Once again our weekly adventure was rained out so we did what any adventurous gaggle of millennials would do -we made sure to get a solid two or so hours of sleep and then went antiquing! OK, so I might be exaggerating a little but after 30 everything feels like two hours of sleep. Your knees gets creaky, you gain a fetching pair of black bags to place permanently under your eyes, and you look at children voluntarily sitting on the floor with immense envy. Youth really is wasted on the young. But I digress. We were talking about antiquing. I think. Yes. Antiquing.
ANYWAY. Earlier on my travel companion spent a good few minutes Googling cool places to check out. There was one in town and another whimsically titled store called The Book Garden that garnered his attention but alas the one in town was so devoid of personality I’m not even going to bother making an entry for it and the Book Garden was weirdly lacking in both books and gardens. It was a cute little place in the corner of one of those wedge shaped buildings that may have been nice to visit if you were already shopping on the street but it wasn’t worth just going to in it’s own. By now we were both wondering if today was going to be a total waste.
That’s when we finally stumbled half-hazardly onto a nearby winner – the Wickford Village Antiques! It was a cute little place absolutely loaded to the brim with loose buttons. Ten cents a piece. A button lovers utopia. But it wasn’t just the buttons that endeared me to this place it was also the strange doll in the window that looked like she was maybe an old Halloween decoration but I honestly couldn’t tell. And a creepy Humpty Dumpty plushie. And a windchime in the shape of a fish skeleton. Little weird. Loving that. And for the math nerds and historians there was even a tax book for the town of Coventry circa 1941. Suffice to say taxes were a lot less then. I admit it. I looked.
It was a sweet little shop in the end. Definitely worth a look if you happen to be in town.
Last week my one full day in Rhode Island turned out to be a rainy one so we decided that we should find something to do that was indoors. I didn’t really have any ideas but my travel companion suggested we poke around Providence for the day. We looked up what to do in Providence and found the RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] Museum. The photos of it made it seem very random and if there’s anything we both love it’s really random things.
The cost was steeper than most of my entries here at $17 per adult so it had to have something interesting, right? Well, we were off to find out! I was just hoping there was parking nearby, preferably a garage but alas there was only parallel parking along a busy street. Joy. There’s three things I haven’t learned how to do in life: tie my shoes like normal person, tell my left from my right, and parallel park. Luckily some ways up the road there was a park and I found three empty spots in a row. My travel companion says when this happens it’s not parallel parking, it’s just parking, but I’m not going to let his cynicism cloud what is clearly a win for me.
A hare! GET IT!!
The museum was surprisingly ordinary for being dedicated to design… Just a big plain brick building. Though the lobby by itself was as big as most of the museums I have visited here in New England. It even had a coat room with lockers and a bucket for wet umbrellas. Impressive. This was going to be good…
We entered the museum which… seemed to be a huge mostly empty gallery. There were a few creative dresses on display in one corner, some sort of holographic water fountain in another, and a neat selection of tiles made to look like hands were coming out of the walls. Besides that there was just a ton of white empty walls. The only full display we saw was another student exhibit talking about life in the US as a person of color. It was interesting… but still clearly the early work of students. It was something we were both happy to support buuuut…. we thought maybe there was something more to this? If not we both felt as if $17 was a bit steep. After this we entered another empty gallery that was huge and only contained a set of hand drums. They were curious things and I wanted to read the plaque on the wall but there was a security guard standing next to them with an intense energy that made me way too uncomfortable to want to stay in the room long enough for that so we both wandered off.
From here we finally stumbled into a gallery with something in it. It was mostly full of seemingly random things – a really dangerous looking toaster from the early days of electricity, a bunch of weird chairs, a flapper dress, a TV set from the 1960’s that looked like an astronaut’s helmet. And on the walls a small Jackson Pollock was mixed in. for seemingly no reason.
“I don’t get it.”
“I don’t either.”
“I could barf that up in ten minutes. Maybe he was really good at networking. And selling useless shit to rich people.”
Not too far away there was also a small Georgia O’Keefe painting. At least it looked like something. But didn’t really elicit any emotion from me. Which is probably a good thing. I’d been nearly brought to tears while visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam… which distressed everyone around me.
