Hudson, Mass. - For the edification of anyone who particularly cares, here are the lovingly complied statistics from the trip. They get a bit complicated and obtuse at times, so bear with me. Since I effectively took two trips with very different tones - Anacortes to Bar Harbor, then the less focused jaunt around Nova Scotia and down to Massachusetts I've mostly divided the numbers into the "cross-country" portion and the "after" portion, with a few numbers reflecting both. The ones in bold are the ones I'm most proud of.

Total miles traveled (both trips): 6,138
Total miles traveled (cross-country): 5,030ish
Total miles traveled (after): 1,100ish
Those numbers reflect every single mile I went on the bike, including tooling around on my days off. Based on those numbers, I averaged 88 miles a day on the first trip and just 51 on the second trip.
However, if you don't count my days off, I averaged 103 miles a day on the cross-country trip and 97 afterwards. I consider those much more accurate numbers.
Length of trip: 57 days cross-country(incl. 10 days off); 19 days afterward (incl. 9 days off)
Longest day: 149 miles (from outside Cleveland to outside Buffalo)
Fastest speed: 43.9 mph, down a steep hill(obviously) in New Hampshire. I probably went faster than this at other times, but at speeds like that I'm usually too busy hanging on for dear life to check the speedometer.
States passed through: 16 (WA,ID,MT,ND,MN,WI,IA,IL,IN,OH,PA,NY,VT,NH,ME,MA)
Provinces passed through: 4 (AB,ON,NB,NS)
Time zones passed through: 5
Cheapest campsites: $0(several occasions)
Most expensive campsite: $35(!), Searsport, Maine (fortunately, I was sharing it with another cyclist. So I never spent more than $19 for a night.)
Fast food meals: 2 (Dairy Queen, Malta, Montana; Taco John's, Kankakee, Illinois)
Hotels: 3 (Sandpoint, Idaho; Malta, Montana; Raquette Lake, New York)
Hostels: 6
Nights 'free camping': 2 (outside the Mason's Hall in Lubec, Maine; 100 feet down a nature trail in Exeter, New Hampshire)
Broken spokes: 6
Broken spokes fixed at Christian teen centers: 1 (no, really)
Front wheels/tires run through: 1
Rear wheels run through: 3
Rear tires run through: 6
Boat and ferry trips: 10
Numbers of rides hitched due to bike problems: 3(Outside Cardston, Alberta; outside Stillwater, Minnesota; outside Saint John, New Brunswick. For the record, I went back after the first two rides and completed the sections of the route I had skipped in the car, thus making this a true coast-to-coast bike trip; I didn't do that in New Brunswick, but that was after the coast-to-coast bit anyway.)
Close calls with motor vehicles: 3 (Idiot almost-sideswiping truckers in Iowa and Maine; idiot almost-sideswiping pickup driver in Maine)
Close calls with other bikers: 1 (The only time I was forced off the pavement the entire trip was by a dumb 12-year-old coming my way on a bike path as wide as a two-lane road who managed to swerve about 15 feet into my path for no apparent reason. Sigh.)
Other cross-country bikers encountered: I'd guess about 30, total. Most of them were in groups, and most were heading east like me.
Number of peanut-butter-and-jelly-on-a-tortilla sandwiches eaten: Lost count after about 150

Hudson, MA - Nova Scotia libraries, it turned out, were not all that useful in terms of giving me USB ports so I could post photos. Darn unfriendly of them. (And don't even get me started on the Digby library, where access was free unless you weren't Canadian, in which case it was $2 for half an hour.) Anyway, now that I'm home in the land of unfettered internet access, I get to post the final set of primo pix from the trip.

