Fall Traditions

Every fall, as Halloween approaches, my teeth begin to ache and I salivate more than usual. It's time for candy corn.


I gorge myself on this stuff every October. It's a new thing. I never touched it as a kid, not even in high school or early college. But then when I lived with Seamus and Ashley, in the fall of '06, I got really sick and spent a week on the couch, playing Final Fantasy XII, watching movies, sweating, dying, and eating nothing but candy corn and loaves of french bread. Ever since then, candy corn is fall comfort food. I bought a tub at Hannaford's yesterday.

I also need to accompany it with a video game, so I started back in on Link to the Past. What a fantastic game. I played it until I could eat no more candy corn and felt guilty about not doing homework, then I stopped. Also, if you haven't noticed by now, my secret goal here at thisisnolongertheroadtrip is to write about video games until I have driven everybody I know into a state of coma-like boredom.

Ashley and I also bought a scented candle, which is SOP for me in autumn as well. It's my favorite season. School is really, really time-consuming, so I haven't had a lot of time to get out and do things that are actually fun/worth writing about. Ashley and I did, however, buy our plane tickets home. We're getting out of here on the 11th of December and spending almost six weeks in Washington! Get ready Bellingham, friends who still live in the area, and Gabe and Amanda and Kaylee. I also got a second job, working as an online tutor for Smarthinking. I'm going through their training program right now and getting pretty excited about it. I'll have students again, sort of! I really miss teaching, and this will bring a bit of it back to me. The training manual is full of funny composition neologisms. I am an e-structor who focuses on HOCs before I focus on LOCs when I am writing an asynchronous tutorial. They also won't me to know that "although you can't see your students, you can still touch them."

I will, however, refrain from touching them.

Crisis Averted

Thirteen and a half pounds of Adam's crunchy.

Things that I like (so far)

Last night on the phone, my mom mentioned she's been reading my blog (hi mom). “It's good. Remember to keep it positive,” she said. And I laughed. It has been a little whiny and gripy around thisisnolongertheroadtrip, so I'm going to try and pick things up a little bit. Here are some of the things that I've found and absolutely loved.

• The bridge from Kittery to Portsmouth. You cross from Maine to New Hampshire over the Piscataqua on a cool bridge built as a memorial to New Hampshire's fallen World War I soldiers and sailors. Entering Portsmouth, you can look to your right and see an old line of riverfront brick buildings, their sides right up against the river. Every time I see them I feel for a second that I'm not looking at buildings on the Piscataqua, but on the Thames. There's another awesome bridge from Portsmouth to Newington that crosses a small bay always crowded with white sailboats. It's gorgeous, and looks so New England.

• The UNH campus. It's old and made of bricks. It's got bell towers and halls named after local scholars, and somewhere in it, Charles Simic is probably hanging out writing something genius.

• Deb, the helpful hairstylist. I got a haircut today in a tiny walk-in place on Central street in Dover. Deb, the barber, asked if I came here often to get my hair cut by Al. I said no, and that I was new in town. “Welcome to Dover,” she said, and launched into a long list of the best places to eat, to buy groceries and home furnishings, to pick local fruit, and to buy cheap gas. Ashley and I got tons of ideas of places to eat and things to do. Cheers, Deb!

• The cemeteries. Turns out when the area has been inhabited for four hundred years, there are lots of cemeteries. Ashley and I walked around a big one today just outside of Portsmouth. It's weird to see names of families I recognize from buildings on UNH's campus, or the handful of state parks we drove past yesterday. I thought about last summer when we walked around Bayview cemetery in Bellingham and marveled at the grave stones from the 1890s and early 1900s. Today I saw the grave of a preacher who was buried in 1731. Many of the graves from the 1800s had fresh flowers on them—family members still come to honor their lineage. “Nobody stays in one place for one hundred years in the west,” Ashley said. It's a very different sense of history.

• Tuttle Farm. On our way back from the cemetery we stopped at Tuttle farm, the oldest continually running family farm in the country (est. 1632). I've complained before on here about the weirdness of the grocery stores—no good cheese or peanut butter, unfamiliar brands, etc. Tuttle farm fixed all this. It carries mostly locally grown organics (most of them grown at Tuttle farm itself), along with tons of plants and herbs, candles, locally made soaps, and all that crazy hippie crap I'm used to in Bellingham. The place even smelled like the Bellingham Co-op. We're definitely going back.

Five questions for New Hampshirites (and New Englanders in general)

1. What's up with all the bunting? It's everywhere, along with tons of American flags. I've never been to a place that has so much red, white and blue. We drove past a house that had an American flag in every window (and the old houses here have lots of windows)! There are Obama-Biden stickers everywhere, and a surprising number of still-hanging-on Kerry-Edwards stickers. Some sort of New English pride thing, maybe? All of this I can understand, except for the bunting. I don't think I've ever seen bunting outside of period films, and now it's everywhere. What's up with all the bunting?