Demons, Tlazoteotl ‘Eater of Filth’ Martine Gutierrez
I thought this room was the end of the museum but it was actually just the end of this section. Beyond it was where things finally got interesting. We suddenly found ourselves wandering into what looked like a proper art museum. An enormous hall with giant portrait paintings surrounded by two rooms of medieval things. My travel companion finally felt like this was worth the trip. The paintings all seemed to have weird things going on in the background. I fell in love with the bored expression of this one boy and was alarmed by a swarm of Cherubs ripping a hare apart in the corner of another. Well… they do say children and animals don’t mix… and I always have been super creeped out by Cherubs. Maybe even more so than dolls and that’s saying something.
From here there was just a totally random mix of pretty much one or two items from every art movement jumbled with a lot of dishes. I enjoyed the Grecco Roman artifacts (including an ornately carved sarcophagus) and my travel companion seemed to be more keen on the Egyptian mummy complete with canopic jars. Both of us were impressed by the one sweet little Van Gogh they had in the same room as a Picasso. By now even the building was taking on character – most of it emanating from a massive glass bubble chandelier that was a spectacle all on it’s own even without the tentacles that slithered out of it.
When we came back down we realized we missed a room where this photographic portrait of the Aztec “filth-eater” god was. It was the perfect bizarre way to end our visit. By now we both agreed it was totally worth the $17 even if we were a bit skeptical at first…
Last week’s adventure was a little different as the entire point of it was to give some kids one last hurrah before the end of summer vacation which these days isn’t really as easy at it sounds… still I agreed to drive as mini golf sounded plenty reasonable to me. And monsters make for a fun theme in any event.
The adventure began when the GPS dumped us at a random busy intersection and all I could see were stores on every side of it. We drove for a while but didn’t see any signs. That’s when fate decided to step in when one of the kids suddenly needed a bandaid. This resulted in us driving into a nearby parking lot that housed a grocery store. The big surprise was finding out the mini golf was indoors, out back of the grocery store with only a few tiny signs letting people in to their existence. I don’t think we would have ever found it if it wasn’t for the bandaid incidence. Especially since I was looking for an outdoor venue. Being from the country I’d never heard of a putt putt golf green being indoors.
This place was interesting for sure. It was super dark and lit by black lights with bizarre neon murals dancing across the walls and all sorts of Halloween-like decorations everywhere. Up front there was a light smattering of arcade games. Not surprisingly there weren’t many people here. We were there quite a while and I think there were only three groups of people playing the course in all that time.
It was a surprisingly big course with lots of room for social distancing- although my ball turned out to be sticky for some unknown reason which made me desperately want my hand sanitizer but I get it. Anything held by children for any amount of time is going to be sticky. That’s one of the laws of nature.
All and all it turned out to be pretty fun. This was in part due to the fact I was almost as bad at it as the kids but to be fair this was only the second time I’ve ever been mini golfing. The kids seemed to be enjoying themselves which is all that mattered.
After we finished the course we let the kids play Spy in a big laser filled box. Weird game but creative and they seemed to like it. It was a sweet little outing and just the right amount of activity for me who was having my ass kicked by a non-Covid related bug at the time. This place was just the right amount of weird and obscure and I’d happily recommend it if you have children to entertain or need an idea for a cutesy date.
Mind you, it’d been a harrowing journey and I had been suffering from heat stroke for hours so I wasn’t exactly in the best of shape when I showed up. Add to that the fact that just prior to going into the tavern I’d made the mistake of trying a sip of sarsaparilla which did not go down well!
I showed up at the tavern red as a lobster and unable to string together a cohesive thought (which is probably why I somehow managed to wear a mask on my face and another around my neck at the same time without noticing.) ANYWAY… we had come here because we heard the place was supposed to be haunted and who doesn’t love a good haunted bar? The place was very old looking. They had decked it out in rustic 1800’s style. I was surprised the menu however was decidedly not rustic in any way shape or form. In fact it was downright worldly for a place like this.
I ended up ordering the Pecan Chicken which came on a bed of butternut squash ravioli. My companion got steak tenderloins which came out in a massive dish. I would have loved to have eaten my chicken but my stomach was violently angry at the abuses I put it through earlier in the day so I spent much of the next forty five minutes just sighing and looking at my food longingly. That being said I did bring it home and eat it later and it was fantastic!
