Our Princeton Weblog

Last week headed north to visit Connecticut and Salem, Ma. Trusting Google directions (which had been pretty reliable till this point) I picked Michael up from work at 4.30 and we headed onto the New Jersey Turnpike - a truly mind boggling maze of connecting roads that leads to and around Jersey City and New York.

Had there been anything - anything! - in the Google directions that suggested they were actually taking us into New York proper, we would have made our printed version into a paper plane, shot it out the window and gone another way but, lo and behold, after buzzing up the turnpike at great speed for an hour we found ourselves grinding to a halt in a maze of overpasses and connecting roads all converging on the George Washington Bridge at the northern edge of the city that never sleeps. Thus our 2.5 hour trip to Connecticut turned into 4.5. At the worst point it took an hour to travel 2 miles. (In fact referring to the photo below, it took 20 minutes to get from the point shown to the second bridge in the background!) Ah well, it’s one way to learn…

Exhausted and a little frayed around the edges, we finally arrived at our B&B in the cute little town of New Milford. Fortunately, we had packed plenty of wine which we unpacked in record time and so were able to toast the Aussies walking into the stadium in Beijing. (Honestly, the American TV coverage of the games is bizarre - the opening ceremony, which began at 8.15am US East Coast time, was not broadcast till 8pm that night and was presented as though it was actually happening at that moment. I had actually watched most of it on-line that morning and enjoyed reading the US bloggers contempt for their TV networks. As one guy wrote - ‘it’s all so 1984′)

The next day we explored New Milford and several other small towns in the area of Washington (there is a street, town, county, whatever, named after George Washington everywhere!). Attention Gilmore Girls fans: this is the area of Connecticut that inspired the fictional town of Stars Hollow in the series and I must say New Milford was delightful and had quite a Gilmore Girls vibe to it.

After a fabulous lunch at a gorgeous inn, set high on a hill overlooking gardens, a river and forest, and named - you guessed it - the George Washington Inn, we set off for Salem which is on the coast, just north of Boston. It proved to be a delightful, historic town with some amazing old buildings and houses and lots of ‘witch’ shops, ghost tours, paranormal happenings and such like for the tourists.

We toured what’s called the ‘Witch house’ built around 1650 and home to one of the judges in the witch trials. Unusually for this town, the house doesn’t claim to be haunted or to have anything to do with witchcraft (apart from the judge connection) just sets out to show what everyday life was like in Salem in the 1600s.

We also visited the ‘Witch Museum’ which related the history of the witch trials - having no idea beforehand just how hokey it would be. We were herded into a darkened, barn-like room. Music and red lights were followed by a recording in which an actor (narrating in his best Vincent Price, 50s acting voice) told the story of the witch trials and various still-life scenes were lit up around the room. The presentation really didn’t seem to know if it wanted to inform you, or try to scare you - but if it was trying to scare it was lamentable - not even worthy of Hammer Horror at its schlockiest and when the final dummy was lit up - a devil with red eyes shining on and off - Michael and I burst out laughing.

Once it was over, we decided to forgo the second half of the tour and wandered down to the harbour instead, followed by a guided tour through the ‘House of Seven Gables’ - another fascinating building dating from around 1650 and inspiration for the novel of the same name by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

It was fairly late in the afternoon when we headed off on our long drive back to Princeton - having enjoyed the history and harbour of Salem very much but quite relieved to escape from the witch museums, paranormal tours etc. Needless to say, as we left we took the print-out of our Google directions, folded it into a paper plane and threw it out the window.