(Kingston, Ontario, Canada)
As I don’t foresee a whole lot of travel in the near future, I’ve decided to take a plunge into my “pre-digital camera” travel archives. Today’s travel flashback covers our 2007 road trip to the state of Vermont (that’s the state capitol in Montpelier, at the top of this post). We passed through Vermont again in 2009, but this earlier blog post explains why I didn’t have too much to say about it (and the state capitol was hard to properly photograph then too!).
You may wonder why I’ve included a picture of a local hospital. Unfortunately, we had to make an emergency visit here because my wife was stung by a bee in nearby Claremont, New Hampshire…and she began having a bad allergic reaction. This was when we discovered that she was allergic to bee stings! Fortunately, she was insured and was able to get medical attention without worrying about the cost. The emergency department was empty: it seems to handle mainly broken bones during ski season.
We stayed in the town of White River Junction that evening. While there isn’t very much rail service in this part of New England, this town still has a station. I suspect that the Hotel Coolidge (see photo above) was originally built to accommodate rail passengers. When we were there, we had a huge room and you could tell that it had really been something special once…but it was in a state of transition. However, it seems to have received a significant overhaul and it is now looking spiffier again. It is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Vermont is a beautiful state with lots of recreational opportunities. We went for a hike in the Quechee Gorge, which passes underneath Route 4. This is one of those cases where a photograph doesn’t really do justice to the scenery. There is even a small ski area here.
In yet another foreshadowing of my eventual lawn bowling “career” (here’s a link to a similar situation in Scotland’s Orkney Islands), I was able to bowl outdoors at the Rock of Ages Granite Quarry in Graniteville, Vermont. The “lane” is made entirely out of polished granite! Apparently, this idea never took off because the granite eventually breaks conventional bowling balls. However, the quarry has specialized rubber bowling balls that can withstand the hard granite surface. The lane is still open from May to October of each year.
We followed that with a tour of the Rock of Ages Quarry. It is almost 600 feet deep and they claim it is the largest operating deep-hole, dimension granite quarry in the world.
Main Street of Lake Placid, New York – showing the old (1932) Olympic Arena
My photos for most of the rest of the trip weren’t very good. In those days, you just couldn’t tell until you had the film developed. We returned home through the Olympic Village (1932 and 1980 Winter Olympics) of Lake Placid, New York. It’s a really small place, and it is sometimes hard to imagine that the Winter Olympics took place here. But they did!
Stay tuned for more (and older!) travel flashbacks.