Now Norma Knits

An Awesome Pee Place: Guilford, VT

Coming north on I-91 from wherever the heck I picked it up on my way home from Queens, NYC (I was just blindly following my GPS), I was just about to loudly complain to Mr. Jefferies (because he was the only one in the car), "I-91 has NO FREAKIN' REST AREAS*!" when lo' and behold, I entered my beautiful state of Vermont and there was the most gorgeous rest stop you ever did see. I'm sure my assessment of its beauty was largely informed by the fact that my bladder was about to burst, but it truly was a lovely, lovely, fun place to stop. 

I had stopped there once before, and even took photos to do a writeup for the blog, but it was dark then and the photos turned out grainy, and I never bothered to write about it. This was my chance. It was in the middle of the day, the sky was blue and the temperature was pleasant, and I had my new camera along for the ride. 

In Vermont, our rest stops do not have gas pumps or McDonaldses or Starbucks. They have free (donations recommended) Green Mountain Coffee Roasters coffee, clean facilities, and vending machines. 

This one, though, is a true showpiece.

First of all, the property is HUGE. As you're driving in, you see what look like several New England barns -- beautiful ones -- and a large meadow with several antique farm machines -- balers, rakes, wagons, etc. I could not take a photo from the approach because I didn't have my camera out of the trunk, but I took those above from inside the safety of the property. It was not immediately evident to me when I was driving up, but there is a quite lengthy walking trail through that lovely "meadow exhibit."  

This property is just crammed full of thoughtful exercise and rest and recuperation areas to encourage stretching and moving in the middle of a long drive:

This fenced-in picnic area is pet-free. But don't worry, there are another two for people with pets.

So many delights for the eye, so many things to do, such as park bench yoga:

And a formal garden, with a sundial in the center:

You'd think this was quite enough, wouldn't you? But we're not done yet, not by a long shot. 

There was a dog-walking field that was HUGE. It had to be about an acre.

And then indoors there were beautiful art exhibits and setups by local cabinetry artisans and furniture makers and food sellers. 

 

And get this:  A salad garden growing in a container inside:

...leading to a lovely stone and brick patio with a millstone seat/table:

These are our tax dollars at work, and I approve. In these difficult economic times, several of our rest stops have been closed. Thank goodness this showpiece welcome center is open. I hope it stays that way. 

There were complimentary copies (donations gratefully accepted to defray the costs of running this place) of Vermont Life. I took one and left a tenner. Now, looking through these photos, I wish I'd left more. 

*As far as I could tell, all through the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts, it only had "parking areas" -- little places you could pull your car off the road and stretch your legs, but no place to, ahem, relieve yourself. 

220. When All Else Fails, Talk About Pee

I've been sitting here in front of this screen for a while, trying to think out a post.  It's just not working.  This is not an affliction from which I suffer often, so we probably ought to just roll with it, hm?

Well, I thought, maybe I can find something in my photo folder, but I didn't really think I could, since I'm really not that much of a photographer.  Then I had to go pee. 

Eureka!  Bodily functions as a mnemonic -- try it some time.  Honest!  It works!  I remembered I had a bunch of photos of a nice pee place that I took on my way home from Sandy's, and stored away for a rainy day.  I gotta tell you, if it has been anything in this state lately, it's been rainy. 

So here you go:  I give you Pee Stop, the Sharon, Vermont, edition.  I-89 Northbound (the southbound is still in serious need of an upgrade, which I hope they get to soon) between Exits 1 and 2 after 89 gets into Vermont from New Hampshire.  The Vermont Vietnam Veterans Memorial Rest Stop. You can read more about it here and here.  It's a green place, a place we can all be proud to have spent our tax dollars. I'll just give you my little taken-in-the-dark, somewhat grainy, photo essay.  It's a lovely and unique and well-maintained place.  You ought to stop there to .... rest. 

 

177. Thursday's Blog - A Washington Pee Break

This edition of Pee Break is brought to you by the Newseum.  I had a couple of hours to fill on Friday, and I did it at the Newseum. It was a great place.  I thoroughly enjoyed the way it's put together.  It's very thoughtfully done, and it's recommended that you work your way from the top down. There are enough well-placed benches to be able to sit down and rest frequently, a feature I find essential in a museum. I enjoyed the content and the atmosphere of the place.  And I was pleased that there weren't too many (that day) of that thing I hate most of all -- people. (Aren't I terrible?) The cafeteria was tempting to try -- it's a Wolfgang Puck establishment.  But I was between a big and lovely lunch with Wendy and dinner with Lara. I thought I should stay away from the cafeteria!

