Tag: travel

The Athenaeum – Providence RI

So after the John Hayes Library we decided to keep on walking to “The Ath” as the locals call it. It’s another library but with its own unique charm. Apparently, it was in this library where Edgar Allen Poe had his marriage proposal turned down and H P Lovecraft also wrote about it in his many letters to friends. He seemed to have a great affection for it and I could see why.

Upon stepping in there’s a little room to the side you’re guided into and there was a woman at a desk handing out visitor stickers and politely saying that there was a suggested $5 per person donation but that it wasn’t required. I was already endeared to this place so whatever. Spending $5 here was a lot better than the $5 that the parking meter ate (no, I still haven’t forgotten about that.) In return for our most gracious donation, we were handed a little guide and told we could do a self-tour.

This place was kind of adorable. I was digging the whole vibe with the historic figure busts around the ceiling, the Roman statue at the entrance, and in the center of it all the bane of my childhood existence – A card catalogue. Today’s youth will never know the pain of having to search for “key words” manually by hand, flipping through index card after index card only to end up absolutely nowhere because guess what? The key words in your brain will NEVER match the keywords of the insufferable clerk that put this hellfire together. Made me a little nostalgic.

The guide was fun, we walked about looking at different things it was talking about and just generally digging the place. The downstairs had a distinct speak easy feel about it and this place did say it held a lot of cultural events so who knows! We then wandered accidentally into the rare volumes room and were quickly shuffled out by a very intense academic whose energy was let’s just say tightly wound. VERY tightly wound. The door we walked through was supposed to be locked. We held up our hands, swore we didn’t touch anything, and tried to back out in the friendliest way possible. I sighed, spending a day out in this college town was a bit of a mindfuck for me. It was the kind of place I always daydreamed about as a kid when I still had aspirations. I wonder if I had not had a total likely autistic burnout in nineth grade if I would have ended up somewhere like here… being someone like that guy, hidden by academia because the world is really too much, swatting at people getting too close to my drawers full of bones (as I would have studied paleontology not literature.) Life has not been easy or straight forward for me but I like who I am now and I’m actually grateful that I have come this far. I certainly enjoy life more.

And with that epiphany we decided to continue our journey to the Edna Biology Lab.

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John Hayes Library – Providence RI

I really needed more trees but when the weather is 89 degrees you tend to want to do things indoors… so this week I tepidly pointed towards Providence and said, “Why don’t we poke around there until we find something weird.” And we did.

The John Hayes Library is a big beautiful library set up mostly for the nearby Brown University students which is rumored to have not one but three separate books bound in human skin. Morbidly I was hoping they might have one on display so off we went!

But first I have to warn you that if you use the Brown University visitor’s parking don’t pay in cash unless you have exact change. There were NO signs up saying the machine didn’t do change so when I gave it a $20 for a $15 day pass IT ATE MY FIVE DOLLARS. That’s just super not cool you guys.

The library wasn’t too far away. We walked through the college campus to get there (trying to take the shortest route possible since it was so miserably hot that day.) When we arrived it was another ornately decorated building with an entrance befitting a castle. We walked in and noticed there were displays everywhere so we wandered around, quietly looking at them and trying not to look too much like tourists. We’re both WAY old to be students although being baby faced no one would know that.

Somehow we ended up on a different floor in a big room that seemed 100% dedicated to tin soldiers in historic battles. And I don’t just mean American ones either. There were a lot of British Empire type things going down as well as armies consisting of elephants and people from far off lands. It was… fucking surreal if I’m honest. Like how exactly did we topple down a rabbit hole and land in the middle of a bunch of toys reenacting military history? I have no idea. This was not in the pamphlets.

Other art was scattered about – paintings of very posh looking historical figures adorned the walls in the hallway and there were also a lot of illustrations and photos of the library back in the day. No human skin books though. However, before we left we did ask about the H P Lovecraft letters that were supposed to be here.

