Dog Days in New England

Dog Days in New England

Sian Thornthwaite

Dog Days in New England

Sian Thornthwaite

Copyright 2013 Sian Thornthwaite

Smashwords Edition

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Idle Thoughts

Having a plan

Setting sail

Heading to the Orient

Across Connecticut

The smallest states

Cape Ann, MA

And into Maine

Deer Isle

New Hampshire

Into Vermont

Keeping it local: Middlebury

South to Woodstock

Branbury State Park

Into the high country

Revolution and independence

An unholy Sunday

In search of Champ

Moosalamoo

Most Peculiar

Burlington - the best of Vermont

Return to the Empire State

Heading south

The final stop

To the lighthouse

On the Hippy Trail

Back to the lighthouse....

Kaaterskill

New York: New York

Sailaway

Debark

Idle Thoughts

Warrensburg, Missouri sits bang in the middle of the United States, it is the mid of the mid-West of America, at the very heart of the fly over states. Geographically located at the centre of this vast country, a thousand miles from either ocean, it is small town, provincial, rural America; where politics is most definitely local, very local, and its Main Street every one of its 1,161 miles from Wall Street.

However, I did not fly over, I landed in Warrensburg. Actually, the US Airways plane landed at Kansas City airport, but Warrensburg was my first real experience of the United States. In May 1990, as the cold war was thawing, Latvia declaring independence and Germany reunifying, I was a post-graduate student, with a newly awarded travel scholarship to study transportation in the States. The plan was to spend time visiting federal agencies and departments in Washington DC, with school district officials in Maryland and Virginia, but before that I would join delegations from all fifty states for two weeks in Warrensburg, Missouri.

I had travelled abroad before, on safe exchange trips to stay with school pen friends in Germany and France - the usual rite of passenger for English teenagers in the 1980s. This, however, was a world away; bewildering, strange and alien. It smelt and sounded, looked and felt so far abroad, geographically and personally. As I walked from my motel into Warrensburg’s small town centre, I was fascinated. This was-the all-American image of the white picket fenced, rambler houses and of the boxy brownstone banks with their ornate fascia lining a dusty main street straight out of a western movie. The roar of an occasional flashy sports car stood out incongruously among the lines of great hulking boxes of cars wallowing along the streets and parked up, nose in to the pavement, staged as though the modern day equivalent of horses. I stood in the dusty heat by the railroad track near the station and watched the daily gleaming huge brushed aluminium Amtrak train as it rattled and whistled its way through the grade crossing, anonymous people sitting in the dining car far above looking out, and I was bewitched.

I was as intrigued by the people as much as by the place. They were friendly, confident, inquisitive, and so boisterous. The conference room was a cacophony of noise, as delegations rose to speak, arguments and debates in full flow, but with a courtesy and order that belied the bellicosity. I sat beside a New Yorker, whose brash staccato accent was demanding and forceful, yet who plied me with coffee, and kindly ensured I understood what was going on during the proceedings.

For the twenty-two years since that sunny May day the United States of America had been a country, and Americans a people, that continued to fascinate me. During the intervening years I had travelled to the States innumerable times, on business, for friends’ weddings, to see colleagues and a partner. In the early years after 1990, my trips had often included the luxury of a few days travelling by train tagged on to a business or other trip providing opportunity to sample the scale and variety of the American landscape. Days and nights on romantically named routes that conjured up the movie elegance of the 1930s. The California Zephyr, boarded in Denver late one night, swayed and shuddered its way from a mile high down through the Rockies and across the wide expanse of the plains of Nebraska, to wind its mile-long silver tail across the mighty Mississippi river. Taking the Lakeshore Express, which escaped the skyscrapers of Chicago, to skirt the great Lakes before heading east to hug the Hudson river bank and burrow into the commotion of Penn Station. Catching the Carolinian from Washington DC’s cathedral like Union Station with its vaulted great hall, chic shops and platform gates to roll south across the Potomac and through the Virginian fall foliage to Greensboro, North Carolina.

There had been many sharp spring and balmy autumnal Sunday mornings whiled away with a coffee and copy of the Washington Post, sitting at café tables in the quaint and chic Old Town in Alexandria or at Eastern Market in the shadow of the Capitol, in Washington, DC, neighbourhoods that had come to feel more home than any other ‘home’ did.

