Nobody loves I-91. There are no songs written about out, no road signs on the walls of diners (or Applebee's). If you live in New England, you know its second only to I-95 in its unavoidability and congestion. But every cross-country ski season, I spend most weekends driving from New Haven to northern Vermont and back, almost entirely on I-91. My teammate likes to compare that road to a pneumatic tube: you get on at one end, and four hours later, you're deposited at the other. I'm short on exotic travels at the moment, but here is my affectionate take on a road I've seen too much of in the last 2 months.
We get on at exit 1 in New Haven, CT. We're heading North, because that's the direction of Friday afternoons, fresh snow, and adventure (South means the weekend's over, work is looming, and the sore muscles are setting in). After 2 years, New Haven's starting to feel like home. It's even kind of beautiful if you catch the sun setting behind West Rock. There's something about East Rock and West Rock, the two sheer-sided hills that rise abruptly on either side of the city, that makes me feel like I can imagine the way this part of the country looked to the first Europeans arriving from the sea.
Hartford's the first real landmark, a little under an hour later. I've never been to Hartford, despite having driven through it about a million times in my childhood on the way from Maine to Philadelphia. Am I missing anything? I have to admit that the blue onion dome that I can see from the highway has always made me wonder if there's more to the city than the insurance company offices that dominate the skyline.
Just north of Hartford is a landfill. I've got a love-hate relationship with Connecticut: I love New Haven, and hate the rest of it. Ok, that's not fair, but I still feel like this about sums it up: Northern New England has mountains; Connecticut has a giant mound of trash. When we got hit by the snowbomination/snowpocalypse/snowmaggedon this January, the featureless artificial hill looked like a bizarre, nightmarish giant marshmallow.
Next we cross into Massachusetts, and quickly come to Springfield, another city I've never been to despite driving through a million times (Worcester completes the trio). Should I see more of Springfield than convenient pit stop gas stations? The Basketball Hall of Fame is shaped like a basketball, which is pretty cool, but I'm not sure thats enough of a draw.
Its better to hold off on the pit stop in any case, if you can wait until Northampton. Not only does it have the Iron Horse, venue of many an Enter the Haggis concert, its got curry at the Haymarket Cafe and a great natural food store.
Northampton (exit 19) certainly beats Deerfield (exit 24). Deerfield, although I'm sure its a lovely place, is home to two things I strongly disapprove of, though of course not in equal measure: Yankee Candle and one of the worst massacres of the French and Indian War.
That war left its mark on another landmark a few miles on: the sign for French King bridge. After much wondering, I discovered that the bridge is named after French King Gorge, which was named for (you guessed it) the King of France. This doesn't answer why 1. if the French lost the war, we kept the name, and 2. it isn't called Louis XIV Bridge, instead of being named for "any generic French king".
Now its the Vermont border, and 91 begins to follow the twists of the Connecticut River. Exit 2 is Brattleboro, home to yummy if overpriced general store, with chocolate chip cookies the size of your head. Putney (exit 4) has a real small-town diner, the type that serves six kinds of pie, and has a Saturday meatloaf special. Its not totally old-fashioned - they were serving "beefalo" burgers - but then, it is Vermont.
For a long time after that, its just the road and the trees. There's plenty of time to listen to music, and invent song parodies for the all-teams talent show. But sooner or later (sooner if our speed-demon captain is driving), we get to White River Junction. That's usually the end of the line. This season, one meet was in Hanover, a little bit farther and on the New Hampshire side of the river, but the other two were in Jericho, in the western part of the state. That means taking the other branch at the junction, and following Route 89, a beautiful road with panoramic mountain views and signs for bear crossings.
I've never driven to the end of I-91, the last 110 miles through St. Johnsbury to the Canadian border. Though it's dangerously near to a cliche that my "road not taken" should be in Robert Frost's home state, its nice to think that even though this is such a familiar route, there's still a part of it I haven't travelled yet. Maybe next winter.