“We have a lot of his letters here. He wrote a ton to his… pen pals?” I had to laugh at this poor young librarian in search of a better word. “Anyway, the main collection is huge but we can show you the samples if you’d like.”

And so we were handed a box full of what I can only describe as mad scribblings. A few full letters, a bunch of little doodles, lots of notes…. just absolute and utter mental chaos. There was even maps and schematics to imaginary locations. As a fiction writer myself I found this refreshing. And slightly horrifying. Please don’t scrutinize my To-Do lists after I die.

ANYWAY… I did not muster the courage to ask about the damned tomes but I suspect they’re hidden somewhere safe only to be seen by appointment and I…. do not have a legitimate reason to be asking strangers about their human skin books. Sad Sigh. I can tell you that at least one of them is an anatomy book probably bound in the skin of a cadaver – to which I say – that’s a really fucking bomb way to go out. Can someone make me into a book after I die? Almost makes me want to get a tattoo that could also work as a book title… *whistles*

That all being said and done we left to continue searching for weird shit. Later we’d find ourselves in a different library, in a lab for dead animals, and at the foot of a totem made of guns.

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Dighton Rock – Dighton MA

If King Philip’s Cave was a bit of a disappointment surely we could find something else cool to see in these parts. Why not check something off my list that has been on there for a few years? Dighton Rock. Dighton Rock is a boulder that was discovered covered in all sorts of strange petroglyphs. We have no idea what it says, who made it, or why. It’s just a total mystery which of course beckons me like nothing else.

There’s a long-standing story that the indigenous people didn’t build anything out of rocks or have a written language when the colonists came over buuuuut the more I poke about New England finding curiosities like these the more I think that’s a load of hogwash. We don’t know shit about the people who lived here before us because we kinda sorta killed them off and drove any survivors away. Suffice to say whole civilizations were lost and clearly this rock was part of that.

The rock is advertised through signs on the main highways nearby and I have passed by it a number of times. It’s actually located within a park, Dighton Park, in a building that calls itself a museum that was built around it.

When we got there we parked in a parking lot that claimed it was $3 but had nowhere or no one to pay. It seemed to be a very pretty little park with lots of grass for children to run and some picnic tables near the water, all surrounded by trees. Honestly it was one of the sweetest parks I remember. There was even a young woman here at one of the picnic tables playing her guitar. She waited until we were out of sight to start singing The House of the Rising Sun but she shouldn’t have. She had a nice voice! And her guitar playing was also lovely. It echoed eerily in the air on this fine summer day.

We managed to find the museum nearby but it was all locked up. There wasn’t any opening hours posted anywhere. It was just a whole lot of nothing. When we got back to the parking lot we found a sign saying to call for opening hours so we did and got an answering machine asking to wait for a call back for an appointment. We didn’t leave our info, it seemed unlikely anyone would call back within any reasonable amount of time to come down here and unlock the museum for two out of towners. Their website claims that opening hours are dependent on local health regulations… so I am guessing Covid has struck again.

So we wandered back to the car and started driving off when my travel companion yelled, “PARK PARK!” I stopped, and parked again. He’d seen a sign reading, “Dighton Cemetery” and wanted to check it out. However, upon further inspection it read, “Former site of historic Dighton Cemetery.” In other words no stones remained. We hiked down the trail a ways anyway. It had a lot of bowed trees going over the path from both directions and I found it to be quite whimsical, but my travel companion was disappointed there wasn’t an actual cemetery. He had wanted to stumble blindly onto another sweet forgotten collection of headstones in the woods like we’d seen at Historic Cemetery 26. No such luck. As for myself I was trying to keep positive but I was suffering from heat stroke and a migraine was kicking up so we went back to the car and continued our journey to find a real cemetery to round out the day.

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Casalis State Forest Route 123 Entrance – Peterborough NH

I’m not going to lie. Mentally I haven’t been doing so great lately and honestly, I am suspicious of anyone who is on top of the world right now. It’s been a rough few weeks and there has been so many people just burned out and screaming into the void as the world burns. I’m right there with them. And I know life is sucking HARD right now for a lot of us which is why I have decided I needed more trees in my life. A LOT MORE TREES. Because trees are good people. They’re quiet, they gives homes to birds, they never say anything mean, and when we’re not watching they make oxygen!