I am sure we will be back. Probably whenever we get to find the nearby ghost village in the woods which we didn’t get to that day. Either way it was a lovely experience with polite staff and delicious food. With or without ghosts I’d still recommend this place.
Having decided one covered bridge was not enough we made our way from the Swamp Meadow Covered Bridge just a half an hour away to the Carl Erickson Covered Bridge which is in Pulaski State Park. This would have been helpful information to have as this is when our little adventure started to go sideways. It had no address to type in so I was at a loss on how to find it. Fortuneately although my GPS was clueless my phone believed it knew where it was so I handed the phone to my probably begrudging navigator and off we went!
We managed to drive within a mile of the covered bridge when we came to an open gate. I believed it was still an accessible road, my companion did not, so I let him convince me to park at a nearby picnic area so we could walk. This park was large but seemingly completely deserted. We didn’t see any other people and scarcely any other cars parked anywhere. Since it was only a mile hike he didn’t bring the water he usually does. Mistake number two.
It was in the nineties and we both figured a nearby trail probably was going in the same direction as the covered bridge so we took it. It was an obvious trail but poorly marked and it forked off into what seemed to be dozens of other sub trails. My phone was still on and attempting to track us but coverage was poor and it’s responses were flakey. Sometimes we’d be headed dead-on to the central trail which the bridge was supposed to be on, other times we appeared to be walking in exactly the opposite direction. Up hills. In extreme heat.
For once the exercise wasn’t making my legs burn or getting me super tired but that’s when my exercise induced asthma started to set in. It’s yet another way my body likes to randomly try to kill me. I huffed and puffed and tried not to push it too far. I’ve never been officially diagnosed so it’s not like I had an inhaler or anything. For the past thirty something years I have forgotten to bring up this issue to my doctor. Stupid me only remembers it’s a problem as it’s happening. Because I have the attention span of a gnat.
If that wasn’t enough I was starting to overheat. Bad. Heat rash crawled up my arms and turned my whole face beat red. My travel companion wanted to go back to the car but by this point my phone was telling me we’d already made 3/4ths of the journey so I convinced him we should just keep going. It wasn’t too much longer before we hit the Central Trail…. which was a road. The same road I’d parked near. We could have driven to the damn bridge! But no, we had .4 miles to go. On any normal day that’d be quick and easy. Not so much when you’re dying of heat stroke.
“I hope it’s over a big river! I need to dip my feet in cool water!” Every other time I have suffered this level of heat exhuastion a river has always rescued me and if it was deep enough I was jumping in. I did not care for proper manners at this point.
FINALLY we found the bridge. The bridge made for cars. Over a road. And the river it traversed…. which was tiny. More of a gurgling brook than a river. And it smelled of algae but I did not care. I lopped off my shoes and into the water my feet went. BLESSED COLD!! I splashed my legs and arms as well making sure not to get any water on my face… I didn’t want to add weird wilderness parasites to today’s damage report. I splashed for a few minutes but my travel companion was being eaten by bugs so we decided it was only a mile down a flat even dirt road to the car. Being refreshed from the river I ankled it pretty fast for about a tenth of a mile before heat exhaustion caught up with me again. I couldn’t keep up. At all.
So I threw the keys at my travel companion and told him to have fun finding the car as he apparently was born in the bowels of Hell and is completely impervious to heat. I’d be here somewhere along the road ready and waiting to be picked up. I cannot tell you how frustrating these situations are for me when my body just fails me. It wasn’t long after this I was forced to stop walking because my feet broke out in heat rash and literally felt like they were cooking from the inside out. Every step felt like I was walking over hot coal. So I sat on a rock, cursing, and resting for about fifteen minutes before I tried again. Luckily by then the Prius was driving up blaring bizarre music so I knew it had to be the right Prius! I hopped in and drank a liter and a half of water in two long draughts. Would have drank more if I could but at that point I’m pretty sure I would have puked it back up again.
Back at the beginning of the road I got back into the driver’s seat and we decided where to go next. We’d wanted to find a nearby ghost town but that was out of the question in the state I was in. Our other thing to tick off was the haunted Tavern on Main but it wouldn’t be open for another two hours… so we just drove into town, parked at the local dollar store, and walked up and down main street revisiting the country’s oldest consecutively run general store and the numerous antique stores. After which we did in fact make our way to the Tavern on Main. (And I know I complained A LOT in this entry but the bridge was sweet and the walk through the woods was beautiful! I was too busy trying to stay alive to take any photos but it was otherwise very enjoyable!)
