Today we traveled through some of the prettiest country we've yet seen. Staying off the Interstate, we wandered in an easterly direction, mostly on Route 4, through much of Vermont and about half of New Hampshire. Although the sky turned out to be an ominous gray color most of the day after a brilliantly sunny morning, we still just loved the winding mountain roads, lush forests, and light traffic. We even got to see a pack of Appalachian Trail hikers as they crossed the highway at Killington, Vermont, and plunged into the forest on the other side. Had I seen the opportunity swiftly enough, we would have liked to have parked and walked a quarter mile on the trail just so we could say we'd been on it. Such opportunities are so fleeting when you're motor-homing, as sufficient pull-off space is ALWAYS a problem, especially on narrow mountain roads.
The name Killington brought back a flood of memories for me from my days in the Naval Air Corp. Back then I was stationed near Chicago, Illinois. Our base was actually located in Glenview, Illinois, just north of Chicago, and was so tiny that the Navy would let sailors live in nearby apartments if you could find one or more roommates to share and afford the rent. I remember my starting pay was only $65.00 every TWO weeks, which wasn't much even back in 1970. So, in my first apartment, I gathered up three other guys to help pay the rent, and we found a place in Des Plaines.
One of my three roommates was an avid skier, and one of his favorite ski areas was Killington, Vermont. This fellow, Brad Chase was his name, lived in New Hampshire and was at least six inches taller than me, and a trifle on the gangling side. Even so, he could out-ski me any day of the week.
Now I'm sure you're wondering just where we could possibly find a place to ski in Chicago. The answer is we didn't. We had to drive north to Wisconsin to where you could find several small ski areas that had built their own "mountains" with a bulldozer. The runs weren't very long, but they were fairly steep in places. And the shortness of the runs made it possible to do a lot of runs per day.
So, the entire winter of 1969/1970, Brad Chase and I, and often one or two others, would be hitting the slopes on our days off. Unlike most U.S. Navy operations, sailors at the Glenview Naval Air Station only worked five days a week and got two days off, most often Mondays and Tuesdays. These were perfect days to go skiing, since you could avoid the busy weekends.
You're probably wondering at this point just where we got the money to buy lift tickets with such a low salary. Well, the answer is we had to work extra jobs for it. I'm not sure where Brad got his money, but I did two jobs. First, I worked as a janitor for an on-base maintenance company. It took me about an hour every night to knock out my assigned building.
Second, I advertised that I would stand base security watches for the married guys so they wouldn't have to drive back to the base from their homes in the community. All sailors had to stand a four-hour watch once every eight days, which meant I had lots of takers for my services. At the height of my career I was not only doubling my Navy salary every month, I was subbing out jobs I couldn't cover to a couple of cohorts. This meant I had plenty of spending money for the ski slopes.
In the spring of 1970 the Navy Base administration found out about my money-making career and put a stop to it. But by then I was earning flight pay as well as something called "hazardous duty pay" for flying around in circa 1947 Neptune anti-submarine aircraft. And by then I had moved on to other roommates. I don't know what ever became of Brad Chase, but if I had to guess, I'd say he was probably still spending part of his winters in Killington, Vermont. Cheers, Brad!
The next thing Concetta and I encountered as we wended our way further into the forests of Vermont was a veritable "army" of bicyclists. We're not just talking a large bunch of guys who rode by at one point and then were gone. We're talking twenty or thirty cyclists passing us every few minutes for a couple of HOURS! They had police escorts on motorcycles. They had private escorts on motorcycles. They had chase cars AND police cars with flashing lights. And they had "watch out for the cyclists" signs every quarter mile or so. It was a BIG deal, evidently.
We never did see any information on what group was riding in the contest, nor who was sponsoring it. I grabbed a few shots when we stopped for lunch, but the light was so gray and flat that they're not very impressive. What WAS impressive were the riders. Let's just say that these guys and girls, all dressed in their racing togs, were NOT tackling some namby-pamby hills. No, most people would be walking their bikes up these Vermont hills. At least I would be walking MY bike up these Vermont hills. My hat is definitely off to them, whomever they are.
We didn't really get to stop to take photos today (other than the bikers). The roads were too narrow and seldom offered any wide spots for stopping, even if the light had been decent. Had we known that the sunlight this morning wasn't going to last, we might have found "something" to shoot. As it was, we had another sort of adventure. We changed the oil.
Yes, I know you probably don't consider an oil change much of an adventure, but I've been scouting for a convenient place to do that for the past thousand miles. My plan, and the opportunity I've been anticipating, was to find a fix-it shop of some sort, perhaps way out in the boonies, where some grease monkey would be happy to earn a few extra bucks for doing the job. I thought perhaps I'd even buy my own oil-change container at Walmart and just get said grease monkey to take the dirty oil off my hands after I had changed it myself in his parking lot.
It turned out my complicated plans weren't necessary. Today, as we rolled through the Vermont city of Rutland, we spied a small grocery store where we hoped we might add to our larder without too much trouble. Then, as we got in the turn lane to access the store's parking lot, I noted something else interesting just to the south of the grocery store: an oil change business. The "Instant Oil Change" establishment had a couple of cars they were servicing, but I didn't see any other customers waiting. That looks perfect, I told Concetta, who didn't even realize that I was thinking of changing the oil.
After we parked the rig, Concetta set out on the grocery run, while I walked next door to chat up the oil change guys. Incredibly, when I got there both of the customers, whose cars I had seen in the oil-change bays, were now gone. My heart instantly started to beat faster. "Gentlemen," I said to the trio of gray-suited technicians as I walked into their establishment. "You're just the guys I've been looking for."
Thankfully, the guys I'd been looking for didn't have any previous engagements and were quite willing to let me pull the rig right into the largest bay and agreed to go right to work on it. So it was that inside of thirty minutes they had not only changed the oil, but had checked and replaced both the engine air filter and both windshield wipers. They had also checked a dozen other things, and pronounced me good to go. The very best thing about the whole experience was that they let me use my own oil and filter which I had on board the rig. I'm still shaking my head at the fortuitous nature of the whole thing.
Meanwhile, over at the grocery store, Concetta was running head long into a store where you had to pay a quarter to get a grocery cart. All the carts are locked together in giant rows. To extract a cart from the pack, you have to insert a quarter in the handle and pull hard, which was supposed to separate the cart from the chain holding it to the next cart. This didn't exactly go easily, and another customer had to help.
And, of course, since I had told her that I would be over very soon with the money, Concetta hadn't taken her purse or wallet. She didn't even have a quarter and ended up having to borrow it from one of the grocery clerks.
This particular small store was sort of like the Lilliputian's version of Costco. No neatly arranged merchandise on shelves, just cases of products, arranged side by side, and you took whatever was in the top box; bare bones to say the least. Still, we managed to find almost everything we needed, even with the abbreviated selection, and were soon out the door and on our way.
So, we used up all the good sunshine this morning doing nothing photographically interesting, and the rest of the day looked like London in a Sherlock Holmes mystery, all socked in with fog. But what can you do but take it one day at a time. Maybe tomorrow we'll stumble over something exciting as we make our way toward the New Hampshire/Maine border. We're getting very close now to our stated goal for the trip: eat Lobster in Maine. So stay tuned, and we'll try not to bore you. And until we meet again, we wish you Happy Travels!
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