So I struck out on my own. I know for the past couple of years almost all my adventures have been with travel companions and that’s cool, I still enjoy it, but that doesn’t change the fact I still need to submit myself to the solitude of the forest on my own every now and again. So I shall be doing more hiking – as much as my angry body allows.

Today I started driving to an actual hiking destination (which is more planning than I usually put into these things) but then I got completely and utterly distracted when I found the entrance to this trail on my way. Clearly it was calling me so I had to go in. In the rain. Because it was also raining (yes, I’m that desperate to go play in the woods.)

And I must say skulking through some swampy woods in the rain was exactly what I needed. I spent two hours wandering from the route 123 entrance to the other side of the park at the Condy Road entrance. Along the way I took sooo many photos of raindrops on leaves, found a whole swarm of orange newts and said hi to every one of them, and somehow didn’t get lost even though the trail was not marked and diverged at several points. That being said it was for the most part a very flat trail with only a couple mild inclines at the beginning. I could hear cars for most of the trek but also tons of birdsong and a couple bullfrogs to boot. Someone had even brought their horse down here at some point as I found their leavings and some hoof prints. And of course, I had to pick up two dog ticks along the way. BLECK. All and all it was a nice little find and fed my soul. So if you happen to be in the area and needing a little tete a tete with nature I would suggest this happy little trail.

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Watch Hill Merry Go Round and Lighthouse – Westerly Rhode Island

Last week was just so completely random. I have no idea how I ended up at the bougiest corner of Rhode Island staring down the world’s most terrifying carousel while surrounded by ice cream lapping tourists but I’m not complaining…

Truth be told I desperately needed to be somewhere, anywhere, that was so completely and utterly different from my usual surroundings that I could just mentally check out for a while. You know what I mean. You feel it too. Well, I don’t live anywhere near the ocean so that fit the bill but really we went for the carousel and the lighthouse. The rest was just a cheerful bonus.

When I drove up it was definitely hoppin’. People were everywhere packing nearby beaches and perusing the shops and boutiques. It was like… going back in time… you know to the mid 1990’s, before the economy collapsed and people had vacations like this all the time! Parking was just an ever lovin’ joy to figure out as it was all parallel and pretty much full down the whole block. No worries after a 20-minute show with at least one horrified onlooker I was able to technically get the car within the lines. Technically. Then we walked!

This was the most touristy tourist trap I have ever seen in New England. Kids ran about with reckless abandon being ‘watched’ by their dads who were buying ice cream for the whole gaggle while their wives fucked off and enjoyed some sweet sweet alone time in the boutiques. There was even an antique store! Granted it was all nautical, just vaguely antique, and reminded me more of one of those Old Timey Country Stores with what it was selling. Just add some salt water to that country chic and you can picture it. I took some whimsical photos of random hanging trinkets.

And then we made our way to the carousel at the end. It was…. a thing of tremendous terror. Something that shall haunt my nightmares for years to come. Here they were selling tickets to ride the Merry Go Round $1 for the inner ring of horses, $4 for the outer ring and a chance to grab a gold ring to win a free ride. Now as fucking amazing as I find all that truly obsolete Americana I was a little trepidatious for the poor children on this machine who were whipping around that thing at great speeds, so much so the horses were at full tilt, their wee hooves kicking the air towards the onlookers at the sides. It made my heart skip a few beats. And the horses. Oh my God, the horses. I have no words to describe just how blood curdling creepy they were. They are supposed to be America’s longest continuously running Merry Go Round built in 1867 and “mysteriously abandoned” at Watch Hill in 1883 by a travelling carnival which… makes sense for a bunch of ponies that look like they could suck out your soul. I’m told each one of them still has it’s original eyes which is some sort of stone… but really it makes them all look like they have milky white cataracts and combined with their over all grizzled appearance I wouldn’t be surprised if they were the zombie horses of the apocalypse. They look the part. Every time I found one that just had to be the most unnerving another one would pop up behind it that made me gasp even more. Left me in a real pickle to find a favorite.