In recent years though, my view of the United States had become that of the vista from an airplane window, the panorama from behind the double glazed hush of a multi-story city centre hotel or meeting room, or looking out from the plate glass sterility of an airport lounge. It had become limited to the cloistered, sanitised and homogenised world of business suits, expense lunches; upscale, upbeat, and upmarket; but personally unchallenging and uninspiring. Visits that had become concertinaed together, book ended by my increasingly stubborn belief that New York really was ‘doable’ in two days, Washington DC manageable in three and the mid-West perfectly practicable in four; real places replaced by the alphabet soup of IATA codes joining the dots on ever shorter and more brutal journeys. My sense of America had become no more than airport hopping, devoid of any concept of place, distance, location or time; the working world of corporate, Anywhereville bland and beige.

This journey, therefore, began as I guess many adventures, foolish jaunts, escapades or mid-life crises do, with chance conversations and some idle thoughts.

I was increasingly wearying of such hard-edged brutal business travel. When the arrival in the mail of an elite status air miles card counted as exciting news, the realisation hit hard that it might be time to take a pause from a life that had fast become an homage to Walter Kirn. I wanted to rediscover America and the concept of travel if only temporarily. As I watched the film Up in the Air in some soulless multiplex in suburban London surrounded by kids who looked as though they had never been further than Hayes I realised, that with one notable exception, there was not a hotel or airport featured to which I could not add a Trip-Advisor review. I might have been travelling more and more, but I was seeing and feeling less and less, which brought to mind an interview question at university many years earlier when asked to comment on whether there was any difference between a traveller and a tourist. My response had been along the lines of a tourist too often visits but does not necessarily see. I wanted to be a traveller again, to see and feel; not to be a tourist or business visitor.

My view of America was increasingly one of skimming on the surface, cocooned in major city centres, hotels and convention centres, and I wanted recapture my initial fascination of that day in May 1990. Did that more quirky small town America still exist, or was it only in my memory? Were Steinbeck and Tom Wolfe right that you could not go back home because home ceased to exist other than in the mothballs of our memory? Had small town America been denuded, corporatized and coalesced into some parody of America, the scenes portrayed in so much bland US TV and film exported round the world? Or would it still have the power to bewilder and bewitch?

These idle thoughts had played around for a while but, as always, required a catalyst or two to overcome the inherent inertia required of any travel outside the comfort zone and the first of those challenges came in the form of Travels with Charley. A friend taught English Literature and she recommended reading John Steinbeck’s book Travels With Charley. It was one of the set texts for her winter book group.

In the autumn of 1960, at the age of fifty-eight, John Steinbeck had travelled around the United States, taking seventy-five days to rediscover his country. There were those who argued he never made the journey, others who contended much of it was spent not alone but rather in the company of his wife. Other argued he stayed in hotels and motels rather than slumming it in a camper van. The motives for his journey were also disputed, one argument being he wanted to see his country one last time, knowing that he was dying and in poor health.

You’ll love it, she proclaimed. She was right. I laughed out-loud and recognised so much; it was un-put-downable. I read the book in one sitting, and re-read it, but then what? The obvious question was why not do Travels with Bailey? The conflicting theories about Steinbeck’s own travels to me were irrelevant. I was captivated by his comments and his words chimed I discovered that I did not know my own country…I had not felt this country for nearly twenty-five years. I wanted to look again and to rediscover his monster land, to re connect with the America that (and its people who) so intrigued me as a student on that dusty May Day. America was ugly, brash, loud, and tacky; simultaneously, it managed to be disturbingly familiar whilst dis-orientatingly alien. The oft mis-quoted adage about us being separated by a common language I knew did not even begin to scratch the surface of our shared heritage or our differences. America itself was a huge land of extreme contrasts and contradictions that I wanted to understand and travel into again.

Steinbeck’s companion was Charley his old French gentleman poodle. A born diplomat, a very big poodle of a colour called bleu. Described as a good friend who would rather travel than anything he can imagine.

I no longer wanted to travel without my beagle, and if Steinbeck could do it with Charley, why not us? My companion would be Bailey. For a brief time, I did debate whether taking Bailey was wise, but it was a fleeting thought. He and I had travelled and done most things together. Bailey is a pedigree English hound. Born near Oxford, in Prime Minister David Cameron’s Witney constituency his lineage is most definitely rural English through and through. One colour short of a typical beagle, Bailey is a tan and white, which means he has a saddle and patches that are a lovely toffee coloured brown. His white is often not too white (due to his habit of rolling in anything that can take the edge off) but at his brightest, it is a lovely shiny creamy colour. Everyone assumes he is called Bailey because of his colouring, Bailey’s Irish Cream, but that is coincidence and there are other reasons he acquired his name. Rather than the deep chestnut colour nose he should have, he has instead a distinctive little pale pink and brown nose. However, it is a nose that glows almost deep red at times of intense scents or excitement. It is the Belisha beacon of the beagle world and a useful warning sign of an impending chase, over excitement or agitation. He is an independent and strong willed Beagle, and he was five in May, so the ideal age for a beagle to travel the world.

