Bear Spray to Sea Spray: Williamstown to Old Orchard Beach (Maine)

We left around 9 am this morning, after getting a half decent coffee from Dunkin Donuts. Good coffee has been unbelievably hard to come by, and I am ashamed to say that I have been buying coffee from Starbucks when we can. Other than Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts, all other coffee is 'Americano' or bitter, watery drip filtered coffee. They drink it black, or with a horrific substance called 'creamer' - which is probably made out of the ground up foot skin of old people. It sure tastes that way anyway :)

We had programed the GPS the night before with a number of waypoint towns to keep us off the Interstate and take us through the back roads through Vermont.

The riding was amazing, starting off with tall trees and lush green forest on both sides of the road, and some great twisties up and down rolling hills. I was wearing a shit eating grin, and flogging my loaded up bike through everything, only slowing down when a bastard truck decided to spoil my morning... on purpose of course!

We road through some amazing towns, including the ski town Willmington, which had an amazing town centre, and some beautiful old colonial style buildings. The streets were narrow (for the US) and all the stores were grouped together and it had a cute 'little village' feel.

All of the houses had planters hung on their verandahs with matching or alternating coloured flowers, and lots of the houses had red white and blue bunting draped over the railings out the front. They were also very patriotic, with about 70% of the houses having one or more flags out the front. It was very cool, and one of the better days riding of the whole trip.

All too soon though, we had exhausted all the back roads we could take, and did the last 100km on the interstate, and I soon lapsed into my usual stupor and dreamed of all the things I would build when I got home.

About 3pm, we rolled into Old Orchard Beach, which is a small holiday town right on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. First thing we noticed was the salt air, which we had not smelt since we left Sydney. The second thing was we seemed to have re-materialised in a world that was a cross between the Royal Easter show, and Surfers paradise in the 70's. There was an amusement park right on the waterfront, which reminded me of The Lost Boys - one of my favourite movies from when I was a kid; when Vampires were still badass and not dick loving nancy boys like Edward fucking Cullen!

We checked into our hotel, and spent a great afternoon walking down the Beach to the Pier, dipping our toes in the water, and stepping around all of the sand castles and various other 'excavations' kids had made all over the place. The Sand was quite strange, it was very fine, and seemed to have a very high silt content, because the wet sand stuck to the bottom of your feet in places a bit like mud. The sand was also very hard, and it hurt our feet after a while, it was almost like walking on concrete, even down near the water. The people at the beach were kinda weird, they were more interested in sitting on the sand, and there was only a handful of people swimming, kinda the opposite of home. The ocean was the opposite as well, bugger all swell and it was actually warm for some reason, I was expecting it to be freezing cold.

We checked out the pier, which was a bit 'seedy' and had a Lobster roll at a nearby (much nicer) restaurant. It was ok I guess, shell fish are not really high on my list of favourite foods. You can keep your alien sea cockroaches thanks very much - I'll have a steak please.

We made our way back the 3km down the beach to our hotel, just as a huge storm started to roll, in. We got a little rained on, but it was really nice to be near the ocean and watch and hear the storm chasing us up the beach.