Though I took in a lot of the serious bits, I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that my favorite parts were the comedic ones.  There was a running loop of comedy bits about the news from old Saturday Night Live skits, various other comedy shows, and of course Stephen Colbert's take on the Newseum.  I watched the entire loop at least twice.

Then I stopped in the 3rd-floor bathroom.

I was all alone!  The place is new, so it's all clean and nice.  See my nice new batik bag I got at a kiosk in Union Station?  It's just right for my BlackBerry.  Want a better look at how sweet it is? 

And it matches just about everything I own.

Sorry.  I got sidetracked.  This is supposed to be about the pee place, right?

Don't pay no never-mind to the toilet paper strewn around the floor.  (I didn't do it!) I'm sure someone was going to be in soon to neaten up a bit. The staff at this place was amazingly cheerful and helpful.

Here's what I loved about this bathroom and why I thought to make this a Pee Break feature:

(click all these photos to make them bigger)

So a private, quiet, clean pee with several chuckles.  What more can you hope for?

24. High Peaks, New York -- A Great Place to Pee, But Forget About Your Cell Phone

It was delightful that so many people took so much interest in my first pee place post. Who knew I'd hit such a nerve? And who knew that I'd have the opportunity so soon to take you to my 2nd favorite place, but another trip to the Albany train station allowed me the chance.

Somewhere on the Adirondack Northway, aka  I-87, aka the New York Thruway (signage in Upstate New York is so confusing), between Exits 29 and 30, high in the Adirondacks (it feels like another world), you'll find the High Peaks Welcome Center. If you are on the way and you need to pee, it's worth holding it. Bypass the old run-down grungy places, and wait for High Peaks to relieve yourself.

Reminiscent in feel, and paying homage to, the Adirondack Great Camps, this place is lovely, in a lovely setting.  A few photos for your relief and pleasure.

  Welcome to our French-speaking neighbors.

Res ipsa loquitur.  Well, okay, I'll spell it out:  Beautiful scenery.

Bear-and-raccoon-proof trash bins.  It takes a high IQ to figure out how to put one's trash in these.  Not that I'd know much about that.  The grounds are impeccably clean and well maintained, and there are many picnic tables.

A clarification card in the exhibit.  We wouldn't want to mislead anyone into thinking all these specimens came from New York.  (I got a kick out of this for some reason.)

As clean and beautiful and immaculately tidy as a four-star hotel.  Not an odor to be smelled.  I'd eat off these counters.  It is always this clean every time I've been here, several times over five-plus years.

I'd even eat off the baby-changing station.  And that might be the very last time you'll ever hear me say something like that.

Interesting display of fishing lures.  Above it was a good-looking, informative poster about fishing in the area.

Daylight was on the wane when we got back to the northbound stop:

Interestingly, as with the Williston rest areas, the northbound facility is slightly more lovely and has slightly more detail than the southbound.  I wonder if this is intentional.....and for what reason?  It seems oddly coincidental.  I love that moose weathervane on top of the northbound one.

One thing you will NOT find here:  Food, except vending machines.  And cell phone service.  It is very desolate out here, and the lack of cell service feels a bit disconcerting in this day and age when we are all so reliant on being connected.  It is the source of much controversy and random interviews of weird women photographing their knitting in the snow at rest stops. However, there is a state police station inside this northbound unit.  A nice, cute officer came out and said hi while I was snapping photos. 

Also, if you are transporting illegal aliens or drugs, fair warning:  There is a semi-permanent U.S. Immigration/Customs/Border Patrol (?) something-or-other traffic stop set up just as you approach the southbound High Peaks rest stop.  Rumble strips warn you to slow down for a good long distance before it. Apparently there was a bad accident a while back, where a tractor trailer truck driver didn't see the signs saying "stop ahead" (?) and just plowed right through. I am quite sure there were many fatalities as a result of that event.

So you see?  New York can do it, too -- not just Vermont.

23. My Most Articulatest Moment

   
ARE WE THERE YET?  (nope)

A funny thing happened on the way to the coliseum Adirondacks High Peaks Welcome Center, and aren't I just the lucky blogger?  We love little odd things to happen -- we LIVE for them, don't we?  And of course I just have to tell you about it. 

I have every right to humiliate myself at every given opportunity, and I often take advantage of that right.  More about that later.

