Detour #162: An Englishman's New England, USA
The road clings to the coast in Acadia National Park, Maine
Familiar place names and a very unfamiliar Lincoln Town Car made Simon Heptinstall’s meandering tour up the coast from Boston all the more memorable.
White clapperboard homes beneath the trees with immaculate bowling-green lawns signalled I had reached another pristine waterfront village. Yachts bobbed on a choppy blue-grey sea beyond swaying golden foliage, Stars and Stripes fluttered from front-yard flagpoles.
I was enjoying a very pretty roadtrip – through New England in the Fall. But instead of heading for all the leaf-peepers’ hotspots inland, I was actively avoiding them on a massive coastal detour.
Ignoring each state’s much vaunted special Fall Colours Hotspots meant I could avoid the autumn crowds and quietly drive 400 miles of America’s most wiggly shoreline. I had much of the New England coastline between Boston and Canada to myself.
I already knew the coast here is very wooded – even in the towns. So I reckoned I’d see enough leaves along the way anyway. And I’d avoid queues of cars driving at 1mph gazing at yet another slightly orange oak tree in the Fall honeypots.
So after I’d flown into Boston I headed north on the 95 and 1, taking detours to the coast whenever a place sounded interesting. That loosely meant if I’d heard of it, fancied some food or increasingly, if it sounded like a town back home in the UK.
One of the most noticeable features of this route for British visitors is surely the place names: strange re-incarnations of hometowns left behind by settlers hundreds of years ago.
This has created scores of towns and villages with the same names as familiar UK towns and villages. They are so unlike the original I found it ceaselessly interesting to visit. Whether Boston or Portland, Camden or York, it adds an extra something to rolling into a town when you know that back home the place with the same name is mostly horrific or deathly dull.
That meant I got a silly buzz exploring the white sand beaches of Scarborough, Maine, and wandering round pastel painted fishermen’s houses on the leafy waterfront of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Portsmouth, New Hampshire is perfectly picturesque
I turned off the highway to visit repro-communities along the coast like Yarmouth, Bristol, Ipswich, and even Manchester-by-the-Sea. Of them all, I think only Bath, New Hampshire, was a little disappointing compared with its English birthplace.
As for seeing trees with colourful leaves, I was right. I got plenty. After all, the now globally famous phenomenon of ‘New England in the Fall’ is not about seeing any one particular spot. It’s about a huge area with lots of trees that change colour in the autumn.
At one point I took a glider flight over the woods. Don’t ask, it was something to do with an eccentric ex-US army pilot. But I did get to see that these trees extend to a distant horizon in all directions and look pretty uniformly colourful from up there.
Yes, if you head inland to explore the dedicated leaf trails in each of the New England states and follow the daily leef-peepers’ news reports you will find some great panoramas of seasonal woods turning red, yellow and brown – but if you are familiar with much of the English countryside at the same time of year you might wonder why they are making quite such a fuss about these specific patches.
Instead I reckoned that adding seascapes into the scenic mix was a definite plus. Some of the photogenic views of rocky shores with dozens of tiny islands backed by colourful woods were sure to boost anyone’s Insta ratings.
What I didn’t control quite so well was the hire car, which was generously provided by tourist officials for their visiting British journalist. I was given a two-ton, five-litre, Lincoln Towncar that was 18-and-a-half feet long – and as soft, slow and sumptuous as driving a super-king mattress with an added memory foam topper. It gave a whole new meaning to the phrase armchair traveller.
The Lincoln is rather more at home in town than on country curves
Actually, with radio on, arm on windowsill, the Lincoln was okay for cruising gently curving flat smooth roads between ribbons of technicolour foliage. But on arrival anywhere difficult it turned every parking manoeuvre into a Mister Bean-type scene of multiple hopeless attempts to get into huge spaces before I gave up and headed for the nearest coach park.
But apart from that, I found this coastal road trip is a gorgeous sequence of small waterfront towns in scenery that gets more rugged and rocky as you head north. That meant to me it got better and better.
The best bit of all was Northeastern Maine’s Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. It’s a detour from Ellsworth on Highway One, north of Portland, that’s definitely worth making.
The road swoops round smallish mountains with grey granite outcrops between the trees, with yachts in the craggy inlets and tiny forested islands far below. Cadillac Mountain here is 1,530ft high, the highest point on the North Atlantic seaboard – and for the lazy there’s a road right to the summit. Any car can make it up, even a Lincoln Towncar.
Cadillac Mountain peaks at 1,530 feet, but even a Lincoln can make it to the top
Bar Harbor itself has a cool beard/check-shirt vibe. No need to shop around, everywhere serves exactly the same lobster and clam chowder.
Whatever you do, don’t arrange to stay in different rental homes each night like I did. Is it just me or is there’s something Steven King/Halloween/witchcrafty about New England? Roadside motels are just as cheap, much more convenient… and don’t risk any brushes with New England spookiness.
In particular, don’t ever stay in that very lonely cabin I was sent to on Mount Desert Island, down a long straight flat track in an empty conifer forest where the view from every uncurtained window was deep ranks of whiskery tree trunks disappearing into the darkness where the branches creaked, branches cracked and mysterious creatures yelped and hooted through the night. That cabin still haunts my dreams.
Words Simon Heptinstall Twitter | Instagram
Photography Shutterstock
The kind of bed and breakfast that gave Simon nightmares