Halifax, Nova Scotia - This one's for all you fans of the Titanic movie out there. (Go on, admit it. There's no shame.) Jim Cameron lifted "Jack Dawson," the name of Leo's character in the film, from an actual Titanic victim; I think the real guy worked in the engine room. Anyway, after the movie came out, lots of teary-eyed teenage girls started leaving flowers and such at J. Dawson's grave, one of a few hundred uniform Titanic headstones in a cemetery on the outskirts of Halifax. As you can see, a few of them are still doing it nine years later.

Halifax, Nova Scotia - The CBC used to have a TV show called "Theodore Tugboat," sort of the nautical equivalent of Thomas the Tank Engine. So some enterpising soul built a full-size replica of the character and gives Halifax harbor tours on it. It's very cute, but when you see a giant face - even an innocent smiley one - coming at you out of the harbor mist at you, it's also invariably a bit disturbing.


South Shore, Nova Scotia - just a little scenery for you. Tell me that ain't a calendar photo.
Nova Scotia - They really like Kit Kats up there: hey have caramel ones, white chocolate ones, peanut butter ones, big ones, giant ones, and this novel creation. Better than it sounds, actually, though I preferred the yummy array of Cadbury bars you can get up there but not in the USA.
Long Island, Nova Scotia - "Balancing Rock" is a maybe 20-foot tall hunk of basalt precariously perched along the shore of this rugged and scenic island. It's quite a sight, but the shoreline itself, composed of eroding basalt columns rising straight out of the surf to the treeline, is just as remarkable to look at.
Off Camden, Maine - The windjammer Angelique, where my father and I were among about 25 passengers for a sailing tour of Penobscot Bay.


Off of Camden, Maine - My dad and I on board the Angelique, cruising through somewhere in Penobscot Bay. The scenery was stunning, and gave me a much better picture of Maine then the often terrible and crowded roads. You can shove about 10,000 boats into Penobscot Bay (in fact, I suppose they have) and it still wouldn't constitute a crowd.
Lisbon Falls, Maine - Moxie was the most popular soft drink in the US for 40 years, even though it tastes like Diet Coke mixed with cough syrup. You can still get it these days on the East Coast, especially in Maine, where the stuff was invented. And the small town of Lisbon Falls is the epicenter of it all, home of (I presume) the world's only Moxie gift shop. Which was closed when I got there. Dammit.
Tyngsborough, Massachusetts - Getting near the end of the road for Ganesh and I. Lord knows how many times I've passed "Welcome to Massachusetts" signs in my lifetime, but never under these circumstances.
Bolton, Mass. - I noticed this less than 10 miles from home. Proof that you don't have to go far to find roadside oddities. Don't know if I ever could have spotted it from a car, though.

Hudson, MA - Me steaming up the driveway of my parents' house with 6,100 miles behind me and about 10 feet to go. (Note: Ya got me. This photo was in fact posed.)

Hudson, MA - Yeah, I borrowed the title from Bilbo Baggins, and its not very accurate, but damn if I don't feel a little like I just returned to Hobbiton after a long and treacherous journey halfway across Middle-Earth. Or at least Middle America.
So I'm home. At precisely 1:50 p.m. EST, I rolled down Davis Road and crossed the threshold of our driveway, letting out a massive "Woo-hoo!" before braking to a halt for the final time this trip.
It was incredible. It really was. I said back in Bar Harbor that I was saving the true moment of catharsis for when the trip actually ended, and I hit it this afternoon. Around 10 miles from home, I started getting goosebumps. A mantra stuck in my head: "I'm home." It repeated itself over and over again, strengthening each time I passed an area I recognized. In Ayer, I noticed the spot where I had had my driver's test. (I passed, despite parallel parking about 3 1/2 feet from the curb.) In Harvard, I spotted the beach where my father took me a few times. In Bolton, I stopped at the Candy Mansion, site of numerous sugar-laden shopping trips in my youth.
From there the whirlwind in my head just got stronger. The route map took me directly onto Berlin and Frye roads, two isolated, wooded routes that I had bicycled I don't know how many hundreds of times in my youth. By the time I get off the route map to head home along Rte. 62, I was picking out the landmarks before they appeared: the garden center, the 495 interchange, Roller Kingdom. A jog through the trailer park, up a short hill, over the end of Davis Road -for several years of my toddlerhood, the farthest away my parents would let me ride my bike- and I was home. 6,100 miles, and I had completed the last one.
I was, I dunno, agog. Ecstatic. I couldn't wipe the smile off my face. I had finally done exactly what I set out to do: get from Hudson, MA to the Pacific. I did it in reverse, but that's plenty good enough for me.
I was home, the house where I spent the first 17 years of my life and a not insignificant portion of the next 13. The trip from Maine to Mass. had actually proven fairly uneventful and often pretty dull. But I couldn't imagine ending the trip any other way, and I couldn't imagine ending it anywhere else.

