New England road trip

[pderocco]

I just wrapped up a road trip in New England, touching all states except Connecticut. The weather was mixed, hitting me with an hour-long downpour in Maine, a few days of clouds and sprinkles, and a few good days.

The main part of the road trip was a six-day loop starting and ending in southeast MA. I clinched a bunch of routes on the North Shore (N of Boston), then completed US-1 and all its alternates up to Fort Kent ME over the course of a few days. I also drove the northernmost part of I-95, so now I only have gaps in FL, SC, and PA on that road.

From Fort Kent, I took a short detour through New Brunswick, partly because that had the only Starbucks within a hundred miles. I then drove the eastern US-2 and a couple of alternates across ME and NH to Lancaster NH, where it crosses US-3 and the Connecticut river. I drove all of US-3 to the Canadian border and all of VT-102 on the other side of the river, and as I mentioned in the Connecticut River Crossings thread, drove every bridge along the way. I stopped at the Third Connecticut Lake, the official headwaters of the river, which was a plain vanilla lake with nothing on it to distinguish it from any other small lake. But a couple of the bridges I drove were covered bridges, and a couple were next to old covered bridges too rickety to support cars any more.

Since I grew up in MA, I had driven lots of I-93 and US-3, but there were gaps I filled on this trip, including the north end of I-93, and a bit more south of Franconia Notch. I systematically clinched the rest of US-3 in NH along with all of NH-3A and MA-3A.

So the main clinches were US-3 and all its alternates and I-93. "State" clinches included I-95 in ME, and US-1 and US-2 and all alternates in NH and ME. Combining that six-day trip with four days of other travel in the southeastern MA and RI area, I also clinched 42 other little state routes, none of which were particularly interesting by themselves except perhaps for VT-102 along the Connecticut River. I also enjoyed NH-1A which runs the length of the coast along the beach.

I also visited the last two missing counties in ME, and one in VT, so only have three more counties to go in New England. Next summer.

Some things I noticed along the way:

• Maine has very good signage, especially for reassurance signs and directional signs. The latter are not usually green signs with a bunch of numbers on them, but rather are Christmas trees of white bannered route numbered signs with arrows, but they always seemed to be well organized, and I didn't see any errors in them (not that I checked the validity of every side road mentioned on them).
• Maine is pretty poor and run down. I've seen lots of barns before, that were collapsing under their own weight as they rot away, and that seems to be a natural part of the life cycle of barns, but in Maine, I saw a lot of actual houses, including a couple of big ones, caving in on themselves. Never saw that before.
• Being in the francophone part of Canada, all the signage in New Brunswick is bilingual. However, the workers at Starbucks seemed to have limited English comprehension, and didn't get my order right.
• MA is promiscuously scattering BGSes with electronic displays of the time to various exits. They seem to be everywhere. I never thought those were very useful, and are getting less and less so as smartphones become ubiquitous. And they must be expensive.