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.

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.