Kittery, Maine - This is it. I know the stated purpose of this trip was to make it coast-to-coast, but there was always a tacit understanding (in my head, at least) that the ultimate finale would come when I rolled up the driveway of my childhood home, 12 Davis Road, Hudson, MA 01749. At the rate I'm going that'll happen tomorrow afternoon.
Of course, I'd have been home a long time ago but for a pleasant detour, my four days aboard the windjammer Angelique. I arrived in Maine on the "The Cat" catamaran from Nova Scotia (a speedy but soulless trip, full of too much plush seating and slot machines and not enough sea air) in a torrential downpour, which was pretty good timing on my part as I only had to bike for about 200 feet to the ferry terminal where my dad was waiting with the family minivan. From there he drove me to the touristy-but-awfully-attractive town of Camden, Maine, where we boarded the Angelique.
The trip was awesome in a lot of ways and a letdown in others. As this blog makes fairly obvious, I'm used to pretty active vacations, and the passengers on board don't actually have a lot to do. We got to lend a hand hoisting and lowering sails and such, but mostly we just watched the scenery go by.
Fortunately, the scenery was majestic. We spent three days plying a random course through the hundreds of tiny islands of Penobscot Bay, some uninhabited, others occupied by the gargantuan summer homes of the rich and/or famous. Some of us went swimming in the nippy Atlantic, many of us made a few token shore excursions in the ship's rowboat, and all of us spent a couple of hours on an empty island enjoying a mammoth lobster bake. (I had 4 of them, which is actually more lobsters than I've had in my entire life, combined, up to this point.)
The other part I really enjoyed about the trip was simply cruising along without the rlentless drone of an engine beneath you. The voyage really does feel much more serene when the only sound is the ripples of water against the hull and the sail billowing out with the wind.
The trip finished Thursday morning, and I had my dad drop me off at Damariscotta, which is the point at which my route to Bar Harbor and the route I'm taking back to Mass. (I got another Adventure Cycling map for this part of the trip) diverge. From that point, it was 220 miles back home.
I've now covered about 140 of them, so tomorrow should be a relatively brief final day. I must admit I've enjoyed this portion of Maine more than I did the jaunt into Bar Harbor, mostly because there seem to be more backroads on this map. The main roads south have mostly been mob scenes, jammed as they are with late-August vacationers, but get about 100 feet off them and you're in the middle of classic New England: qauint farmhouses, meadows, stone walls. Even the crowded roads have been enjoyable at times, as the maps have routed me right along the sea shore past some stunning vistas of a very frenetic coastline.
In about half an hour I'll be in new Hampshire and leave the Atlantic behind, turning inland past Exeter and into Massachusetts. I'll spend tonight camping in New Hampshire somewhere, one last time in the old sleeping bag (which could use a good airing-out anyway.)
Lest you think this blog is about to peter out, stay tuned: I'll have a final entry about the last miles of the trip as well as some more photos and a bunch of lovingly-compiled statistics from the trip.
But now: To home!