2. How are west coasters supposed to eat here? Food here is generally cheaper than back home (no sales tax, sweet), but we're finding it difficult to find some of our staples: no Tilamook cheese, yogurt, or sour cream; no Adam's peanut butter or gourmet peanut butter of any kind; no Hershey's syrup (that one's weird); and on a weird note, it's not called Dreyer's ice cream over here, it's called Edy's, even though it's the exact same product.


3. Why so serious? A mean way to put it would be that everybody is just a little uptight, but that's not quite accurate. Ash characterized it as a lack of west coast earnestness, which is a good way to put it, but I think there's also a lack of self-deprecation. Everything is important. And with good reason: Dover was established in 1623, a donation from Andrew Carnegie helped establish the University of New Hampshire, and many local restaurants, no matter how skeezy, proudly trace their history (Asia Fantasia! Fine Chinese and Korean takeout since 1958!). This all isn't to say New Hampshirites don't joke or have fun—we bought our bed from a jocular, elbow-nudging old guy named Frank—but there's kind of a current of seriousness running beneath everything.


4. Why does your traffic suck so bad? Everybody gets backed up at the tolls as people frantically lane change between the cash, EZ Pass, and exact change lanes—that's to be expected. But why does Dover, with barely 26,000 people, get swamped by bumper-to-bumper traffic during rush hours? I have two theories about this. Firstly, the town is so old there's no grid system—streets intersect at weird angles, there are no stoplights where there should be, occasionally stoplights where I'm used to seeing stop signs, pedestrian-only roads, giant six-way intersections where two or more of the roads are one-way.... it's a giant mess. I'm getting used to it, though. Secondly, nobody here takes the bus. Everybody drives. I'm hoping this changes when school starts and the students return.

5. Why is wine so expensive? When we find bottles we recognize from Bellingham and Seattle, they're four to seven dollars more expensive. The local stuff is expensive too, although oddly the French imports aren't too much more than they are at home. What makes this even weirder is that beer is much cheaper than in Washington (haven't compared liquor yet). As we are too poor to afford a $13 bottle of wine that tastes like a $6 bottle, this makes Ashley very sad.

This came out a little gripier than I intended. Sorry New Hampshirites, I really do like your state! It's just the little things that hang me up and make me remember I'm not at home. Last night my friend in New York posted a Facebook status update about a meteor shower from midnight to five a.m. Man, I thought, wouldn't it be cool to be on the east coast so I could see that? I didn't realize until this morning that I am on the east coast, and, had it been clear last night, I would have seen the meteor shower. This is going to take some getting used to.

Road Trip Day 5: Double meat

In Ohio and Pennsylvania, Ashley and I were confronted by a horrifying realization. Americans are fat. Of course it's a stereotype, but on the west coast, it's a stereotype that's easy to laugh off. Sure some Americans are fat, but many of us are skinny and beautiful, right? Right? In Pennsylvania, the words “obesity epidemic” take on new meaning. It's as widespread here as the common cold.

We stopped at a Subway to get lunch and plan out the last leg of our trip. I bought a ham sub.

“Would you like double meat?” the sandwich-maker asked.

“No.”

“Double cheese?”

“No.”

“Would you like to add bacon to your sandwich?”

“Uh, no.”

“Make it a combo and pay thirty-three more cents for a large soda?”

“No thank you.”

She nodded and finished my non-double-meat-double-cheese-added-bacon (yet still huge) sandwich. On the way into the bathroom I noticed a Subway advertisement. “Double your meat and get a free cookie!” And to think I could have had a free cookie.

Road Trip Day 4: Never go to Maumee, Ohio

We stayed at a Motel 6 in Maumee, Ohio. The only reason we stopped at the motel, hidden behind a strip mall of mini golf courses and low-rent beauty salons, was because we were both starving. On our way in, a fat man in sweatpants threw a styrofoam cup into the bushes (everybody litters in Ohio, it's weird). The hostess ignored us while we checked in. There was bulletproof glass in the hallway. In our room—accessed via a narrow, stained hallway—peeling stickers reminding us to use the deadbolt and warning us that Motel 6 was not accountable for stolen property coated the door.

Ashley had a monster of a headache, and we were dying of hunger, but Maumee had little to offer. There was a Chicago-style pizza place next to us, but we'd ordered pizza into the hotel room the night before, so we skipped it and drove across the freeway looking for something, anything. Hunger eventually forced us into a Frisch's Big Boy.

The food was sad and greasy, the waitstaff was composed of Maumeeians in their 40s and 50s, and Ashley's headache was so bad she was nauseous. I stared at my cheese steak sandwich. The people in the booth behind us were massively fat and having a loud conversation full of Star Wars puns and references. (The woman related a story about how she accidentally cut somebody off in traffic and responded to the shouted “Nice driving, Princess!” by yelling “We all drive like that... on Alderaan!”)

Needless to say we crashed early and left Maumee ASAP.

Apparently there is one cool thing in Maumee. We didn't see it.