Not by any gun-totin' sheriff or badass desperado, but by small furry critters - mice! In our cosy cabin in the woods in Intervale, we'd seen some evidence that they were around, in the form of small droppings here and there, but we'd neither seen nor heard anything, so were not overly bothered. (Our other wildlife sighting here was much more exciting, though - a small black bear came ambling into view right beside the cabin, sniffed around a little and then headed down the bank to the riverside, where we lost sight of him. We'd loved to have gone out and followed him, but there was always the danger that mummy or daddy bear were not too far away!). Anyway, back to the mice. On what should have been our penultimate, but in the event became our final night there, we were kept awake most of the night by the sounds of at least 4 or 5 mice skittering around on the wooden floorboards in both the living room, and even around our bed - yuk! Several times we got up, switched on the lights and looked around, twice spotting mice dashing under cupboards or behind the sofa, and once, at around 4 o'clock in the morning, Andy successfully caught and threw one quite large mouse out into the freezing cold night. Not sure if it found its way back in, but the skittering and other noises continued until sun-up, by which time we'd had enough. We decided to pack up and leave then and there, rather than risk another sleepless night, and our Airbnb host readily agreed she should refund us not just for the night we would not be using the place, but also for the previous, practically sleepless night too.
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| Mouse! |
So, we started our journey back towards New York a day earlier than planned, driving north-westerly and then due south, through some stunning scenery in the rest of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, into the Green Mountains of Vermont and then through Connecticut. We travelled for quite a while alongside the massive Lake Champlain: with a surface area of 490 sq miles, it's the largest lake in the US outside of the Great Lakes, and straddles the states of Vermont, New York and Quebec. At the southerly end of the journey, we travelled alongside the lazy, flat Housatonic River, and the whole journey, stopping for two nights in Middlebury and then Great Barrington, took us through huge tracts of gorgeous fall colours at the northern end, and some huge tracts of heavily wooded green space interwoven with hiking trails, small rivers and falls, and dozens more covered bridges as we neared the Big Apple. On Highway 7, we stopped a couple of times for brunch at two very different, but still each both typically-American roadside diners: Blue Benn in Bennington, in an old railway-carriage, very homesy, and full of quirky things, and Diner Luxe in New Milford, a fabulous, over-the-top Art Deco diner like something straight out of a 1950s Hollywood movie. On the night that we left the cabin in the White Mountains, we stayed overnight in a very lovely old Inn in Middlebury, Vermont - a university town in which, we'd only recently discovered, two of our colleagues from the Refugee Tales project, Anna Pincus of Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, and Professor David Herd of Kent University, had been addressing a gathering of students about the RT project, only the previous evening, just about the time when we were beginning our mighty mouse battle! Made us think that, had the mice taken the trouble to drive us out of the cabin just one night earlier, we could have joined the session in Middlebury and offered our support.
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| Two of Vermont |
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| Two of Blue Benn's Diner |
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| Four of Diner Luxe (and one Luxe Diner) |
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| One More of Diner Luxe |
So, now we're back in my sister Joy's apartment in Manhattan, for our final weekend of this trip, before we head home on Monday. We've woken to a cold but bright and sunny morning, after dropping off our little VW Beetle yesterday afternoon, and are preparing to go walkabout once again, to explore more of her new neighbourhood.