Yarmouth, Nova Scotia - ten days after taking off from Bar Harbor on the post-transcontintal portion of my bike trip, I'm sitting in this seaport town impatiently waiting to catch a ferry back to Maine. Tomorrow afternoon in Portland, I'll meet my father for a four-day trip aboard a windjammer, sort of the rustic retro New England equivalent of Carnival Cruise Lines.
This trip has definitely been a mixed bag, a situation that is entirely my own fault for not planning it out better. What I didn't realize is that Nova Scotia is actually a pretty big place, certainly larger than it appears on your average map. As a result, despite skipping the portion of the trip that would have led through northern New Brunswick, I've still spent the last week feeling pressed for time. I've had to do more 100-mile days than I really wanted, and I haven't found myself with enough time to stop and simply see Nova Scotia. Plus I've had to contain myself to a fairly limited route that cut out most of the province.
That all being said, I have at least gotten a chance to briefly dunk myself into Nova Scotia culture and ride down a lot of seacoast roads, many of them quite gorgeous. After Halifax, I followed the south shore of the province, then turned inwards and cut across the isloated interior. The highlight of the whole exercise came yesterday and the day before, when I rode out Digby Neck, on the north shore, to a place called Brier Island - basically, I rode out an isolated 25-mile peninsula, caught a ferry at the end of it, rode down a 10-mile long island, caught a ferry at the end of that, and spent the night on the tiny island upon which it deposited me. The ride was remarkable: no traffic and seacoast views all around. On Brier Head, I had an entire hostel to myself, and went to bed with the pounding of the surf outside my windows and sea air in my lungs. It was all too brief a stay (see previous lament), but it was worth it, even if I had to retrace my route for 40 miles yesterday.
Now I'm in Yarmouth, a small and generally pretty charming town on the west end of Nova Scotia. My plan is to catch the ferry tomorrow, spend four nights on the windjammer, then bike back to the ancestral Moran manse in Massachusetts, a two to two-and-a-half day ride. THat will end the biking portion of my trip, and commence the siting-around-on-my-duff-for-a-week-or-so-while-I-figure-out-what-I'm-doing portion. (Sure, no doubt, to lead to some scintillating blog entries.)

Halifax, Nova Scotia - I may have had bad timing rolling into Bar Harbor, but I couldn't have picked a better time to get into the capital of Nova Scotia. That's because it's in the middle of the Halifax Busking (street performing) festival, during which performers of every stripe roll into town and spend all week giving free shows along the waterfront. It's awesome. I haven't found Halifax itself to be anything special - it actually feels just like Boston, except with a French flavor replacing the Irish - but the buskers have made this a visit to remember. In just a few hours today, I saw a robotic Elvis impersonator; Japanese acrobats; another Japanese guy who could pretty much balance anything on anything; a wild-haired fellow from Montreal who can do things with his bike I would never consider; and a breakdancing bagpiper. After some more city touring tomorrow, I plan on spending most of the afternoon watching more of this inspired madness.
As for the biking around here, I have found parts of Nova Scotia to be impossibly gorgeous and others to be merely dull. After arriving in Digby two days ago, I biked 50 miles, mostly through the rain, to the middle-of-nowhere town of Middleton. (This was, believe it or not, the first sustained bit of rain I had to ride through this entire trip, which is kind of incredible. It was also my first chance to find out that some of my supposedly waterproof stuff, in fact, wasn't.)
Middleton turned out to be a sage choice, as for $5CN I stayed in about the nicest campground of this entire trip. Instead of cramming all of the tent sites together, the owner of Smith's Campground (who I guess would be, um, Smith) plowed out a giant lea, dotted with trees and with a tranquil river running through the middle of it. Then he stuck campsites at random spots through the meadow, each one in a peaceful glen beneath a small grove of trees, most with a river view. Cows mooed in the distance and the river gurgled nearby as I incredulously set up my tent. I felt like I was camping inside a Gainsborough painting.
In fact, a lot of the landscape of Nova Scotia reminded me of England: a gently rolling countryside of verdant fields interspersed with groves of trees stretching off to a ridged horizon. Parts of it were about as beautiful as anything I've seen on this trip.
Unfortunately, the biking book I've gotten up here doesn't seem to be as good as the maps I used before, and after some wonderful back roads I ended up on a fairly busy route into Halifax that only got worse as I neared the city. Perhaps this was inevitable, but I find it hard to believe there wasn't a less crowded (and hence safer) way into what really isn't that huge a metropolis. Ah well, I'm here now. I'm also ensconced in a fun hostel that has free internet access and a USB port, so here come some more pics:
Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia - The "Octopuses' Garden" (which was, in fact, under a tree, in the shade) was created by a local sculptor who took seaworn tree stumps and roots and glued burls to the top of them. Interesting, but frankly kinda creepy.