In retrospect, that my induction to small town America was in Warrensburg had been apt given it was the place where the phrase Man’s best friend supposedly was coined. At the Old Johnson County Courthouse in 1870, Graham G Vest delivered his famous Eulogy to a Dog about the one unselfish friend that a man can have in this selfish world…… in alert watchfulness, faithful and true, even unto death in a trial known as Old Drum regarding the shooting of a dog. Although Old Drum the best friend referred to was, of course, a foxhound rather than a beagle.

It was time for me to rediscover that monster land and revisit small town America, but this time with Bailey.

Having a plan

Being inspired to follow in Charley’s paw prints raised further obvious questions: where, when and how? It equally raised myriad reasons as to why we should not set out on such folly. I ran a business, and therefore really could not take the time off; then there was the cost of it all as I was self-employed, which meant not only the cost of the travel but the very real effects of the down time and the potential loss of work; and not least if we were to travel to the United States then there were the logistics of getting a dog across the Pond, and then; and so it went on.

The first and most obvious problem was getting across the Pond. The Atlantic Ocean is big. It covers about a fifth of the Earth’s surface, and there are more than three thousand miles across it from the UK to the United States. Although for several years now dogs had been allowed to travel without quarantine on re-entry into the UK, taking a hound to and from the States was not quite as simple as putting him on any plane or boat with me. I had spent many hours in airports across the States and seen dogs balefully staring out of crates in terminals, anticipating their collection, or sitting on the tarmac awaiting loading into aircraft holds. Although I was sure Bailey would be more than adaptable enough to cope with an eight-hour flight in an aeroplane’s cargo hold, I was not keen on flying myself. That initial excitement experienced as a sixteen or seventeen year old from buying a ticket, the anticipation of travel, the hubbub of checking in and boarding had all long since evaporated in the reality of travel, in the wake of 9/11 and budget airlines. Any vestige of enjoyment had been replaced by a visceral loathing of that mode of travel. Even turning left rather than right and heading to the sharper end only tempered the loathing; it still necessitated the mind numbing tedium of hours in pointless queues for demeaning checks of questionable value, being crunched up into confined spaces and feeling pernicious jet lag; not to mention the sheer hell of noisy, crowed, often dirty and disorganised airports.

A decade ago, I had visited the Ellis Island immigration museum in New York harbour and stood in its cathedral like registry room with its soaring, white-tiled roof. The evocative echoes nearly a century on of the forty million feet and the emotion of twenty million dreams that had passed through that room, the tears and the laughter of those who had waited patiently for entry into the United States, palpable and poignant. The presence of those who had lingered on the long lines of benches fearfully awaiting inspection somehow remained imprinted in the room; and their relief and elation as they passed down the stairs out to their New World beyond still tangible. As I stood at the window and contemplated the sight of the Twin Towers and the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan across the narrow strip of water, I was determined that one day I would sail into New York Harbour. My decision for this trip was made. I would sail. If I was to sail to New York, then the animal import regulations dictated there was only one option and that was to sail on the Queen Mary II.

I sent an initial enquiry to Cunard in October 2010 about taking Bailey to New York on Queen Mary II and almost immediately they responded providing photographs of the deck area and the kennels and giving indicative prices. It was spartan, and I was sure that Bailey was not going to be too impressed at the lack of grass, but it would only be for six days. They also informed me that whilst bookings for cabins should be made via Cunard UK, their kennels were to be booked directly through their American kennels’ office in the United States.

