway, partially because we spent a lot of time driving and partially because there was torrential rain the night we arrived.
We spent our Amherst day checking out the town and, mostly, touring Emily Dickinson’s house!
I love house museums and poetry, so this was pretty much perfect for me. The tour was fascinating, with lots of details about Dickinson’s life, and lots of fun pattern mixing:
She wrote all her poems at this teeny tiny desk!
The Evergreens, another house on the property, is also part of the tour. This is the house Emily Dickinson’s brother and SIL lived in, and it’s currently undergoing a restoration, so there’s a lot more on that tour about that restoration process.
And now we just have one more significant stop on this 2024 trip to talk about! We were actually supposed to do a White House tour, but we ended up having to cancel it because the van was causing some trouble (of a minor sort), but we did still make a DC stop and saw some cool stuff that we hadn’t made it to on past trips.
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