Windsor, Nova Scotia - It's good to know that I can find primo pieces of 'Roadside America' despite the fact that I'm actually in Canada. This, for example, graces a public park in Windsor, which is not only the birthplace of hockey, but also the home of a four-time world champion pumpkin farmer. This is him. And his pumpkin.



Halifax, Nova Scotia - Yes, that's an 8-foot-long Titanic model floating in the lake in the Halifax Public Gardens. This is where they brought the Titanic survivors, so there's a pretty strong local connection to the wreck. In fact, tomorrow I'm headed out to see the cemetery where they buried a lot of the victims.




Halifax - One half of "Sublimit," a Japanese couple performing at the busking festival. Note the startling amount of stuff he's balancing on.










Halifax - "Silver Elvis." Basically, he did the whole human robot routine, using Elvis moves, to Elvis music. Pretty novel. Very silly.










Halifax - "Dubike," a guy from Montreal with a ridiculous accent, even more ridiculous hair, and an impressive array of bike stunts. For obvious reasons, his performance struck near to my heart.

Digby, Nova Scotia - As it turned out, the best thing about New Brunswick was getting there. Which is why I'm not there anymore.
My first night off of the Adventure Cycling maps brought me to Lubec, Maine, the Easternmost town in the USA. It's a picturesque little village on a hill amid a series of tidal flats. It's also home to some very exorbitant campsites, which is why when I rolled into town on Thursday night I decided to look for alternatives.
Handily enough, I wandered into a $6 all-you-can-eat barbeque in the middle of town put on by the local Masons. I helped myself to a ridiculous amount of food, then asked the head Mason honcho is he minded terribly if I threw my tent up on their lawn. He didn't, so I camped for free in the middle of downtown Lubec.
Making my visit even more memorable, I was heading out of town the next morning when a writer for the local paper saw me and decided she wanted to do a story on my trip. So sometime in the next month my photo and a (brief, I imagine) piece about me will be appearing in the Quoddy Times, a bi-monthly regional paper. Look for it at your local newsstand, unless you don't live within a 10-mile radius of Lubec, Maine. In that case, just read USA Today. It's got pretty colors and stuff.
After Lubec I passed over a small bridge onto Campobello Island, which is actually in New Brunswick. Its also the home of FDR's rather impressive summer home, which I took a tour of before catching a tiny car ferry to Deer Island, about half an hour away. I then rode the length of Deer Island (about 10 mostly forested and uninhabited miles) to get to another ferry, which dropped me on the New Brunswick mainland. This may all seem rather complicated, but it cuts about 100 miles of riding off the trip, so I figured it was worth the trouble. Plus I'm just a sucker for a ferry ride.
From there on out, unfortunately, New Brunswick started to go downhill. Traffic was bad and I had no choice but to ride a long stretch of Highway 1, which is effectively an interstate. No fun at all. Then, as luck would have it, I blew another spoke, this one behind the cassette on my rear wheel (meaning I would need a bike shop to fix it.) And it started to rain.
So I threw up my arms (or, rather, my thumb) and caught a ride the last 20 miles into the harbor city of St. John with a couple of roughneck pipeline inspectors. They dropped me at a bike shop and I was able to get on my way in about 30 minutes.
But it was then that I started to wonder where "on my way" would actually take me. My intent was to bike through the length of New Brunswick so I could turn off into Nova Scotia. But New Brunswick had been severely disappointing me all day: no scenery at all, no shoulders, and I looked at the map and saw nothing but a two-day trudge to get through it to my ultimate destination.
So, about 10 miles past St. John - and this is the great part about not using the maps - I decided, "forget it." I turned the bike around, found a campsite near the city center, and first thing this morning I hopped the "Princess of Acadia" for the three-hour ferry ride from St. John to Digby, Nova Scotia. That's where I am now, ready to (hopefully) enjoy some greatly improved riding conditions for the next few days as I work my way east to Halifax.
New Brunswick was a bust, but I'm glad I went: It was worth it to see the northern Maine coast, Lubec and the islands.
Good thing #1 about Nova Scotia: really fast computers, allowing me to post pictures with ease. So here are a few:



Brockport, NY: I loved riding the western stretch of the canal, primarily because it passed an endless succession of quaint towns, each one reachable by a freshly painted drawbridge over the canal.






Palmyra, NY: Here's an interesting bit of US history I almost blew past. Just south of Palmyra is the Smith farm, where 14-year-old Joseph Smith had the first of the visions that led him to found the Mormon church. Here's the farmhouse he lived in; those trees in the rear are the edge of the "Sacred Grove," where Smith actually saw whatever it is he saw.




Ticonderoga, NY - The first of what are turning out to be numerous quaint l'il ferry rides on this trip took me across Lake Champlain from Ticonderoga into Vermont. This one's actually a chain ferry.






Bar Harbor, Maine - The town pier, end of the road for the Northern Tier route.







Outside Lubec, Maine - End of the road for the continental United States.

Machias, Maine - As of this morning, I am officially winging it. After two months of generally following a route meticulously laid out in Adventure Cycling maps, I am now trying to navigate my way to and through Nova Scotia using nothing but what I can get from tourist boards, chambers of commerce and AAA.
This, as it turns out, is harder than it might sound. The Adventure Cycling maps mostly did a great job of finding local secondary roads with big shoulders and little traffic. Now, finding those roads has become more of a guessing game, as has finding campgrounds, grocery stores and libraries. Obviously I'm doing all right, though, at least on the last count.
After polishing off the coast-to-coast route, I spent two days in Bar Harbor exploring Acadia National Park by bike and foot. And as much as Bar Harbor is a hellish tourist madhouse this time of year, I must admit I had a good time there and in the park. (Well, mostly in the park.) Acadia is beautiful in a sort of low-key weathered granite sort of way, with the park anchored around a series of low mountains, ragged coastal cliffs and hidden lakes. They've also got a system of carriage paths that make for some great backwoods bicycling. Everything was crowded, but some of the views of the headlands and the Atlantic were amazing, and generally there was enough outdoors to go around. My mood was also helped by staying at the Bar Harbor hostel, which housed a very friendly staff and a gregarious crew of international guests (and which, despite the unfathomable rates the local hotels were charging, was still a bargain.)
I didn't want to sit around too long, though, so this morning I gathered up my information on eastern Maine and Canada and headed back the way I came, looping out of Bar Harbor and turning north and east along the Maine coast. As I expected, the crowds thinned out dramatically as soon as I got away from the Acadia area, and I've enjoyed several stretches of mostly empty roads today. I also feel like I'm seeing a little more of the "real" Maine that was pretty hard to discern through the crazy crowds in the south of the state. (Although the antique shops on this route still seem to outnumber stores selling actually useful things, so I guess I'm not quite off the tourist trail.)
My plan is to camp tonight in Lubec, easternmost city in the U.S., and spend tomorrow exploring Campobello Island before catching a pair of ferries that will drop me in New Brunswick, Canada. I'm either going to head all the way through New Brunswick and enter Nova Scotia from its northeast corner, or (if I don't like the riding up there) catch a ferry that will lead me right to Nova Scotia. I'm planning to spend 10-14 days on this little jaunt, after which I will catch a ferry back to Maine and ride the rest of the way home to Massachusetts.
Its great to be back on the road again. I was a bit trepidatious at first about having to figure out the route by myself, but I'm starting to get into it. So far, so good.
Greatest thing I've seen today: a town line sign that proudly declared "Cherryfield: Blueberry Capital of the World." It would appear the town naming committee kind of dropped the ball on that one...