I wasn't the only one in the car with a teeny bladder.  That's all I'm gonna say about that.  So first we stopped in Beekmantown.   (ick, ick, don't want to touch anything, smells awful, etc., etc.) 

Next stop, Lewis. I didn't go inside; it looks the same as Beekmantown. But wait.  What have we here?!

Am I being scooped?!  Channel 5 news team on the scene, interviewing truckers about what?  Pee places? 

Totally bogus, man!  This is MY gig! 

I boldly take photos of the news crew, then I go about my business, photographing the neckwarmer that later died.  Remember?

Then I hear, "Ma'am!"  and turn around.  That cute little thing in the photo, with the legs up to there and the long hair, was running up to me.  She didn't even bat an eyelash at the fact that I was photographing my knitting in the snow.  She might have backed.away.from.the.weirdo, but instead she said, "Before you go, can I snag you for a minute?" 

"Um...."

"We're doing a story on the cell phone coverage, or lack of it, on this route."

"Oh, it's CRAP!" I so eloquently say.

"If you could even say that on camera, it would be great!  And can I get the others with you, too?  I won't hold you up for long." 

Oy.  Poor Abigail, who was already in the car, later said she couldn't figure out what was happening.  She thought that the reason the young woman came rushing up to me was that she recognized me. (as in "Mom, you're so famous," blah blah) (pardon me while I stifle a guffaw)

So I said sure, and she followed me over to the car.  Then she interviewed each of us without us knowing the camera was on.  We thought it was sort of a dry run, she'd see if we had anything worth recording, and then we'd do the real thing. 

She asked me, "So what is your opinion about the lack of cell phone coverage here?"  In my shining moment of absolute articulate BRILLIANCE, I answered something like,  "Well.....(dramatically) my cell phone is searching for a signal right now.  It's a perennial problem.  It's....(searching for a word)... nonexistent."  (W.T. Fuck?) 

Well, thank dog I did not say CRAP on camera.  But honestly!  I should not be allowed out in public.  I can hear the viewers at home saying, "She didn't even answer the QUESTION!"  My brain had clearly been left at the rest stop in Beekmantown.

The other two members of my family showed more than a modicum of intelligence, and their answers were so impressively articulate that I wanted to crawl into a hole in the snow and just lie there in the fetal position until the snow crews uncovered me in the spring.  We weren't home in time for the 6:00 news, but on the 11:00 they played a piece of David's answer, and he looked good, though squinting in the sun's glare a bit.  They had his mouth moving, but had his words completely unsynched. Looked a bit like a cartoon character, or a Japanese dubbed movie.  "David Miller, Motorist."   Then on Monday morning he arrived at the gym and a guy in the locker room said, "Hey, I just saw a guy on TV that looked JUST LIKE YOU!"  He goes upstairs to find a couple people he knows say they had just seen it, and clips of Abigail's, too, and someone said it was also played on Sunday.  Thankfully the viewing public was spared from me. 

It would have been so much better if she'd asked me the question, "What are you doing here?"  and I could have answered, "Taking photos of pee places."  At least I wouldn't have sounded QUITE so stupid, and perhaps I would have been labeled, "Norma Miller, Rest Area Chronicler."

Tomorrow is the real deal:  High Pees.  I mean Peaks.

P.S.  On the drive home, I noticed giant signs when entering the Adirondack Park.  They say something to the effect of, "Cell Phone Service Extremely Limited or Nonexistent for Next 120 Miles"  (I can't remember the exact number of miles, but it's quite substantial)  and that is what the news piece was mainly about -- that those signs were put up that day.  All this arises out of a horrific fatal accident that happened last year and the fact that there is no cell phone service there and the rising level of public ire about it.  We used to worry about this endlessly when Abigail was traversing that route all by herself for four years.  For example, it doesn't do much good to have AAA if there is no way to call them.  So about the signs:  Nice touch, New York.  What are you supposed to do?  Decide to turn back? 

And P.P.S.  Have you ever had a conversation with a know-it-all?  Yeah, me too.  One time a few years ago, some guy in a deposition was insisting to me that on I-87 there was cell service all the way down.  I argued with him and said no way!  It's scary and unsafe and annoying!  He inSISTED that there are "repeaters running all the way down the Interstate, and if you just stay on the interstate, you'll have cell service.  I do." (he told me)

Well, I've talked to a good number of folks about this since that time, and nobody has any idea what a "repeater" is.  Pfffft.  Well, regardless, if he thought he knew it all, he was kidding himself, because there is ZERO cell phone service on that route.  So much for know-it-alls. 