It was another sweltering 90-something degree day so we decided to do something that wasn’t too excessive. My travel companion had never seen a covered bridge so we looked it up and apparently there’s only one authentic covered bridge in Rhode Island – the Swamp Meadow Bridge in Foster. Even more adorable than the fact there’s only one is the story behind the bridge which is not in any way haunted or even old… actually it’s basically the youngest covered bridge I have ever heard of being built in 1994 to replace a normal boring cover-free bridge. Damn, I was alive then!
But hey, this bridge was immediately beloved. This is something I know because only four months after it was built someone burned it down and the town immediately rebuilt it. This never happens! Small towns never agree to do anything fast, especially something that was just completed four months prior!
But I digress. Off we went to Foster to see this little beauty. We had no issues finding it what-so-ever. It is located on a dirt road with only one house within eyesight. And the locals have posted a little historic bulletin to make it seem like it’s really old – the fees to cross such a bridge by mule for example. We parked nearby and poked around for a bit, taking a photo of the flyer and gently teasing the whole concept of it.
It was a sweet little bridge but was by far not a whole afternoon’s worth of nerdy New England entertainment so we decided to continue on to Rhode Island’s infamous non-authentic covered bridge the Carl Erickson Covered Bridge in Pascoag which was only a half an hour away. And in case you’re wondering what makes a covered bridge authentic… well, this is what Wikipedia has to say, “An authentic covered bridge is constructed using trusses rather than other methods such as stringers, a popular choice for non-authentic covered bridges.” I know, my eyes are glazing over too. Onwards we go!
Did you know there are numerous airplane crash sites in the woods you can still hike to all over New England? I have wanted to visit one for a long time now but most of them are pretty intense hikes into the mountains which I knew I couldn’t physically do… but the B-52 crash site in Greenville is practically right off the parking lot so it was the optimum amount of difficulty for me!
And the story surrounding it is more exciting than an Indiana Jones adventure. On January 24, 1963 a B-52C Stratofortress flew out of the Westover Airforce Base in Massachusetts. It was a training mission for six crew members and three observers to learn how to fly at low altitudes over rugged terrain to avoid RADAR detection in the Cold War effort. All was going well until the turbulence became violent enough to rip off the vertical air stabilizer which sent the plane careening into Elephant Mountain. The pilot gave the order for everyone to eject but it’d only be ten seconds between this and the plane hitting the ground. Almost everyone on board died on impact but the pilot and navigator managed to eject in time but there was a big problem here too – the pilot’s parachute didn’t deploy after ejection and he landed without it’s aid the five feet of snow below. Remarkably he only suffered a broken ankle and is the only one in US history to survive an ejection without a deployed parachute. The navigator survived with only minor injury but this was only the beginning of a miserable situation because they were six miles beyond civilization in the thick and untamed wilderness. If that wasn’t bad enough the temperature was at -15 degrees that night with a wind kicking up at 40 knots. With the added wind-chill factor this would have felt like -51F or -46C respectively. They somehow survived the night and were rescued in the morning when they could be reached.
Currently the wreckage is still six miles beyond the borders of Greenville up a series of logging roads. Having learned my lesson from my last logging road adventure I left the Prius behind and took the RAV4. This was the right idea! Several parts of the road were nearly washed out from recent rains and it got rough at points but unlike the abandoned trains the journey was relatively short and very well marked. There were signs pointing to the B52 memorial site all along the route and afterwards there were signs to guide us back to Greenville which was great because the GPS is useless on logging roads and shouldn’t be relied on in such a situation.
We weren’t the only ones there that day as several families with an inordinate amount of children were bounding out of the woods. They were respectful though, everyone was. I was shocked at the sheer carnage. You’d think that after so many decades in the wilderness that there wouldn’t be much left but actually there were pieces of metal and rubber everywhere, scattered over a disturbing distance, some pieces were still in trees. We could identify some of the wreckage but most of it was just lumps of shrapnel at this point. And that’s where the deeply unsettling thought comes to mind that airplanes are basically just tin cans we’ve convinced to stay in the air for a while.