Bar Harbor, Maine - 'Tis done. 5,000 miles, 57 days, two rear wheels, six rear tires, an awful lot of peanut butter and jelly and all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets behind me, I pulled into this little tourist town on Monday at about 3:00. I rode to the end of the town pier, hit the brakes, and it was all over.
To be honest, it was kind of an anticlimax.
First of all, it's not all over. I'm almost certainly going to spend the next 10-12 days touring to the north around Nova Scotia, then will bike for another few days to reach the ancestral Moran residence in Hudson, Mass. When I roll into the driveway at 12 Davis Road, THEN it will be over. Until then there's plenty more biking to do.
Second of all, Maine has been really, really awful. Tourist season is in full swing, and all the major roads I've biked on have been chock-a-block with cars. The minor roads have mostly been in absolutely terrible condition, with shoulders that are either nonexistent or crumbling their way there. There's been little in the way of scenery. The campsites have been exorbitant ($35 for a tent site?!), and Bar Harbor itself is so jammed with tourists it looks like Disney World. After biking for two months, I had to basically walk my bike the last 1/2 mile or so in order to get through the insane traffic. The conditions tended to drown out my moment of catharsis/triumph/whatever it was I was supposed to be feeling.
That being said, I'm in a better mood now. Myself and a guy I've been biking with for a couple of days found beds at the very friendly Bar Harbor hostel, and I spent today biking through the very mobbed but very beautiful environs of Acadia National Park, a wondrous spot filled with rugged ocean cliffs, quiet lakes and imposing granite mountains. It was effectively big enough to absorb the crowds fairly well, and I felt a little better once I had some room to breathe.
From here on out, its off the map. I have a bunch of info on cycling on Nova Scotia and will spend tonight and tomorrow piecing together a route to get up there overland, than catch a ferry back to Maine. I'm very excited about it: first, its apparently a lot less crowded there than here, which is a very, very good thing. Second, now that I've actually crossed the continent, the rest is just gravy. And I do like gravy. So to Canada I go!
After more all-you-can-eat Chinese for dinner tonight, of course.

