Beam Me Up

Day 6 of the New England trip with my husband was going to be a big day of driving. We were far north in New England, and needed to make it back down south to hit Connecticut and Rhode Island. So we began with a big breakfast. We went to a place near Burlington, called Sneakers. We had to have a meal with Vermont maple syrup before leaving the state, of course. And that's just what I did, with pancakes. And a maple latte. Delicious.

We then headed south and stopped at Woodchuck Cidery. Over the years, my tastes in cider have shifted to less sweet options... but I, like many, first grew to love cider in large part due to the widely available Woodchuck. Their factory is in a huge, welcoming barn. The front is dedicated to a vast tasting room which we, arriving just as the place opened, had all to ourselves for a while. We enjoyed a sampling of Woodchuck, including offerings not distributed outside Vermont.

Then we headed into the back of the building, where you could look down into their large canning and bottling facility. This was rather more like what I'd been expecting of Ben & Jerry's the day before. (They even had a display case full of discontinued and seasonal bottles to serve as their sort-of Flavor Graveyard.) 

Next, we made the one non-New England stop of the trip, swinging about 45 minutes over into New York to head to Ticonderoga. Being so close, I simply had to. The most dialed-in of Star Trek fans will know why, and what is in Ticonderoga. There, in an abandoned grocery store, a Star Trek superfan with access to old blueprints (and a lot of time spent scrubbing episodes of classic Star Trek) has built a full recreation of the original series' sets. (OK, not quite "full." The one significant set yet to come is auxiliary control, but it's on the to-do list.)

Short of inventing a time machine (and squandering it on something trivial like this), this is the closest anyone will ever get to going back to the late 1960s and seeing the actual sets. You can stand on the transporter pad...

walk down the corridors...

peruse the weird items on McCoy's sickbay shelves...

hang out in Kirk's quarters...

stand in Engineering next to the warp core...

...and, of course, sit in the captain's chair on the bridge.

Later Star Trek series are more "my" Star Trek series than the original series. But I enjoy that one too, and found it oddly thrilling even to visit this facsimile of the classic sets.

That feeling had to sustain us for the next several hours as we worked our way back into Vermont and on south across Massachusetts. Ahead of time, we'd looked into a couple of possible short hikes in the Green Mountains, but in the moment, we decided we weren't in the mood for any extra walking that day. But we had a couple more small adventures all the same.

We stopped in Massachusetts at a well-regarded brewery called Brick and Feather. They were pretty good, but it was all we could do to finish the one drink as we heard the poor bartender being harangued by a conspiracy-minded patron monopolizing his time. Then we grabbed dinner at a random restaurant in Springfield. There were really sketchy vibes when we got there, such that we almost turned around and left immediately. Only one other couple was there eating. The place had no liquor license. To reach the bathroom, you had to cross over into an adjoining building, into a vast reception-type area where one guy at a laptop was just sitting there.... cooking the books, for all you knew. The whole place felt like a weird money-laundering front for something. But the food was better than it needed to be for that purpose, at least. Pretty good. Having accused the place of being a possible crime front, though, I don't think I'll recommend it by name.

We continued driving until literally the first exit off the highway past the Connecticut state line, and that's where we stopped for the night. Two more full days left in the trip, and two states left to see.