You may ask, “Did you ride the scary pony death machine?” No, no, I did not. The horses on this carousel are very small, clearly just for children unlike today’s carousels with life-size horses (or steam punk monsters if I remember the one I once saw in Brussels, Belgium right…) And I mean if I were a kid I probably would have loved hanging on for dear life as I spun wildly out of control trying to catch a gold ring as I went by. I mean that’s just good old fashioned family fun. Right? RIGHT?

Well anyway, there was a beach right next to the carousel with plenty of people sunning and swimming and having a grand old time. We decided to shun it in favor of walking up a nearby side street to see the lighthouse which I guess is only open for a short time every year – a short time that didn’t include that day. But it was still technically a park so we went to at least poke at it. This was my companion’s first lighthouse so he was impressed. I was amused by the mansions lining the drive it was on (especially the one with the witch weather vane) but the lighthouse itself was intensely meh for me. Maybe I’m just jaded having gone to so many. Either way it did seem to be a nice fishing spot and a few people were here doing exactly that and enjoying this gorgeous summer day.

All and all it was a nice way to spend an hour or two and the carousel made it 100% worth it because it was just soooo weird. Everything else was just a cherry on the terrifying carousel cake.

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Cambridge Antique Market – Cambridge MA

It was yet another day and yet another antique store. I know we’ve been hitting a lot of those lately but it’s hot outside at this time of year so I tend to run for the shade. This time it was at the Cambridge Antique Market which was 5 whole floors of weirdness.

I wasn’t in the most receptive of moods knowing that Cambridge is basically parking purgatory filled with empty parallel parking spots because there’s signs with super conflicting information wafting above each space confusing the ever-loving shit out of even the locals. You’ll see cars driving around and around the block for hours because there’s also not enough spaces to go around. It’s a nightmare. The antique mall was fortunate in that it had a parking lot but it was tiny, shoved between the building and some fences, big enough for maybe 10-15 cars. The front part was full so I had to go to the even tinier back bit which had parking so tight and bizarrely shaped it’d take me a 300 point turn to eventually get out. But parking drama aside this was another delightful adventure.

We had chosen this local for it’s size. It was in another mill building and sprawled out for five whole floors with who knows how many different vendors, each a new chance to find something crazy or wonderful. We’d been in a car a long time though and I had to pee so I tried to find the bathroom right off and it was… a whole separate adventure. They had an old one stall bathroom that felt like the light should be flickering. The lock on the door was this tiny antiquated dead bolt that barely aligned with the door and I was more than a little amused that they had tried to add a little class by using toilet paper with frills. I’ve never seen anything like it! It was like using a doyly! I washed my hands with their fittingly super fragrant soap and hopped out as quick as I could. This adventure was followed by getting into an elevator that could be the whole set for a horror movie any day.

But all the endearing architecture aside this place was packed full and there was a lot to find. There were the usual assortment of haunted dolls (this time featuring an old lady marionette!) deranged Buddhas, terrifying paper mâché masks, weird novelty postcards showing a woman riding a giant grasshopper, boxes and boxes of instant ancestor photos, cannibalistic looking horses, likely serial killer clowns, a smoking bunny, a boot with Chewbacca’s face on the heel, and sooo many freaky cookie jars! I mean just hundreds of them scattered about like tinker tape. We must have been in there a couple hours – time having completely evaporated.

Yes – this was a win. A really wonderful find and I would completely suggest it to all my eccentric friends.

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G’s Treasures – Used Furniture & Antiques – Deep River Connecticut

It was one of those days we wanted to go to a familiar haunt so we ended up at Gilette Castle and spent some time enjoying life there before coming home. We had time to spare though and didn’t feel our adventures were quite over so we kept an eye open to antique stores that may be on route and that’s how we ended up at G’s Treasures.