Bailey’s vet is Dan, a practical, engaging, friendly, no-nonsense country vet who has tended to and treated my beagles for more than a decade and known Bailey since he waddled up the steps into his surgery to introduce himself as an eight weeks old pup, all paws, ears and attitude, as beagle pups are inclined to be. Beagle owners tend to get to know their vets well, usually extremely well, given beagles’ preponderance for eating things that, technically, are inedible, indigestible or toxic and almost inevitably require treatment, almost invariably out of hours. Bailey’s roll call of veterinary disasters to date had been diverse. It had included eating stolen Ibuprofen – a sugar coated delicacy for a beagle puppy - which required not only out of hours treatment but was followed by a memorable visit to the local hospital’s emergency room for a dose of active charcoal, much to the alarm of the waiting room full of weekend mountain bikers nursing their assortment of bloodied scrapes and sprains, and a year later the consumption of a pound and a half of grapes at one sitting, the stalks and pips he left tidily on the table as proof of his impromptu feast. The latter incident required several days of in-patient treatment at the vets, hooked up to a drip, during which time Bailey voiced his objections loudly, entertained and exasperated the veterinary nurses in equal measure, and then got himself evicted for using a dextrous paw to pinch the neighbouring, sicker dog’s food out of its crate.

I shared the information received about the kennels with Dan whose verdict was that it would probably be less of a holiday for Bailey than for me, but that he was unlikely to come to any harm, and so we should go for it. Enquiring about a kennel proved to be the easy part. Booking a kennel was to become a challenge of epic proportions; the word nightmare came to mind. Bailey may be quite tall for a beagle but beagles are not particularly big dogs. Despite that, Cunard’s decision was that Bailey required two kennels (with the partition removed to make one bigger space) not one. My concern was not so much the paying for a second kennel but rather I suspected the chances of getting two kennels would be even lower than only needing one. I queried whether this really was essential, and was met with insistence that yes, two kennels would be required. This then resulted in much measuring of the hound from his nose tip to base of tail, and from ears to paws and back again. Measuring a beagle is not an easy task in itself, as they are practised and energetic squirmers, nevertheless a set of reasonably accurate results was sent off to Cunard. To strengthen our argument, I sent a photograph of Bailey side by side with CoCo, his girlfriend, who as a labra-doodle is substantially larger than him and who had managed her transatlantic crossing a few years before on her way back from Canada on Queen Mary II in one kennel. This having been explained to Cunard, and after yet more lengthy discussion and persuasion, they finally agreed that only one kennel would be required for a beagle each direction.

By December, there was another lengthy email exchange with Michelle in Cunard’s American offices regarding kennels. She and I were now on first name terms. She had been unfailingly polite and responsive, but Cunard really had created the most mind-blowingly byzantine arrangement for any bookings that involved a dog. The gist of it was that we could book a cabin for just about any transatlantic crossing during 2011; however, they could not tell us whether there was a kennel available, and we would have to take a chance on someone cancelling. However, there was no indication of the likelihood of a cancellation…..and if we did not get a kennel then the deposit paid for the cabin would be lost. Therefore, we could go on a waiting list blind, pay a deposit and have no idea whether or not we would be likely to get a booking for a kennel and, if so, what dates they would be or lose the deposit. Either way, planning the day job and running a business around that approach was impossible. Patently, this booking process was intended for those on a substantially higher pay grade than me and who did not have anything as trivial as client meetings or a business to consider. Quite how I was supposed to book accommodation in the States around this elusive arrangements Cunard were not clear on either.

Alternatively, they suggested I waited until February 2011 and then register interest in travelling during summer 2012; but then I could not book a kennel without a cabin and I could not book them together via the same place and so the infuriating circle continued.

The conclusion was that making our trip during 2011 was most definitely a no go. There was nothing for it, we would have to wait and register interest in February for the following year.

Despite the fact there was absolutely no way we could travel during 2011, Cunard added an almost daily colourful pile to the bank statements and bills arriving in the mail. I had to give their marketing people credit, they certainly believed in saturation coverage. The postman conscientiously delivered the endless glossy Cunard leaflets extolling their great offers and cruises and, of course, informing me exactly how easy it was to book.

Monday 4th April 2011 was D-day, the day bookings opened for the 2012 transatlantic sailings. Trying to spend money with Cunard had been a long, laborious journey already spanning nearly eighteen months. By mid-morning, I was glued to my Blackberry…yes! Emails started coming through. At last, our sailing dates had been confirmed; my cabins confirmed and yes, one kennel confirmed for each of the outbound and return journeys. The prices for the kennels as shown on the invoices were of course wrong for both directions; but what the hell, after all the months of toing and froing, who cared whether it was supposed to be in dollars or sterling? That could be resolved at a later day before the final payment due the following year. My fear was that if I queried anything, I could be plunged back into the eternal circle of damnation that passed for booking - again.

Immediately on booking, Cunard wanted me to confirm my preferences for dining arrangements: the