and not a chippy in sight

New England is famed for lobster, as well as other varieties of fish, and clam chowder. Fish soup really isn't to my taste and we can't afford lobster so a simple fish and chips would do. But alas we scour every town we pass to no avail in a vein hope of seeing that allusive chippy. It's just not the done thing here and even when it is the chips aren't chips at all, they're fries.
On we go to an overnight stay in Freeport. On the face of it this white board town is like all the others we've passed through on the east coast but no. This one is much odder. The short main street has shops on both sides, nothing strange about that, until you look closely and realise every building is the same. They all seem to have been painted white on the same day and built in the same style. In fact it's more than that. Nowhere have we seen so many designer named brand shops in one small town before. It transpires that Freeport is a bit fake. It's like an out of town retail outlet that forgot to move out of town and became the town itself.
This all started way back when a bloke called L.L. Bean started selling outdoor equipment here. His store was popular and just kept expanding and expanding into all sorts of other areas like fashion and kitchenware and so on. The popularity of the store drew in people from around the area and other brands latched on to what is now a small town with 120 retail stores. And on the whole they're all completely bland and uninspiring. L.L. Bean's massive store didn't even sell camping gas, and this is supposed to be an outdoor based shop!
That night we try and buy a pizza but the shop is already closing at 7:30pm. Typical. We settle for McDonald's as it's the only thing open and is actually a really flash building inside with a proper cafe look about it.
Next day we fail to find a watch for Laura's birthday in more abysmal shops and head a bit further south to Portland. Downtown Portland has the usual grim and dirty look about it but further on in the Old Port area things improve. A handful of cobbled streets house various interesting shops and restaurants that far outweigh anything Freeport had to offer. We buy a watch from a small jewellers, they're just about to close on a Saturday at 1:30pm, before diving into our second Irish bar on the trip. I hate Irish bars. For one, they're all over the world. In any small town anywhere there's an Irish bar. They're like the McDonald's of pubs. In America it's worse. Everyone likes to think they're Irish in someway and couldn't pull it off worse. There's almost always nothing Irish about these places either, except that maybe they sell Guinness. After average food and slightly better beer we head on.
Further down the coast the towns take on the look of English seaside resorts that over the years have been left to go a bit mouldy around the edges. The unpronounceable town of Ogunquit was our next stop off. It has a couple of beaches that are rough, blustery and pretty cold. But still there are a few people knocking about and over a sand bar it's a bit sheltered from the gale hitting the shore. We stroll about and notice two lads in their late teens playing catch. They could even be in their early twenties. Now playing catch at this age anywhere else in the world is quite clearly ridiculous. But here it's fairly normal as the overly dull sport of baseball is popular. I wouldn't normally mention these two lads at all other than on this occasion they seem to have left their ball at home and decided to throw a shoe at each other. I ask you, who throws a shoe?! We contain our laughter walking on toward the end of the sheltered beach. Unfortunately, this meant we have to walk back past these buffoons on the way to the car. Only this time the shoe throwing has become old hat and they've taken to throwing an ungainly large stick at each other. Then one of them picks up another equally large stick and the topless pair are now whacking each others sticks in a sort of blind man joust. This whole scene makes no sense to me at all.
With this bafflement still fresh in our minds we stop over in York. I've not even been to York in England but I'm sure it's nicer than the American counterpart. Still, it's not a bad town and even has a small beach and park from where we watch the sunset, it's a shame that even small parks like these are charging a fee just to enter. There's no doubting the quality of the facilities but free parks for all is somewhat of a non-entity in this country. It makes me feel like I should take our free parks a bit less for granted when I get home.
From this mix of seaside towns we head to three large and famous cities in close proximity to each other. Maybe one of them will have a chippy.