The King of New England

From Quebec over the river and along the highway back towards America the road is fairly uninteresting. It only becomes undulating and tree filled as we reach the US border. We stop off at a suspermarket before crossing the border to get something decent to eat. Still inexplicably French the young girl at the check out couldn't speak English. I got my French mixed up and tell her, "You don't speak French." Who cares? By this point we're almost at the border and instant English.
At was worried about the border crossing. This route isn't a particulary busy checkpoint and we only see one car drive through in the 10 minutes at the duty free shop in which we get rid of our Canadian change on chocolate.
I was worried because the crossing from Canada last time into Washington state was a hassle and took forever with endless questions about how we came about owning a car in the US. This time it was different. The guys on border patrol were much more laid back and didn't ask us once about ownership of the car. They did search the car, take our keys and ask me a load of questions though. "Do you have any food in the car?",
"Yes, cereal" I reply.
"So you have milk then?".
"No."
"Then how do you eat your cereal?".
"We buy milk, we have no fridge in the car."
And so on.
Once through the border and into the state of Maine the road cuts through large forests and up and over numerous small hills whilst we glimpse at an abundance of lakes and rivers, some still with thin ice on top.
We stop over at Bangor. I'd heard of this town only through fiction. The horror writings of Stephen King were based around the area and Bangor has featured in a few stories. Not only that but this is where he resides, complete with a spiders-web front gate, not that we saw it. We spent half an hour looking along a street for it but it turns out there are two streets both named the same but on different parts of town, brilliant.
The town itself is fairly small but nice enough. Brick buildings mark the couple of blocks of the centre of town and large wooden residential houses are the norm in the widespread outskirts. Although the centre is almost deserted two guys are enthusiastically thrashing away on acoustic guitars and belting out tunes. There's an abundance of large homes here, more than we've seen anywhere else in America. It does remind me of the typical scene in films of kids walking home along wide leafy pavements towards their large whiteboard houses. Generally America is nothing like this at all. Pretty much all across it the houses are small and flimsy looking. Maybe this is a sign of things along the East coast.
We're embarking on a trip down the coast through the major cities and towns that were the first major settlements of America. Most of these are well established towns in comparison to the many new sprawls of the west.
Bangor is ok enough but we're only passing through to get to one of only a few national parks on the eastern seaboard. The west of America certainly has the winning hand when it comes to areas of natural beauty and wilderness.
The next few days are spent on the road passing through the quaint towns of New England. I thought New England was a state but in fact it is just the name of a collection of states in the area, for now we're still in Maine.