Conway, New Hampshire - I can tell I'm back in New England. All of the mountains and trees look somehow familiar. People all around me are wearing Red Sox stuff. And I'm start to recognize the chain stores! Shaw's Supermarkets ... Brooks Pharmacy ... Dunkin Donuts. Ooh, Dunkin Donuts.
As you can see, I've made a lot of progress since my last post. I intended to post sooner, but the quaint little libraries that pepper Vermont happen to be afflicted with quaint little hours too, so I could never actually locate an open one.
Anyway, I have spent the last few days riding through what can only be called Tourist Country. First came the Adirondacks in New York. I was actually very disappointed in the Adirondacks, but I think this is mainly because its the sort of region that can't be appreciated from the road. There were very few scenic views, private properties lined all of the lakeshores, and the towns were all wall-to-wall souvenir shops and overpriced restaurants. The few glimpes I had of the distant masses of mountains towering over lakes were impressive, and I expect if I had gotten into the woods I woudl have found the region enthralling. But, alas, I was chained to the pavement.
After a visit to Fort Ticonderoga and a cool little chain-ferry ride across Lake Champlain, I pulled into Vermont two days ago. One of the major reasons I chose a northern route is because I wanted to end up in New England, and Vermont swiftly reminded me of why. As soon as you enter the state, everything seems more verdant. Rushing rivers ran beside the roads for most of the route while there is a continuous backdrop of forested mountains in view from pretty much the entire breadth of the state. Hills (though often painfully steep) afford you reguar views in every direction. The towns are lovely (if cutesy), and everything simply feels fresh and clear. I only spent 24 hours there, but it was one of the highlights of the trip.
New Hampshire has been great as well. Not quite as cutie-pie, and really, really crowded (well, it is a Saturday in August,) but the scenery has been even better. This morning I ascended Kancamagus Pass, basically the spine of the Appalachians, and enjoyed views of distant rounded peaks stretching for miles in every direction. The White Mountains lack the ferocity of the Rockies or the scale of the Cascades, but in terms of sheer attractiveness they rival both.
The downside to this is that half of New England seems to be here right now. There's a traffic jam stretching for miles in every direction out of Conway, which seems to be the epicenter of this madness. I'm heading east into Maine after this, and hoping things calm down a bit-and that the campsites get a little less exorbitant. And in 2 1/2 days, I'll be done! (Sort of - I'm still debating a loop through Nova Scotia, and I will almost certainly bike south from Bar Harbor to my parents' home in Massachusetts to end the trip.)

Boonville, New York - Clearly, they were asking for that kind of subject line when they named this town.
Upstate New York is terrific - uncrowded, densely wooded, picturesque, and not overly touristy. At least not this bit, which is kind of sandwiched between the Finger Lakes and the Adirondacks. It's been great riding, though, and the temperature has dropped a bit since yesterday (though the humidity hasn't.)
The Boonville library has a USB port, so here are a few more pix. They keep you to 1/2 hour, so I can't give a full complement, but here are a few.

Illinois - Andy Warhol meets Christo? No, just some of the decor outside a Campbell's soup factory in Illinois.






Fremont, Ohio - Answering the eternal question, who's buried in Hayes' tomb? (Speaking of caretaker presidents, I also got to ride a scintillating stretch of the Herbert Hoover Highway in Iowa.)






Perry, NY - The upper right of the image is self-explanatory. The lower left is a giant pile of wrecked sailboats that were ripped from their respective docks during torrential rainfall the previous night.





Geneva-on-the-Lake, Ohio - Located on lake Erie, this was about the tackiest tourist town this side of Hampton Beach. But it did harbor at least one piece of history, as evidenced by this sign.

Fulton, NY - I've been getting a lot of incredulous stares today.
It's not that I'm riding backwards, or standing on the seat, or wearing a tutu. It's that, with the temperature at something over 100 and the humidity making it even nastier, I'm riding at all. But here I am, putting in another roughly 100-mile day through the beautiful, if wilting, countryside of central New York.
Why the heck am I doing this?
Well, for starters, my other options are limited. I could hang around at a campground and sweat all day. I could plop down $50 for a hotel room and sit around watching daytime TV.
Or, I can rise above it and rip down the road, with the reward being a cool wind in my face. In fact, in weather like this, the only time I actually feel comfortable is when I'm on the bike; after all, I'm creating my own breeze. It's when I stop and get off that I start to sweat and suddenly feel lethargy creeping in.
So I'm soldiering on. Fortunately, I'm in the vicinity of Lake Ontario, so whichever campsite I stay at tonight will have a beach and, if I'm lucky, a lake breeze. If tonight is anything like last night, I may have to hop out of my tent at about 2 a.m. and take a dip. As much as I've complained about noisy neighbors at campsites, their ability to keep me awake pales before 80-degree temperatures at midnight.
Man, there are times when I really miss Alaska.
P.S. Relax, Mom and Dad, I'm drinking plenty of fluids. An ungodly amount, in fact.