A Tale of Three Cities

Is it a village, is it a town is it a city?

Last week we drove straight through Manchester (pop 2,465), in the state of Maine on a detour of the Interstate – not much to see I’m afraid and we were through in 5 minutes. It's a fairly rural Manchester with a Dunkin' Donuts and a Subway – the pub Mulligan’s doubles as a funeral parlour! Earlier this week we stopped off in Manchester number 2, New Hampshire (pop 110,378) this was a more substantial place with lots of industry and traffic. We had lunch outside the courthouse and called in a huge supermarket for refreshment (rest rooms), while we were there we didn't visit the grave of Dick McDonald one of the burger brothers. Just to confuse matters we haven't been to Manchester, Connecticut, which is where the nice green sign which features above is located.

Today’s Manchester (pop 4,391) is in Vermont and beats the others hands down. The old part of Manchester looks a bit twee but it is in fact as it’s always been, with amazing marble pavements and 18^th century buildings – with the backdrop of 3800ft Equinox Mountain. Here Vicky stands in sub zero temperatures opposite the very fancy 19th century Equinox Hotel which was quite a marvel in it's day. Here's a quote from the history of the Equinox:  'The lifestyle enjoyed by guests during these years was a lavish one. During its peak, guests were treated to four meals a day – breakfast, lunch, dinner, supper – and tea and gingerbread snacks...... a scale was used to weigh guests at the end of their stay to make sure they'd put on a few pounds!'

Just to prove we’re not just here for the beer, we’ve done some cultural investigations whilst we’ve been travelling, visiting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s house in Portland, Maine and Robert Frosts’s grave in Benington, Vermont. At Benington we found an astonishing Cleopatra's needle type of monument over 300 feet high, which was built 150 years ago to commemorate the battle of Benington where, during the American Revolutionary War, a bunch of revolting locals somehow managed to defeat the British Army (what cads!)

 

And finally there goes a woodpecker outside the motel window just while I'm typing this up. There are no woodpeckers in Australia (there's your 'I never knew that' fact of the day!) but there are plenty here in the US. This one is a Downy Woodpecker - it's a bit like our Little Woodpecker in the UK but without the red hindquarters.