14. Pee Break!

Anyone who travels with me learns right quick that I have a teeny-tiny bladder. A four-hour road trip easily turns into four and-a-half, because of all the "rest stops," a phrase that makes my English friends amused.  ("Whot?  Are you taking a rest in there?") Ten minutes per stop at every rest area, and it really adds up.  Or as my father-in-law would have said, "Ten minutes here and ten minutes there. Before you know it, you've lost ...(pause for comedic effect)... twenty minutes." (ba-dum-DUM)

It's like I have my own Rule of Roadtrip Physics:  Ride somewhere with me, and you might never reach your destination.

If push comes to shove, I'll pee anywhere, even a filthy port-o-let, coz when you gotta go, you gotta go. I've even learned recently (in the last year and a half -- what TOOK me so long?) one of the biggest benefits of wearing a skirt, versus pants or shorts, for traveling -- it takes much less time to go to the bathroom.  Funny how the '70s feminist girl in me fought so long and hard against wearing skirts. (Pants! It's gotta be pants!  Skirts are feminine and frilly and a sign of male dominance! I don't know where I got that stupid idea -- it's probably more of a misinterpretation of the idea that not being ALLOWED to wear pants is discriminatory or something.  But whatever. That notion is gone now, I'll tell ya that.) And if you skip the underwear, I suppose it's even faster, but I'm not saying I know anything about that.

Now I know that every time one of you meets me, you'll be checking to see whether I'm wearing a skirt or pants, (and no, you may not check to see if I'm wearing underwear) and you'll know exactly why I've been won over by the skirt. Oy, the things I tell you! (and as I'm writing this, I'm thinking ABC-Along.   C is for commando; P for pee break; R for rest areas; S for skirts....okay, keep working with me here.)

But back to pee places:  Oh, how I hate the run-down and filthy places.  So imagine my delight when Vermont (and I've noticed New York State, too -- and I bet lots of other states) started to upgrade its pee facilities, incorporating into the designs beautiful local materials and sculpture.

When I was on my way home from work Saturday, (I had a job in Montpelier) I stopped at one of my favorite renovated rest stops on I-89 in Williston, Vermont. I noticed that the sun was setting and the sky was pretty, and I started taking photos of the sky for a Saturday Sky photo. But before I knew it, I was taking photos of the cute-without-being-too-twee picnic tables that look like tractors:

(See the sky?  Those were my intended Saturday Sky photos, but the little curved road to who-knows-where said a lot more about what I was thinking yesterday. Thousand words and all that.)

...and the goofy moose sculpture:

Now you see what the little curving road from Sunday's photo leads to.  It's meant to be a tractor track. If you click the photos to make them bigger, you can see some of the other bits of landscaping in the background, which are supposed to be Vermont-themed. 

They've put miniature rolling hills and a small orchard, beautiful stone walls, and a stone sculptured cow-feeding trough (I think that's what it's supposed to be). Never mind that dairy farming is almost obsolete in Vermont now. It is what we like to think of when we think "Vermont."

The building itself is reminiscent of a barn, built of lovely natural local materials, although it is not the traditional red barn with a silo that is becoming only a faded memory to those of us old enough to associate that with the Vermont landscape. It's lovely and spacious inside, with free Green Mt. Coffee Roasters coffee and lots of tastefully presented advertising for local businesses and places of interest, and nicely presented informative exhibits of various sorts. (e.g., History of the Interstate Highway System)

The building is more like a large sugar house -- another thing that, because of climate change and acid rain, I fear is fast becoming a relic of Vermont's past.  An aside:  Green grass in January?  Mildly disturbing, to say the least. 

The northbound facility seems better kept than the southbound one (different caretakers, maybe?).  It's also larger and contains more pretty sculptures, such as the moose above and the plow shown below, as well as the cool "park bench yoga" display.

And two words that make me weak at the knees:

Free WiFi.

The "free" part is a new thing.  I have been annoyed that you had to pay for the WiFi (and not too cheap, either -- something like $10 or $12 for an hour.)  So my tax dollars are nicely at work here. 

So ends our Pee Break Williston VT. We'll call this the beginning of a series. I even started a new category for it.  I had not taken enough photos the first time around, so when I decided to do this post, I took another trip to the rest stop to get more.  Life really is all about the blog.  Plus, it was a nice day for a Sunday drive, and it gave me another chance to buy a chocolate bar and pee there.  Gotta keep the local economy flowing. Or something.