It was a sweet little store right off the street front. I even parallel parked for it! Well… sorta. There were 3 open spaces and just drove in but I’m still counting that because I need a win. ANYWAY, this place was adorable. It was tended to by a young guy who upon reading my companion’s T-shirt “Ninja Turtles don’t do drugs” snickered, “Maybe, but the guy drawing them sure did!” I don’t know if he understood it was supposed to be ironic but I was enjoying his youthfully enthusiastic energy nonetheless.

This shop was well maintained and had everything from antique furniture to a whole double wide case of old wooden duck decoys. Of course, I was immediately drawn to a rum thing(??) that looked like a soulless Pilgrim with no eyes. Touch the dark side, I dare you. There were lots of other scary things in there too – a stuffed duck that could inspire its own horror movie, a mannikin head with a giraffe neck, a cookie jar in the shape of a fat friar and of course more clowns and a single mammie doll that was tucked away in a dark corner all hidden and coy-like.

I sort of feel bad wandering through all these antique stores because I barely have money for gas much less buying anything and usually leave whatever cool things I find behind. A total tease. Today however one of my travel companions had claimed a couple shinies (necklaces) off a jewelry table to satisfy his “magpie brain.” And they were very reasonably priced at ten dollars a pop! So really everyone left happy.

And if you happen to be in the area looking for lunch there’s plenty of options but we went right next door to Deep River Pizza and all got various wraps and grinders which were all goddamn amazing. So well worth it!

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Slater Mills – Pawtucket RI

Slater Mills was one of those places that I keep hearing whispers about and had on my list but we didn’t end up there until we realized it was a national park and one we could stamp on our National Park passport…

Turns out the park is very new. Hasn’t even been open for a full year yet and we were around the 4,000th visitors there. It’s a sweet little outdoor park with historical markers and in the information center you can sign up for a tour that happens twice a day. We were lucky because we had no idea about this but ended up there 15 minutes before the tour started! So we gathered with what appeared to be one large family full of well behaved children and one older couple who was eying my orange hair in the suspicious way older white men tend to.

The staff were super friendly and the tour was short but information packed. We got to actually go inside the factory which was the first industrial cotton factory in New England! In fact it was the only industrial mill in the United States and the backstory to it was more than a little bonkers.

Basically the man who founded the mill was already a wealthy merchant who had made a fortune in the slave trade. However he seemed to have had an existential crisis and decided slavery was wrong and he shouldn’t be involved with it so he looked for new endeavors. England was going full steam ahead with the Industrial Revolution but the men who made, operated, and maintained their machines were forbidden to leave the British isles with their knowledge. This didn’t stop one fo them from disguising himself as a farmer and sailing across the pond anyway. And when this engineer met the wealthy merchant it was all over.

The mill opened in the late 1700’s and had twelve workers – who were not slaves. They were however children aged 6-14 who worked 12 hour shifts 6 days a week. I guess enlightenment is a gradual process with some. In any event the mill was very successful and operated well into the 1800’s. it was powered by the local river but now their one machine is powered by a motor. I took a short video.

*credit for the featured image goes to Wikipedia – I took 20 or so photos but for some reason they’re not showing up on the card so I had to improvise! Good thing I took the below video with my cell phone!

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Monocacy National Battlefield – Frederick Maryland

We still had some time to kill before we had to go to the airport so for our last little adventure we decided to go to the Monocacy National Battlefield to see where some of the events we’d been reading about actually took place. I’ve never been to a battlefield so I was just expecting a big field somewhere with nothing going on… that’s not what it ended up being.

When we drove in there was indeed a big field with a few cannons set up which is exactly what I pictured but there was also a large visitor’s center. I have to admit at this point my body was DONE with me, especially my feet which were on fire. So I was hoping for a very little display to see and then beat it back to the car. However the visitor center was like a well maintained museum in it’s own right. I sat in the gift shop and talked to the cashier a while waiting for my travel companions to make use of the facilities. I just needed to sit. He seemed a friendly older gentlemen who asked the usual questions – from where had we come from? Everywhere.