I found the memorial to be as interesting as it was sobering and would definitely recommend it to anyone with an interest in these things. It’s near Moosehead Lake and there are a bountiful number of other things you can do in the area – hiking, camping, kayaking, and that sort of thing.
I must admit the Mount Hope Cemetery has been on my bucket list since I was told about it a few years ago. It’s a very large cemetery (possibly the largest I’ve been to with 300 acres and over 5,500 stones!) But besides the sheer amount of stones it’s also beautiful. As far as I know it’s the only garden cemetery in Maine, the second installed in the United States, and is situated amongst the hills of what must have been a swamp at one point which is now a series of well manicured mini ponds.
The cemetery functions also as a park and there’s tons of parking and a number of people out taking walks – perhaps in the steps of a young Stephen King who was said to wander here as a college student looking for inspiration to name his characters off the stones. (And I thought I was the only one to do this!) The monuments speak to great wealth and were at times pretty extravagant. We were on a search for a few famous inhabitants here – first the stone of a certain Mr. Peavey who invented a logging tool in his name that saved countless lives on Maine’s rivers. The second was Hannibal Hamelin who was vice president under Abraham Lincoln. (And who also has a “death couch” at the local library which I have yet to poke at.) Other people of note were gangster Al Brady, comedian Richard Golden, and actor Ralph Sipperly. The only one of these we found was Hamelin who was situated at the very front of the cemetery near the road and was easy to spot.
We both really enjoyed an afternoon amble through the cemetery. We weren’t there long at all when I snapped a photo of a lot of plots that were for The Home for Aged Women. In it a bright orb showed up. I have taken a lot of photos in all sorts of graveyards and cemeteries, this is the first time this has shown up so maybe we weren’t alone!
Indeed it wasn’t long before we found several Civil War memorials – which I must say is a bit odd for New England. And they were strange! A castle and a bronze statue of a faceless grim reaper dragging someone off to the great beyond. I was intrigued. There was also a memorial for the fallen of the Korean War which had a disturbing little plaque that noted half the fatalities of that war were in prison camps.
We went pretty far and enjoyed a great deal of the sights when my travel companion noticed something odd on one of the stones. It was a large bird of some kind. I thought this probably was an owl – which are fond of cemeteries as they are the perfect hunting ground for mice – but actually it was a hawk. A huge, fat, wet hawk. Probably perched here in the sun to dry off. It let us get alarmingly close without reacting. These photos were taken with full zoom but we were still only a few feet away. Just far enough to feel like we were safe from having our faces ripped off if it decided to turn. Very odd. But sweet in a way. Perhaps it was paying respects to a long forgotten life. We continued on after a few minutes, leaving the bird there to keep chilling.
It was a wet day with grey skies and slippery grass. It was probably this that resulted in the end of our little jaunt when my travel companion went flying down some stone steps landing with exceptional violence on his back. He was lucky to have been able to walk out of there. We decided to leave after this in search of first aid supplies for all the cuts. That being said – besides this little incident the trip to the cemetery was well enjoyed by both of us and maybe someday we’ll return to find those other stones. And the nearby death couch…
After checking out the Charter Street Cemetery the day took on the vibe of a sugar-addled squirrel. In all honesty I don’t know where we ended up but it was a lot of places! I was just having fun releasing my travel companion on the streets to indulge his ADD. Traveling with others always allows this sort of delightful shift in perspectives. Of course my own focus may have been considerably off as I had been just ahead of a migraine all day and by the time we were halfway through it had finally landed and I was just barely able to hold a single thought in my head.
Funny enough the day started after we parked and basically beelined to the nearest bathroom after being stuck in traffic for way too long. I wouldn’t even bother mentioning this except the graffiti in the stalls amused me so much. Now I’ve seen phone numbers and course language with the odd comic or cartoon but never have I used a restroom covered in inspirational Sharpie messages. One read, “Stop slut shaming!” another “Happy Pride!” It was a little weird but I appreciated it. Salem is a delightfully inclusive place.
