Brattleboro, VT

Last week, Grace and I decided to take a drive through the country and we ended up in Brattleboro, Vermont, a small town on the border of VT and New Hampshire. Described by some as a college town without a college, Brattleboro features an art museum, several neat book shops, some theater companies, and a local coffee roaster. I forgot to bring my camera to take a photo of the downtown, so here's one I pulled off a Google Images search of Brattleboro:


While we were walking around, Grace bought a hot dog from a street vendor and I purchased the best vanilla gelato I have ever had. We also visited Turn It Up! Records, a great music shop with a few locations scattered across western New England. Later, we stopped by the art museum, where a nice old lady let us in for free because we didn't have any cash. The museum contained a terrific collection of modern and contemporary art, most of it on loan from various New York galleries. It also had an interactive room where Grace and I made designs with colored pencils.

Brattleboro was all in all a delightful little town. According to Wikipedia, it hosts a handful of book, film, and arts festivals throughout the year, so I imagine I'll be back sometime in the upcoming months.

Next stop: New York City.

Springfield

A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon in Springfield, Massachusetts. Springfield is the fourth biggest city in New England - a little bit more populous than Hartford - and it is home to the Basketball Hall of Fame. While it's a tall order to appear lawless and menacing on a sunny weekday afternoon, Springfield somehow managed. What brought me the region's #2 crime city (a little bit less crime-y than Hartford)? Museums.

Springfield's downtown boasts The Quadrangle - a city block dedicated to natural history, fine arts, and sculptures of Dr. Seuss characters.


For a very affordable price, you can purchase a ticket that admits you to all four institutions occupying the Quadrangle. The art museums feature a terrific collection of Asian artifacts, Roman casts, Renaissance paintings, and contemporary American work, and the natural history museum houses exhibits on marine life, astronomy, and all things Africa. All told, the museums are small but satisfying, and the Dr. Seuss sculpture garden was whimsical to say the least!

I doubt I'll return to Springfield any time soon, but I certainly had a fine time while I was there. There seemed to be some shops and restaurants in the commercial downtown, a few blocks from the Quadrangle, and those might be nice to check out. Other than that, however, it doesn't seem like Springfield offers the region much reason to visit it.

Next stop, Nashua, New Hampshire!

Amherst

I was planning on making a trip east to Providence, but final papers and grading took a toll on my free time and I ended up deciding to postpone that adventure till January. Today, however, I found myself in Amherst, Massachusetts and I decided to make that the next city in my New England travelogue. Here's what the downtown looks like:

Amherst is a wonderful little college town twenty-five miles north of Springfield in Western Mass. It features a terrific bicycle-themed bar named Spoke, a great used bookstore called Amherst Books, and a very cozy coffee shop called Amherst Coffee:

I went there to work on a paper, and a band sitting a few tables away from me started to play a set. The first song was Lou Reed's "Perfect Day," and the second was a Talking Heads cover:


Altogether, Amherst is a great place. Pretty buildings, friendly people, and a terrific atmosphere. It's real close to Northampton, a town that I will surely feature on here at some point, and it's about twenty minutes south of a place called the Book Mill, which is a cool restaurant/bookshop/record shop in the woods that I may blog about here as well.

Next stop for real: Providence, Rhode Island.

Montpelier

This blog is a sequel to my old zine Ragamuffins. When I made Ragamuffins, I was going to college in Chicago and I was thinking a lot about what it would be like to be real old, so most of the stories in it were essentially about that. Now I go to graduate school in Connecticut and I'm thinking a lot about what it's like to live in a weird place far away from my family and most of my friends. Instead of writing stories here, which might turn out dull and nostalgic, I want to do something different. Every week or two, I'm going to learn more about my new home by going to a different city or town in New England. I'll walk around, take some pictures, drink some coffee, and write about it on here. I think this will be fun for me and hopefully entertaining for anyone who's reading.

This past week, I went to Montpelier, Vermont with some friends on our way to Montreal. Here's everyone other than me standing around in the downtown:

Montpelier is a pretty nice town. It's kind of tucked away in the mountains, a few miles off the highway. There were lots of bookstores, a great toy shop, and a pleasant diner. It the only state capital not to have a McDonalds, of which the citizen who told us that was very proud.
At one point, I went into a bookstore with a Dunkin' Donuts coffee and I asked the cashier "Is this cool?", meaning bringing my drink indoors. He very politely replied, "Do you mean is it cool that that's a Styrofoam cup? Is it cool that you're patronizing Dunkin' Donuts when what you should be doing is throwing a bomb through their window? Yes, it's fine to bring a drink in here." Luckily, I kept my cool.

I was only in this city for about an hour, but I was really impressed. Great buildings, picturesque surroundings, and everyone there was smiling! Keep up the good work, Montpelier!

Next stop: Providence, Rhode Island.