When my companions returned he gave us all a huge spiel about the park. It wasn’t just this field or even the museum attached to it. The park actually owned all sorts of properties across town and if we wanted to see all the sights we had to get a little map and do a driving tour! And if we wanted there was a few hiking trails as well – one which was supposed to have a nice view of the city. I had wanted to go on a hike but right now, in the condition I was in, the thought made me want to cry.

He also told us about the National Park passports which were like mock passports you could stamp at every national park you visit. We were all intrigued so we bought one. I was too tired to comprehend anything so I merely stamped mine with one stamp and called it good while my companions stamped theirs with all four at the station and added a sticker. I still have no idea where the sticker came from but I took a pic so y’all can see what it’s supposed to look like. In any event this will give us something else to do when we get home – visit all the national parks of New England! (Of which there aren’t many but you never know where I’m going to end up so I’m OK with that.)

When we drove off we made it to an old farmhouse which was basically taken over when Confederates marched through. The place seemed eerily quiet now. Peaceful. It was hard to imagine that it’d ever been a place of great violence and conflict. But it did get me to thinking about what it must have been like to be a farmer minding your own damn business and suddenly find your property filled with an invading army. What chaos! And how scary that would be! It was humbling.

The other stops on the car tour were basically other properties that were involved in this march as we followed the procession. It was very spaced out and hard for me to follow in any capacity. By the time we got to the hiking trail we wanted to attempt I was on the fence if I should push myself any further. My feet gave a defiant NO but the rest of me was like, “This is our LAST stop on this trip, you can’t falter now!” So I went on the little hike, hobbling the whole way. It was much farther than I had been led to believe and we never did get to see that view of the city but despite that it was a gorgeous area to be hiking. All the trees looked like they were about to spring to life and start lobbing apples at us – or maybe the weird “brain fruit” we kept finding on the ground. Everything about these things made me want to play with them and learn more. They were the size of a softball, hard as a rock, with the lumpy texture of a brain. I cracked one open and it seemed to contain a fibrous mush that smelled faintly of pineapple. Others that had been squashed in the road appeared to be decaying into an alien goo. What were these things?! Turns out they were hedge apples, grown in the area mostly to keep pest bugs at bay. They’re mildly toxic and horses that eat them foam at the mouth. Good to know!

We didn’t make it to that many stops on the self tour because by now the clock was ticking and we really did need to get back to the airport (and it’d be another 6.5 hour drive home from there.) That was no small feat and I paid for it dearly but it was worth it. This little trip out of New England was exactly what I needed to lift my spirits and get me back into the swing of things. It’s funny how travel can do that.

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Self Walking Tour of Civil War Field Hospitals – Fredrick Maryland

After thoroughly dissecting the National Museum of Civil War Medicine we picked a booklet up in the gift shop that detailed a self tour we could take of local Civil War field hospitals. This we did. Now I did not have a booklet… I was just half-way listening as we walked and I snapped photos so I am going to warn you now this is a historically underwhelming entry. HOWEVER, here’s what I learned: when your city is surrounded by battlefields churches make great emergency hospitals! Seriously, there was a church on almost every corner and almost all of them had some sort of involvement in this. If I remember right (and do not quote me on this) I think there were around 17 of them on this tour. It wasn’t a long walk and was all and all quite pleasant. Below are the photos I took – most of which are probably of significant buildings.

Here’s what I do remember – the thing that looks like stables were once slave quarters and later stables. The iron fencing is where there is a nuclear bomb shelter that the locals like to whisper about. The Cherub that looks like he’s peeing in the bushes is actually looking over a brick labyrinth that was kind of fun to walk. The iron dog was once stolen to melt down for bullets but was somehow stolen back and replaced before this could happen. And of course there’s a snallygaster hidden in these photos too. He’s the local cryptid. Also I am sorry if these photos are a little on the blurry side. My camera was really struggling with full sunlight!

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