In fact besides being a Mecca for witches Salem also has an increasing population of Satanists who are elbowing their way into the scene with their own church, political functions, and now walking tours! This I learned from their pamphlet which reads, “Join us for an illuminating walking tour of Salem, free of superstition and supernatural influences!” I mean, this makes it sound dry and boring but I won’t argue with whomever is doing their advertising. Satanists after all aren’t the baby eaters frantic middle-aged moms like to envision. They’re more likely to be pragmatic legally-minded trolls – specifically ruffling the feathers of Christians. It takes all sorts to make this world go round.
That’s the wonderful thing about Salem – all the delightful misfits all meshing with each other. You’ll notice just about every shop here has at least one table set up for Tarot readings. Maybe one of these days I’ll sit at one and satiate curiosity. This time around I only aroused the suspicion of one of the readers who was wandering around Omens when she looked at me coming in the door, “Emily! Are you Emily?” “No,” I laughed. “I am not Emily.” “Thank you for your honesty!” She was looking for a client who as luck would have it was looking for parking. She’d arrive twenty minutes later as my travel companion was poking at some sort of talisman.
The witch shops around here have everything from sage smudges and pendulums to hundreds of little statues of Baphomet, Pan, Goddess figurines, Krampus, fertility statues, the odd haunted doll, and black cats EVERYWHERE. Then there are the more specific objects which can lead someone like me to be curious and mystified. One such thing was a row of rather intimidating crystal dildos. I mean… I guess some people think sex magic is a thing so maybe that’s what they were for? Who knows. I gave that one a hard pass, har-har.
And we continued to stray in more educational establishments – everything from the wax museum where I learned Giles Corey was perhaps less of innocent victim and more a petty criminal the town felt need to rid themselves of, to the witch village which described the history of witches in general, to an adorable history of Halloween which had everything painted in Dayglow colors and handed out 3-D glasses to make it even more disorienting! Of course we had to go through a haunted house… which did almost startle my companion at one point. I just laughed because it was all so silly.
Food was great too! I had the freshest haddock I have ever had – so flakey that it did not hold together enough to function as the fish sandwich I ordered. It did give me enough energy to get back to the car after the few hours we spent here. Traffic and road construction would keep us from getting home for almost three hours as my migraine got worse. By the time we reached home base I flopped on the couch too dizzy, nauseous, and pained to move where I was handed a bag of popcorn and allowed to just be until I took my sorry ass to bed. It’d be two more days before I was free of aforementioned migraine – a time I mostly just slept – but that all being said it was still worth everything we did that day and I don’t regret a stitch of it.
How could we go out for a day of sight seeing without ending up at a cemetery? We can’t, that’s how. Especially when said cemetery is in pristine condition, hosts rows of beautifully engraved slate stones, and is right in the same historic district we were already wandering around. Such is the case for the Charter Street Cemetery which is bordered by memorial stones which have all the names, birth, and death dates of all the Salem witch trial victims who were not buried here – in consecrated ground – but were buried in unmarked graves somewhere. We have long since lost where. It’s an interesting turn of events as it was installed by the town in the early 1990’s and now surrounds the same cemetery which hosts the hanging judge who condemned them all to death as well as a number of other historically pertinent individuals involved with these unfortunate circumstances.
The cemetery has its own gift shop which… I mean, that’s a cemetery after my own heart right there. Who wouldn’t want a T-shirt with the cemetery’s name and a death’s head brandished on the front? This is the place for the morbid at heart. And the cemetery itself is gorgeous! It’s VERY well taken care of and although the stones are from the late 1600’s and early 1700’s they’re in great shape. Almost all of them were legible, above ground, and displaying some delightful art. There wasn’t just death’s heads here but cherubs heads, skull and bones, and random faces.
And the people were hilarious. I was not the only one with an expensive camera sitting on the ground taking close up of the stones I found interesting and all the other taphophiles here seemed very welcoming. This was definitely a different kind of tourist and part of why I love Salem so much.
Meanwhile, as i dithered about, my travel companion was on a quest to find the hanging judge. Luckily there was a little map at the beginning of a cemetery that was easy to follow to find this grave. His stone was encased in granite for some reason, maybe to prevent theft? I don’t know but it was the only stone I could see that looked like this. We held in our boos until we left but really… it’s probably best not to be known as a real life super villain. Just saying.
In any event the cemetery was small but absolutely beautiful and I fell in love with the death’s heads and wish to use them as inspiration for tattoo designs. Would definitely suggest a visit to this cemetery to anyone in the area who may appreciate these things.
