Across New England

Day 10 - August 6th

Overnight the weather had cleared up so we grabbed some muffins and juice from the deli across the road and made an early trip back up to Cadillac Mountain.

It was well worth the return trip as the views were stunning, very different to the previous day when we'd struggled to even find our car in the car park amongst all the fog.

Satisfied that we'd now seen the views that Acadia had to offer we started our journey to Montpelier, some 300 miles west in Vermont. The sat-nav tried to send us off down the interstate but we overruled it and set off along Highway 2 instead, this was a shorter but slower route which took us through many of New England's small towns and villages and made for a much more interesting drive than simply blasting down a huge freeway. To help pass the time we decided to count stars-and-stripes flags. After about half an hour we'd counted 200 so we gave up. I'm pretty sure if we'd attempted to count Union Jack flags back home we'd have seen about 2.

The highway also took us past Mount Washington - I'd read stories of how erratic the weather on the mountain can be (it holds the record for the fastest recorded wind speed on the Earth's surface at 231mph) and true to form, as we approached the wind picked up, the temperate drop by 10 degrees and the previously blue sky turned to ominously dark clouds. As we drove through the mountain pass there was a torrential downpour but half an hour later the sky was back to bright blue again - Mount Washington really does have its own crazy microclimate, even though it's only 6,200ft high (by comparison when we visited Yellowstone even the scenic highway we drove along goes up to 11,000ft and the weather there is mostly fine).

We arrived in Montpelier in the early evening. Our hotel is in a beautiful building dating back to 1828, not as old as some of the buildings on the East coast but pretty old by Vermont standards (westerners didn't settle here for a long time after colonizing the coast). Montpelier is a sleepy little town, despite being the state capital the population is only about 8000 and it didn't take us long to see the sights - the state house and er... yeah, it was pretty much just the state house. One of the highlights of the town is the Main St Grill and Bar which is staffed by students from the New England Culinary College - which means you get an interesting menu for a pretty good price. Vermont has some slightly odd alcohol licensing laws, for example we were allowed to take our unfinished bottle of wine home from the restaurant but only after the proprieter of the restaurant had marked a line on the side of the bottle and signed it, so that if the police stopped us we could prove we hadn't been drinking in the street.